Photo by Clay Eals The survival last February of a 14-month- old
Canadian toddler who nearly froze to death stunned doctors and
the public alike. With her body temperature dipping to 61
degrees and without a heartbeat for two hours, Erika Nordby's
recovery from biological limbo seemingly defies scientific or
medical explanation. But Dr. Mark Roth, investigator in the
Basic Sciences Division, notes that a temporary halt to
virtually all life processes can - and does - occur in many
organisms. Roth should know: He and postdoctoral fellow Dr.
Pamela Padilla are the first to develop a method for inducing
this state of so-called suspended animation in a vertebrate
animal. Roth and Padilla discovered that after 24 hours of
oxygen deprivation - resulting in cessation of all observable
metabolic activity, including heartbeat - zebrafish embryos can
be restored to a normal program of development with no
deleterious effects on their health or growth. Their work, the
first demonstration of this phenomenon in a model ver