From the point of view of biology, what is life and what is death and what is the line between them?

Could you freeze your body to come back sometime in the future?

And what does this have to do with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Housefly or the poet John Dunn?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why

and how our lives look the way they do. And in this case, whether life is something that comes

to an end inevitably, or only because we don't understand the biology well enough yet.

So today's episode is about understanding what happens when your molecular cycles grind to a halt

and whether there's anything we can do to hit control z on that can death be reversed a few

months ago my dog was lying on the floor and we were all gathered around her and my kids were

coming in and out and everyone was crying because my dog was dying.

She was 15 and a half years old, which for a dog her size was quite old and her body was

shutting down. And as I sat on the floor stroking her back, I was thinking about a poem by John

Dunn that I'd first read when I was a child, probably about 10 years old.

The poem is called Death Be Not Proud.

And it really blew my young mind when I read it. It begins with these lines.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful for thou art not so now in this poem one of his

nineteen holy sonnets done gets right up in death's face and he challenges death's power and importance

and he tells death not to be proud because it is not as fearsome as it might seem.

And the sonnet ends with the lines,

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more.

Death, thou shalt die. So Dunn ends the poem by spitting right in death's champagne glass,

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