Category Archives: Cryonics

Cryonics: Using low temperatures to care for the critically ill

By Aschwin de Wolf

Well look back on this 50 to 100 years from now well shake our heads and say, What were people thinking? They took these people who were very nearly viable, just barely dysfunctional, and they put them in an oven or buried them under the ground, when there were people who could have put them into cryopreservation. I think well look at this just as we look today at slavery, beating women, and human sacrifice, and well say, this was insane a huge tragedy. Alcor CEO Max More, Ph.D.

Introduction

In contemporary medicine terminally ill patients can be declared legally dead using two different criteria: whole brain death or cardiorespiratory arrest. Although many people would agree that a human being without any functional brain activity, or even without higher brain function, has ceased to exist as a person, not many people realize that most patients who are currently declared legally dead by cardiorespiratory criteria have not yet died as a person. Or to use conventional biomedical language, although the organism has ceased to exist as a functional, integrated whole, the neuroanatomy of the person is still intact when a patient is declared legally dead using cardiorespiratory criteria.

It might seem odd that contemporary medicine allows deliberate destruction of the properties that make us uniquely human (our capacity for consciousness) unless one considers the significant challenge of keeping a brain alive in a body that has ceased to function as an integrated whole. But what if we could put the brain on pause until a time when medical science has become advanced enough to treat the rest of the body, reverse aging, and restore the patient to health?

Metabolic Arrest

Putting the brain on pause is not as far fetched as it seems. The brain of a patient undergoing general anesthesia has ceased being conscious. But because we know that the brain that represents the person is still there in a viable body, we do not think of such a person as temporarily dead.

One step further than general anesthesia is hypothermic circulatory arrest. Some medical procedures, such as complicated neurosurgical interventions, require not only cessation of consciousness but also complete cessation of blood flow to the brain. In these cases the temperature of the patient is lowered to such a degree (16 degrees Celsius) that the brain can tolerate a period without any circulation at all. Considering the fact that parts of the human brain can become irreversibly injured after no more than five minutes without oxygen, the ability of the brain to survive for at least an hour at these temperatures without any oxygen is quite remarkable.

Again, because we know that in such cases the brain that represents the person is still there in a viable body, we do not think of such a person as temporarily dead. These examples illustrate that the medical community already recognizes and accepts the fact that a medical procedure that produces loss of consciousness, and even loss of circulation, does not constitute irreversible death.

Unfortunately, general anesthesia and hypothermic circulatory arrest cannot be used to pause the brain long enough to find a treatment for a person who has been declared legally dead by cardiorespiratory criteria. A person under general anesthesia may require tens, if not hundreds, of years of artificial circulation to keep the brain viable until medical science is able to return him to health. Leaving financial considerations aside, artificial circulation of an organ, let alone such a vulnerable organ as the brain, will produce increasing brain injury over time, and ultimately, destruction of the person.

Hypothermic circulatory arrest eliminates the need for metabolic support of the brain, but only for a limited period of time. Current research into hypothermic circulatory arrest indicates that the brain might tolerate up to 3 hours of complete circulatory arrest if the temperature is lowered close to the freezing point of water (zero degrees Celsius). This is not nearly long enough to put the brain on pause to allow the patient to reach a time where his current medical condition may be treatable. In light of these limitations, it is understandable that no serious attempts are currently being made to continue long-term care for a patient whose body has stopped functioning as an integrated organism.

But if low temperatures can extend the period that the brain can survive without circulation, much lower temperatures should be able to extend this period even further. At -196 degrees Celsius molecular activity has become so negligible that it can be said that the brain has been put on pause in the literal sense of the word. This allows the patient to be transported to a time when more advanced medical technologies are available, even if this would require hundreds of years. Advocates of human cryopreservation argue that long-term care at cryogenic temperatures offers a rational alternative to the current practice of burial and cremation of persons no longer treatable by contemporary medicine.

Contrary to popular views of cryonics, cryonics is not about preserving dead people but about long-term care of critically ill patients. The objection that cryonics is an attempt to resuscitate dead people reflects a misunderstanding of the rationale behind cryonics. The arguments supporting human cryopreservation are not radically different than the already established arguments behind general anesthesia and hypothermic circulatory arrest; it merely introduces lower temperatures and longer care. Therefore, the difference between contemporary medicine and cryonics is quantitative, not qualitative, in nature. Likewise, the relationship between cryonics and religion is not qualitatively different than that between contemporary medicine and religion. In both cases medical technology is used to preserve life.

Vitrification But does the procedure of cooling a patient to cryogenic temperatures not cause injury in itself? Most of the human body consists of water and lowering the body below the freezing point of water will produce massive ice formation. For this reason, patients who present for cryonics are protected from ice damage by using a cryoprotective agent to reduce, or even eliminate, ice formation. Conventional extracorporeal bypass technologies are used to circulate the solution throughout the body. When enough water is replaced with the cryoprotective agent the patient is maintained at cryogenic temperatures for long-term care. Historically the cryoprotective agents that were used in cryonics are mainstream cryoprotective agents such as DMSO and glycerol. High concentrations of glycerol or DMSO can significantly reduce ice formation, but cannot eliminate it altogether.

A better alternative to conventional cryoprotection is vitrification. Vitrification offers the prospect of cooling an organ to cryogenic temperatures without ice formation. Although vitrification of pure water requires extremely high cooling rates, these cooling rates can be greatly reduced if high concentrations of cryoprotective agents and ice blockers are added. Ice blockers are synthetic variants of naturally occurring anti-freeze proteins used by hibernating animals to protect themselves from freezing injury. The vitrification agent is introduced within a so-called carrier solution which includes molecules to prevent cell swelling, support metabolism, maintain physiological pH, and prevent oxidative damage. The vitrification agent is introduced in a gradual fashion to prevent excessive volume changes in cells. During the final stages of cryoprotectant perfusion the temperature is dropped below zero degrees Celcius to protect the cells from toxicity caused by high concentrations of the vitrification agent at higher temperatures.

The current generation of vitrification agents can preserve the fine details (ultrastructure) of the brain without requiring unfeasible cooling rates. Although electrical activity has recently been demonstrated in vitrified rabbit brain slices, reversible vitrification of the human brain without loss of cellular viability is currently not possible. The current research objective, therefore, is to improve on these vitrification agents to allow for reproducible vitrification and recovery of organs with complete long-term viability. Such a breakthrough would not only lead to cryogenic organ banking for transplantation and research but would remove the most fundamental obstacle to suspended animation of humans.

Brain death and cryonics

Although a vitrified patient cannot be rewarmed and restored to health with contemporary technologies, the extremely low temperatures at which a patient is maintained permit possible resuscitation of a patient in the future without any risk of deterioration during long-term care. In this sense it compares favorably to procedures such a hypothermic circulatory arrest which allow for only a few hours to treat a patient. This not only offers the option to treat patients who cannot be treated with contemporary medical technologies, it also offers the possibility to treat medical conditions where successful resuscitation is possible but higher brain function will be lost if care is resumed at normal body temperature.

A good example of this is cardiac arrest. Patients who have suffered more than 5-7 minutes of cardiac arrest can often be resuscitated, but some of the most vulnerable cells in the brain (such as the hippocampal CA1 neurons) will die within days of the insult. There are currently no effective medical interventions or neuroprotective agents that will prevent such damage. As a result, todays medicine can restore viability to such patients, but only by losing some, or most, higher brain functions.

If one believes that the objective of medical care is not just to preserve life in the sense of integrated biological function, but also to preserve the person, then one would agree that such patients might be better served by interventions that place them under long-term care in the form of cryonics. Although there is no guarantee that such patients will be restored to full functionality in the future, the certainty of higher brain death is an alternative that many people would prefer to avoid.

