‘I have been researching death for 30 years. I am now convinced it is reversible’

Cancer, heart disease, diabetes… name most major conditions, and treatment today has changed radically from decades past. Except for one: death.

But, according to Sam Parnia, associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, “what we believe about death is fundamentally wrong”. It is not the end, he says, but a “reversible state”.

Parnia’s 30 years of research into where life ends and death begins have made him a leading resurrectionist, with a fundamental desire to change how we view both. He outlines his discoveries in Lucid Dying, to be published on Thursday: a book that charts compelling evidence that reviving the dead isn’t as difficult as we might think, and his research into what happens when consciousness ebbs away.

Parnia, who is British and trained at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London, has come to see a flatline on an ECG (electrocardiogram) as meaningless. “You can reverse death, and it’s not just a wish, it’s the reality,” the 52 year-old says. “People used to think you could never go beyond the boundaries of [flying], let alone going beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. And if you always believed that, then you’d never try.”

Death, he adds, is suffering from terrible PR. “If we remove that social label that makes us think everything stops, and look at it objectively, it’s basically an injury process” – one that, he believes, can be treated.

Research produced in the past five years has made it clear that our idea of dying is “simply a social convention that does not conform with scientific realities”. This “new frontier of science”, as Parnia terms it, feels at least a little revolutionary, fundamentally challenging one of life’s two certainties (taxes sadly seem less prone to reversal). But he remains frustrated that existing theories about death, which are “either outdated and frankly wrong, or at best inadequate and inaccurate”, persist given the research and tools now at our disposal.

In 2012, resuscitation rates following cardiac arrests at his hospital in New York were 33 per cent (compared to a US average of 16 per cent); he believes his team are the only ones in the world to be giving patients cocktails of drugs similar to those proven to successfully preserve pig organs following CPR, which have “significantly improved survival”.

Parnia, who has an eponymous research lab at NYU Langone, says brains remain “salvageable for not only hours, but possibly days of time”. In one case, brain cells were found to retain full function 48 hours after being removed from a person’s body – in spite of the ice being used to preserve the organ melting due to a delayed DHL delivery. “So that’s a whole game-changer.”

In recent years, such discoveries have come thick and fast. Parnia cites Yale University’s 2019 study detailing how decapitated pig brains had been revived for up to 14 hours post-mortem as among the most compelling pieces of proof for the same being done in humans (the research was labelled “Frankenstein-style” the year prior to publication). Another study published by Yale in 2022 demonstrated how a modified heart and lung machine combined with a series of drugs could restore organs in pigs. “It is just a matter of time” before those same results transcend the pig-person barrier, Parnia thinks.

While the promise to reverse death would be compelling at any point, our current obsession with thwarting time is insatiable; there are supplements and tinctures filling health store shelves and social media feeds; and record-breaking podcasts making stars of their DNA-defying supremos. Last month, excitement ramped up anew when news of Tomorrow Bio, Europe’s first cryonics startup, circulated, with its deep-freeze services going for £170,000 a pop.

Cryonics has yet to prove that it is capable of returning people to life (Parnia calls it “wishful thinking”), though “the idea that cooling the body is highly protective is true”. He points to the case of a British woman who developed hypothermia while hiking in Spain in 2019, whose heart stopped for six hours while rescue teams tried to locate her. “That’s way past what we consider dead for humans,” Parnia says. Yet after being flown to a specialist centre with an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO, which takes on the function of the heart and lungs when the body is unable to do so), she was revived. “She was lucky they had [ECMO]. They did it, they didn’t give up on her. If they had taken her to another place, she would have been declared dead.” (In another similar case, a woman was brought back to life seven hours after being found in the cold in a park.)

Back from the dead

These are reported as exceptional cases, but Parnia says they needn’t be. For the most part, CPR, which was introduced in 1959, remains our sole revival method – in spite of the fact it has a 10 per cent success rate, and many hospitals have ECMO machines. “Why do it with something that’s so inferior, which either doesn’t work properly or it ends up bringing people back but leaves them with brain damage?” Parnia rails. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Still, it is not only the will that is holding medical professionals back from mounting a full-time resurrection mission. With hospitals overstretched – NHS waiting lists hit a record high in August, rising for the fifth consecutive month – the likelihood of departments having the resources and staff to keep at patients’ bedsides 24/7 feels perhaps more far flung than the idea of people returning from the dead in the first place.

But Parnia is convinced it is possible, the fact he is part-way through an intensive care shift when we speak is doing nothing to dilute his fervour. Though his fascination with the subject began in 1994, when a man he had been chatting with an hour earlier suddenly flatlined in the hospital where he was working, the pursuit has only recently begun to feel personal.

Giving up too soon?

He notes that his age and gender makes him a prime heart attack risk, “so I tell everyone, look, I’m going to have a cardiac arrest soon. And I’m appalled at the treatment I’m going to get… It’s atrocious what we have to go through when [interventions] are possible,” he says. “If I have a heart attack and die tomorrow, why should I stay dead? That’s not necessary anymore.”

Parnia doesn’t believe everyone who dies needs to be brought back – someone with multiple organ failure is obviously an unsuitable candidate for life-extension. But of the many “heartbreaking” cases of people who die while in otherwise good health (Parnia cites a young mother stabbed to death in a Sydney mall attack earlier this year, or those killed in war), we are giving up too soon. “You just need someone to go to the operating room, find where the laceration was, stitch it together, and put blood back into your body again,” he says. Those who die while “otherwise young, who are otherwise healthy – those people are all potentially salvageable”.

To Parnia, these ideas aren’t ghoulish, but “hopeful, astonishing and life-affirming”. Just as bringing people back via CPR would have been considered the stuff of fantasy 100 years ago, “I have little doubt that, in the future, people who would be declared dead today will be routinely brought back to life.” He acknowledges that major shifts of this kind are unlikely to have fully taken hold by the time his own death comes, but he remains optimistic, he says. “As I look forward, I am excited to think about what will be discovered.”