Dr. Tess Gerritsen debunks modern "corpse revival" cases—like a Boston woman waking in a body bag—as misdiagnoses, citing oxygen deprivation or drug effects, though she acknowledges rare historical anomalies like a 19th-century girl found alive outside her grave. She dismisses cryogenics and brain storage as unproven, warns of bird flu’s pandemic potential (1918 Spanish flu killed 50M in days), and rejects kimchi/garlic as treatments while praising placebos’ 30% efficacy. Evolution’s vestigial organs—like the appendix—highlight science’s adaptability, not divine design, she argues, though callers clash over faith and biology. Gerritsen’s shift from medicine to writing Vanish (August 23) reflects her fascination with unsettling truths over dogma, leaving Bell to pivot to Amityville’s "real" horrors. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the parade American Southwest, I give you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, each and every one of them covered like a blanket by this program, post-op a.m.
unidentified
I am Mark Bell, here to escort you through the weekend.
Tomorrow night, well, actually, I've got to go to the Yeesu organization, and that's down in Southern California, and so got to be there Monday morning early.
As a result of that, I'm going to take tomorrow off, tomorrow night off, so I can be in Southern California early.
Now, with that in mind, I have picked a program for tomorrow night that I think you're going to love.
In honor of the new Amityville movie, I really thought it would be very, very interesting for all of you to get an opportunity to hear the one program that I did with George Lutz.
Now, what you're going to hear tomorrow night is the real Amityville story.
It was one hell of an interview, and that's tomorrow evening.
Now, coming up in the next hour, here, tonight, it's going to be equally good.
I began reading a series of books by a doctor, a gal named Tess Gerritson, and she is one in a million, I'll tell you.
She's a medical doctor with all the education you could imagine.
I mean, she's really hot stuff, and in more ways than one.
This is a very strange woman.
She writes incredible books like Gravity, for example.
If you have not yet read Gravity and you love high-tech space-type thrillers, Gravity, trust me, is one you want to get on Amazon and order and just read.
God, it's one of those you can't put down books.
She did a lot of books like that, and she is a weird doctor.
She specializes in the weird.
And for example, the first question tonight is, this will give you a little taste of where she goes as a physician.
First question, are there any recent cases of corpses coming back to life?
Wouldn't it be nice if some evening I came on and said, well, you know, now we'll read a little, look at the world news, you know, see what's going on.
Dateline, Miami, dog comes home.
Man happy.
Or, I don't know.
daylight girl scouts sell more cookies in new york city break record Or I don't know.
Anything good.
All good stuff.
But of course, you know, it doesn't work that way.
And in the news tonight, it has not worked that way.
Iraqi insurgents struck across the country with bombs, more bombs, killing at least 16 this time.
And you wish you could say it was getting better in Iraq, but clearly it is not.
And we talk about withdrawing from Iraq, withdrawing Americans from Iraq, but I tell you, it's getting worse.
Every day it seems to be getting worse.
Maybe eventually they will run out of people willing to give their lives to blow us up.
But until then, it doesn't look too good.
Security forces went on alert around the Vatican Saturday and cleared streets for an expected 500,000 pilgrims arriving for the ceremony to formally install Pope Benedict.
And by the way, I told you so.
I said he'd be a German.
That most of the cardinals that had been handpicked were pretty conservative.
And at the head of the list was a German possibility.
Sure enough, a German Pope.
Withdraw or be pushed out by the White House.
Survive the test of his professional life.
Suffer rejection by the Senate.
That's about what it comes down to for John Bolton, the president's besieged nominee to be U.N. ambassador.
So he could either hang in there and make it or not make it.
It's rough.
Why anybody runs for anything or agrees to be put through the meat grinder that is any president's nominee absolutely escapes me.
I have no idea why.
Why would anybody volunteer to have their life torn to pieces, every little thing that they had ever done that could be questioned, brought up?
And that may go a long way toward answering why we have the kind of representation that we do have in Washington.
Well, more of the other news.
you know the other news in a moment us All right, here is some of the other news.
The headline is, Biggest Extinction Caused by Low Oxygen.
This came from Whitley's UnknownCountry.com.
It's amazing.
The biggest mass extinction in Earth's history happened 251 million years ago, and it took millions of years for the Earth to finally repopulate.
What do you think happened?
A big rock from space?
No.
New research shows that this extinction event was caused by a sudden and sharp decline, sudden and sharp decline in atmospheric oxygen, the air we breathe, folks.
Why did it happen?
Could it happen again?
250 million years ago, there was a single supercontinent on Earth, right?
Most of the land was above sea level, or that which was, became uninhabitable because of low oxygen levels.
It simply made breathing too difficult for most land animal organisms to survive.
Biologist Raymond Huey says an additional reason might be that the groups of the same species were virtually cut off from each other because there wasn't enough oxygen in the air for them to travel and find mates.
Now, there's about 21% oxygen in the air today.
Now, there was about 30% in the period before this extinction.
The oxygen level, it seems, fell suddenly from 30% down to around 16% and then bottoming out at less than 12%.
That situation remained on Earth for about 10 million years.
Oxygen dropped from its highest level to its lowest level ever in only 20 million years.
So in other words, nobody, nothing, could breathe.
For some reason, the oxygen totally went away.
Now, of course, they look at carbon dioxide levels, which were very high, which means it could have been global warming.
No, not by our hand, obviously.
When speaking of, it's unclear whether the increased temperature in the Antarctic, which is causing glaciers to begin to shrink like crazy, is a natural effect itself or a result of our hands.
They don't know.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed about 2,000 aerial photographs from 1940.
Over 100 satellite images from the 1960s onward, they calculated that, what, about 87% of the 244 glaciers going out to sea from the peninsula have retreated over the last 50 years.
87% of them are going away.
And now, the commander of the Air Force Special, or rather Space Command, denied yesterday that his 500 nuclear-armed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles are merely, in quotes here, Cold War icons.
