Category Archives: Cryonics

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct 12 (Reuters) - Time and death are "on pause" for some people in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Inside tanks filled with liquid nitrogen are the bodies and heads of 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved in hopes of being revived in the future when science has advanced beyond what it is capable of today. Many of the "patients," as Alcor Life Extension Foundation calls them, were terminally ill with cancer, ALS or other diseases with no present-day cure.

Matheryn Naovaratpong, a Thai girl with brain cancer, is the youngest person to be cryopreserved, at the age of 2 in 2015.

"Both her parents were doctors and she had multiple brain surgeries and nothing worked, unfortunately. So they contacted us," said Max More, chief executive of Alcor, a nonprofit which claims to be the world leader in cryonics.

Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, another Alcor patient, had his body cryopreserved after death from ALS in 2014.

The cryopreservation process begins after a person is declared legally dead. Blood and other fluids are removed from the patient's body and replaced with chemicals designed to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals. Vitrified at extremely cold temperatures, Alcor patients are then placed in tanks at the Arizona facility "for as long as it takes for technology to catch up," More said.

The minimum cost is $200,000 for a body and $80,000 for the brain alone. Most of Alcor's almost 1,400 living "members" pay by making the company the beneficiary of life insurance policies equal to the cost, More said.

More's wife Natasha Vita-More likens the process to taking a trip to the future.

"The disease or injury cured or fixed, and the person has a new body cloned or a whole body prosthetic or their body reanimated and (can) meet up with their friends again," she said.

Many medical professionals disagree, said Arthur Caplan, who heads the medical ethics division at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine.

"This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science fiction and it's naive," he said. "The only group... getting excited about the possibility are people who specialize in studying the distant future or people who have a stake in wanting you to pay the money to do it."

Reporting by Liliana Salgado; Editing by Richard Chang

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Arizona cryonics facility preserves bodies to revive later

1. 200 Frozen Heads and Bodies Await Revival at This Arizona Cryonics Facility  Smithsonian Magazine
2. Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died  MIT Technology Review
3. Arizona cryonics facility preserves bodies to revive later  Reuters
4. Inside the US facility where 199 'legally dead' humans and almost 100 pets await being revived  Euronews
5. View Full Coverage on Google News

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200 Frozen Heads and Bodies Await Revival at This Arizona Cryonics Facility - Smithsonian Magazine

The environment was something of a shift for Drake, who had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Though it was the longtime leader in cryonics, Alcor was still a small nonprofit. It had been freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976.

The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. Typically shunned by the scientific community, cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But its adherents have held on to a dream that at some point in the future, advances in medicine will allow for resuscitation and additional years on Earth. Over decades, small, tantalizing developments in related technology, as well as high-profile frozen test subjects like Ted Williams, have kept the hope alive. Today, nearly 200 dead patients are frozen in Alcors cryogenic chambers at temperatures of 196 C, including a handful of celebrities, who have paid tens of thousands of dollars for the goal of possible revival and ultimately reintegration into society.

But its the recent involvement of Yinfeng that signals something of a new era for cryonics. With impressive financial resources, government support, and scientific staff, its one of a handful of new labs focused on expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and trying anew to bring credibility to the long-disputed theory of human reanimation. Just a year after Drake came on board as research director of the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute, the subsidiary of the Yinfeng Biological Group overseeing the cryonics program, the institute performed its first cryopreservation. Its storage vats now hold about a dozen clients who are paying upwards of $200,000 to preserve the whole body.

Still, the field remains rooted in faith rather than any real evidence that it works. Its a hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology, says Clive Coen, a neuroscientist and professor at Kings College London.

Even if one day you could perfectly thaw a frozen human body, you would still just have a warm dead body on your hands.

The cryonics process typically goes something like this: Upon a persons death, a response team begins the process of cooling the corpse to a low temperature and performs cardiopulmonary support to sustain blood flow to the brain and organs. Then the body is moved to a cryonics facility, where an organ preservation solution is pumped through the veins before the body is submerged in liquid nitrogen. This process should commence within one hour of deaththe longer the wait, the greater the damage to the bodys cells. Then, once the frozen cadaver is ensconced in the cryogenic chamber, the hope of the dead begins.

Since its beginnings in the late 1960s, the field has attracted opprobrium from the scientific community, particularly its more respectable cousin cryobiologythe study of how freezing and low temperatures affect living organisms and biological materials. The Society for Cryobiology even banned its members from involvement in cryonics in the 1980s, with a former society president lambasting the field as closer to fraud than either faith or science.

In recent years, though, it has grabbed the attention of the libertarian techno-optimist crowd, mostly tech moguls dreaming of their own immortality. And a number of new startups are expanding the playing field. Tomorrow Biostasis in Berlin became the first cryonics company in Western Europe in 2019, for example, and in early 2022, Southern Cryonics opened a facility in Australia.

More researchers are open to longer-term, futuristic topics than there might have been 20 years ago or so, says Tomorrow Biostasis founder Emil Kendziorra.

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Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died - MIT Technology Review

The latest episode of The Kardashians contemplates what it means to literally and metaphorically exist in the Kar-Jenner simulacrum. The family hypes Pete Davidsons upcoming space flight, but we never once see the comedian in the flesh. Kris Jenner considers hip replacement surgery, inspiring deeper conversations among the sisters about their momagers mortality. The family also finally addresses Kims Marie Antoinette-esque utterance during her now-infamous Variety cover shoot Nobody wants to work anymore and Khloe tells Kim that the constant criticism they face from the public will only end when we end. Plus, Kendall seeks house-flipping advice from Scott, Martha Stewart stops by the Khloe-Kris compound, and Khloe and Kris go peacock shopping. Here are three things that kept me up after watching season two, episode four of The Kardashians.

Kris Jenners hip replacement storyline feels devised to prepare the public for her inevitable ageing arc. During a confessional, Khloe reflects on her mums increasing physical challenges, saying, I just want her to stay in the cold to prolong her life. When a producer asks whether cold temperatures can really do that, Khloe explains that the theory hinges on personal logic. You lose a finger, you throw it on ice. Im just going to put my mum on ice. Its true that ice has long been connoted with preservation, inspiring mind-bending films about cryonics like Vanilla Sky (adapted from Spanish classic Open Your Eyes) and the persistent cultural lore that Walt Disney had his body frozen after death so that he could be resurrected whenever science advanced enough. Cryopreservation is an actual industry albeit a highly speculative one and because with the Kardashians, no extreme use of technology seems to be off limits, its a little intriguing to now know of Khloes interest in the powers and potential of ice.

Though, in real life, we already know it never ends up happening, weve been hearing about Pete Davidsons upcoming Jeff Bezos-endorsed space flight for two episodes now. Early on in this one, Davidson happens to call Kim while shes telling Kris, MJ and Khloe about how great he is. The ladies put him on speakerphone to discuss his big event.

