We'll soon be able to bring dead back to life

Medical advances mean it will soon be possible to bring the dead back to life, a doctor claims.Modern techniques will enable a patient to be revived up to 24 hours after they stop breathing, Dr Sam Parnia says.The American critical care physician, who trained in London, said: ‘We may soon be rescuing people from death’s clutches hours, or even longer, after they have actually died.’

 He claims the US actor James Gandolfini, star of The Sopranos – who died aged 51 in Rome last month – might have survived if he had suffered his massive heart attack in New York.‘I believe if he died here, he could still be alive. We’d cool him down, pump oxygen to the tissues, which prevents them from dying,’ Dr Parnia told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. ‘Clinically dead, he could then be cared for by the cardiologist. He would make an angiogram, find the clot, take it out, put in a stent and we would restart the heart.’Dr Parnia, whose new book on resuscitation science is called Erasing Death, said death should be reversible for many patients, providing they are in the right place getting the right treatment.