And he said he's preparing alternative uses for the ICBMs, including arming them perhaps with conventional warheads to attack surface or deeply buried targets.
It's a problem.
What are we going to do with all of our ICBMs?
It really is a problem.
We were prepared for, of course, a massive, full Earth-changing, in the sense we wouldn't be on it anymore, kind of exchange with the Soviets, right?
Well, we don't have that anymore.
So the commander of the space, you know, the whole Air Force Space Command is worried, I guess, that all his missiles, well, they're getting old.
They need service.
And he says, well, it still forces adversaries to think before they act, but says he's exploring future uses for these systems and called for help in changing the professional mindset that considers them Cold War relics.
Well, they're not relics, he says.
What we need is something good to do with them.
So what do you suggest?
Anybody out there have any ideas?
What about launching satellites?
Couldn't we launch satellites with them?
I believe they have that capability.
I think now they're aimed at the ocean.
If memory serves me, we made an agreement with the Soviets that we would target all of our missiles to hit the ocean, and they would do the same thing.
So in case there was a mistaken nuclear conflict, we would only kill fish.
Probably I might add most of them.
Pioneer 10 and 11, these are our deep space spacecraft, have been very precisely tracked for over 30 years as they have crossed and then departed our solar system.
They're gone.
When they passed a distance of 20 AU from the Sun, that would be astronomical units.
In other words, as far as we are from the Sun, both probes suddenly exhibited a strange acceleration.
Nobody knows why the Pioneer spacecraft suddenly started going faster.
But they are.
There's no reason.
There's no propulsion system that's suddenly pushing them along faster.
It doesn't exist.
But something's doing it, and the scientists have no idea what.
Now, I don't know how many of you use it, but if this happens, I'm going to be rather upset.
Headline is, Fed's weather information could go dark.
Do you want seven-day weather forecasts for your zip code, Or an hour-by-hour prediction of temperature, wind speed, humidity, chance of rain, or the weather data beamed directly to your cell phone.
The information is available for free from the National Weather Service, but under a bit of pending legislation in the U.S. Senate, I am really thunderstruck to have to report to you that it all may disappear.
A bill introduced last week by Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, what's the matter with you, Rick, would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies like AccuWeather, the Weather Channel, which offer their very own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported websites.
Well, supporters say the bill wouldn't hamper the Weather Service or the National Hurricane Center from alerting the public to hazards.
In fact, it exempts forecasts meant to protect life and property, but otherwise they'd go away.
And that wonderful weather forecast, which I'm used to, look, I love our local weather.
I love it.
I read, I don't know how many of you read the forecast discussions, but I do.
I'm sure the guys at NOAA and so forth all think that nobody ever reads their discussion.
And that's where they kind of, it's really neat.
If you get the federal weather, do it yourself, try it yourself.
Just scroll down.
You'll see forecast discussion.
It's kind of fun.
The meteorologists talk about what they think might happen and occasionally make some wise cracks in there.
But it's just a kind of sit-down discussion of what they really think the weather dynamics are, what's behind that forecast.
It is fascinating.
And speaking of fascinating, a ham friend of mine, Karen, W6SO, sends the following.
Now, remember, you know how I feel about the Princeton project, the human consciousness project.
I am fascinated by it.
And Karen has an awfully good idea.
She says, I wonder if the folks at Princeton have considered trying to couple the random number generators, what they call eggs, to some kind of very large antenna array.
And I wonder what the effect would be on the result.
Do you think it could be made more sensitive?
That's a very, very, very, very good question, Karen.
I don't know.
But what a hell of an idea.
I'm not sure how you really would couple an antenna in a meaningful way to a random number generating computer, but I suppose it could be done.
Something I'm certainly going to think about, and perhaps some scientists out there might want to consider.
Any antenna would have the ability to receive frequencies that we could perhaps not even conceive.
Just the fact of it being there might enhance whatever communication is going on from the collective or whatever.
Think about it, guys.
And finally, here is what has probably got to be the Darwin Award winner for 2005.
Already.
I mean, we're not even halfway through the year, and yet we have the following.
The following mind-boggling attempt at a crime spree in Washington, D.C., USA appeared to be the robber's first and last.
You see, his target was H ⁇ J leather and firearms.
Store, right?
They sell leather and firearms.
A gun shop specializing in handguns.
The shop was full of customers, armed customers.
Now, to enter the shop, the robber, get this, had to step around a marked police patrol car, which was actually parked right at the front door.
A uniformed officer was standing at the counter having coffee before work.
Upon seeing the officer, the would-be robber announced, it's a hold-up!
And he fired a few wild shots from a 22-target pistol.
Very bad idea.
The officer and a clerk promptly returned fire.
The police officer fired with a 9mm Glock 17.
The clerk, that's my preference, by the way, the clerk with a .50 caliber desert eagle, assisted by several customers who also drew their guns, several of whom also fired.
The robber was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.
Crime scene investigators located 47 expended cartridges in the shop.
Scotty, you know, they did a body and Clyde on him.
Clyde, I guess.
The subsequent autopsy revealed 23 gunshot wounds.
Ballistics identified seven rounds, or rounds rather, from seven different weapons.
No one else was apparently hurt in the exchange, which in itself is amazing when you think about it.
Here we are at the beginning of March, and we already may have the 2005 winner of the Darwin Award.
This guy's going to be hard to beat.
I mean, think about it.
You're going into a gun store where it's full of customers, every one of them with something strapped to their hip.
You have to step around a police car, cop car parked right there.
The cop is standing up at the counter.
You go in like an idiot, or a Darwin Award winner in this case, and announce that the store is being robbed.
I mean, they're going to be picking lead out of this guy's corpse.
And then they had a show about the volcano that went off in the Indonesians in 1815 and caused major climate change in 1816.