Are you nervous? Kris asks. My personal life is scarier, he answers, ostensibly referring to Kanyes viral Twitter spirals at the time, which had included threats and a derogatory couples name for Kim and Pete (Skete). Pete Davidson has always generated a certain kind of meme-able enthusiasm from the public, but his attachment to Kim Kardashian elevated the hoopla. His tattooed-boy-next-door image contrasted whimsically with her own self-mythologising as a New Media icon, he was clearly a Kanye West agitator, and now he was apparently doing one of the biggest things a person can do leaving the literal planet? At this point, you might notice that the viewers experience of Pete on The Kardashians has only been through telling, rather than showing subverting a common narrative principle. It almost seems as though the hype of a rocket ship ride is a proxy for his actual presence on the show. Its an interesting dilemma: Is a dramatic and colourful storyline enough to turn a phantom figure into an actual character?

Over the past few years, weve seen Khloe and Kim becoming increasingly close confidants, and, while in the backseat of a black car together, Kim bemoans the backlash she faces for her Variety statements. It never ends will it ever end? She asks. Itll end, Khloe says, when we end. The answer is morbid, and probably only half-true, but it echoes a larger question Im often asked by critics of the family, especially during Kar-Jenner scandals. When will the Kardashian reign be over? Khloe is correct the family is, by now, too entrenched in culture and the media cycles that uphold it for their notoriety or power to dissolve during any of our lifetimes. But when I say Khloes statement is only half-true, what I mean is that the family is multi-generational, with many children to inherit the proverbial monarchy. Plus, Kim has plans to use her new private equity firm, SKKY partners, to invest in future media companies, and we have no idea yet just how far shell take her law pursuits upon achieving licensure. But beyond the known Kar-Jenner ventures certain to extend the familys legacy, for all we know, theyll all put themselves on ice. Im kind of kidding but the idea, at least, is likely to persist. After all, the Disney-on-ice rumours have been debunked and yet we still hear of them. And Marie Antoinette lives on through a famous phrase attributed to her; we dont need to see her in the flesh to know her name.

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3 Things That Kept Me Up After The Kardashians, Season 2, Episode 4 - British Vogue

Cryobiology illustration generated using Midjourney generative AI

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you suddenly need organ transplantation, but no one you know who is willing to donate is a match? An integral part of organ transplantation is, of course, donors and recipients, or people who donate the organs for matching people in need. They are registered within the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, an organization that arranges everyone on donor-recipient lists taking into consideration the severity of their illnesses. Their database contains all detailed information on blood and tissue types, organ sizes, medical urgency, and the geographical distance between the donor and the recipient. As soon as there is a newly available organ, a match is found throughout their database and shipped as soon as possible. Or at least thats how the system aims to work.

But there is a hidden player - cold. From Ancient Greece and Rome to modern days, our society has utilized cold in many ways, mostly to preserve food. However, in modern medicine, cold was also found in quite a few applications, such as freezing human sperm and embryos in the process of in vitro fertilization. Intuitively, modern medicine also futuristically looks at cold as a useful agent that could save our lives many years ahead, in the sense of preserving (freezing) our bodies now, and reviving them once we find the cures for untreatable diseases that may have impacted us.

But, coming back to organ transplantation, cold plays a huge role in this process. Once the organ has been removed from the donor's body, it needs to come to the recipient in the exact same functional state. Several external and environmental conditions can severely damage the organ until it's no longer of use. One of the key factors is temperature, which needs to be low enough to slow down biochemical reactions happening in the organ after extraction to prevent further damage. To successfully transport and deliver organs, they need to be kept on ice (a term called hypothermic storage), with an average temperature of +4C. Unfortunately, the heart and lungs can survive on ice for only about 4-5 hours, after which theyre no longer usable. Human organ transplantation requires intense immunological screening of both the donor and the recipient, and this period is usually insufficient to perform it. Finally, 4-5 hours is not enough for an organ to travel from Europe to the United States, for example. It's not even enough to travel within the United States, depending on the ending location, and in many cases, when paired with other logistical constraints, not even sufficient to travel from hospital to hospital. Therefore, geographical location plays a huge role in organ transplantation, and organs that cannot be delivered in a timely manner in optimal conditions will simply be lost. And that's exactly what happens because about 28 thousand organs are wasted in the United States only per year, due to poor performance of currently available preservation methods.

French Blood Bank In Bordeaux. Blood Transfusion Center, Storage Room For Stem Cells In Nitrogen ... [+] 196C. Open Vat Containing Bags Of Stem Cells. Stock Room For Cellular Therapy. (Photo By BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)

The field of science that investigates the application of cold on biological samples is called cryobiology, whereas the process of using cold to preserve those samples is called cryopreservation. There are quite a few scientific groups, working both in academia and industry, that keep expanding the knowledge in these fields every day. The process of cryopreservation entails many steps, mainly cooling, storage, and rewarming. Each one of these steps can be divided into multiple reactions, and all of them could be performed in multiple ways. It is, however, vital that all of them are performed in an optimal way such that the biological sample that's being preserved does not get damaged, or lose its functionality upon reviving. The main problem in cryopreservation is the formation of ice crystals, that can happen at any step of the way, but mostly when samples are being either cooled to or warmed from subzero temperatures. This is a major issue because the largest part of all biological samples is water. Therefore, many research groups in cryobiology are working on ways to avoid ice crystal formation.

If successful cryopreservation and reviving of complex biological samples, e.g. human organs, was made possible without the interference of ice crystals, organs could be easily transported throughout the world without considering the time it would take to get them to their final destination or be stored for a long time until somebody would need them, as opposed to discarding and losing hundreds of them on a daily basis. Similarly, even if their functionality could be prolonged to a few days instead of a few hours, tens of thousands of human lives could be saved every year. Some researchers dedicated their whole careers to making this happen, and today I will introduce you to one of them.

In my last article on cryopreservation, I had the pleasure of interviewing the group of Dayong Gao, that works on methods to improve reviving of frozen biological samples using single-mode electromagnetic resonance rewarming. Today, I'm interviewing Matthew J. Powell-Palm, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Texas A&M University, and a co-founder of BioChoric Inc. Following in the footsteps of his mentor Boris Rubinsky, he works on understanding the underpinnings of cryopreservation and manipulating the first major part of this process, i.e., freezing itself. The method they are establishing is called isochoric cryopreservation, a technique that could improve transplantation medicine immensely.

Cryobilogy in cancer

The History of Cryopreservation: Major Breakthroughs

By providing you a little bit of historical context, well have a look over the major breakthroughs that happened in the field of cryobiology, and that instigated the modern use of cold in medicine. The start of the modern field of cryobiology is thought to have happened in 1948, when Christopher Polge discovered the cryoprotective effects of glycerol, a cryoprotective agent (CPA) that prevents ice crystal formation through the creation of bonds with free water molecules. Since then, a huge aspect of cryobiology and cryopreservation technologies was that we can modulate a given system's chemistry by involving CPAs, which could, in theory, allow us to preserve a live biologic sample for a long time. Many more CPAs, like dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), appeared on the scene afterwards, revolutionizing the subfield of human sperm cryopreservation. In 1972, scientists Peter Mazur, Stanley Leibo, and David Whittingham published evidence of the first-ever successful cryopreservation of mammalian embryos using slow-freezing. Eleven years later, the first-ever human embryo was cryopreserved.