Conclusion

Cryonics does not involve the freezing of dead people. Cryonics involves placing critically ill patients that cannot be treated with contemporary medical technologies in a state of long-term low temperature care to preserve the person until a time when treatments might be available. Similar to such common medical practices as general anesthesia and hypothermic circulatory arrest, cryonics does not require a fundamental paradigm shift in how conventional medicine thinks about biology, physiology, and brain function. Although current cryopreservation methods are not reversible, under ideal circumstances the fine structure that encodes a persons personality is likely to be preserved. Complete proof of reversible vitrification of human beings would be sufficient, but is not necessary, for acceptance of cryonics as a form of long-term critical care medicine. The current alternative is death; or for persons who are at risk of suffering extensive brain injury, loss of personhood.

For very old and fragile patients, meaningful resuscitation would require reversal of the aging process. Obviously, the objective of cryonics is not to resuscitate patients in a debilitated and compromised condition, but to rejuvenate the patient. Ongoing research in fields such as biogerontology, nanomedicine, and synthetic biology inspire optimism that such treatment will be available in the future. The fortunate thing for cryonics patients is that even if fundamental breakthroughs in these fields will be the result of long and painstaking research, the cold temperatures allow them time a lot of time.

The first minutes after death

As currently practiced, cryonics procedures can only be started after legal death has been pronounced by a medical professional. To prevent brain injury between pronouncement of legal death and long-term care in liquid nitrogen all major cryonics organizations offer standby services to ensure that the time of circulatory arrest is minimized. In ideal circumstances the cryonics organization of which the patient is a member will deploy a standby team consisting of cryonics professionals to stabilize the patient immediately after pronouncement of legal death.

A mechanical device is used to restart blood circulation and ventilate the patient. Because the objective of this intervention is not to resuscitate but to stabilize the patient this is called cardiopulmonary support (CPS). At the same time the patient is lifted into a portable ice bath to induce hypothermia to slow metabolic rate. A number of medications are also given to support blood flow to the central organs, reverse and prevent blot clotting, restore physiological pH, prevent edema, and protect the brain from ischemic injury.

If the patient is pronounced legally dead at a remote location an additional step to this protocol is added and the patients blood is washed out and replaced with an organ preservation solution to preserve viability of the tissue during transport at low temperatures. The organ preservation solution that is currently used by cryonics organizations is similar to the cold organ preservation solutions that are used in conventional medicine (such as Viaspan) to preserve organs for transplantation.

At the cryonics organization the patients blood (or the organ preservation solution) is replaced with the vitrification agent to prevent ice formation during cooldown to liquid nitrogen temperatures for long-term care.

Read the rest here:
What is cryonics? | Institute for Evidence-Based Cryonics

Humans have been ingesting mindand mood-altering substances for millennia, but it has only rather recently become possible to begin to elucidate drug mechanisms of action and to use this information, along with our burgeoning knowledge of neuroscience, to design drugs intended to have a specific effect. And though most people think of pharmaceuticals as medicine, it has become increasingly popular to discuss the possibilities for the use of drugs in enhancement, or improvement of human form or functioning beyond what is necessary to sustain or restore good health (E.T. Juengst; in Parens, 1998, p 29).

Some (transhumansits) believe that enhancement may not only be possible, but that it may even be a moral duty. Others (bioconservatives) fear that enhancement may cause us to lose sight of what it means to be human altogether. It is not the intention of this article to advocate enhancement or to denounce it. Instead, lets review some of the drugs (and/or classes of drugs) that have been identified as the most promisingly cognitive- or mood-enhancing. Many of the drugs we will cover can be read about in further depth in Botox for the brain: enhancement of cognition, mood and pro-social behavior and blunting of unwanted memories (Jongh, R., et al., Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 32 (2008): 760-776).

Of most importance in considering potentially cognitive enhancer drugs is to keep in mind that, to date, no magic bullets appear to exist. That is, there are no drugs exhibiting such specificity as to have only the primary, desired effect. Indeed, a general principle of trade-offs (particularly in the form of side effects) appears to exist when it comes to drug administration for any purpose, whether treatment or enhancement. Such facts may constitute barriers to the practical use of pharmacological enhancers and should be taken into consideration when discussing the ethics of enhancement.

Some currently available cognitive enhancers include donepezil, modafinil, dopamine agonists, guanfacine, and methylphenidate. There are also efforts underway to develop memory-enhancing drugs, and we will discuss a few of the mechanisms by which they are proposed to act. Besides cognitive enhancement, the enhancement of mood and prosocial behavior in normal individuals are other types of enhancement that may be affected pharmacologically, most usually by antidepressants or oxytocin. Lets briefly cover the evidence for the efficacy of each of these in enhancing cognition and/or mood before embarking on a more general discussion of the general principles of enhancement and ethical concerns.

One of the most widely cited cognitive enhancement drugs is donepezil (Aricept), an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. In 2002, Yesavage et al. reported the improved retention of training in healthy pilots tested in a flight simulator. In this study, after training in a flight simulator, half of the 18 subjects took 5 mg of donepezil for 30 days and the other half were given a placebo. The subjects returned to the lab to perform two test flights on day 30. The donepezil group was found to perform similarly to the initial test flight, while placebo group performance declined. These results were interpreted as an improvement in the ability to retain a practiced skill. Instead it seems possible that the better performance of the donepezil group could have been due to improved attention or working memory during the test flights on day 30.

Another experiment by Gron et al. (2005) looked at the effects of donepezil (5 mg/day for 30 days) on performance of healthy male subjects on a variety of neuropsychological tests probing attention, executive function, visual and verbal short-term and working memory, semantic memory, and verbal and visual episodic memory. They reported a selective enhancement of episodic memory performance, and suggested that the improved performance in Yesavage et al.s study is not due to enhanced visual attention, but to increased episodic memory performance.

Ultimately, there is scarce evidence that donepezil improves retention of training. Better designed experiments need to be conducted before we can come to any firm conclusions regarding its efficacy as a cognitive-enhancing.

The wake-promoting agent modafinil (Provigil) is another currently availabledrug that is purported to have cognitive enhancing effects. Provigil is indicated for the treatment of excessive daytime sleepiness and is often prescribed to those with narcolepsy, obstructive sleep apnea, and shift work sleep disorder. Its mechanisms of action are unclear, but it is supposed that modafinil increases hypothalamic histamine release, thereby promoting wakefulness by indirect activation of the histaminergic system. However, some suggest that modafinil works by inhibiting GABA release in the cerebral cortex.

In normal, healthy subjects, modafinil (100-200 mg) appears to be an effective countermeasure for sleep loss. In several studies, it sustained alertness and performance of sleep-deprived subjects(up to 54.5 hours) and has also been found to improve subjective attention and alertness, spatial planning, stop signal reaction time, digit-span and visual pattern recognition memory. However, at least one study (Randall et al., 2003) reported increased psychological anxiety and aggressive mood and failed to find an effect on more complex forms of memory, suggesting that modafinil enhances performance only in very specific, simple tasks.

The dopamine agonists d-amphetamine, bromocriptine, and pergolide have all been shown to improve cognition in healthy volunteers, specifically working memory and executive function. Historically, amphetamines have been used by the military during World War II and the Korean War, and more recently as a treatment for ADHD (Adderall). But usage statistics suggest that it is commonly used for enhancement by normal, healthy peopleparticularly college students.

Interestingly, the effect of dopaminergic augmentation appears to have an inverted U-relationship between endogenous dopamine levels and working memory performance. Several studies have provided evidence for this by demonstrating that individuals with a low workingmemory capacity benefit from greater improvements after taking a dopamine receptor agonist, while high-span subjects either do not benefit at all or show a decline in performance.

Guanfacine (Intuniv) is an 2 adrenoceptor agonist, also indicated for treatment of ADHD symptoms in children, but by increasing norepinephrine levels in the brain. In healthy subjects, guanfacine has been shown to improve visuospatial memory (Jakala et al., 1999a, Jakala et al., 1999b), but the beneficial effects were accompanied by sedative and hypotensive effects (i.e., side effects). Other studies have failed to replicate these cognitive enhancing effects, perhaps due to differences in dosages and/or subject selection.