And then another show about the potential chaotic events that could be caused by the Cascade Fault that is in the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles off of the coast of Northern California all the way up to Washington.
I am a Discovery Channel devotee, and I hope you are too.
It is an amazing channel, absolutely amazing channel.
And of course, it's wonderful in, particularly wonderful in high-definition, perhaps, perhaps the best high-definition channel that is produced anywhere, period.
HBO has very high standards for the video they send out, but I'll tell you what, the Discovery Channel is simply unbeatable.
So yes, all of that, right down my alley, you can depend that I'm watching.
Don't forget, coming up at the top of this hour, one of the weirdest, no, the weirdest doctor we've ever had on the program, Tess Garradson.
And boy, can that woman write a book from the high desert in the middle of the night where we do business.
I spoke with you a few weeks ago when the GIS was on and was referred to someone that Brendan knows who worked with George Meeks who is slow getting back to me, but in the meantime, I've located what's called the Spiracom manual.
And I was wondering, it's not like really A to Z schematics and was wondering if you could repost the schematics that you had found, just don't know if it's the same thing that you have.
Well, I did have schematic diagrams, block diagrams and schematics for the equipment that was used, and I'll see about reposting it for you.
So you actually know somebody that is going to take it on?
unidentified
Well, it's my brother, and I mean, I'm doing all the legwork.
He's the electronics person, and again, still trying to have this guy get back to me who actually worked with George Meeks.
In the meantime, in the last two weeks, I've spoken with five people who I tracked down from different websites that worked directly with him who are all on their deathbeds, and I could barely get them to really, really sad, you know, didn't want to bother them.
I didn't want to let them die.
But, you know, I'm realizing these guys are really ready to go, and there's one guy left, and hoping he'll get back to us.
Well, I'm hoping that the work we did on this broadcast, thank you very much, the playing of the SpiritCom tapes and then the posting of that information that I will try and get back up for you, will reinvigorate this study.
And what it was, you may not have heard it, on Halloween I played a pretty long track, it might have been 40 minutes or more, of some of the work done by George Meeks in a live, real-time communication with the dead.
This was not a hoax.
This was not baloney.
This was a scientist, actually a group, that produced electronics, that produced a series of signals, different audio pitches, that were then able to be modulated by somebody on the other side.
So instead of EVP, sort of haphazardly, interesting as it is, picking up whatever is said, this allowed actual live two-way communications with the departed.
We had examples on the air.
And if you were listening carefully, that absolutely set the back of the hair on the back of your neck standing straight up, believe me.
First one, this might be a silly question, but I was wondering, I used to, I was in the Marine Corps and flew around in helicopters to talk about the crew chief.
And a lot of times we see all these shooting stars, and sometimes we see tons of them, especially when we were on night vision goggles.
And it got me thinking, how is it that a meteor, sometimes they do make it to the ground.
Planes usually travel at 30,000 fleet, 30,000 feet.
How is it that one hasn't smashed into an airplane yet, or is it just a matter of time?
All right, back away from your phone a little bit.
You're too loud.
unidentified
Okay.
Yeah, I really appreciate the kind words that you say about especially our area forecast discussions because a lot of us put a lot of thought into that now that it's a public product.
Well, recently the federal government decided to reorganize all of the forecast information put out by the National Weather Service with some new whoopsie-doo computer system.
And I've never seen anything so screwed up in my whole life.
unidentified
Well, it is a work in progress.
Basically, what you're talking about is the digital data forecast phase.
Well, to tell you how messed up it was, though, when it was first done, we had a forecast here in Peronto, Nevada, where it rarely, if ever, snows of five days straight with accumulations of one to two inches.
unidentified
Like I said, this is working far.
This is something that they've just started over the past couple of years.
Thank you very much, and good luck from the National Weather Service.
It would be a crying shame.
It's one of the better uses in my mind for our tax dollar to have a reliable government forecast, one that's there every day, along with the little extras they give you, like the local radar and the comments from the forecast discussion, all the rest of it.
My question is simply, with what's gone on in present days of terrorism and all, do you think that bomb shelters, fallout shelters, I've done a lot of research on the Internet, and there are a lot of ones that have, in contrast to this one, have been restored to their historic value, which is just amazing.
I appreciate that very much.
But do you think that we would ever go back to a situation where it was just a couple or three years ago where we were being asked to buy duct tape and tarp or whatever drop cloth to designed to withstand,
of course, not a direct nuclear strike, but something fairly regional, that that bomb shelter could reasonably be converted into some sort of biological shelter now and would be more effective as such.
Which is another way of telling you that I think the attack upon us will come, and when it comes, it will be biological in nature, not nuclear.
As a matter of fact, that's something we're going to talk about with our guest coming up shortly.
She's Dr. Tess Gerritson.
And I'm telling you right now, if you've never heard Tess, you're in for a real treat.
There's nobody like Tess Gerritson on the planet, really.
Tess Gerritson, Dr. Tess Gerritson, took a very unusual route to a Writing career, her lifelong interest has always been science, especially the creepy and weird aspects.
As a child, she would dissect snakes, collect buckets full of lizards, to study and stuff.
It's no wonder, then, her college studies focused on biology and physical anthropology, which in turn led her to study medicine.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, she earned her B.A. in anthropology and went on to receive her MD from the University of California, San Francisco.
She completed her internal medicine residency in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she worked as a physician.
Tess is the author of eight bestsellers, and in her free time, she continues to compile a weird biological facts file viewable on her webpage, which, by the way, is www.tessgarratson.com, T-E-S-S-G-E-R-R-I-T-S-E-N.com.
We've got a link up for the ease of your clicking through.
Now, when I got on the phone with her just before the program, I said we're going to have fun because I knew we were.
And she said, we'll just talk about creepy medical stuff.
I wonder what, when she was a doctor, practicing physician, I wonder what kind of bedside manner she had.
I don't know.
