Critical care physician, Dr Sam Parnia, said his 'revival research' is on the cusp of major breakthroughs which will allow the dead to rise again.
He explained that in the past decade there has been incredible progress and that while doctors can bring people back to life up to two hours after death, it is only a matter of time before this window is widened significantly.
Eternal life: Critical care physician, Dr Sam Parnia, said his 'revival research' is on the cusp of major breakthroughs which will allow the dead to rise again after being dead for some time'We may soon be rescuing people from death's clutches hours, or even longer, after they have actually died,' Dr Parnia, author of new book Erasing Death, told Germany's Spiegel magazine
'With today's medicine, we can bring people back to life up to one, maybe two hours, sometimes even longer, after their heart stopped beating and they have thus died by circulatory failure. In the future, we will likely get better at reversing death.
'It is possible that in 20 years, we may be able to restore people to life 12 hours or maybe even 24 hours after they have died. You could call that resurrection, if you will. But I still call it resuscitation science.'
The average resuscitation rates for cardiac arrest patients in U.S. hospitals is 18 per cent. In the UK, it is slightly lower at 16 per cent.
He said: 'Most, but not all of our patients, get discharged with no neurological damage whatsoever.'
He said it is a 'widely-held misconception, even among doctors', that the brain suffers massive oxygen-deprived damage after three to five minutes after the heart stops.
'It's mostly based on research done in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s,' he went on.
'In those days, doctors concluded that brain cell death was inevitable in such a short time. Now we know that if treatment is correct, it really can take hours for brain cells to die.
'And only if all the treatments that we know today are not implemented, the damage can become apparent after as little as five minutes without blood flow.
'Part of the problem is that we all live in the past.
'We have preconceived ideas about death. For thousands of years, death was a clear, precise moment: The heart stopped beating, and that was it. Nothing could be done from then on. You either were alive or not.
'But since the arrival of CPR more than 50 years ago, we know that this view is no longer correct.
'Death is not a fixed moment anymore. From a cellular perspective, it is a process that proceeds at various speeds in the different tissues of the body after the heart stops.
'My basic message: The death we commonly perceive today in 2013 is a death that can be reversed.