Methylphenidate (Ritalin) is a well-known stimulant that works by blocking the reuptake of dopamine and norepinephrine. In healthy subjects, it has been found to enhance spatial workingmemory performance. Interestingly, as with dopamine agonists, an inverted U-relationship was seen, with subjects with lower baseline working memory capacity showing the greatest improvement after methylphenidate administration.

Future targets for enhancing cognition are generally focused on enhancing plasticity by targeting glutamate receptors (responsible for the induction of long-term potentiation) or by increasing CREB (known to strengthen synapses). Drugs targeting AMPA receptors, NMDA receptors, or the expression of CREB have all shown some promise in cognitive enhancement in animal studies, but little to no experiments have been carried out to determine effectiveness in normal, healthy humans.

Beyond cognitive enhancement, there is also the potentialfor enhancement of mood and pro-social behavior. Antidepressants are the first drugs that come to mind when discussing the pharmacological manipulation of mood, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Used for the treatment of mood disorders such as depression, SSRIs are not indicated for normal people of stable mood. However, some studies have shown that administration of SSRIs to healthy volunteers resulted in a general decrease of negative affect (such as sadness and anxiety) and an increase in social affiliation in a cooperative task. Such decreases in negative affect also appeared to induce a positive bias in information processing, resulting in decreased perception of fear and anger from facial expression cues.

Another potential use for pharmacological agents in otherwise healthy humans would be to blunt unwanted memories by preventing their consolidation.Thismay be accomplished by post-training disruption of noradrenergic transmission (as with -adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol). Propranolol has been shown to impair the long-term memory of emotionally arousing stories (but not emotionally neutral stories) by blocking the enhancing effect of arousal on memory (Cahill et al., 1994). In a particularly interesting study making use of patients admitted to the emergency department, post-trauma administration of propranolol reduced physiologic responses during mental imagery of the event 3 months later (Pitman et al., 2002). Further investigations have supported the memory blunting effects of propranolol, possibly by blocking the reconsolidation of traumatic memories.

GENERAL PRINCIPLES

Reviewing these drugs and their effects leads us to some general principles of cognitive and mood enhancement. The first is that many drugs have an inverted U-shaped dose-response curve, where low doses improve and high doses impair performance.This is potentially problematic for the practical use of cognition enhancers in healthy individuals, especially when doses that are most effective in facilitating one behavior simultaneously exert null or detrimental effects on other behaviors.

Second, a drugs effect can be baseline dependent, where low-performing individuals experience greater benefit from the drug while higher-performing individuals do not see such benefits (which might simply reflect a ceiling effect), or may, in fact, see a deterioration in performance (which points to an inverted U-model).In the case of an inverted U-model, low performing individuals are found on the up slope of the inverted U and thus benefit from the drug, while high-performing individuals are located near the peak of the inverted U already and, in effect, experience an overdose of neurotransmitter that leads to a decline in performance.

Trade-offs exist in the realm of cognitive enhancing drugs as well. As mentioned, unwanted side effects are often experienced with drug administration, ranging from mild physiological symptoms such as sweating to more concerning issues like increased agitation, anxiety, and/or depression.

More specific trade-offs may come in the form of impairment of one cognitive abilityat the expense of improving another. Some examples of this include the enhancement of long-term memory but deterioration of working memory with the use of drugs that activate the cAMP/protein kinase A (PKA) signaling pathway. Another tradeoff could occur between the stability versus the flexibility of long-term memory, as in the case of certain cannabinoid receptor antagonists which appear to lead to more robust long-term memories, but which also disrupt the ability of new information to modify those memories. Similarly, a trade-off may exist between stability and flexibility of working memory. Obviously, pharmacological manipulations that increase cognitive stability at the cost of a decreased capacity to flexibly alter behavior are potentially problematic in that one generally does not wish to have difficulty in responding appropriately to change.

Lastly, there is a trade-off involving the relationship between cognition and mood. Many mood-enhancing drugs, such as alcohol and even antidepressants, impair cognitive functioning to varying degrees. Cognition-enhancing drugs may also impair emotional functions. Because cognition and emotion are intricately regulated through interconnected brain pathways, inducing change in one area may have effects in the other. Much more research remains to be performed to elucidate these interactions before we can come to any firm conclusions.

ETHICAL CONCERNS

Again, though it is not the place of this article to advocate or denounce the use of drugs for human enhancement, obviously there are considerable ethical concerns when discussing the administration of drugs to otherwise healthy human beings. First and foremost, safety is of paramount importance. The risks and side-effects, including physical and psychological dependence, as well as long-term effects of drug use should be considered and weighed heavily against any potential benefits.

Societal pressure to take cognitive enhancing drugs is another ethical concern, especially in light of the fact that many may not actually produce benefits to the degree desired or expected. In the same vein, the use of enhancers may give some a competitive advantage, thus leading to concerns regarding fairness and equality (as we already see in the case of physical performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids). Additionally, it may be necessary, but very difficult, to make a distinction between enhancement and therapy in order to define the proper goals of medicine, to determine health-care cost reimbursement, and to discriminate between morally right and morally problematic or suspicious interventions (Parens, 1998). Of particular importance will be determining how to deal with drugs that are already used off-label for enhancement. Should they be provided by physicians under certain conditions? Or should they be regulated in the private commercial domain?

There is an interesting argument that using enhancers might change ones authentic identitythat enhancing mood or behavior will lead to a personality that is not really ones own (i.e., inauthenticity), or even dehumanizationwhile others argue that such drugs can help users to become who the really are, thereby strengthening their identity and authenticity. Lastly, according to the Presidents Council on Bioethics, enhancement may threaten our sense of human dignity and what is naturally human (The Presidents Council, 2003). According to the Council, the use of memory blunters is morally problematic because it might cause a loss of empathy if we would habitually erase our negative experiences, and because it would violate a duty to remember and to bear witness of crimes and atrocities. On the other hand, many people believe that we are morally bound to transcend humans basicbiological limits and to control the human condition. But even they must ask: what is the meaning of trust and relationships if we are able to manipulate them?

These are all questions without easy answers. It may be some time yet before the ethical considerations of human cognitive and mood enhancement really come to a head, given the apparently limited benefits of currently available drugs. But we should not avoid dealing with these issues in the meantime; for there will come a day when significant enhancement, whether via drugs or technological means, will be possible and available. And though various factions may disagree about the morality of enhancement, one thing is for sure: we have a moral obligation to be prepared to handle the consequences of enhancement, both positive and negative.

Originally published as an article (in the Cooler Minds Prevail series) in Cryonics magazine, December, 2013

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Institute for Evidence-Based Cryonics

76251363 story Posted by Soulskill on Saturday September 12, 2015 @08:06PM from the have-you-tried-delivering-pizzas dept. biobricks writes: The NY Times covers cryonics and destructive mind uploading, with some news on progress in brain preservation research. Quoting: "Dr. Fahy, a cryobiologist whose research focuses on organ banking, had provided the most encouraging signs that cryonics did preserve brain structure. In a 2009 experiment, his team showed that neurons in slices of rabbit brains immersed in the solution, chilled to cryogenic temperatures and then rewarmed, had responded to electrical stimulation. His method, he contended, preserved the connectome in those slices. But a complication prevented him from entering the prize competition: Brain tissue perfused with the cryoprotectant invariably becomes dehydrated, making it nearly impossible to see the details of the shrunken neurons and their connections under an electron microscope. ... He could fix the brains structure in place with chemicals first, just as Dr. Mikula was doing, buying time to perfuse the cryoprotectant more slowly to avoid dehydration. But he lacked the funds, he said, for a project that would have no practical business application for organ banking." You may like to read: Post

"Dump the condiments. If we are to be eaten, we don't need to taste good." -- "Visionaries" cartoon

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Finding Hope In Cryonics, Despite Glacial Progress - Slashdot

Read the Alcor Membership page and follow the instructions. Most members use life insurance to pay for their cryopreservation. Rudi Hoffman has written most of the life insurance policies in the cryonics community.

