3 ms·
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...
by jajag 6y ago
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...
- danenania 6y agoInteresting, thanks. Apparently it's already being used to treat covid-19. But the potential side effects seem to be nasty and the survival rate not great, so I guess it's only really a last resort treatment. Human bodies are just too damn complex. Even when the problem is clearly identified--a lack of oxygen in the blood--there's no way to just insert more that doesn't cause a hundred new problems :-/ Natural selection seems to be really bad at modular design.
- ycombobreaker 6y ago> Natural selection seems to be really bad at modular design. Or the other way around, modular design does not appear to be a requirement for "success.". We like it for the reduction in complexity but that is ultimately a tradeoff.
- danenania 6y agoWell, it’s successful until it’s not. Nature’s primary approach to debugging seems to be: you die. We clearly weren’t intended to open up the hood and fix things.
- pacala 6y agoBiology doesn't care about individuals. It cares about populations. The main mechanism is exponential growth, capable of quickly filling carrying capacity boundaries of arbitrary size. Individual death is a small setback, as another branch of the exponential growth tree takes over shortly.
- DennisP 6y agoBiology is layers and layers of legacy code and technical debt and it never gets refactored.
- joezydeco 6y agoThere's also a concern that the filters in an ECMO machine damage or eliminate the antibodies that are trying to fight the virus. So putting someone on an oxygenator might condemn the patient to stay on one until the virus kills them.