A turning point in cryobiology happened in the 1980s, the so-called golden era of cryopreservation. Building on seminal early work by Father Basile J. Luyet, a Catholic priest and professor who helped to establish the thermodynamic foundation of modern cryobiology, Gregory M. Fahy and William R. Fall introduced the process of vitrification to medical cryopreservation. Vitrification is a process of rapid cooling of liquid medium until it becomes a glass-like non-crystalline amorphous solid. It requires the protective effect of CPAs, which lower the freezing point of water, as a major part of biological systems. In its vitrified state, water is locked in place, preventing the formation of ice crystals, and the entire sample becomes a glass-like solid. Vitrification is used widely today in the cryopreservation of very small biological samples (specifically in in vitro fertilization and other reproductive applications), and many cryobiologists believe it could eventually be applied to freeze any biological materials, even organs and whole organisms.

Human kidney frozen in ice cube, 3D rendering isolated on white background

Using vitrification, many research groups have already been able to successfully preserve and revive different cells and tissues, showing that there is major potential in cryopreserving and reviving organs as well. One of the major focus in cryobiology research is, in fact, centered around the process of vitrification and how much and which CPAs to add during this stage, or how to remove them in the rewarming stages. But, so far, CPA-aided vitrification only enabled the routine preservation of cells and cell suspensions and failed to produce any clinically translatable technique on how to preserve any complex biological systems like organs outside of the human body.

Isochoric Cryopreservation: Out With the Old, In With the New?

Methods in cryopreservation havent changed much in the last few years but there is a different approach currently available called isochoric cryopreservation. The term stands for cryopreservation of biological tissues at a constant volume, versus the more traditional way of cryopreservation that's done at constant pressure, called isobaric cryopreservation. During isochoric preservation, the cooling process happens in a confined, constant-volume chamber, representing one of the biggest differences between isochoric and isobaric conditions. Another difference is minimized role of CPAs, which are very much needed in the classical isobaric cryopreservation, but not in several modes of isochoric cryopreservation. The advantage of isochoric freezing is that it completely avoids the question of the toxicity associated with CPA usage as well as the amount of CPAs needed to be present in the biological sample you might want to freeze. Even if there is a need to use CPAs, their concentrations would be dramatically decreased. Under isochoric conditions, a biological sample is confined within a container with high rigidity and strength, usually made out of titanium. The container is completely absent of the bulk gas phase, and is denied any access to the atmosphere, which changes both the thermodynamic equilibrium and the ice nucleation kinetics within the system inside.

Isochoric cryopreservation is a technique conceived initially by Boris Rubinsky, a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Prof. Rubinsky obtained his Ph.D. at MIT in 1981 and has been engaged in the field of cryobiology ever since. His major research interests include heat and mass transfer in biomedical engineering and biotechnology and, in particular, low-temperature biology, as well as the development of bio-electronics and biomedical devices for clinical purposes. He has also pioneered in the fields of medical imaging, cryoablation, and non-thermal electroporation. Prof. Rubinsky has been involved with more than 470 peer-reviewed scientific papers since the beginning of his career and holds more than 30 US-issued patents.

The aim of isochoric cryopreservation at Prof. Rubinsky's group is not strictly preservation of biological samples (to be revived) per se, but rather about further developing the technique to offer the world a chance for a more successful general process of cryopreserving biological samples and decreasing the using toxic CPAs. Some of their latest research includes the creation of a quantitative approach to develop a general framework for the design of metastable supercooling protocols which incorporate the phase transformation and biochemical kinetics of the system. You can find the paper here. The group has also played with carbohydrate polymer protectants, as opposed to the small-molecular weight chemical ones mostly in use nowadays, and found that they can be used to manipulate the metastable-equilibrium phase change kinetics of the system at subzero temperatures. This approach has revealed that a carbohydrate polymer can be used to help modulate the stochasticity of ice nucleation in the supercooling system, which is important to designing supercooled biopreservation protocols for practical use. This research can be read here.

It seems the group is really striving to develop and optimize an application of supercooling and freezing techniques that could be used in biomedical devices already today. Some of Prof. Boris Rubinsky's technologies were already used to treat tens of thousands of patients, and the companies he founded were acquired by the big fish, such as Cryomedical Sciences which became a $300 million NASDAQ company. A new name in the field of isochoric cryopreservation is eager to follow in these steps, and to further develop the field in his own way: Matthew J. Powell-Palm.

Future Players in Cryo-thermodynamics: Professor Matthew J. Powell-Palm

Matt Powell-Palm is one of Boris Rubinsky's former PhD students and a leader in the field of isochoric cryopreservation. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Texas A&M University, and a co-founder of BioChoric Inc. (along with his former PhD supervisor), a medtech startup that is working on transforming transplant medicine by developing methods to prolong organ preservation. He obtained his Master's degree in 2016 at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Jon Malen, and his Ph.D. in 2020 at UC Berkeley.

Currently, a central focus of Matt's research is within the field of isochoric thermodynamics and cryopreservation. His expertise revolves around the applications of isochoric supercooling and vitrification protocols and devices to improve organ preservation, conserve endangered marine animals, and improve global food storage and transportation. Even though he completed his Ph.D. only two years ago, he's already established himself as one of the leaders in the field of isochoric thermodynamics and cryopreservation with more than 25 published peer-reviewed scientific papers and numerous patents. I was honored to share the online space for some time with Matt and pick his brain on all things cryo, plus ask some additional futuristic questions.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD interviewing professor Matthew Powell-Palm via Zoom, September, 2022

First, I wanted to see what Matt's perspective was on different terms in cryobiology, and what he considers the differences between them.

Alex: Can you describe the differences between cryonics, cryobiology, and cryopreservation?

Matt: Cryopreservation is the application of cryobiology, and the biggest difference between it and cryonics is the end goal. The field of cryopreservation is not particularly interested in existential or societal aspects of life prolongation and is solving daily problems in medicine, conservation biology, agriculture, and in any application where the elongated shelf life is important. Cryonics is the application of cryobiology where the end goal is to prolongate a human life by freezing and reviving it in the future.

Alex: Can you talk about your current research and, specifically, the concept of isochoric cryopreservation?

Matt: Looking back on the many successes and failures of modern cryopreservation, I have been asking myself the past few years if there are any new non-chemical ways in which we can manipulate the thermodynamic behaviors of water to achieve the goal of preventing ice crystal formation below the systems melting point, which is the main problem in cryopreservation.