If you're interested, but not quite ready to sign up, become an Associate Member.

A common misconception is that cryonics freezes the dead. As the definition of "death" is "a permanent cessation of all vital functions" the future ability to revive a patient preserved with today's technology implies the patient wasn't dead. Cryonics is actually based on the more plausible idea that present medical practice has erred in declaring a patient "dead." A second opinion from a future physician one with access to a fundamentally better medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology lets us avoid the unpleasant risk that we might bury someone alive.

The major reason that cryonics is not more favorably viewed in the medical community is relatively easy to explain. Medicine relies on clinical trials. Put more simply, if someone proposes a technique for saving lives, the response is "Try it and see if it works." Methods that have not been verified by clinical trials are called "experimental," while methods that have been tried and failed are rejected.

In keeping with this tradition, we would like to conduct clinical trials of the effectiveness of cryopreservation to determine whether it does (or does not) work. The appropriate trials can be easily described. Cryonics proposes to cryopreserve people with today's technology in the expectation that medical technology of (say) the year 2115 will be able to cure them. Thus, the appropriate clinical trials would be to:

While this problem is not entirely unique to cryonics (the plight of a dying patient who wishes to know whether or not to take a new experimental treatment is well known), cryonics poses it in a qualitatively more severe fashion: we must wait longer to determine the outcome and we have no preliminary results to provide a clue about what that outcome might be. If a new treatment is being tested we normally have the results of animal trials and perhaps some preliminary results from human patients. Further, we expect to get reliable results within a small number of years. In the case of cryonics, we are quite literally awaiting the development of an entirely new medical technology. Preliminary results, even on experimental animals, are simply not available; and the final results won't be available for several decades.

Thus, while we can begin the clinical trials required to evaluate cryonics today, clinical trials cannot provide a timely answer about the effectiveness of cryonics. It is not possible (utilizing the paradigm of clinical trials) to draw conclusions today about whether physicians tomorrow will (or will not) be able to revive someone who was cryopreserved using today's technology.

The correct scientific answer to the question "Does cryonics work?" is: "The clinical trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we'll give you a reliable answer." The relevant question for those of us who don't expect to live that long is: "Would I rather be in the control group, or the experimental group?" We are forced by circumstances to answer that question without the benefit of knowing the results of the clinical trials.

When we think about this question, it is important to understand that future medical technology will be no mere incremental or evolutionary advance over today's medicine. Think of Hippocrates, the prehistoric Greek physician, watching a modern heart transplant. Advances in medical technology in future decades and centuries will be even more remarkable than the advances we have already seen in centuries past. At some point in the future almost any infirmity that could in principle be treated is likely to be treatable in practice as well. In principle, the coming ability to arrange and rearrange molecular and cellular structure in almost any way consistent with physical law will let us repair or replace almost any tissue in the human body. Whether it's a new liver, a more vital heart, a restored circulatory system, removing some cancerous cells, or some other treatment -- at some point, nanomedicine should let us revitalize the entire human body and even revive someone who was cryopreserved today.

How might we evaluate cryonics? Broadly speaking, there are two available courses of action: (1) sign up or (2) do nothing. And there are two possible outcomes: (1) it works or (2) it doesn't. This leads to the payoff matrix to the right. In using such a payoff matrix to evaluate the possible outcomes, we must decide what value the different outcomes have. What value do we place on a long and healthy life?

When evaluating the possible outcomes, it's important to understand that if you sign up and it works, that "Live" does not mean a long, wretched and miserable life. Many people fear they will wake up, but still suffer from the infirmities and morbidities that the elderly suffer from today. This is implausible for two very good reasons. First, the kinds of medical technologies that are required to restore today's cryonics patients will be able to restore and maintain good health for an indefinite period. The infirmities of old age will go the way of smallpox, black death, consumption, and the other scourges that once plagued humanity. Second, as long as we are unable to restore cryopreserved patients to satisfactory good physical and mental health, we'll keep them cryopreserved until we develop better medical technologies. To put these two points another way, when that future day arrives when we have a medical technology that can revive a patient who was dying of cancer today, and was cryopreserved with today's technology, that same medical technology should be able to cure their senile dementia and restore their musculature; they'll walk out into a future world healthy in mind and body. In the unlikely case it can't, we'll keep our patients in liquid nitrogen until we develop a medical technology that can.

It's also important to understand that technology is moving rapidly, and accelerating. When you wake up, your children and your younger friends and acquaintances are likely to be alive and well, along with most of your awakened friends from the cryonics community. While several decades might have passed, your social network within the cryonics community will still be there and likely many of the younger members of the rest of your social network.

While different people will answer these questions in different ways, this provides a useful framework in which to consider the problem.

At some point in the future we will have direct experimental proof that today's cryopreserved patients either can or cannot be revived by future medical technology. Unfortunately, most of us must decide today if we wish to pursue this option. If we wish to gain some insight today about the chance that cryonics will or will not work we must consider several factors, including most prominently (a) the kinds of damage that are likely to occur during cryopreservation and (b) the kinds of damage that future medical technologies might reasonably be able to repair. Those interested in pursuing this subject should read this web page which discusses the chances of success and The Molecular Repair of the Brain.

Recent coverage of cryonics is available from Google news.

There has been much discussion of cryonics in the blogosphere, notably including discussions at Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. Ciphergoth has sought articles critical of cryonics.

California Magazine, Summer 2015, "Into the Deep Freeze: What Kind of Person Chooses to Get Cryonically Preserved?" "[Max] More [Alcor's President] comes across as a reasonable man who is acutely aware that most people think his ideas are insane, or repugnant, or both. Like most of the cryonicists I spoke to, he frames his points as appeals to logic, not emotion. His confidence is infectious."

Hopes & Fears, May 11, 2015, "I freeze people's brains for a living" "For me, cryopreservation was an obvious mechanical problem. Youve got molecules; why not lock them in place so that somebody can fix them later?" "I was an ENT physician, but I havent practiced for about five years now. I still have my license. My participation in the cryonics field happened very gradually."

ESPN, May 5, 2015, "The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived On" "In her book, Claudia writes what her father told the doctor. ... I'd like to have some more time with my two kids. "

Specter Defied, April 25, 2015, "How to sign up for Alcor cryo" "This article is intended for those who already think cryopreservation is a good idea but are putting it off since they don't know exactly what needs to be done."

The Dr. Oz Show, March 10, 2015, "Why Larry King Wants to Freeze His Body" "I think when you die, that's it. And I don't want it to be it. I want to be around. So I figure the only chance I have is to be frozen. And then, if they cure whatever I died of, I come back."

The List, March 12, 2015, "Live Forever by Freezing Your Body" "First and foremost I look forward to the future, I think it's going to be a great place. I want to live as long as possible." "Many pay for their cryonic treatment by naming the company itself, Alcor, as their life insurance beneficiary."

The Journal of Medical Ethics, February 25, 2015, "The case for cryonics" " insofar as the alternatives to cryonics are burial or cremation, and thus certain, irreversible death, even small chances for success can be sufficient to make opting for cryonics a rational choice."

The Onion, October 15, 2014, "Facebook Offers To Freeze Female EmployeesNewborn Children" "We recognize the many challenges women face starting a family and balancing a career, which is why our company will provide extensive support to female employees who want to preserve their infant in a frozen state of suspended animation until theyre ready for child-rearing, said Facebook spokesperson Mary Copperman, ..."

The Atlantic, August 26, 2014, "For $200,000, This Lab Will Swap Your Body's Blood for Antifreeze" "Cryopreservation is a darling of the futurist community. The general premise is simple: Medicine is continually getting better. Those who die today could be cured tomorrow. Cryonics is a way to bridge the gap between todays medicine and tomorrows."