I picture her as a kind of physician that, you know, you come in with a little slash or a cut, you know, required three or four stitches, and she'd give you a lecture on the horrors of flesh-eating bacteria or something.
will test garrison in a moment Well, the reason all this began is because of a book called Gravity.
Gravity is in the top 10 books I've read of all time, and I read a book a day, you know, or a book every two days.
I knock them down real quick.
I'm a very avid reader.
And so I tend to follow authors.
When you find an author you like, well, then you're going to probably like the rest of their work.
And that was the case with Tess Garretson.
I've read all her books now.
All of them.
And I suggest you begin with gravity if you're kind of a techie type and you like space stuff.
Gravity, it's one of those books that cannot or you will not put down until you're done.
I mean, it is that riveting.
God, it's good.
That said, here is Tess Gerrit, Dr. Tess Gerriton.
And that's why, even though locally, I mean, the epidemic is pretty bad, you don't really worry about it killing hundreds of millions of people around the world the way you would with flu.
For a while there, they were actually beginning to wonder if this particular strain of Marburg, which by the way was much more deadly up in the high 90s, it killed almost everybody, this particular strain might be becoming airborne because of the number of health care workers that were using precaution but nevertheless got it anyway.
But the other thing, though, is that, you know, you do have symptoms and you are spreading the virus when you're symptomatic.
And so you can protect yourself.
You know who's going to kill you, as opposed to something like the flu where people are spreading it around and they don't even feel like they're sick.
Now, I understand how it works in Africa, where it seems to come and go magically and mysteriously.
But we have these terrorists in the world, and all it would take is someone going down there and getting a good sample of blood, and then perhaps tampering around with it a bit, and getting it definitely airborne, and then releasing it in a very populated U.S. city.
The reason I got this interest in it was because of something that I had read in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago about a young woman who was found dead in her bathtub in her apartment.
The fire and rescue people came and said, yep, she looks dead, and they found some pills, and it appeared she had had an overdose.
And they called the state police, and they came and said it looked like it was an accidental overdose.
So they zipped her into a body bag and sent her to a morgue, and a couple hours later she woke up and actually ended up being just Fine.
And I read that story, and it just gave me the chills.
You know, I'm always paying attention to what scares me.
Declared dead by the emergency medical people who came to see him, brought to the morgue, and they opened up his bag later on and realized he was breathing.
And he ended up in the hospital.
I don't think he's actually awakened from his coma, but here's a four-year-old boy who was brought to the hospital, found unconscious, declared dead, and began to breathe.
And he's now recovering.
So it is case after case.
There was one woman who was actually about, she was lying on the table about to be embalmed when she began to talk.
And you can imagine how the funeral home director was a little bit shocked by that.
What we don't know is that it's sometimes very hard to diagnose.
And I'm talking as a doctor, and I'm going to make a little confession here, all right?
And when I talk to other doctors, they all say the same thing.
When you are a medical resident or an intern and you're called in the middle of the night to go and pronounce somebody dead in the hospital, the nurse has already decided this patient is dead.
So you're walking there and it's maybe late at night and you're exhausted and you walk into the room and there are all the relatives sitting around crying.
You don't want to spend a lot of time in that room.
So you may be bent over and listen to the heart for 20 seconds and you look and they don't look like they're breathing and you say, I'm very sorry and you walk out.
And there have been a couple of times when I walked out and thought, did I listen long enough?
And I have heard from many doctors who said the same thing, that there are times when they wonder whether they listened long enough.
Well, I even mean a little deeper into the question of death.
For example, after we die, everything doesn't wind down, I guess, right away.
And at the instant your heart stops, I mean, this is kind of like a private little horror for me, but I wonder if the dead lie there sometimes, aware of the fact that they have just died.
So we're really, really, really sure that people who have just died aren't hearing some few little things around them and have some final flashes of consciousness.
I think you probably lose consciousness, certainly after your heart stopped, but even before, because as the heart is failing, it's not pumping as strongly.
And you're going to, you know how it is to black out when you start to, your blood pressure goes down and a little fuzzy.
You're not going to notice anything.
So I wouldn't worry about that.
But what I would worry about is being declared prematurely dead when you're not and waking up in a situation that is not too pleasant.
They have a nursing home, and whenever somebody is declared dead, they're brought to the local morgue, and in three times that she could remember, the person woke up.
And so their local morgue has been known as the home of rejuvenation.
what i'd really like to do here is to take a moment which i've been meaning to do to talk about this television program this was a show that aired on And this was a show that aired on, well, my beautiful wife is right there at Showtime.
And it was just one of the best things you've ever seen.
It was called Dead Like Me.
It fits kind of right in with what we're talking about right now.
And what can I say about that show?
It took the comical side of death.
And I know it's hard to imagine the comical side of death, but there really was one.
And it mixed it, at least in the first season, I would like to say, with the serious side of death.
So it was kind of a drama-slash-comedy about dying.
And what it would be like if you died.
And in the first season, they regularly followed those who had sort of passed on.
And they had sort of little angels of death known in this program as Reapers.
And it was just an unusually good program.
And I understand there's a little thing you can sign running around on the internet.
And I hope, you know, a petition.
And I hope you will find it and sign it.
And then maybe somebody will pick up dead like me.
There are rumors out there that WB or one of those other networks may pick it up.
But it's worth picking up.
It's worth developing.
It's worth returning to what they did in the first season because of like this program.
It was so unusual and entertaining.
It's simply one of the best shows ever put on the big or the small tube in this case, I guess.
Dead Like Me, it was called.
If you see it on DVD, pick it up, check it out.
And if you're in the television business, for God's sakes, pick it up.
unidentified
I'm R.F.L.
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And it turned into this sort of quack cure in which everybody thought, well, shocks can make a dead frog's leg twitch maybe could make people come back to life.
So that was sort of the basis of why she wrote the book Frankenstein.
