Death Without Pain

I guess I am happy today. Today I stumbled upon a BBC documentary on ‘How to kill a human being’ and seemingly my search for painless methods to die is over. I think if the question is why you want to die, the answer would be very simple purely based on logic and personal choice.

Surely, there is no absolute truth (there is nothing called a fact),even the fact that electron’s mass is 9.18 times 10^-31 Kg is not a fact because I could devise another story in which I could assume the presence of a person wanting to forge facts in all the experiments done since Millikan to make the whole community feel that it is true(maybe no such experiment was ever done, maybe everyone including Millikan plotted a conspiracy just to convince you) and the fact is you would never know.

There is no purpose of life, since if it was there, it would be clearly stated in objective manner which I have never seen anywhere. Getting a PhD would make you more money, good food, good sex, good life but you will die. So you achieved nothing more than the beggar who died last night having no money, food or sex. Hence there is no point of living life, it’s sort of a burden, if you don’t have anything to do, coz it gets boring.

There is no need to live since you don’t have to do anything which is a pre-requisite for dying. People die each day. There being no real reason to live, and having so much time at hand, and having the control over the choice of living or not, it makes sense to die.

Now coming to point that if you wanna die, how would you make sure you do. Enter the documentary.

The movie starts with the pursuit of author trying to find a humane method of killing prisoners in which he tests methods like hanging, the electric chair, poisonous injection etc and then realises that nothing of the conventionally used killing methods are humane. Here humane can be taken to be same as painless. Here a snapshot of where they decide the height of fall while hanging based on the weight of the person(these charts are highly inaccurate as the parameters are quite less).Note that the heads is joined to the body using a metal rod.

Here’s what happens when the height is increased by just 2 feet in the above case.

 And now the cool fact, the charts of hanging heights based on weights is different in the Britain and US, which comes to close to 2 feet. So if you are hanged in the US or Britain could make a difference whether your head would be intact or not. Cool, isn’t it?

Now coming back to the main topic. So this narrator tried different methods of killing prisoners in which he found none was good. So he came to bio lab (ultimate solution to every question). Lab rats are regularly killed in labs for various experiments as a result of which the so-called ethics committee found new painless and humane way of killing animals that is Hypoxia. Hypoxia being  the condition in which the oxygen does not reach the brain in proper amount as a result of which the person feels unconscious and dies in a minute or so. It is a common condition experienced by pilots at high altitudes in which the g-force pushes the body blood down as a result of which blood(and hence oxygen) does not reach the brain in proper quantities. This is also the same thing which happens when you turn on the heat in the car and close the windows, carbon monoxide can form due to incomplete combustion and enter your blood through air pipe, and we know CO binds to haemoglobin competitively over oxygen and hence depriving brain of oxygen leading to death. A couple of unintentional deaths like this have happened a lot of time in Jammu and in Japan, probably America as well. Now the method to induce Hypoxia could be painful but then we have got the choice to decide which method is the least painful. Let’s design an experiment.

Objective: Finding the least painful method of inducing hypoxia.

Available options: An gas which prevents oxygen from circulation like CO2, CO, N2,Ar etc.

Leaving the experimental approach, some Indian born British researcher at University of Bristol has found that the combination of pure nitrogen and argon which being odourless are the most easy way of inducing hypoxia and hence death. Without 15 seconds of inhaling pure nitrogen, the body is unconscious and death comes a minute later (of course, the numbers not being very trustworthy).

But ultimately we have a tool, don’t we in delivering painless methods of death to people like me who don’t wanna live.

Just for fun, I am putting up some common methods of taking life.

1.       The lethal injection given to a patient tied to the bed with three types of drugs

a.       First to induce unconsciousness by anaesthesia

b.      Second to induce muscular dystrophy.

c.       Third to induce cardiac arrest

1.       The classical hanging method I already talked about. The aim being to break the stem joining the spinal cord to the brain to lose the coordination of the brain over the heart muscle, breathing etc.

 The old method of electric chair still in use in some American states which actually passes 2500V of current across the body with the intention of messing up the cardiac activity but there’s no real research behind this and it can go terribly wrong as classically shown in the movie ‘The Green Mile’.

1.       The gas chamber in which the subject breathes HCN which causes asphyxiation. In the below pics, the subjects were two rabbits.

The supposedly best method of inducing hypoxia by inhalation of pure nitrogen/argon mixture.

But in all this, I find the list being incomplete. While I was working in the neuro lab of some prof after my 12^th standard, their standard method of killing birds was quite easy.

They used to put a lot of chloroform on the bird as a result of which the bird was seemingly unconscious and then used to get the bird out from the cage and simply chop off its head. The bird would never know because it would be dead in sleep. Ain’t that cool?

And some pics of that stuff.