The Huffington Post, June 23, 2014, "Should Cryonics, Cryothanasia, and Transhumanism Be Part of the Euthanasia Debate?" "Approximately 40 million people around the world have some form of dementia, according to a World Health Organization report. About 70 percent of those suffer from Alzheimer's. With average lifespans increasing due to rapidly improving longevity science, what are people with these maladies to do? Do those with severe cases want to be kept alive for years or even decades in a debilitated mental state just because modern medicine can do it?" "In the 21st Century--the age of transhumanism and brilliant scientific achievement--the question should be asked: Are there other ways to approach this sensitive issue?" "Recently, some transhumanists have advocated for cryothanasia, where a patient undergoes physician or self-administered euthanasia with the intent of being cryonically suspended during the death process or immediately afterward. This creates the optimum environment since all persons involved are on hand and ready to do their part so that an ideal freeze can occur."

Alcor, December 19, 2013, "Dr. Michio Kaku and Cryonics: Why Michio Kaku's Critique of Cryonics is Bogus" "You'd expect that a man of that learning, and knowledge, and experience ... would have done his research and get things right. Unfortunately, just about every single point in that video was incorrect."

BBC, October 31, 2013, "Will we ever bring the dead back to life?" "The woods cool temperature, it turned out, had prevented the womans cells from breaking down as quickly as they would have in a warmer environment, allowing her to lay dead in the forest for around four hours, plus survive an additional six hours between the time the passerby called the ambulance and the time her heart began beating again. Three weeks later, she left the hospital, and today she is happily married and recently delivered a baby."

The Guardian, September 20, 2013, "Cryonics: the people hoping to give death a cold shoulder" "Scores of Brits have also signed up for what the movement has dubbed "a second chance at life""

Singularity Weblog, September 12, 2013, "My Video Tour of Alcor and Interview with CEO Max More" "During our visit CEO Dr. More walked us through the Alcor facilities as well as the process starting after clinical death is proclaimed, through the cooling of the body and its vitrification, and ending in long term storage."

Science Omega, July 1, 2013, "Exploring cryonics: Could science offer new life after death?" "Medical advances have made it possible given favourable circumstances for physicians to bring patients, who are clinically dead, back to life." ... " cryonics has been viewed as somewhat of a fringe science since its inception. However, advances within fields such as regenerative medicine and nanomedicine have caused some experts to acknowledge the fields growing potential. Last month, for example, three academics from the University of Oxford revealed that, once dead, they will be cryogenically preserved until it becomes possible to bring them back to life."

The Independent, June 9, 2013: "Academics at Oxford University pay to be cryogenically preserved and brought back to life in the future"

"Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy at the Future of Humanity Institute [FHI] and his co researcher Anders Sandberg have agreed to pay an American company to detach and deep freeze their heads in the advent of their deaths.

Colleague Stuart Armstrong is instead opting to have his whole body frozen. Preserving the full body is technically more difficult to achieve and can cost up to 130,000.

Bostrom, Armstrong, Sandberg are lead researchers at the FHI, a part of the prestigious Oxford Martin School where academics complete research into problems affecting the globe, such as a climate change."

"It costs me 25 a month in premiums to cover the cost of getting cryo-preserved, and that seems a good bet, he [Armstrong] said. Its a lot cheaper than joining a gym, which is most peoples way of trying to prolong life."

BuzzFeed, June 6, 2013, "The Immortality Business" "The richest vein of professed cryonicists is, not surprisingly, in the world of technology." Alcors "public-facing members include prolific inventor and Singularity cleric Ray Kurzweil; nanotechnology pioneer Ralph Merkle; and Marvin Minsky, co-founder of MITs artificial intelligence laboratory."

The Observer, April 6th, 2013: "Sam Parnia the man who could bring you back from the dead" '"The longest I know of is a Japanese girl I mention in the book," Parnia says. "She had been dead for more than three hours. ... Afterwards, she returned to life perfectly fine and has, I have been told, recently had a baby."' "One of the stranger things you realise in reading Parnia's book is the idea that we might be in thrall to historical perceptions of life and death and that these ultimate constants have lately become vaguer than most of us would allow."

Discovery Channel, April 16th, 2013: "Maria Entraigues Discovery Channel interview" In Spanish. "Alcor is the place where I will take a little nap so that I can wake up in the future..."

Cryonics, January 2013: "Alcor-40 Conference Review" "From the science of cryopreservation to the implications of neural network research on cryonics to strategies for preserving your assets as well as yourself, no stone was left unturned and no question unasked."

Phoenix New Times, September 17th, 2012: "Best Second Chance - 2012: ALCOR Life Extension Foundation" "ALCOR ... specializes in cryonics, the science of preserving bodies at sub-zero temperatures for eventual reanimation, possibly centuries from now."

CNBC, September 20th, 2012: "William Maris: Google Ventures Managing Partner" "What's the most exciting areas right now?" ... "There are two areas. One, I'm interested in macro trends that are 5 or 10 years out, things like radical life extension, cryogenics, nanotechnology, and then there are trends that are occuring sooner." ... "So go back to cryogenics, how realistic is that idea at this point?"... " we're looking for entrepreneurs that have a healthy disregard for the impossible. If I start from a place by saying that's not realistic, or not possible, we won't make any investments. So I think it's very realistic." ... "I want to know if this is a reality that we could see sometime in my lifetime?" "It's a reality now, there are companies that specialize in cryogenics."

OraTVnetwork, July 17th, 2012: "Seth MacFarlane & Larry King on Cryonics" (41 seconds) Larry King: "How about we get frozen together?" Seth MacFarlane: "Let's do it!"

PBS Newshour, July 10th, 2012: "As Humans and Computers Merge ... Immortality?" Ray Kurzweil, co-founder, Singularity University: "People say, oh, I don't want to live past 100. And I say, OK, I would like to hear you say that when you're 100."

Newsmax Health, December 7th, 2011: "Larry King's Vow to Freeze His Dead Body Is Not Crazy, Experts Say" "the 78-year-old King stated, I wanna be frozen, on the hope that theyll find whatever I died of and theyll bring me back."

SENS5 Conference, September 3rd, 2011: "Cryonic Life Extension" "Cryonics enables the transport of critically ill people through time in an unchanging state to a time when more advanced medical and repair technologies are available" said Max More, President and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Science Channel's Through the Wormhole (Season 2), July 15th 2011: "Cryogenic Preservation" "Cryogenic freezing is a process that could successfully preserve a human body over an extended period of time."

Time, February 10th 2011: "2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal" "Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them."

Rolling Stone, December 2010: "Life on the Rocks: can you bring people back from the dead?" (slow site) "Isn't it a leap of faith to believe in something that hasn't happened yet? 'The comparison's more like talking to someone 150 years ago and saying, "In a little while, humans are going to have flying machines."'"

Lightspeed, October 2010: "Considering Cryonics" Author and Physics Professor Gregory Benford looks at cryonics, and says "...its a rational gamble, especially when you consider that cryonicists buy life insurance policies which pay their organization upon their death..."

Singularity Summit 2010, August 15th, 2010: "Modifying the Boundary between Life and Death" Lance Becker, MD, Director, Center for Resuscitation Science, Emergency Medicine, University of Pennsylvania: "Our initial results are very encouraging. We have taken 6 dead people ... plugged those patients into cardiopulmonary bypass and we have a 50% survival rate out of those 6 patients". On cryonics: "I look forward to seeing that field [cryonics] be synergistic with some of what we're doing."

New York Times, July 5th, 2010: "Until Cryonics Do Us Part" Cryonics can produce hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.

Colorado Court Order, March 1, 2010: "IN THE MATTER OF THE ESTATE OF: MARY ROBBINS" "The Court finds that the evidence clearly shows Mary's decision in 2006 for Alcor to preserve her last remains by cryonic suspension was an informed and resolute one." "Alcor shall have custody of Mary's last remains..."