And people back then did believe a lot of strange things.
So they had this cure called the blue window glass cure where you laid under blue glass and that was somehow supposed to make you better.
Or they would use a blue light bulb.
It was called a violet light treatment.
And they had electromagnets that would be put around the body and they would attach it to a lighting socket and was supposed to make the iron in the blood respond to the flow of magnetism.
But there were some things that people were doing in the history of medicine that were actually working.
For instance, you know, in the 15th century, midwives already knew that when newborns were born and weren't breathing, that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation could sometimes work.
So midwives were already using mouth-to-mouth.
And later on in the 1700s, they were doing that also.
They were Using mouth-to-mouth on people who were drowned.
The curious thing is that I think Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, her husband's ex-wife died, was drowned.
And they tried to resuscitate her, and it didn't work.
So that was something else that she was very aware of what was happening in her time in medicine.
And there were all these attempts to bring people back from the dead.
Doctor, moving that concept to the modern day, is there really any reason why, even though your body died or something in your body gave up the ghost and you died physically, that if we had the science to do it, and I know we're close, that we couldn't keep a brain alive.
Well, yeah, I suppose theoretically it's possible that if you were able to keep the brain, the blood flow going to the brain, even though everything else was dead, you could keep it alive.
Now, brain tissue, supposing that this could be done, is there anything in brain tissue by itself that would continue to age and finally, no matter how well-fed it was, it would get Alzheimer's and essentially gone, I guess?
Or could it conceivably live for hundreds and hundreds of years?
And then, you know, I think the worst part, I think the worst part for most of us is the idea that we would live and people we loved would have passed on.
And we would be left alone with nobody we loved still alive.
Well, no, any possibility that those people could be right, that those people being cryogenically stiffened might someday actually have a chance of becoming winners from their point of view and returning to life?
And, you know, the other question that comes up is if we're going to be fixing people, if we're going to be donating our health care dollar to certain things, and I'm doing this from a point of view of public health, who are you going to take care of?
Are you going to take care of all these brains that are sitting in a freezer for 10, 20 years?
Are you going to be taking care of the next generation and making sure that every child is vaccinated and every kid has proper nutrition?
I just think that from a societal point of view, you have to look at where your money should go.
We've just discovered that people who go under general anesthesia, especially older people, when they come back out of it, even though the surgery went well and there were no incidents on the operating table, they have lost some intellectual capabilities there.
And that's certainly true for people who have been on bypass, you know, who've had cardiac bypass.
Their brains have been perfused the whole time, but just that trauma of being made unconscious for a while can lead to some intellectual deficits.
Okay, well, I hear stories all the time about people who have had bypass operations, and they say they come out, what they say is different personalities, that they go through a personality change of some kind.
That's sort of a common rumor.
And really, you're saying there's a reason for that.
And I think there's a scientific explanation for that.
They are having oxygen deprivation hallucinations.
We don't know.
We really don't know.
I would love to believe that there's life after death.
I wish I was not agnostic.
I just happen to be.
But I just don't see any if somebody was to come back to me and say they are reincarnated and tell me everything about a loved one that there is no way they could possibly know, maybe I would believe it.
But I've never come across a case that was convincing.
You know, people study these things and interview people who do appear to have sometimes incontrovertible evidence, things they just could not possibly have known.
And they talk, of course, about what about all the people who talk about floating up out of their body and seeing the resuscitation work and being able to repeat things that the nurses and the emergency care people said.
They're not afraid of death anymore because of what they saw or experienced.
And that's kind of convincing.
I mean, bad people coming back as much better people and realizing that there is something else.
The reason I'm saying this, I mean, after all, our attitudes are formed, aren't they, by if we're sure there's something else and there's some accountability for what we do in this life, then we act one way.
If we think there's absolutely no accountability whatsoever, then at least a certain percentage of the people are likely to act very differently.
Don't go around tonight, but you finally take your life.
There's a bad moon on the right.
I hear hurricanes are blowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I hear rivers are blowing.
I hear rivers are blowing.
Feels like we ain't down I'll be down and move Down and move and stop When I go now that I've lost you far So I know When I'm falling as a bone So go around and go When I'm falling as a bone When I'm falling as a bone Wanna take a ride?
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Medical science can do a lot of, it can do a lot of really interesting things.
For example, the recent story that I heard, I don't know, a couple years ago, on 60 Minutes, about the lady who had the aneurysm, right?
And an aneurysm is like a little filled-up balloon in your brain, which was absolutely inoperable, except they came up with a new idea.
They cooled this lady down, reduced her body temperature, took all of the blood out of her body, stopped her heart, brainwaves went flat for 40 minutes.
Put the blood back in her body, pre-warmed, I might add, as you would a baby bottle, and thump, started her heart with a little thump, and this lady came back, well, back fully intact.
And so where in the heck was she for 40 minutes, doctor?
They give them xenobarb and they put them into a coma.
It essentially puts the brain into this state of suspended animation so that everything else can recover and then the brain is slowly brought back up again.
If there was a way to revive the dead, perhaps those dead for various periods of time and frozen, would it be, in your opinion, a very ill-advised thing to do or a scientifically valuable thing to do?
I think it'd be fascinating, but I don't think it would be advisable from the point of view of all of society.
And I know we talk about ourselves as individuals, we think we don't want to die.
Of course we don't want to die.
We're having a good life.
But when you look at overall society and you look at people, you know, at cities and populations, again, I just have to get back to what is the best thing for all of mankind.
And I don't think it's having huge buildings with jars and jars and jars of brains waiting for reanimation.
But the other thing that scares me as well is the fact we have all these crops, genetically engineered crops that are all one, they all have the same genes.
Yeah, and so if something happens to wipe them out, we may have lost a big supply of our corn.
I think it could be pretty big if you're talking about letting a plant seed out there that will completely out-compete everything that should be there for genetic variability.
