Death is not a single moment, so what happens when you die? The decomposition ecosystem helps in a cascade of reactions that turn a body into a skeleton, according to the researchers.
what happens when you die
Death is a natural and necessary part of life. As Chris Packham explained in Earth, even extinction has its advantages as it clears the way for new life. However, having a bunch of corpses lying around is a nightmare for the spread of disease, but luckily life has found a way to take care of all that stuff.
University of Kent forensics lecturer Dr Devin Finaughty calls this ecosystem the decomposition ecosystem. It’s a sophisticated series of processes that take a body and break it down until all that’s left is a skeleton, a process known as skeletonization.
Before you get to the neat and essentially non-contagious skeleton, there are all kinds of tissues that need to be taken care of. In an interview with IFLScience for CURIOUS Live, a virtual event, Finaughty walked the audience through these processes. But a curious point he also made is that death itself is not a single moment.
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Death is not a single moment
Dr. Devin Finaughty says that decomposition begins very soon after death: “one thing I want to make clear is that death is not a single moment. It’s a cascade of reactions and processes that happen over time.”
What will usually happen is that the individual will lose consciousness and then proceed to respiratory and heart rate suppression, at which point they will die. Or they could lose consciousness as a result of stopping these two processes. Anyway, that’s what we call clinical death. So this is death from which you can be brought back to life, you can be revived many times if necessary.
The problem is, once your heart stops pumping, once the oxygen has stopped circulating, your cells only have so much oxygen available to make their energy source, which is known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) . Once the cell runs out of oxygen to make ATP, it can go into anaerobic respiration and make ATP that way.
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The problem with this is that it is a very energy inefficient process and generates lactic acid as a byproduct. So there is a limited amount of time.
Once the cell runs out of ATP, its cellular transport machinery has stopped working, meaning it can no longer exchange with its extracellular environment. That means those internal conditions in the cell start to deteriorate, they become more acidic, the acidity starts to dissolve the lysosome in the cell, and once the wall of the lysosome opens, all the enzymes and lysosomes that are inside it come out, and they start to damage the cell .
Eventually the cell will rupture and this is a process known as necrosis and is different from apoptosis which is programmed cell death. That’s because apoptosis is technically reversible, while necrosis (or autolysis, as we’d call it) is an irreversible process.
What the researchers explained
The problem is then the cell pours all these toxins and lysosomes and stuff into the extracellular environment, that starts to damage the adjacent cells, which are also experiencing the same kind of internal stress. So you get this cascade of cell death.
It happens first in the tissues that have the highest oxygen and highest water content. So the brain, the stomach, the lungs. Your brain would be the first to stop working because it requires 20 percent of the glucose our body needs. It is very, very demanding.
This takes about four minutes, so from the time your heart stops beating, you have about four minutes until your brain cells start to die, and that process is also irreversible. Once enough brain cells have died, then you will experience brain death.
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Other parts of your body will persist and can hold out for quite a while, surprisingly, but once you lose neural control, the entire system working against balance fails. And that, from a chemical perspective, is what death really is. It is a malfunction of our biological systems that prevents a return to chemical equilibrium, and everything that follows from that point onward is characterized to some extent by a return to equilibrium, unless all these biotic agents are acting on the body.
That’s because once all of that stops working, your immune system stops working, and because your immune system stops working, the bacteria that are intrinsic to our guts, which outnumber our cells 20 to one, are no longer constrained. . So, they will start consuming everything.
They will pass through the lining of the gastrointestinal system and into the bloodstream and begin to spread throughout the body. They will begin to metabolize the substrates in your body, starting with the sugars that are on the surface of our cells and being removed from the cells.
Then, they’ll move on to more complex carbohydrates and fats. This is really the beginning of decomposition, and the metabolism produces a number of by-products, called volatile organic compounds. Anyone who has smelled a corpse, not necessarily a human body, but any corpse that’s starting to decay, that smell is volatile organic compounds, and there are about 400 to 500 of them that researchers have identified in humans so far.
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2023-12-28 10:43:00
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