Will Humans Ever Learn to Hibernate?

Rucking_Fetard

The idea isn't as crazy as you might think. Here's why we might need hibernation to save lives and (maybe) get to the stars.

You've probably never heard of the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, a nocturnal primate (native to Madagascar) that hops around in trees and is about the size of a rat. But these little guys are pretty closely related to humans—relative to most other life on Earth, anyway—and they are able to do something quite extraordinary.

Like bears, marmots, and bats—but unlike any other primates—they hibernate (or, as some researchers put it, enter into a prolonged "period of increased torpor") during Madagascar's winter season. For as much as half the year, they huddle together, dramatically slow their metabolism, and (hence the name) live off of their plentiful tail fat.


This primate species, explains University of Pennsylvania professor of medicine David Casarett, may provide a roadmap for how humans themselves might someday enter a hibernationlike state. After all, despite the dramatic differences between us, we share 97 percent of our DNA with this tiny (and super cute) mammal, according to one Duke University lemur expert. "There's hope out there, maybe, for a wonder drug, a simple injection that will reduce somebody's metabolism by 99 percent, and put victims in a state of suspended animation,"

Outside of the medical realm, there are some far wilder reasons for wanting to hibernate. Long-distance space travel, for instance: A period of stasis extends your life, maybe long enough to take a journey that exceeds our current average human lifespan.


Surprisingly, given these possibilities and the fairly large number of species that hibernate, scientists still don't quite understand how hibernation works. In lemurs, a hormone called ghrelin, which is involved in feelings of alertness and hunger, is at lower levels during hibernation, explains Casarett. "There may be something about that decrease, a decreased drive to be awake and alert and eating, that might be part of the hibernation process," he says.



Switching over to humans, Cheng Chi Lee, a researcher at the University of Texas' Medical School, is studying a molecule that goes by the name "adenosine monophosphate" (AMP), which is one of the building blocks of adenosine triphosophate (ATP), the compound that our cells use to create and store energy. Lee's research is showing that AMP might trigger "hypometabolism,"—in other words, it slows down the rate of energy use in our cells. And AMP is ubiquitous: In Casarett's words, this "might be able to be almost a universal way, across species, of decreasing metabolism."

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/inquiring-minds-david-casarett-lemurs-hibernation-space-travel-cryonauts