The umbrella technique the Rubinsky Lab has come up with leverages the effect of confinement or constant volume thermodynamic properties to manipulate phase transitions and equilibria of water. In the world around us, we are always in communication with the atmosphere as this constant and infinite pressure reservoir, and the core premise of isochoric cryopreservation processes is that we may be able to affect the phase equilibria and kinetics of water and ice by denying them access to this constant atmospheric pressure. When we do that, the natural variables that describe their existence are now constant volume and temperature, not pressure and temperature. When we confine the volume of a given system, it has a huge effect on the relationship between water and ice. We all know water expands almost 10% upon freezing, and weve all left a bottle of water or beer in the freezer only to come back and find it exploded. So lets imagine what would happen if instead of having liquid in a glass bottle, we held it in an unbreakable titanium flask. Ice will form and try to expand, but now it can't break the container or push the water out. What happens? Ice will start to expand, but the flask won't break and will instead push back on the contents within, pressurizing the growing ice and the remaining water. As a result, only a small portion of the liquid will end up as ice, even at temperatures well below the freezing point.

And isochoric conditions affect not only the equilibrium between water and ice, but also the metastability of water, the vitrification process of water, and the ice nucleation and growth process. So we are working on a broad suite of thermodynamic techniques that arent dependent on chemical intervention but enable us to reach sub-zero temperatures without ice formation in a stored biologic, which opens up many new avenues for exploration in cryobiology.

Alex: Among the classical isobaric approaches used in cryopreservation with antifreeze agents, vitrification, and rapid reheating, how is isochoric preservation better?

Matt:

You can think of the isochoric effect as being a value-add to any system. Speaking generically, our data and research suggest that if you take any classical technique or system and conduct the same protocol not under atmospheric pressure, but instead under isochoric conditions, you will encounter a lower chance for ice crystal formation. For conventional vitrification for example, you need incredibly high concentrations of cryoprotectants, usually 7 to 10 mol/L, or up to 40-50 % of the weight ratio. By using isochoric conditions, we can relieve some of the work that the chemistry needs to do in aiding glass formation, facilitating the same process of vitrification using a lower concentration of cryoprotectants, but under isochoric conditions. Similarly we can supercool metastable systems with higher reliability by confining them, we can hold equilibrium systems in a passively pressurized ice-free state, and so on.

Ill note too that a lot of the classical cryobiology literature and techniques have focused on ultra-low temperature preservation that targets months or years-long preservation, but there are all kinds of pressing medical cryobiology problems that dont necessarily require that, the most obvious being full organ preservation, where shelf-life extension on the order of even a single day would be transformative. So theres been a notable shift in the last decade towards what the community calls high subzero methods, which operate in the 0 20C range and leverage processes that aim to be much less physically and chemically intensive on the biologic than something like vitrification. Were finding that isochoric techniques can be particularly useful in this domain too, because you enter the realm where totally-CPA free isochoric supercooling or isochoric freezing protocols are very possible.

Alex: What about rapid reheating by using microwaves? How does the isochoric approach help with this?

Matt: Our goal is to build our protocol so that we ultimately wont need rapid reheating, which is required to escape the high probability of ice crystal formation when rewarming biological samples. If we can decrease the probability of ice crystal formation across the board, we would decrease the need to use rapid reheating. For example, and although I can't talk about it in too much detail, we are collaborating with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute on vitrifying whole fragments of endangered corals under isochoric conditions, which has never before been achievable. In preliminary data, we are able to reheat the system without problems at a ballpark rate of 100s of degrees C per minute. The more sophisticated electromagnetic heating techniques achieves warming up rates of thousands of degrees and up in small systems, and those methods are indeed very cool, but so far unneeded for our systems. Ill note too that another aspect of the rewarming challenge is heating the system without building up significant thermal stress, which can lead to cracking throughout the sample because of uneven heating. One advantage that the isochoric system appears so far to offer is that physically confining the volume can help stabilize the system against cracking. If your system is open to the atmosphere, as it warms, the outermost layer that's open to the environment can expand freely, and cracking can happen easily. In the isochoric system, the boundaries of the sample are constrained, and it can help with reducing thermal cracking.

Matt's answers really intrigued me. I have been looking at cryopreservation through the eyes of cryonics and improving medicine by being able to extend the time until we find cures for untreatable diseases, which would imminently save so many human lives. However, it seems one part of the field, which Matt is intensively developing with his colleagues, could help to save so many lives in the present time very soon. It seems like a real, graspable possibility.

However, this made me wonder about the field of cryopreservation I have been interested in for months now. We saw some major breakthroughs in the field a long time ago, but lately, it seems as if the progress has been really slow. Is it because the field has been focused on the complicated process of vitrification by using cryopreserving agents too much, or is there something else at play? I was interested in what Matt had to say about this.

Alex: Clearly, the field of cryopreservation has been around for quite soe time. Why did it not yet pick up?

Matt: This is a fascinating question thats obviously affected by many different factors both historical and contemporary, but one of the biggest as always is funding, plain and simple. In the 90s and early 2000s, there was vanishingly little money available for research on cryopreservation, and what money there was was sort of narrowly focused. In the last decade however, cryopreservation, which we now include under the larger umbrella of biopreservation, has become something of a space race, and funders as varied as NIH, USDA, DOD, and even NASA are now giving out money for low-temperature biopreservation research. For example, NASA is looking for ways to protect astronauts in the theoretical manned missions to Mars. Even though using cryopreservation techniques to achieve goals like that seemed like sci-fi only a few years ago, we are now seeing more and more adventurous cryopreservation ideas getting funded, and funded well, and this has enabled the modern cryobiology field to start operating at the pace expected of a cutting-edge, super-impactful branch of science.

Alex: What happened in the last 5 years in cryopreservation research that may result in a major breakthrough in industrial applications?

Matt: Oh yeah, the last 5 years have been huge. Im lucky to get to see watch this progress unfold from both the academic angle, as a professor, and the industrial and clinical angles, as a startup founder. The suite of core technologies driving cryopreservation these days has just exploded in the last half-decade or so, driven by key advances in our understanding of aqueous metastability and supercooling of bulk volume liquids, uses of electromagnetic effects and nanoparticles for rapid and uniform warming, new thermodynamic configurations like isochoric, and many more. These fresh approaches are driving work in all sorts of new applications, and bringing new interdisciplinary physical science angles to the field.

Supercooling alone is a potentially transformative technology for large clinical applications, e.g. to extend the shelf-lives of transplantable livers, hearts, kidneys, etc. Id put my money on that technique seeing the light of day in the clinic within the next 5 years, as some kind of self-contained supercooling device. In my company, we have an isochoric supercooling technique that I think can be ready for pre-clinical trials very soon, though I can't say too much there. But the potential public health benefit of stable supercooling is just tremendous. I mean, if you could extend the preservability of a heart by just 4-8 hours, you might save a thousand lives next year. Extend it by a day or two and you could potentially be saving tens of thousands of lives around the globe.

As a field, we don't need technologies that will take ten more years to develop and will enable indefinite storage of a human heartwe need technologies that will take ten more months to develop and will enable storage of a heart for just long enough to get it from the donor to the recipient!

Although Matthew didn't point it out now, he is also doing a lot of work on preserving and extending the shelf life of food, which is another pressing societal issue, given the rising problems of food waste in some regions of the world, and the lack of food in other regions at the same time. In one of the groups latest research papers, isochoric supercooling and freezing have been applied to freshly harvested pomegranate, with its shelf-life being successfully extended for a month. You can read the publication here.

