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"How ECMO is redefining death-where will it take us?"

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

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In today’s newsletter, outsider organs, and then: • Giving a new meaning to living at the office • Revenge of the home page • The company monetizing investigative journalism

How ECMO Is Redefining Death

A medical technology can keep people alive when they otherwise would have died. Where will it lead? By Clayton Dalton Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli Every year, nearly four hundred thousand Americans suffer cardiac arrest outside of a hospital. Despite the use of CPR, defibrillators, and powerful drugs, fewer than one in ten survive. “That’s where ECMO comes in,” Jon Marinaro, an emergency physician and intensivist, told me. ECMO is a medical technology that can take over the work of the heart and lungs completely. Marinaro is using it for cardiac arrest, with about a thirty-per-cent survival rate. “If you were to triple survival with a cancer drug, people wouldn’t believe it,” he said. Robert Bartlett, who pioneered ECMO in the nineteen-sixties, envisions a future in which the technology could be used to create organ banks, revolutionizing organ transplant. “We could take out a liver that’s full of cancer, treat it, and then return it to the patient,” he told me. But, sometimes, patients who are put on ECMO don’t recover. They’re stuck in the I.C.U., on a bridge to nowhere. They can’t leave because they can’t live without the machine, and they can’t take it home with them. “It’s a trap,” the palliative and critical-care physician Jessica Zitter told me. “The technology is ahead of the ethics,” another expert said. My piece examines the tension between the promise and the peril of this technology. Will ECMO really create banks ready with living organs? Will it allow doctors to pop out a cancerous organ and overhaul it, like the transmission on a car? Or will it complicate life, when it inevitably begins to end? Read the story If you know someone who would enjoy Science & Technology, please share it. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up.

Editor’s Pick

Turning Office Towers Into Apartments to Save Downtowns

Nathan Berman has helped rescue Manhattan’s financial district from a “doom loop” by carving attractive living spaces from hulking buildings that once housed fields of cubicles. Photo illustration by Josh Cochran; Source photograph by Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Among white-collar workers, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a profound shift: even as it became safer to return to the office, many employees preferred to work remotely. Nationwide, offices are only about fifty per cent full. For a feature in this week’s magazine, D. T. Max met with Nathan Berman, a real-estate developer who specializes in taking existing structures and converting them into apartments, and who has helped show desperate office-tower owners a way out. Since 1997, Berman, through his firm, Metro Loft Management, has turned eight Manhattan office towers into rental-apartment complexes, adding some five thousand units to the city’s housing stock. Berman spends hours dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens. Is this a useful solution in a city that’s always starved for housing—and newly wary of the five-day-a-week office routine? Read the story » New in The New Yorker Store! Check out limited-edition tote bags and more, featuring art by celebrated contributors including Saul Steinberg and George Booth. Visit the Store »

Annals of Technology

Infinite Scroll

The Revenge of the Home Page

As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate. By Kyle Chayka Annals of Communications

Is Hunterbrook Media a News Outlet or a Hedge Fund?

The hybrid media-finance company wants to monetize investigative journalism in the public interest. Is it a visionary game changer or a cynical ploy? By Clare Malone Annals of Inquiry

The Battle for Attention

How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age? By Nathan Heller P.S. As the days grow warmer, remember that for scientists summer months are “a hothouse for the idylls of research,” Siobhan Roberts suggests, in this bid for vacation experimentation. Encouraging play and mess and idleness, she writes, “There’s no way of knowing when an idea will coalesce and the stars align, producing a discovery that solves a crucial problem, creates a windfall of googol dimensions, or triggers a smile.”

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