Organogenesis, Vol 5 Issue 3, 2009: "Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification" "We report here the detailed case history of a rabbit kidney that survived vitrification and subsequent transplantation"

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, November 5, 2008: "A Science Without a Deadline" "If sceptics dont want to pursue this area, thats fine, but I ask them not to interfere with my own efforts to save the lives of myself and the people I love"

BBC News,October 20, 2008: "Doctors get death diagnosis tips" "...there is enough ambiguity in diagnosing death that doctors need guidance" "...like low body temperature when it is inappropriate to confirm death." (audio)

Cryonics, 4th Quarter 2008: "A Cryopreservation Revival Scenario using MNT" Molecular nanotechnology is the most compelling approach ever put forward for comprehensive repair of cryopreservation injury with maximum retention of original biological information.

Newsweek, July 23, 2007: "Back From the Dead" "The other is to scan the entire three-dimensional molecular array of the brain into a computer which could hypothetically reconstitute the mind, either as a physical entity or a disembodied intelligence in cyberspace."

Newsweek, May 7, 2007: "To Treat the Dead" ""After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later."

Channel 5 (UK), 2006 : "Cryonics Freeze Me" (A.K.A. "Death in the Deep Freeze") "Almost every major advance has met with its critics, who have said that it's impossible, unworkable, uneconomical; and then, of course, when it's demonstrated, they announce that it's obvious and they knew it all along." (If you have a link to the video, please email it to me).

The Wall Street Journal, January 21st 2006: "A Cold Calculus Leads Cryonauts To Put Assets on Ice" "At least a dozen wealthy American and foreign businessmen are testing unfamiliar legal territory by creating so-called personal revival trusts designed to allow them to reclaim their riches hundreds, or even thousands, of years into the future."

This Is London, May 25th 2004: "Sperm 'can be kept for thousands of years'" "...sperm could survive 5,000 or 6,000 years stored in liquid nitrogen."

The Arizona State Legislature is not regulating cryonics.

Reasononline, February 25th 2004: "Regulating the Biggest Chill" "Arizona's state legislature is about to consider one of the silliest pieces of "consumer protection" legislation ever devised."

Guardian Unlimited, January 23rd 2004, "House of the temporarily dead" "Officially, the building is "the world's first comprehensive facility devoted to life extension research and cryopreservation", a six-acre structure that will house research laboratories, animal and plant DNA, and up to 10,000 temporarily dead people."

Science News, December 21st 2002: "Cold Comfort: A futuristic play of cryogenic proportions" an amusing story in which Ted Williams, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman awake in 2102 and find they are wards of the Martha Stewart Living Foundation. Says Ted: "...the Red Sox should have won a World Series by now."

The Fifth Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension resulted in several articles:

Wired News, November 18th 2002: "Ray Kurzweil's Plan: Never Die" "Ray Kurzweil, celebrated author, inventor and geek hero, plans to live forever."

Wired News, November 20th 2002: A Few Ways to Win Mortality War "Discussions among leading researchers in nanotechnology, cloning and artificial intelligence focused on much more than cryonics, the process of freezing the body in liquid nitrogen after death to be later reanimated. Cryonics is basically a backup plan if technology doesn't obliterate mortality first."

Wired News, November 20th 2002: Who Wants to Live Forever? "Gregory Benford, of the University of California at Irvine, believes the public should know that 'cryonicists aren't crazy, they're just really great, sexy optimists.'"

KurzweilAI.net, November 22nd 2002: The Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension "Bringing together longevity experts, biotechnology pioneers, and futurists, the conference explored how the emerging technologies of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and cryonics will enable humans to halt and ultimately reverse aging and disease and live indefinitely."

Coverage of cryonics related to the Ted Williams case was voluminous. Wikipedia describes the events succinctly. Here are links to a few contemporaneous articles:

Sports Illustrated, August 2nd 2003: "Splendid Splinter chilling in Scottsdale" Sports Illustrated, June 30th 2003: "Chillin' with the Splinter" The New York Times, September 26th 2002: "Fight Over Williams May End" CNN Sports Illustrated, August 13th 2002: "Williams' eldest daughter asks judge to keep jurisdiction" USA Today, July 28th 2002: "Vitrification could keep tissue safe during the big chill" The New York Times, July 16th 2002: "They've Seen the Future and Intend to Live It" The New York Times, July 9th 2002: "Even for the Last .400 Hitter, Cryonics Is the Longest Shot" (Note that the Boston Globe links and others that have gone dead have been deleted).

Christopher Hitchens quote, February 15, 2011: "If someone is reported dead on Tuesday, and you see them on Friday, the overwhelming, the obvious conclusion is that the initial report was mistaken."

Howard Lovy's blog August 27th 2003: "Unfrozen Cave Men"

Reason Online, August 2002: "Forever Young: The new scientific search for immortality"

New Scientist, September 2nd 2002: "New Scientist offers prize to die for." "When the winner of the New Scientist promotion is pronounced legally dead, he or she will be ... suspended in liquid nitrogen at 196, in a state known as cryonic preservation[sic]."

KRON 4 News, Nightbeat, May 3rd 2001: "Frozen for Life" [medical] advances are giving new credibility to cryonics.

Wired News, July 20th 2001: "Cryonics Over Dead Geeks' Bodies"

Scientific American, September 2001: "Nano nonsense and cryonics"

Search PubMed for published articles on cryonics.

Read the rest here:

Cryonics - Merkle

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Excerpt from:

Cryonics-UK

Cryonics is the practice of freezing clinically dead people in liquid nitrogen with the hope of future reanimation. Presently-nonexistent sufficiently advanced nanotechnology or mind uploading are the favored methods envisioned for revival.

Scientists will admit that some sort of cryogenic preservation and revival does not provably violate known physics. But they stress that, in practical terms, freezing and reviving dead humans is so far off as to hardly be worth taking seriously; present cryonics practices are speculation at best, and quackery and pseudoscience at worst.

Nevertheless, cryonicists will accept considerable amounts of money right now for procedures based only on vague science fiction-level speculations, with no scientific evidence whatsoever that any of their present actions will help achieve their declared aims. They sincerely consider this an obviously sensible idea that one would have to be stupid not to sign up for.

Cryonics should not be confused with cryobiology (the study of living things and tissues at low temperatures), cryotherapy (the use of cold in medicine) or cryogenics (subjecting things to cold temperatures in general).

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.

Cryonics enthusiasts will allow that a person is entirely dead when they reach "information-theoretic death," where the information that makes up their mind is beyond recovery.

The purpose of freezing the recently dead is to stop chemistry. This is intended to allow hypothetical future science and technology to recover the information in the frozen cells and repair them or otherwise reconstruct the person, or at least their mind. We have literally no idea how to do the revival now or how it might be done in the future but cryonicists believe that scientific and technological progress will, if sustained for a sufficient time, advance to the point where the information can be recovered and the mind restarted, in a body (for those who see cryonics as a medical procedure) or a computer running an emulator (for the transhumanists).

Most of the problems with cryonics relate to the massive physical damage caused by the freezing process.

Robert Ettinger, a teacher of physics and mathematics, published The Prospect of Immortality in 1964. He then founded the Cryonics Institute and the related Immortalist Society. Ettinger was inspired by "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones (Amazing Stories, July 1931).[1] Lots of science fiction fans and early transhumanists then seized upon the notion with tremendous enthusiasm.

Corpses were being frozen in liquid nitrogen by the early 1960s, though only for cosmetic preservation. The first person to be frozen with the aim of revival was James Bedford, frozen in early 1967. Bedford remains frozen (at Alcor) to this day.

New hope came with K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, postulating nanobots as a mechanism for cell repair, in 1986. That Drexlerian nanobots are utterly impossible has not affected cryonics advocates' enthusiasm for them in the slightest, and they remain a standard proposed revival mechanism.[2]

A major advance in tissue preservation came in the late 1990s with vitrification, where chemicals are added to the tissue so as to allow it to freeze as a glass rather than as ice crystals. This all but eliminated ice crystal damage, at the cost of toxicity of the chemicals.