You know, you just don't want the whole world to be taken over by one kind of wheat.
Also, I've talked to some scientists who have, this will get you, they've begun to hook themselves up to computers.
And when I say hook themselves up, I mean go for a main nerve part of the arm, for example, and hook it up to a computer in hopes of interfacing the brain, to some degree, with a computer.
what is the point of it Yeah, I'm just still having trouble figuring out why you would want to hook up a biological, why a man would want to hook up to a computer.
You were once a medical student, and it sort of portrays the torture that they go through at everybody's hands, you know, the residents and the whatever.
There is a tradition in medicine that you have to prove that you're a man.
This goes back to the days when there were very few women who were in medicine.
It was part of a trial by fire, and the feeling was that if you couldn't stand the heat, that you really shouldn't be a doctor.
And that tradition has really not left medicine.
And there is a reason for it because one of the reasons that you stay overnight and watch a patient for 24 hours or however long you're on call is that you get to see the progress of an illness.
You get to see what happens to a patient who has this particular disease.
And you can see it with your own eyes.
And that led to people being forced to stay in hospitals for their education.
What ended up happening, though, is they were finding that people were making too many mistakes.
They're tired.
And it led to a lawsuit in New York State, actually, of there was a resident who made a mistake on a dose of medication and killed a patient.
And New York State decided to pass a law that limited residents from working more than 80 hours a week.
And you think, that's outrageous.
But when I was a medical resident, there were weeks when I was working 100 hours a week.
And I suppose many times coming to a patient and having to make a decision without your eyes being all the way open and your brain fully functioning after a cup of coffee, huh?
And, you know, when you work in a situation that's sometimes tragic, you have to learn to deal with it.
And I can tell you some wild stories.
For instance, when I was a medical resident in San Francisco, we had a lot of what we would call, I guess you would say, they were undesirable patients.
Gomers, which is short for get out of my emergency room.
Or trolls, you know, people you'd find sleeping under bridges.
And they'd come in and you'd take care of them and you'd just want them to leave again.
Well, we had one man who just kept coming back for an infected foot, and we didn't know what to do with him.
So finally, this residents all got together and chipped in some money and said, told the man, look, we're going to give you an airline ticket to Los Angeles.
You get to L.A., you go to the emergency room, and you check in and say, my foot is infected, please admit me.
So Demand said, sure.
And so they got him an airline ticket, put him on the plane, sent him to L.A., and didn't hear anything from him for a long time.
And then a couple of weeks later, something came from UCLA house staff, and it was a big envelope.
And all it had in there was an x-ray of a hand.
And the hand had its middle finger extended.
unidentified
So that was the response they got from the UCLA house staff.
I think there are plenty of doctors who are religious.
And part of it has to do with, I guess, a sense of when you watch someone die, and I've done it so many countless times, you always question where they're going.
And it's hard to believe that somebody who was alive and talking to you didn't go somewhere.
You know, you want them to be somewhere, not just have gone into oblivion.
Well, medical school doesn't try to drum that out of you.
Well, they tell you that things must be proven.
And they tell you that drugs, before you can give a medication, that there has to be a drug trial that shows that it's effective and safe.
And that is supposed to be objective evidence.
So I think that, again, faith is just something that is very private, and it's something you have to believe in yourself, and you may never have proof for it.
But I would think being a doctor and seeing these things around death and hearing of these hauntings and hearing, have you, for example, did you ever get to hear a patient tell a story of after they've come back from, you know, being arrested?
And this night, Dr. Chess Garritson, she is a physician and author of a lot of very strange books about the darker side of what could happen in the medical world, I guess.
That'd be the way to put it.
And definitely the dark side in some cases.
Every single one of her books, you know the way you get when you like an author.
Well, you just go plowing through all her books, and all her books are well worth getting, just lining up and reading one after the other.
we'll be right back I wonder what causes a physician normally dedicated to the saving of lives and the doing no harm thing to turn to the dark side.
You know, I have to admit that I have a lot of problems with intelligent design, and I know I'm going to get In trouble because every time I talk about this, I get lots of emails.
Well, you know, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I'm looking at it from just the point of view of somebody who's looking at it logically.
And if you are to believe in intelligent design, in other words, you believe that there is some kind of an intelligence that created us, you still have that same problem of who created the designer?
Who designed the designer?
You still have to go back to that.
You know, where did he come from or she come from?
They were dumped out, but we still carry it in our genes.
So I think that for a lot of reasons, there's really no doubt about evolution.
I mean, we talk about it being a theory, and that's what we get hit with.
Oh, it's just a theory.
But the truth is, I mean, what is a theory?
I think that people don't understand what it means in the scientific sense, which is it's a logical and well-supported explanation that explains a great variety of facts.
You probably don't know the name Matthew Alper, but he wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
Simply saying death is our biggest fear.
The brain, in a defense to that fear, because it always forms a defense, demands something like religion, and that even when you go into the deepest forests in the middle of heaven knows where, you find people worshiping something.
Whether it's for Christians or whether it's for people who worship the earth, there is something that wants us to be in touch with something deeper, something very spiritual.
Well, we certainly do have the capacity for worship, whatever form it takes.
But it doesn't mean that you can't also believe in science as well, and you can't believe that we carry our past in our DNA, which, in a way, is just as wondrous a thing.
There's so much about nature that's very wondrous.
I look at various things around the world, and the bird flu thing is actually scaring me.
I've read story after story here on the air, which in an eerie way seems to have scientists and biologists predicting, you know, just saying, almost saying, it's going to happen.
I mean, maybe not in five years or ten years or whatever, but we are going to have another flu pandemic.
We have them about three times a century.
And in fact, you know, the reason I'm actually terrified of this is because I've been doing research on the 1918 pandemic and saw what a truly living horror it was for people back then.
And I just got a bulletin from the Harvard School of Public Health.
And this is a man, he's a physician, and he says, it's coming.
