It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, survival.

We're going to meet some of the oldest living things on the planet.

And a NASA scientist with a list of everything you need to know after the apocalypse.

But first, there's one thing no one can survive. And that's death.

Unless, well, it depends on just how dead you are.

Sam Parnia is an intensive care doctor with a sought-after medical specialty, resurrection.

He can bring patients back to life hours after they die.

Parnia teaches at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and he's at the

forefront of the new science of resuscitation. Steve Paulson sat down with him to talk about

erasing death. Sam, I have to say, I always thought I knew what death is. It's what happens

when your heart stops and your brain stops functioning, but it's actually a bit more complicated than that, isn't it?

Yes, it is. It's an evolving understanding that we have. And the reason why most people, including

perhaps most physicians, actually, have this perception of a sort of a fixed moment, you know,

to most people listening to the program, if you were to say a person is dead, for them, that's absolute finite, and there's a moment that you get there, and then when you get there,

you can't come back again. And the reason for that is because if you look back historically

through centuries and millennia, essentially when the heart stopped beating, a person would

then immediately stop breathing, the brain would immediately stop functioning, and that's why

doctors shine a light on

the eyes, and they demonstrate that you have these fixed and dilated pupils of the eye, demonstrating

that the brain stem and the reflexes of the brain have stopped functioning, and that was the moment

of death. And that is still the moment of death that is used in hospitals to give someone, for

instance, a time of death that's put on a death certificate.

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