Upon his death in 2011, Ettinger himself was stored at the Cryonics Institute in Detroit, the 106th person to be stored there. In all, over 200 people have been "preserved" around the world as of 2011. [3] There are about 2000 living people presently signed up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute the cryonics subculture is very small for its cultural impact.

Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

Cryonics for dead humans currently consists of a ritual that many find reminiscent of those performed by practitioners of the world's major religions:

As the Society for Cryobiology put it:

The Society does, however, take the position that cadaver freezing is not science. The knowledge necessary for the revival of whole mammals following freezing and for bringing the dead to life does not currently exist and can come only from conscientious and patient research in cryobiology, biology, chemistry, and medicine.

In the US, cryonics is legally considered an extremely elaborate form of burial,[4] and cannot be performed on someone who has not been declared medically dead. You are declared dead and your fellow cryonicists swoop in to preserve you as quickly as possible.

The body, or just the head, is given large doses of anti-clotting drugs, as well as being infused with cryoprotectant chemicals to allow vitrification. It is then frozen by being put into a bath of liquid nitrogen at -196C. At this temperature chemical reactions all but stop.

Long-term memory is stored in physical form in the neural network as proteins accumulated at a chemical synapse to change the strength of the interconnection between neurons. So if you freeze the brain without crystals forming, the information may not be lost. As such. Hopefully. Though we have no idea if current cryonics techniques preserve the physical and chemical structure in sufficient detail to recover the information even in principle. Samples look good, though working scientists with a strong interest in preserving the information disagree.[5]

Recovering the information is another matter. We have not even the start of an idea how to get it back out again. No revival method is proposed beyond "one day we will be able to do anything!" Some advocates literally propose a magic-equivalent future artificial superintelligence that will make everything better as the universal slam-dunk counterargument to all doubts.[6]

Ben Best, CEO of the Cryonics Institute, supplies in Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice[7] a list of cryobiology findings that suggest that cryonicists might not be completely wrong; however, this paper (contrary to the promise of its title) also contains a liberal admixture of "then a miracle occurs." His assertions as to what cited papers say also vary considerably from what the cited papers' abstracts state.

Alcor Corporation calls cryonics "a scientific approach to extending human life" and compares it to heart surgery.[8] This is a gross misrepresentation of the state of both the science and technology and verges on both pseudoscience and quackery. Alcor also has a tendency to use invented pseudomedical terminology in its suspension reports.[9][10]

Keeping the head or entire body at -196C stops chemistry, but the freezing process itself causes massive physical damage to the cells. The following problems (many of which are acknowledged by cryonicists[11]) would all need to be solved to bring a frozen head or body back to life. Many would need breakthroughs not merely in engineering, but in scientific understanding itself, which we simply cannot predict.

This is the big problem. The two existing cryonics facilities are charities with large operational expenses run by obsessive enthusiasts. They are small and financially shaky.[20][21] In 1979, the Chatsworth facility (Cryonics Company of California, run by Robert Nelson) ran out of money and the frozen bodies thawed.[22][23] The cryonics movement as a whole was outraged and facility operators are much more careful these days. But it's an expensive business to operate as a charity.

The more general problem is that many cryonicists are libertarians and, unsurprisingly, have proven rather bad at putting together highly social nonprofits designed well enough to work in society on timescales of decades, let alone centuries. The movement has severe and obvious financial problems the cash flows just aren't sustainable, and Alcor relies on occasional large donations from rich members to make up the deficit.[24][25]

Insurance companies are barely willing to consider cryonics. You will have to work rather hard to find someone to even sell you the policy. There are, however, cryonicist insurance agents who specialise in the area.[26]

Of the early frozen corpses, only James Bedford remains, due to tremendous effort on the part of his surviving relatives. Though they didn't do anything to alleviate ice crystals, so his remains are likely just broken cell mush by now.

There are many medical issues connected with reanimation, but it is worth pointing out that a reanimated person faces numerous non-medical issues after returning to society. These might include:

All of these could cause the person great social, not to mention psychological, problems after revival. The person may also experience identity crisis or delusions of grandeur.

Cryonics, in various forms, has become a theme in science fiction,[27], either as a serious plot device (The Door into Summer, the Alien tetralogy), or a source of humor (Futurama, Sleeper). Its usual job is one-way time travel, the cryonics itself being handwaved (as you are allowed to do in science fiction, though not in reality) as a pretext for one of various Rip Van Winkle scenarios.

As a fictional concept, "cryogenics" generally refers to a not-yet-invented form of suspended animation rather than present-day cryonics, in that the worst technical issue to be resolved (if at all) in the far future is either aging, or the cause of death/whatever killed you.

Timothy Leary, the famous LSD-dropper, was famously interested in the "one in a thousand" chance of revival and signed up with Alcor soon after it opened.[28] Eventually, though, the cryonicists themselves creeped him out so much[29] he opted for cremation.[30]

Walt Disney, who is cited in urban legend as having had his head or body frozen, died in December 1966, a few weeks before the first cryonic freezing process in early 1967.

Hall of Fame baseball player and all-time Red Sox great Ted Williams was frozen after he died in 2002. A nasty fight broke out between his oldest children, who had a will saying he wished to be cremated, and his youngest son John-Henry who produced an informal family agreement saying he was to be frozen. This resulted in a macabre family feud for much of the summer of 2002. Williams was eventually frozen.[31]

Cryonics is not considered a part of cryobiology, and cryobiologists consider cryonicists nuisances. The Society for Cryobiology banned cryonicists from membership in 1982, specifically those "misrepresenting the science of cryobiology, including any practice or application of freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation."[32] As they put it in an official statement:

The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science.

The Society's planned statement was actually considerably toned down (it originally called cryonics a "fraud") after threats of litigation from Mike Darwin of Alcor.[33]

It can be difficult to find scientific critics willing to bother detailing why they think what the cryonics industry does is silly.[34] Mostly, scientists consider that cryonicists are failing to acknowledge the hard, grinding work needed to advance the several sciences and technologies that are prerequisites for their goals.[17] Castles in the air are a completely acceptable, indeed standard, part of turning science fiction into practical technology, but you do have to go through the brick-by-brick slog of building the foundations underneath. Or, indeed, inventing the grains of sand each brick is made of. (Some cryonicists are cryobiologists and so are personally putting in the hard slog needed to get there.)

Cryonicists, like many technologists, also frequently show arrogant ignorance of fields not their own not just sciences[35] but even directly-related medicine[36][37] leaving people in those fields disinclined to take them seriously.

William T. Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, said, "Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery."[38] Mostly, doctors ignore cryonics and consider it a nice, but expensive, long shot.

Demographically, cryonics advocates tend to intersect strongly with transhumanists and singularitarians: almost all well-educated, mostly male to the point where the phrase "hostile wife syndrome" is commonplace[39] mostly atheist or agnostic but with some being religious, and disproportionately involved in mathematics, computers, or physics.[40] Belief in cryonics is pretty much required on LessWrong to be accepted as "rational."[41]

Hardly any celebrities have signed up to be frozen in hopes of being brought back to life in the distant future.[42] (This may be a net win.)

Cryonicists are some of the smartest people you will ever meet and provide sterling evidence that humans are just monkeys with shiny toys, who mostly use intelligence to implement stupidity faster and better.

When arguing their case, cryonics advocates tend to conflate non-existent technologies that might someday be plausible with science-fiction-level speculation, and speak of "first, achieve the singularity" as if it were a minor detail that will just happen, rather than a huge amount of work by a huge number of people working out the many, many tiny details.

The proposals and speculations are so vague as to be pretty much unfalsifiable. Solid objection to a speculation is met with another speculation that may (but does not necessarily, or sometimes even probably) escape the problem. You will find many attempts to reverse the burden of proof and demand that you prove a given speculation isn't possible. Answering can involve trying to compress a degree in biology into a few paragraphs.[35] Most cryonicists' knowledge of biology appears severely deficient.

