The existence of life has generally and understandably been regarded as opposite to the state of death. Nevertheless, scientific progress is putting this black and white approach into doubt. The biologists are finding the significance of a so-called “third state”, which lies somewhere between life and death and creates entirely new perspectives for biology and medicine.
Don’t You Die In There: The Survivability Of Biological Cells Beyond Death
Death has always been defined as the physiologically irreversible cessation of life in an organism. But practices such as organ transplantation have offered tantalizing evidence that some tissues, some organs or cells can remain functional even when the organism from which they were harvested is no longer alive. An even more interesting question: Why some cells remain in a functioning state even when the whole organism has died?
It has been discovered that when these cells had some specific conditions provided to them – such as presence of certain nutrients, oxygen, bioelectricity, or certain biochemical cues – then they were found to be able to develop into entirely new multicell organisms after the death of the parent organism. This phenomenon brings us to the existence of a state that is beyond our very limited experience, living or non living.
Xenobots and Anthrobots: New Life Forms Developed from Dying Cells
Xenobots are one of the most vivid examples of outside-the-envelope thinking. These are multicellular life forms formed of skin tissues harvested from the dead embryos of frogs. Upon incubation in a petri dish, these cells exhibit glued reorganization and even evolved new roles which were never their primary biological functions. For example, they manipulate cilia which is used to shift the mucus in the live frog hosts to their surrounding environment.
Radar systems fitted to small drones make it possible for quite intricate moves to be performed by such anthrobots.1 For donkey’s years, polyethyleneglycol (PEG) is known to be able to assist leukocyte migration towards very small tubules. These cels, even when present singularly inside human lungs, have been observed to agglomerate to form bacteria like multicellular mammals – anthrobots.
These discoveries seem to be quite distant from the evolution of cellular patterns and divisions that are imposed by nature. They imply that death as an event for an organism may more importantly affect how organisms change over time, adding a plastic element that we had not contemplated earlier.
Implications for Medicine and Future Research
The discovery of this third state isn’t just of academic importance –it has immense potential for transforming medicine. For instance, using Anthrobot oxygen supplied with drugs could be infiltrated without triggering an immune response as they would be used from the patient’s own tissue. They may even be designed to do such things as eating the plaque that makes up arterial blockages, or fetching excessive mucus from a body that suffers from certain diseases.
Most significantly, these new multicellular entities also include a self-destructing feature, in that synthetic nanomaterials naturally breakdown in a few weeks. This feature is beneficial especially for medical purposes since it minimizes the risk of engineered cells growing too much.
As we go on to further investigate this third state, we shall probably be able to better understand the limits of cells and their conversion into other behaviors. This research does not only provoke us to reconsider what we know about the natural lifecycle of a living organism, intricate as life and death are, but also enthuses the bringing to successive stages, the medicine which is oriented to the patient and is focused on the prevention of diseases. It appears that the border separating being and non-being is much more porous and intricate than it has up until now seemed.