And he points out that the 1918 pandemic killed, I think, probably closer to 50 million people, but it may have been 100 million.
And he says, we are totally unprepared.
And I didn't realize this, but our Homeland Security Department has actually looked at 12 disaster scenarios, and even Homeland Security agrees that the most likely and probably the most deadly will be a flu pandemic.
In other words, if it, in its evolving way, decides it's too deadly, does it make the trade-off and become somewhat less lethal but spread more easily so that it doesn't kill itself off?
If you listen very carefully, we're about to begin taking questions for Dr. Gerritson.
So if you've got a sort of weird medical question, you know, the very weird category like death and the kinds of things we've been talking about, here come the numbers.
unidentified
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Of course, sometime before the beginning of the year, I think I told you all that bird flu was my absolute biggest fear.
And the fact that I saw these scientists continually pummeling us with stories that it was, you know, virtually saying it's going to happen, that you could almost presume it will happen.
And, Doctor, if it did happen, if the viruses got together, exchanged RNA, married, became the worst scenario, what are we looking at?
Well, I can take as our model the 1918 pandemic, otherwise known as the Spanish flu.
Now, of course, the number of deaths probably wouldn't be so bad because I would assume that some of those were due to bacterial pneumonia, which we can treat.
But just looking at the Spanish flu, it killed 50 million people around the world.
It killed about 700,000 just in the United States alone.
Part of it was that part of the reason for the deaths was because the body was responding.
It was actually our immune system that was killing us.
You know, what happens when you get an influx of this virus is that your immune system pours out white blood cells and various toxins to try and kill the virus.
And what it ends up doing is flooding your air spaces in your lungs so that you get pneumonia.
You just can't breathe.
There's no way to exchange oxygen with your bloodstream.
Well, we're not entirely sure about bird flu because, you know, it does appear to be effective, though, in bird flu.
The way Camelflu works is it affects one of the proteins on the virus, which it actually prevents the virus from being spread once it's invaded your cells.
So it kind of keeps it from multiplying very quickly.
And it works for other viruses as well, but it does seem to be the one thing that is the most effective.
Unfortunately, it's pretty expensive.
And as I said, this country just does not have enough.
Now, the other thing, of course, is a vaccine.
The problem with developing a vaccine is you're working with a moving target.
By the time you figure out what the final flu virus is going to look like, it's going to take you six months to manufacture the vaccine.
And by that time, you may have had already one wave of an epidemic.
And that's the other thing that we have to worry about.
Even though we have these antibiotics for bacterial infections, everything moves much faster now.
So it could move much faster.
I know that the UN really has devoted quite a lot of attention to just watching for outbreaks in Southeast Asia, which is where we think it will happen.
But we have to remember that the Spanish flu, the outbreak started in Kansas.
Hearkening back to an earlier subject, Mark in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania says, hey, would you please ask the doctor, is there a double-sided zipper inside a body bag so if you wake up in one, you can get out?
Now, that story you told me about the fellow, the doctor, about to cut into the body on the table and the hand grabbing him and his dying, that's really a true story?
I have, you know, there's another story like that.
There was a, I think he was a cardinal in the 1500s who had died, and there was going to be a post-mortem on him, and they cut open his chest, and they looked, and the heart was still beating.
Prey was a really good book, as I mentioned to you, I think, just before the show.
It was about these nanites, these designer little machines that are sort of set loose in a swarm with the idea of making a camera that nobody could shoot down for the Defense Department.
And this is technology that we're on the edge of and we are working with right now, Doctor.
Waffardline, you're on the air with Dr. Garritz and hi.
unidentified
Hello.
Yes, I think that God and evolution are not incompatible.
And so my version of the Asimov quote, which you mentioned at the bottom of the last hour, which was that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, my version is any sufficiently advanced deity can act in ways that may be indistinguishable from science.
There are some people who say maybe if there was a God, he set in motion evolution.
unidentified
Yeah, and I think that also John Muir about 100 and something years ago came up with the concept that there was not a creation and then it stopped and then the world, now we're living in what's created, but that it's a continual process of creation.
And I think possibly he was not the first to come up with that, but as far as I know, he was.
And so if you look at it from that point of view, a lot of things, like for instance, things you refer to as mistakes.
Obviously, if something bad happens to me or you, we refer to that that was a mistake or someone did something.
Well, I was going to use what you spoke about, the appendix, was actually very brilliant in a way, because if you look at the appendix as an analogy, from a lot of old-fashioned viewpoints, they viewed Antarctica or the Arctic as wastelands.
They were sort of useless.
Or volcanoes and earthquakes were just useless and terrifying things that served no purpose.
And now we can see that Antarctica regulates our climate.
Now we can see that volcanoes actually created our climate.
If you don't, they cause you a lot of pain, and they cause a lot of crowding.
And the question, you know, is why do we have them?
It appears that we must have had larger jaws at some time in our ancestry.
And as somebody who had all four of mine taken out, and everybody in my family has had all four of their wisdom teeth taken out, I can testify that they are a pain.
So I don't really know why we still have them.
I think it's because we must have, we just, the human jaw has changed.
I've learned the origin of perhaps six new words tonight.
Is it the Rockies?
You're on the air with Dr. Tess Garrison.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi.
I had a couple of things.
One related to what you were just talking about with the last caller on the vestigial organ situation and the junk gene stuff.
Yes.
You know, recently they've been talking about plants repairing their DNA when there's been a problem in the environment.
And perhaps we are holding on to DNA that we had used for in case that cycle comes around again and we need those to be able to adapt to that situation.
I tend to think that it's leftover genetic material.
Again, it's like vestigial organs.
It's vestigial DNA.
unidentified
Or maybe it's for something that hasn't come up yet.
We're being prepared.
And also, I had a bodybuild story for you if you wanted one.
I worked for 20-odd years or so with a guy who was a LERP team radio man in NAM.
