Because so many hibernators are our close genomic cousins, there is good reason to believe that we can tweak our brains and bodies to mimic what they do.
In 1960, Hock published a paper entitled “Potential Application of Hibernation to Space Travel” that offered the first sober, detailed look at how the budding American space program might benefit from the research he was helping to pioneer. Hibernation was within our grasp, he argued, the major hurdle being the human heart's sensitivity to rapid temperature fluctuations.
Hock also noted that hibernation has the potential to slow aging. “A hibernator, with its greatly reduced annual energy expenditures, will live longer than a non-hibernating mammal of the same body size,” he asserted. If humans, like bears, were able to maintain an internal temperature about 13 degrees colder than normal, he estimated that “aging should occur at half the normal rate during this period.
But Hock died in a tragic accident in 1970. And as the Cold War matured, hibernation research fell out of fashion. With funding from the Pentagon and NASA at an ebb, biologists came to think of the field as a backwater. Since it takes a full year to gather data about an annual hibernation cycle and then compare it to an animal's normal activity, the research tends to be agonizingly slow.
Drew, who became an assistant professor at the Institute of Arctic Biology in 1993, initially hypothesized that gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter commonly known as GABA, was chiefly responsible for sparking hibernation in her squirrels. GABA is integral to inducing sleep, the state in which a non-hibernating animal's metabolism is typically at its lowest.
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