Biologist Mark Roth asks his assistant if the rat is ready. It is. The assistant turns a dial and the critter's sealed enclosure fills with poison gas. An ounce could kill dozens of people. The rat sniffs a few times and within a minute becomes still. It looks bad. But the rat isn't dead or dying. The process creates what Roth calls "a state of suspended animation" and he sees it as an alternative for critical care medicine.
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The air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen. At 5 percent, those fish and flies -- like us -- would be dead in a few minutes. At 0.1 percent, it was another story. "You get a state of suspended animation and the creatures do not pass away, and that's the basis of what we see as an alternative way to think about critical care medicine," Roth says. "What you want to do is to have the patient's time slowed down, while everyone around them [like doctors] move at what we would call real time."