At his young age, Matthew is already wearing two hats (as he candidly points out), one of an academic professor and researcher, and the other as a co-founder and owner of a start-up company called BioChoric Inc. The company carries on with its research on isochoric preservation and aims at putting applicable devices and methods on the medical market as soon as possible, with everything being rooted in peer-reviewed and solid-proof research. Matt shared with me what the first days of starting the company looked like, and what their main future goals are.

Alex: When did you start BioChoric Inc. and what drove you to it?

Matt: We started the company in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. It was a spinout out of UC Berkeley, with me and Boris Rubinsky as founders, and the impetus was a crop of data we got on the effects of isochoric conditions on the supercooling of water, which suggested to us that an isochoric supercooling approach may be immediately applicable to organ and tissue preservation. We have a couple of integral patents and papers that describe the premise that, by confining the system, we can stabilize water in a metastable supercooled state, and predict the behaviors of this state in a rigorous quantitative sense, which has so far proven very difficult in unconfined systems.

The underlying philosophy of BioChoric Inc. is the obligation we feel to make rapid if incremental progress in full organ preservation. The degree of donor organ waste and the number of people dying on organ transplanting lists every day is huge, and that made us look at everything with a more clinical perspective. That's what we're pushing forward with BioChoric, even though the company is very small for now. One unique thing about the company is that it represents most of the thermodynamic expertise surrounding isochoric systems in the world today, and we rely heavily on interdisciplinary academic collaborations to help us further build the confidence and evidence we need to start pushing our techniques to clinical markets. We haven't taken any outside funding and it's fully internal equity, even though we've been approached by investors several times. We want to make sure we are scientifically sterling, peer-reviewed, bullet-proof before we start trying for the clinic.

One of the side hats BioChoric wears is also building isochoric biopreservation platforms and devices for other labs interested in advancing the science, and the small profit we generate from that helps to sustain our early R&D efforts.

It seems Matt is fully focused on improving human lives in the sense of prolonging the time transplantation-ready organs can be preserved, and that's the main goal of BioChoric. However, Matt and Boris's company is not the only one out there that offers cryo-products, although it may be the only one with a focus on isochoric cryopreservation, at least for now. Let's see what Matt thinks about how his company compares to similar ones in the field of cryobiology.

Alex: How do you compare and compete with companies like Lorentz Bio or X-Therma? When do you think BioChoric Inc. will be ready to fundraise and go industrial-scale?

Matt: I think there are many great young companies popping up in this space, but I'm glad you bring up Lorentz Bio because it has sparked quite a bit of chatter in the community, and they're taking an approach opposite to ours I think. My generic observation is that they have tackled raising the big money first, presuming they can fill in the scientific blanks later. In our case, its the scientists who have built the company, and built it on a core piece of new science, and were presuming we can fill in the money blanks later! Both fine ways to approach the problem. But personally, Im not really in the business of speculation or gambling I'm here to make sure were producing rock-solid, air-tight science, and the fundraising aspects don't worry me as much. Maybe that's just my academic side coming out. I think historically though, companies with really high checkbook-to-scientist ratios often end up coming to companies with really high scientist-to-checkbook ratios, like ours, to license our scientifically-established techniques and products. So suffice it to say, were focused on the science first and everything else second, and we're shooting for both fundraising and expansion to industrial scale in the next two years.

As my final question, I asked Matt the same futuristic question I asked Dayong Gao's research group at the University of Washington's Center for Cryo-Biomedical Engineering and Artificial Organs in my first article on cryopreservation, which you can read here. Matt was brave enough to offer me a timeline in which we could see some real breakthroughs in cryonics, as opposed to only preservation.

Alex: When do you think we will be able to see isochoric cryopreservation being used to cryopreserve and revive a small mammal?

Matt: Interesting question! I would say within the next 5 years, we will certainly see isochoric preservation of endangered marine species. Marine biodiversity is such an unbelievably urgent problem, and we are thinking about expanding our research on coral to other marine organisms in the next few months. If things continue to go well, we may be looking at trying to deploy field-ready isochoric devices at every marine research station on Earth, as bombastic as that sounds! The problems there are just too pressing to wait. On the human organ scale, I think we will see the preservation of organs extended to at least single days within the next 5 years. And I also want to take this opportunity to give a shoutout to each and every research group working on this problem right now, because the many often divergent results from differing corners of the field each move us all forward.

I admittedly havent thought much about preserving small live mammals, so I cant speculate in a properly scientific fashion, but Ill speculate for fun! Current approaches would require us to preserve each organ of the mammal separately because the preservation process gets more complicated the more complex you go. Based on the progress in the last 5 years, we will probably see a supercooling approach to preserve every major organ separately within the next 5 years. I don't know what happens at one step higher if you would want to preserve a multiorgan construct, and what would be different about it in comparison to just one organ. The relationship of these animals with air is also more complex than with marine animals that live submerged in a liquid anyway. But as a cop-out, Ill go ahead and say that the timeline will once again depend really acutely on potential increases in funding, and it will depend on which aspects of the field will get the most funding. So, I would speculate we could see a small mammal preserved and revived in about 20 years if the funding goes in that direction. But in my opinion, there is much more pressing research to be done.

With such young and bright-minded scientists led by the field's giants, like the combination of Matthew J. Powell-Palm and Boris Rubinsky, cryopreservation is definitely looking at several major breakthroughs coming from all areas of the field in the next few years. Also, as Matt also smartly pointed out, progress coming from different areas of cryopreservation actually helps developing all areas of cryopreservation, as the complex process of cryopreservation itself is made of various tightly-bound and regulated steps that cannot work alone.

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Think Outside The (Titanium) Box: Isochoric Cryopreservation Could Save Lives - Forbes

ryonic or cryogenic preservation has been around for the past 60 years, but the world still does not want to believe that such a thing actually exists and this is only something that can be found within science fiction movies. The photo above may also seem like a science fiction movie, but it is as real as it gets,these pods that preserve bodies that have been frozen in the past 60 years have been built to resist for thousands of years to come. For those who may be a bit confused,this talks about the science of freezing the bodies of those who have recently passed away in order to preserve their bodies for the future in the hope that they will one day be resurrected.

In one of my previous articles (linked below), I have spoken about the first person to have ever beencryonically-preservedfor the future, in the same article I explain the difference betweencryonics and cryogenicsas they are sometimes confused as the same term, but they have different meanings. I felt that the whole idea of preserving bodies for the future is quite interesting to discuss and this is why I wanted to use a separate article for this. In order to get a better idea please read this article.

As mentioned in the article above, the first few cases since 1967 have been done by some private scientific organizations that only wanted to prove their theories above cryonic preservation. In 1972 a couple named Fred and Linda Chamberlain had fallen in love with the idea of preserving the future, so much so that they founded the first company to offer this service, named Alcor Incorporated. In the beginning, they were only storing the bodies that scientists were preserving, either human or animal.

