It's like that Orson Scott Card story

I don't know what to think about this, except that it may be the biggest medical news of our lifetimes. If so, it has received a notably quiet reception from the press. Dr. David Roth, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has come upon a way to put organisms in suspended animation. Success has thusfar been confined to rats, the only available test subjects. Recently, however, he's moved up to pigs, which the article claims possess a physiology more comparable to that of human beings.

I have no idea of intimate details of the biological processes at work here, but, from my meager understanding of the larger picture, the injection of (otherwise) poisonous hydrogen sulfide into the body helps drain it of oxygen, and, once empty, prevents the formation of free radicals which would otherwise cause permanent cellular damage in the absence of O2. I know that logically that's all a bit twisted--you're draining oxygen from something in order to avoid harm from the drainage of oxygen--but I assume the implication is that it's the free radical side-effect, and now the lack of oxygen, which is dangerous to us. Apparently, in the absence of O2, we would otherwise go into complete stasis.

Moral dilemmas abound. For one, the research is funded by DARPA, which, so they say, wants it to be used to keep injured soldiers alive while they are transported from the battlefield to the nearest medical facility. That's the line that the DOD's dragging in public, so we can be sure that they have a whole medley of ethical wonkiness up their dress uniform sleeves. Second, and with reference to the title of my post, there is an immediate social question raised by a discovery of this nature. Who lives, and who dies? Since the mechanism by which we distribute access to services in the United States is currently a market one--that is, purchasing power is the ultimate determinant--it would seem that we were inviting a severe perpetuating of inequality. If wealth lacks mobility when people live only 75 years, imagine what things would be like if the Buffets and Schwartzs of the world never died and could, therefore, hold onto and expand their capital in perpetuity. Sound like the kind of inflammatory daydreaming that would've adorned the rhetoric of many a barrier buster in Barcelona or Berlin of the early 30's? Well, that chicken's come home to roost, and it's a weird one.