Blood supplies the body with oxygen.  When oxygen levels in cells drop low enough – for example if there's too little blood to deliver it -- oxygen forms reactive radicals that cause virtually irreparable damage to cells around the body.

One scientist, Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, believes he has found a solution in an unusual place: a poisonous gas.  The 50-year-old biologist first latched on to his current line of research when he discovered that by draining oxygen from all the cells in a fish embryo, he could essentially put it in stasis.  Restoring oxygen a day later caused the fish to pick up where it left off in growth.

Typically, oxygen levels in the air are about 21 percent of the total atmosphere.  As levels dip to about 5 percent, death by damaging radicals is all but certain.  However, at about 0.1 percent, Professor Roth discovered, animals can instead go into stasis as they lack the damaging radicals.  He comments, "With those fish, I turn off the heartbeat so they are clinically dead. But I can bring them back. So they must not have been dead, after all."

Next, he tried the same experiment on fruit flies, this time using a different technique -- using hydrogen sulfide to replace oxygen.  Hydrogen sulfide is a very poisonous gas; just an ounce can kill dozens of adult humans.  The gas worked like a charm, though, making the flies appear dead, but miraculous capable of coming back to life when oxygen is restored.

The research attracted plenty of attention.  In 2001, Professor Roth received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant.  Using the DARPA grant, he moved up the food chain turning to rodents.  In trials he gassed rats with just enough hydrogen sulfide to reduce their breathing rates to just under 10 percent of normal rates.  He was able to use the technique to put the rats into stasis, where they were able to survive low oxygen conditions, simulating severe bleeding.

An intriguing side effect is that when given small doses that stay in the body a mere 15 minutes, the rats gained resistance to damage from heart attacks.  The metabolic side effect caused rats receiving the dose to receive 72 percent less damage.

After that success, Professor Roth received a MacArthur Genius Grant and has won more than $600M USD worth of venture capital funding for Ikaria, a start-up he co-founded to market the technology.  He is now testing a solution of sodium sulfide to inject into swine, which are physiologically similar to humans.  The drug is still imperfect -- pure injections of the drug caused damage, so he's currently testing a cocktail of other compounds to inject along with the sodium sulfide to reduce the risk of damage.  However, he believes if the drug can be perfected and swine put into stasis, that he will be able to achieve the same success in humans. 

If he can succeed, he may save the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions injured yearly.

He is not alone in the quest for stasis.  Other researchers are looking at tweaking metabolism to prevent the body from dying in extreme conditions.  Dr. Philip Bickler, an anesthesiologist at the University of California, San Francisco Hospital is studying whales and dolphins, trying to figure out how they can hold their breath for hours, under sustained strenuous activity, and if the chemical basis is applicable to humans.  Likewise, a group in Minnesota are looking to develop a human-ready version of chemicals used to induce hibernation in squirrels.  However, Professor Roth is perhaps the farthest along and the closest to coming up with a cure to death by blood loss.