Their inspiration, just like James Hiram Bedfords to be cryopreserved came from the book The Prospect of Immortality published in 1964 by Robert Ettinger. It wasnt until 1976 that the company performed its first cryopreservation on a human. Since then more and more scientists around the world have wanted to be part of this company, people that had a similar vision and believed in the idea that cryopreservation brings.

The process itself was and still is quite expensive, but not as expensive as it used to be and it always had success within Alcor. The only problem is that the idea is sort of selling a belief, just like religion in a way. have a look at this:Benefits of people purchasing a membership at Alcor (Source:Alcor)

Everything seems correct, but the last part says possible revival meaning that nothing is assured and not that this is something wrong, but definitely something that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.I presume that most people who have agreed to this service were told that this is only a possibility and there is no assurance that they will ever be resurrected.I mean what sort of legal paperwork can you come up with? The company may not even be around by the time you are hopefully resurrected.

It wasnt until 1986 that Alcor actually got another person to use their cryopreservation service and since then the phone started ringing more often. Ontheir website, there is an interesting report about the cryopreservation of a man named Roy Schavello in 1990.The report starts explaining the whole process since Schaevello agreed to the process, to his death and the cryopreservation process.

In 1994 Alcor relocated to Scottsdale Arizona because of the good ground to preserve the bodies, the same place. Since then and until the present,Alcor had been focusing on research to improve the process of cryopreservation and on attracting more and more people to use this service. Yes, there are other companies doing the same thing, but Alcor had been officially the first and is now considered the world leader in cryonics.

There have been some discussions about the ethics behind the procedure, the legality of the whole thing, and of course the possibility of a human body resisting preservation for thousands of years.

It is said that there are two things in this world that make us human. One is the ability to follow rules and be civilized and the other is our awareness of our own mortality. Death is a natural part of life and no one gets away from death. Our knowledge cannot yet comprehend at a scientific level the possibility of resurrecting a dead person as we dont yet understand how our souls comprise life within these meat boxes that we call bodies.

For thousands of years, various civilizations had their own idea of resurrection and how this could be possible with the power of Gods. Yet none of them are very specific within the process, this is something that may be actually impossible, even for science.The inside of a cryopreservation pod from Cryostat Cryostat | KrioRus, Alabushevo, Moscow, Russia 2010 (Source: Cryostat/ Murray Ballard)

Before we imply an impossible process, we need to take into consideration the ability of the human body to last for thousands of years, even if placed in a special man-made environment as the preservation pods. It is true that some animals such as theCanadian wood frogand micro animals such as theArtemia Salinacan survive being frozen, but this is because they have biologically evolved to survive in such an environment.

The human body was never made to stay frozen, it was never made to survive over a period of 200 years, despite stories from biblical times where people may have survived for hundreds of years.

For the sake of argument lets assume that the human tissue is not affected and it can function if in some way it is resurrected. Lets assume that the pods will be discovered in 3000 years time by some advanced civilization that has reached the perfect way of living, no war, all peace, and equality. Somehow this civilization is also able to resurrect the dead and even those people found within the cryopreserved pods.Patient Care Bay (dewar being filled with liquid nitrogen) | Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. 2006 (Source: Alcor)

You manage to bring the organism back to life at 100% function, including all the organs, but how do you bring back its soul? Technology may reach a point in time to revitalize and repair all the destroyed tissue, but what technology is able to play God and bring back a soul that is resting in heaven?

Only one person in history tried scientifically prove the existence of souls, but his way and pretty much the only way humans can measure the existence of souls was not accepted. Therefore I presume that the experts from Alcor and other scientists working on cryopreservation believe that humans have no soul and it is something else that provides our consciousness.

I know that science and religion do not mix together very well as science focuses on precision whilst religion has an extensive focus on probability, however in this case science is only offering a possibility that cannot be assured by any sort of theory or piece of technology in our present time.

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184 Frozen Bodies Are Waiting To Be Resurrected | History of Yesterday - History of Yesterday

As a species, were not big fans of death and aging. We certainly do spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to dodge our fates, to stay alive and look young for as long as we can. Our fear of getting old and dying has led us to create religions that promise life after life, just in case the cryonics dont work. And the reaper, he is grim, not great or generous. Alas, our souls are, as Yeats puts it in Sailing to Byzantium, his poem about immortality, fastened to a dying animal the human body.

So one of my theories on why vampire stories are popular is rooted in our strong longing to live forever, to relieve our fear of death. The undead are manifestations of our undying desire for immortality. Across the centuries, there has been a steady flow of vampires in folklore, books, and art, and, more recently, in movies and on TV, each one having managed to dodge the final rest that awaits the rest of us. Just when youd think wed had quite enough of these fanged creatures, say, after the Twilight books and movies and the Sookie Stackhouse books and TV series (True Blood), the trend nevertheless continues, most recently with the premieres of AMCs Interview with the Vampire, Showtimes Let the Right One In, and Syfys Reginald the Vampire. We can quit them; we just dont want to.

But theres a twist. These tales of bloodsuckers are not straight-ahead fantasies by any means. Weve created them in our collective imagination but then weve made them miserable. They arent enlightened Buddha figures who, from existing across centuries, have found an empowered perspective on life or anything close to that. They brood, they grieve their familial loved ones, they fall for unavailable humans. They hate themselves for their need to feed off of the living, and they hate living forever in the dark. Lights out is a term for dying, but for the living dead its literal, too; they can no longer enjoy the warmth of the sun.

Dark Shadows, the late-1960s gothic soap opera, was a critical developmental moment in the portrayal of the vampire. Barnabas Collins, played perfectly by Jonathan Frid, is the model for todays sad, romantically-inclined Draculas. He desperately wanted a consort, but his efforts to create one from among the female population of Collinsport, Maine, were repeatedly foiled. One woman did love him, the loyal Dr. Julia Hoffman, but he did not return her feelings. He was a lonely, tortured creature and the model for the likes of Edward Cullen of the Twilight series.

Louis in Interview with the Vampire is also a Barnabas baby, as, like Edward, he is wont to drink animal blood so he wont harm any people. Technically, he and his kind are no longer human and yet they continue to live according to their consciences and feel shame when they dont. Bill Compton on True Blood, Angel on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the Salvatore brothers from The Vampire Diaries theyre all more or less wretched beings. The vampires who arent unhappy are, like Lestat in Interview With the Vampire, usually just villains who, with their violent ways, are also far from enviable.

The vampires we like to watch dont even get a pass when it comes to society. They generally exist as outsiders, lurking in the shadows, excluded from the communities theyre in because of their differences. Weve made them into a metaphor for disenfranchised people and those on the fringes, those who dont feel welcome. Weve also made them into a metaphor for passing viruses through blood and other kinds of illnesses, as they either kill victims or infect them. Not a pretty image.

Indeed, vampires are living in eternity, but they remain base animals. They are predators, driven to feed on the lifeblood of those below them on the food chain. They are serial killers.

So our fantasy of cheating death is complicated, and, ultimately, I think it helps us affirm our lives, our limited time, and our inevitable ends. Even these beings that have been granted immortality suffer greatly. They havent prevailed over time, that thing that dogs humans; existing forever is not a lot of fun either. Just ask Claudia from Interview with the Vampire, who will remain in a childs body, even as she grows up on the inside. Youth, in her tragic case, is wasted on the ancient.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.

