Suspended Animation

Mark Roth's Proof of Reincarnation - Scientist Bringing Back the Dead - Esquire

Apparently, this guy is in trials with a drug that provides hours of "suspended animation" -- really really good if your heart stops or if you are bleeding out in a battlefield someplace. Get some of this drug that tells your body "stop burning oxygen", and your cells will sit there not burning oxygen for quite a long time with "no ill effects" until they are restarted.

He made the insight that they don't die because they don't have oxygen, they die because they are BURNING oxygen and they don't have any. You stop their operation by telling them "quit burning oxygen".

One of the interesting points of the article -- we still don't scientifically know what "life" is ... we just know what it does.

We don't know what life is, anyway. Not really. We just know what life does--it
burns oxygen. It's a process of combustion. We're all just slow-burning
candles, making our way through our allotment of precious O₂ until it becomes our toxin, until we burn out, until we get old and die. But we live
on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees. They're related.
Decrease the oxygen to 5 percent, we die. But, look, the concentration
of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3
percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the
candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we
don't even have the energy to die?