Cryonicists also tend to assert unsupported high probabilities for as-yet nonexistent technologies and as-yet nonexistent science.[43][44][45] Figures are derived on the basis of no evidence at all, concerning the behaviour of systems we've built nothing like and therefore have no empirical understanding of they even assert probabilities of particular as-yet unrealised scientific breakthroughs occurring. (Saying "Bayesian!" is apparently sufficient support with no further working being shown under any circumstances.) If someone gives a number or even says the word "probable," ask them to show their working.

One must also take care to make very precise queries, distinguishing between, "Is some sort of cryogenic suspension and revival not theoretically impossible with as yet unrealised future technologies?" and "Is there any evidence that what the cryonics industry is doing right now does any good at all?" Cryonics advocates who have been asked the second question tend to answer the first, at which point it is almost entirely impossible to pry a falsifiable claim out of them.

When you ask about a particularly tricky part and the answer is "but, nanobots!" take a drink. If it's "but, future nigh-magical artificial superintelligence!", down the bottle.

Cryonicists are almost all sincere, exceedingly smart, and capable people. However, they are also by and large absolute fanatics, and really believe that freezing your freshly-dead body is the best current hope of evading permanent death and that the $50120,000 this costs is an obviously sensible investment in the distant future. There is little, if any, deliberate fraud going on.

Some cryonicists considered the Chatsworth facility going broke to be due to fraud, but there's little to suggest it wasn't just the owner being out of his depth.

In widely-reported allegations by their ex-COO, Alcor have been incredibly careless with the frozen heads in their care.[46] Alcor denies all allegations, tried to get his book blocked from publication[47] and threatened further legal action. However, considering what fanatics cryonics people are, the allegations are unlikely to be true, despite how widely they were reported.

Cryonics enthusiasts are fond of applying a variant of Pascal's wager to cryonics[48] and saying that being a Pascal's Wager variant doesn't make their argument fallacious.[44][45][49] Ralph Merkle gives us Merkle's Matrix:

The questionable aspect here is omitting the bit where "sign up" means "spend $120,000 of your children's inheritance for a spot in the freezer and a bunch of completely scientifically unjustified promises from shaky organizations run by strange people who are medical incompetents." It also assumes that living at some undetermined future date is sufficiently bonum in se that it is worth spending all that money that could be used to feed starving children now.

When you freeze a steak and bring it back to edible, I'll believe it.

The basic notion of freezing and reviving an animal, e.g. a human, is far from completely implausible.

Instead of freezing your brain ... how about plastinating it instead?[69]

The rest is here:

Cryonics - RationalWiki

For the study of the production of very low temperatures, see Cryogenics. For the low-temperature preservation of living tissue and organisms in general, see Cryopreservation. For the Hot Cross album, see Cryonics (album).

Cryonics (from Greek 'kryos-' meaning 'icy cold') is the low-temperature preservation of animals and humans who cannot be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future.[1][2]

Cryopreservation of people or large animals is not reversible with current technology. The stated rationale for cryonics is that people who are considered dead by current legal or medical definitions may not necessarily be dead according to the more stringent information-theoretic definition of death.[3] It is proposed that cryopreserved people might someday be recovered by using highly advanced technology.[4]

Some scientific literature supports the feasibility of cryonics.[4][5] An open letter supporting the idea of cryonics has been signed by 63 scientists, including Aubrey de Grey and Marvin Minsky.[6] However, many other scientists regard cryonics with skepticism.[7] As of 2013, approximately 270 people have undergone cryopreservation procedures since cryonics was first proposed in 1962.[8][9] In the United States, cryonics can only be legally performed on humans after they have been pronounced legally dead, as otherwise it would be considered murder or assisted suicide.[10]

Cryonics procedures ideally begin within minutes of cardiac arrest, and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation.[11] However, the idea of cryonics also includes preservation of people long after legal death because of the possibility that brain structures that encode memory and personality may still persist and be inferable in the future. Whether sufficient brain information still exists for cryonics to successfully preserve may be intrinsically unprovable by present knowledge.[12] Therefore, most proponents of cryonics see it as an intervention with prospects for success that vary widely depending on circumstances.

A central premise of cryonics is that long-term memory, personality, and identity are stored in durable cell structures and patterns within the brain that do not require continuous brain activity to survive.[13] This premise is generally accepted in medicine; it is known that under certain conditions the brain can stop functioning and still later recover with retention of long-term memory.[14][15] Additional scientific premises of cryonics[16] are that (1) brain structures encoding personality and long-term memory persist for some time after legal death, (2) these structures are preserved by cryopreservation, and (3) future technologies that could restore encoded memories to functional expression in a healed person are theoretically possible. At present only cells, tissues, and some small organs can be reversibly cryopreserved.[17][18]

Cryonics advocates say it is possible to preserve the fine cell structures of the brain in which memory and identity reside with present technology.[19] They say that demonstrably reversible cryopreservation is not necessary to achieve the present-day goal of cryonics, which is preservation of brain information that encodes memory and personal identity. They say current cryonics procedures can preserve the anatomical basis of mind,[11] and that this should be sufficient to prevent information-theoretic death until future repairs might be possible.[20]

A moral premise of cryonics is that all terminally ill patients should have the right, if they so choose, to be cryopreserved.[21] Some cryonicists believe as a matter of principle that anyone who would ordinarily be regarded as dead should instead be made a "permanent patient" subject to whatever future advances might bring.[22]

Long-term cryopreservation can be achieved by cooling to near 77.15 Kelvin (approximately -196.01C), the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. It is a common mistaken belief that cells will lyse (burst) due to the formation of ice crystals within the cell, since this only occurs if the freezing rate exceeds the osmotic loss of water to the extracellular space.[23] However, damage from freezing can still be serious; ice may still form between cells, causing mechanical and chemical damage. Cryonics organizations use cryoprotectants to reduce this damage. Cryoprotectant solutions are circulated through blood vessels to remove and replace water inside cells with chemicals that prevent freezing. This can reduce damage greatly,[24] but freezing of the entire body still causes injuries that are not reversible with present technology. The difficulties of recovering complex organisms from a frozen state have been long known. Attempts to recover large frozen mammals by simply rewarming were abandoned by 1957.[25]

When used at high concentrations, cryoprotectants stop ice formation completely. Cooling and solidification without crystal formation is called vitrification.[26] The first cryoprotectant solutions able to vitrify at very slow cooling rates while still being compatible with tissue survival were developed in the late 1990s by cryobiologists Gregory Fahy and Brian Wowk for the purpose of banking transplantable organs.[27][28] These solutions were adopted for use in cryonics by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, for which they are believed to permit vitrification of some parts of the human body, especially the brain.[29] This has allowed animal brains to be vitrified, warmed back up, and examined for ice damage using light and electron microscopy. No ice crystal damage was found.[20][30] The Cryonics Institute also uses a vitrification solution developed by their staff cryobiologist, Yuri Pichugin, applying it principally to the brain.[31]

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Cryonics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The year is 1967. A British secret agent has been "frozen," awaiting the day when his arch nemesis will return from his own deep freeze to once again threaten the world. That day finally arrives in 1997. The agent is revived after 30 years on ice, and he saves the world from imminent destruction.

You'll probably recognize this scenario from the hit movie, "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" (1997). Cryonics also shows up in films like "Vanilla Sky" (2001), "Sleeper" (1973) and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). But is it pure Hollywood fiction, or can people really be frozen and then thawed to live on years later?

The science behind the idea does exist. It's called cryogenics -- the study of what happens to materials at really low temperatures. Cryonics -- the technique used to store human bodies at extremely low temperatures with the hope of one day reviving them -- is being performed today, but the technology is still in its infancy.

In this article, we'll look at the practice of cryonics, learn how it's done and find out whether humans really can be brought back from the deep freeze.

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How Cryonics Works - HowStuffWorks