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Why TV vampires have our undying attention - The Boston Globe

ost of you must have heard about people being cryonically or cryogenically frozen, if not in real life then at least in some science fiction movies. Truth be told there have been quite a few people that decided to be cryonically or cryogenically preserved for the future.

First of all, I will need to explain the difference between cryogenic and cryonic preservation. Many people think that both terms represent the same meaning, but truly they are very different.Cryogeniclooks at preserving the body whilst being maintained in homeostasis at a low temperature.Cryonic means fully freezing the whole body including all organs to death in the hopes that later in life the advanced technology will be able to bring them back to life.

The first man to have done this in history was James Hiram Bedford, a psychologist who was fascinated with this idea. Bedford was born in 1893 and worked his way up to reach a very avid academic career at the University of California. He became a professor in the 1940s and at the time psychology didnt have much to do with technology, nor did Bedford have an interest in technology, but something was about to captivate his brain.

As time went by Bedford was hit by cancer in the 1960s, which developed at reached his kidneys. In the 1960s most cancer patients were already destined to death, the technology didnt exist to discover cancerous cells in their early stages and the treatments were still in their testing phases with a very low chance of survival.

With not much that he was able to do, Bedford tried to live the rest of his life as best as he could. In 1962 the first book about modern cryonics was published by Robert Ettinger entitled, The Prospect of Immortality. Of course, the since is a bit of a lie sold to those that chose to be cryonically frozen. I say this because you are clinically killed by having all of your organs stopped (frozen) in the hopes that some advanced civilization from the future will have the technology to defrost you and bring your body back to life.

The pillars of cryonic hibernation focus on freezing the cells in time at a stable temperature. Think of how we are able to preserve foods for years if kept in the freezer, well the idea is pretty much the same and it sort of stops there because science didnt know how to bring whatever is frozen for years back to life. Of course, this is a very simplistic view as the science behind cryonic hibernation is quite complex and interesting.

Nevertheless, once Bedford had a read of the book he knew what he wanted to do with his body. He thought to himself that he does not have long to go and if there is a chance of preserving himself for future generations to share his vast knowledge within psychology, there was nothing that could have made him happier to pass away from such a disease.

Bedford knew that there was a cure for his cancer, but in the future where technology would become more advanced. That is why Bedford decided to put aside $100,000 to be donated towards research in the field of cryonics and cryogenics. In his testament, he wrote that his last wish was to have his body cryonically frozen after his death.

His hopes for a cure in the future were most probably built by Ettingers book which worked as a good solution for a man about to die on the brink of desperation.

Bedford passed away on the 12th of January 1967 and since then a huge war started between his wife and the organization that was carrying out research in the field of cryogenics and cryonics. This war was for $100,000 (today that would be $819,000) which Bedford gave to this organization instead of giving it to his wife and son. His wife lost the case, therefore the company was able to fulfill Bedfords last wish of having his body cryonically frozen.James Bedfords face upon his death andBedford being injected by Robert Prehoda and Dante Brunol with dimethyl sulfoxide following his death on the afternoon of 12 January 1967 (Source: Rare Historical Photos)

The two scientists assigned to do this procedure were Chemist Robert Prehoda and Biologist Dante Brunol. Two men who have dedicated good years of their lives to the science of cryonic hibernation. They were very happy to hear that someone was considering going through with the procedure as they were trying for years to get someone to donate their body after death for science.

The first step was to inject dimethyl sulfoxide (medical-grade antifreeze) into his bloodstream while continuing to pump oxygen through his system in order to minimize damage to his brain. His body was then placed in a capsule filled with dry ice at a temperature of -79 degrees Celcius (-174 Fahrenheit). Then the capsule would be sealed and placed in liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees Celcius/ -385 Fahrenheit).

Bradfords body was moved multiple times after the process, however, right now it is held by an organization calledAlcor Life Extension Foundation, the biggest and first company that is offering to cryonically freeze people. Right now the cost of being cryonically frozen is around $28,000 for the procedure and $50 per month to pay the rent for your capsule for as long as you wish the company to hold your capsule. The high costs and the low chance of such technology taking place in the near future are what puts people off, the reason why to this day only about 300 people have been cryonically frozen.

However, most of these people have done the procedure with another idea in mind, with the hope that in a however long time, humanity will evolve to the point where they will reach immortality and at that point there surely must exist some sort of technology to bring all of these frozen corpses back to life, that is if they make it that far and humanity does not end this world.

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The First Person To Be Cryonically Frozen and Preserved for the Future - History of Yesterday

Although once ridiculed, Lovelock's theory that the earth's natural cycles are living, self-regulating organisms underpins much of climate science

Although most of the world knew James Lovelock as an independent scientist and originator of the Gaia hypothesis, he had a slightly different take. Im not a scientist really. Im an inventor or a mechanic. Its a different thing. The Gaia theory is just engineering written very large indeed, hetold theGuardianin 2020.

Regardless of labels, theres no denying the significant influence of Lovelock, whodied July 26on his 103rdbirthday. Although many of his discoveries and ideas on subjects ranging from cryonics to chlorofluorocarbons, and climate to nuclear power were controversial, most gained acceptance as the world caught up.

Named for the Greek Earth goddess, hisGaia theory developed with evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis during the 1960s when he was working for NASAs moon and Mars programs saw the world with its natural cycles as a living, self-regulating organism. When one cycle is knocked out of equilibrium, others work to restore balance.

At the time, many prominent scientists ridiculed the hypothesis, but its continued to gain acceptance because it helps to explain the chemical and physical balances in air, land and water that make life possible. It underpins much of climate science. The idea isnt that Earth is conscious of these processes; just that the cycles work together to keep the planet healthy and able to support life.

Its similar to the ways in which many Indigenous Peoples worldwide view the living Earth. Everything is interconnected. He understood that human activities that destroy rainforests and reduce biodiversity, for example, hinder Gaias ability to minimize the impacts of runaway greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Lovelock wasnt afraid to change his views in the face of evolving evidence, but he also refused to ever soften his message, something I learned from interviewing him several times.

His research revealed the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, and he warned that burning fossil fuels was changing the climate before these issues were on most peoples radar. His electron capture device, invented in the late 1960s, detected rising CFC levels in the atmosphere as well as pollutants like PCBs in air, soil and water and led to the discovery that this was causing ozone depletion. That eventually resulted in theMontreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, adopted in 1987 by all countries helping the ozone layer to recover and preventing millions of cases of skin and other cancers and eye cataracts.

Like many who clearly see the environmental predicaments weve created, Lovelock wasnt always optimistic, despite his knowledge of the many available and emerging solutions. I would say the biosphere and I are both in the last 1% or our lives, he told theGuardiantwo years ago.

Lovelock, who started out in medicine, even thought pandemics such as COVID-19 could be related to planetary self-regulation: I could easily make you a model and demonstrate that as the human population on the planet grew larger and larger, the probability of a virus evolving that would cut back the population is quite marked.