And as you may or may not know, LERP teams would get dropped 50, 100 clicks up the trail to watch what was coming down to give some warning.
And they asked him to go out one more time.
He was getting very short, was due to come home in less than a week.
But they said, you know, we really got just a two-day mission.
Go ahead for it.
And they got the information they needed and they headed for the LZ and were letting the chopper know that they were on the way.
And the guy in front of him stepped on a bouncing bedding and dodged it, which, of course, is almost unheard of.
But with the radio on him, he couldn't dodge it.
He was right behind the guy and it just shredded him.
And the guys just picked him up and started running.
And they said, you know, they got the handset on the radio and they're saying, you know, to the chopper, get in quick because everybody in the neighborhood is going to have heard that and they're going to be looking for us.
And they said, we're at the LZ.
It's already too hot.
Get to the backup.
They said, we can't get there.
We're carrying this guy.
And they said, you've got to get to the backup because we can't get in here.
And so they got to the backup LZ.
It was some clicks away, so it took them a lot of time to get there.
Corman jumped out before the chopper even hit the ground, put his fingers on his throat, put his fingers on his wrist, said he's dead, grabbed his tags, and realized he was looking down the barrels of seven M16s.
And they were saying, he's going.
He's not staying.
He said, we're overloaded already.
You're going to kill us.
They said, then you can stay.
And they put him on the chopper, and of course, Corbin came with him.
But during the entire 45 minutes or an hour of flight, they never found one sign of life.
They got him to the mass unit, triaged Doc, looked at him and said, dead.
And again, looking at seven barrels of M16s, they said, Doc, we're not expecting miracles.
Okay, okay, we've got to expect him miracles, but you've got to do what you can.
They opened him up.
They said, there's nothing we can do.
They put a tow tag, body bag, sent him to the morgue.
So he's now at about an hour and a half, two hours, maybe three already since there's been any sign of life.
Three hours later, he woke up in the body bag, and they took him back, took out about 15 or 20 feet of intestine, and he lost down from 185 to about 70 pounds.
Well, we do, and we're here to help you through the night.
No question about it.
If you'd like to provide a little bit of input, here's how you do it.
unidentified
To talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at Area Code 775-727-1295.
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You know, I wanted to comment on that last caller because there is a case out of Iraq of a similar thing of a soldier who was shot in the head, was declared dead by a medic at the scene, was again declared dead in the helicopter, and 13 hours later, and he gets to the hospital, they detected a heartbeat.
I couldn't believe it either because clean as it might be, if it got the tumor, there would still be cells, messy cells around that would start it up all over again, wouldn't there?
I mean, it's your interpretation of what happened, but clearly you had visions, and visions and dreams and weird things are not unusual after that kind of event, are they, doctor?
It certainly is a weird story, whether it was a soul transfer or whether she actually met somebody on the other side who told her, go back and take care of this problem I had, you know, get my murderer.
I don't know where that came from, but I think that if you were going to go about this from the skeptic point of view, you would assume that she heard about the case somewhere and just did not remember that she had heard about it.
And, you know, one of the worst examples of all of harm that we have done has to do with puripural fever.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but in the 1800s, 1700 and 1800s, scores of, I mean, just how many women would die from childbirth because of infections that were given to them by doctors.
They're saying that in Europe a woman had a 10 to 20% chance of dying, not from the childbirth, but from the infection that came afterwards.
So now a great deal of harm was done.
But I would agree with you that most things do get better with time without any medical intervention.
Well, then, why not, here's an idea for somebody to make a million dollars.
Why not actually produce, or do they, a real placebo that you could go to the pharmacy and a doctor could fill out a prescription form for, send you to the pharmacy, you get your placebo, you go home and get cured.
I have a friend who was on the way to the morgue, and the orderly accidentally hit the side of the doorway with the gurney, and he woke up.
So it's rather disturbing, but sometimes the only way to know if somebody is actually dead is to put an EKG on them and see if they have any electrical activity in their heart.
You may not be able to hear that heart beating very well, and you never know.
If you're tired, you may put the wrong end of the stethoscope down on the chest.
There was a doctor, a doctor or scientist in France, and he was experimenting on a paraplegic, and his brain impulses would be sent to this computer box.
And the computer box would send messages to his lower legs, and of course, his legs would supposedly move.
But I saw that on a documentary on a cable channel.
But my question is, if a stealth pilot was to encircle the earth for like 10 or 20 years beyond the speed of sound, and of course being refueled every so many thousand miles, and he was to circle the earth for 10 or 20 years, would he age, Doctor, at the speed of light?
I would also think, and maybe it's only my own version of God, is that my viewpoint of the Christianity is that God is merciful, that he is willing to welcome anybody who has been a good person, who has done works of good, and whether or not they believe, I would think that they would be welcomed.
So it's a matter of how you view the Almighty, whether you believe they're merciful or whether you believe they're.
I wonder if there's any possibility or what the social implications would be if science definitively answered the question of God one way or the other.
I think it's something that, and maybe it has to do also with think about it, evolution.
For us to get along with each other, for us to not be out there committing crimes and killing each other, we had to somehow develop a social sense that we are a community and that we have to do good to each other.
And that may actually be something about our survival, our survival as a species.
I'm one of these omnivorous people who just, I read Science Magazine.
I love Science Magazine and Scientific American and Discovery and the National Enquirer.
So really, what I do is I read something, and if I get that punch in the gut that tells me, oh, this really bothers me, this is really scary, or this really raises the hair on the back of my neck, then I work at that to see if I can make it into a book.
Well, I actually left medicine because I had two young kids, and I just could not do it all.
I really feel kind of sorry for women who are forced to work and want to be home with their kids.
I wanted to be home with my kids.
So it was really them who determined this.
But now that I've been a writer for, I don't know how many years and making a lot more money than I ever did as a doctor, it certainly made a lot of sense.