Is there an article about those electrochemical processes? I'd like to read that. Well, let's say life is something like electricity which makes everything happen, once it's gone, you can't simply add voltage to make life again. I'm not stating any facts, just saying my opinion about this.
Yeah man, don't worry. I'm actually giving my opinion as well, and throwing a couple of questions in the middle.
I'm not anywhere near a specialist on this subject, and maybe there is someone here who can help us out:
@Gpa (I say maybe because I'm almost sure he's a biologist
).
But, the good news is, this isn't a complicated topic. You don't need to read a "Scientific Article". A high school biology book will have all the information you need to understand this. :thumbsup:
It all starts in the cell. In a veeery simplistic way, a living organism like you and me, is nothing more than a whole bunch of cells functioning together. Cells form tissues, tissues form organs and we are a group of organs typing on a keyboard. There are several reasons why our cells, tissues and organs will stop functioning: Oxidation (old age), diseases that will mess up their entire physicochemical balance and will prevent them from generating energy, replication, exchange nutrients, etc and eventually cause organs to collapse, and the most tragic one, and my favorite: lethal physical damage. All of these things will make your body die. Also, poison, starvation and many others.
What they all have in common is that they all alter the balance in your body and dead you are.
And why can't the body "undie"? It has to do with the chemical balance I talked about. And the cells. The cells can only function in a limited number of different environments. Your body will react to all of the menaces I talked before by adapting, healing, releasing antibodies, hormones, chemicals of all sort to try and keep you alive.
But, it can only do so much. Your organism has a shelf-life. There's nothing you body can do about that by itself. You will die of old age because, biologically speaking, we are vehicles for our genes. Our purpose is to pass them on. Once you hit sexual maturity, there's no need for you to keep on living. Second, if you get a disease, your body (organs, tissues, cells) will do its best to fight it. And last, if you get physically hurt your body will also try to heal, but in the case of something lethal like decapitation, torso crushing, torso separation or carbonization, you won't stand a chance, although your body would have tried to keep you alive in those last seconds. All of these things are just variations in degree of things that will alter the chemical kinetics of your body rendering you dead.
We are actually very fragile!
So again, why can't you just put a functioning heart on someone who died of a heart attack and expect them to live? Once you die, your whole chemical balance changes. It's unbalanced now. You can't see it, but the environment in your body is no longer suitable for your cells to live in. We haven't found a way to revert that yet. It's like this: you can't "unboil" an egg. Once you boil it, you have altered its proteic structure and it will not go back to raw, no matter what you do.
Anyway, this is what I learned in high school. If you wanna go deeper, look for how each cell, tissues and organs work,
chemically speaking. Krebs cycle, mitochondrion, the functioning of your kidneys, lungs, brain, bones... All those are valid keywords for this purpose.