He said opposition to the Gaia hypothesis surprised him: Im wondering to what extent you can put that down to the coal and oil industries who fought against any kind of message that would be bad for them.

As for solutions to the climate crisis, he advocated for technologies that havent always been popular, including nuclear energy and Edward Tellers suggestion of a sunshade in a heliocentric orbit that would diffuse a few percent of sunlight from the Earth. However, he cautioned, I dont think we should start messing about with the Gaia system until we know a hell of a lot more about it. It is beginning to look as if renewable energy wind and solar if properly used, may be the answer to the energy problems of humanity.

James Lovelock continued to work, write and speak until his final days. My main reason for not relaxing into contented retirement is that like most of you I am deeply concerned about the probability of massively harmful climate change and the need to do something about it now, he said.

Lovelock may have left Gaia, but the knowledge he left endures and is essential to understanding our place, predicament and future.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

@nowtoronto

David Suzuki

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and cofounder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

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David Suzuki: Gaia theorist James Lovelock was always ahead of the times - NOW Toronto

August 3, 2022

A paper published in Nature suggests cellular recovery can occur in pigs after death.

Prof Martin Monti, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), said:

Biological death is more like a cascade of dominoes, with one event triggering the next, than an instantaneous transition. What is ground-breaking about this technology is that this cascade can be halted in some organs if only the right cellular environment and metabolic parameters can be restored. The potential implications, if this will ever be successfully translated to humans, are huge: how many more lives could be saved through transplantation each year thanks to greater organ viability?

What this technology did not do, however, was restore any form of brain network activity and any associated function. Whether this is due to brain tissues having a faster death cascade than other organs or other factors remains unclear.

What is clear, however, is that this technology is not about magically reviving dead tissue. It is about expanding the window for restoring organ function by interrupting the death cascade.

Dr Anders Sandberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, said:

When blood circulation stops, cells begin to die due to lack of oxygen, and chemical changes begin that harm tissues and organ function. At normal temperature, irreversible changes set in after a few minutes. What this paper shows is that significant improvements are possible in how long after death preservation methods to keep organs alive can be started (up to an hour), and that some of the cellular damage can be partially reversed.

While the experiment was done on pigs, helping humans is an obvious goal, and the most obvious impact is on organ donation. Currently, most organ donation happens after brain death: the brainstem has permanently ceased functioning, but the body is otherwise functional. These cases are rarer than circulatory death where the heart has irreversibly ceased functioning. However, in these cases, there will be a period of no circulation before artificial circulation can be instituted and organs are likely to be damaged. The system in the paper may help overcome this problem, making more transplants possible.

Ethically, this seems to beunproblematic good news. However, further in the future this kind of method may also make treatment directly after a stroke or major trauma more effective: by saving patients that would otherwise have died, it might reduce the number of available transplants. This may still be good news, but there is a risk that it mainly preventspeople from dying rather than making them recover. There is a challenging ethical issue in determiningwhen radical life support is just futile, and as technology advances we may find more ways of keeping bodies alive despite being unable to revive the person we actually careabout. Much work remainsto find criteria for when further treatment is futile, and alsoin how to get people back from the brink.

Right now, the ethically important aspect of this paper is that it shows that the changes happening after stopped circulation can be slowed or reversed with the right treatment: there is more hope for patients in this state. Death is not an instantaneous event but rather agradual process, and we have gained a further tool to nudge it. Once, lack of breathing was regarded as a sign of permanent death, until artificial breathing merely made it a dangerous state to be in. Later, other technologies have pushed back the point of no return, first to cardiac arrest, and later to brain death. OrganExshows that there is more medical wiggle room in cases with no circulation to fix things than previously looked possible: related methods may make new forms of surgery possible. Paradoxically, this makes the futility debate harder since there is a bit more hope. However, it is better to have more options to save lives than fewer, even if hard moral choices have tobe made.

Doubtless some readers will bring up cryonics, the practice of cooling down bodies to extremely low temperatures after death hasbeen declared in the hope that future medicine will be able to revive them and repair the damage from both the terminal cause and the suspension process. This is not what OrganExis about, but the technology will doubtless be of great interest to cryonics organisations as a way of reducing the damage while temperature is lowered. One of the largest practical hurdles is the often excessivetime between circulation stopping and damage-reducing suspension procedures starting: this technique may buy valuable time. The big question about whether future revival is going to be possible remains, but at least one can improve the present practice to boost the chances.

Dr Sam Parnia MD PhD, Associate Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, said:

The press release is accurate but if anything underestimates the significance of these discoveries.

This is a truly remarkable and incredibly significant study. It demonstrates that after death, cells in mammalian organs (including humans) such as the brain do not die for many hours. This is well into the post-mortem period.

Consequently, by developing this system of organ preservation (using organ Ex in humans, which is entirely feasible), in the near future doctors will be able to provide novel treatments to preserve the organs post-mortem. This will enable access to many more organs for transplantation, which will lead to 1000s of lives saved every year.

Perhaps, as important is the fact that the OrganEx method can be used to preserve organs in people who have died, but in whom the underlying cause of death remains treatable. Today, this would include athletes who die suddenly from a heart defect, people who die from drowning, heart attacks or massive bleeding after trauma (such as car accidents). The OrganEx system can preserve such peoples organs and prevent brain damage for hours in people after death. This will provide time for doctors to fix the underlying condition (such as a blocked blood vessel in the heart that had led to a massive heart attack and death, or repair a torn blood vessel that had led to death from massive bleeding after trauma), restore organ function and bring such people back to life many hours after death. As such otherwise healthy people, including athletes who die, but in whom the cause of death is treatable at any given time can potentially be brought back to life, and if the cause of death is not treatable, then their organs can be preserved to give life to thousands of people every year.

Finally, this study demonstrates that our social convention regarding death, ie. as an absolute black and white end is not scientifically valid. By contrast, scientifically, death is a biological process that remains treatable and reversible for hours after it has occurred.

For decades millions of people have reported lucid consciousness and a detailed reevaluation of all their own actions, thoughts and intentions throughout life, when on the brink of death, or after crossing the threshold of death. These recalled experiences surrounding death or so called near death experiences were often been dismissed. However, this study and others suggest consciousness may not be annihilated at the time of death. This further reinforces the need to study consciousness and recalled experiences surrounding death in an unbiased scientific manner. Scientists can study what happens to the human mind and consciousness after death and provide answers to the age old question of what happens to us all after we die through the prism of science.

Cellular recovery after prolonged warm ischaemia of the whole body by David Andrijevic et al. was published in Nature at 16:00 UK time on Wednesday 3rd August 2022.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05016-1

Declared interests

Prof Martin Monti: No conflict of interest.

Dr Sam Parnia: I donthave any conflicts. However, I do conduct other research into methods to preserve the brain after cardiac arrest.

For all other experts, no reply to our request for DOIswas received.

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expert reaction to paper suggesting that cellular and tissue function can be restored in pigs after death - Science Media Centre