Category Archives: Cryonics

The global Cryonics Technology market research report provides the detail analysis of various factors that used for the growth of the market. These factors provide thoughtful and deep knowledge of the flow and future directors of the market. Along with this, these factors also help to provide new market opportunities for the new players who are entering in the Global Cryonics Technology Market. The statistical and numerical data that is provided in the market research report is integrated in the tabular, graphical and pie charts format, which makes easy for the marketers to understand the facts and figures. Moreover, the market research report also covers the information on market drivers, restrains, future opportunities and challenges that helps in the growth of the global Cryonics Technology market.

The report study has also discovered new suggestions and applications of various organizations, which the manufacturers to improve their business on a global scale. The research report also covers the current Covid-19 impact on various industries and channels and what will be its future impact on the global Cryonics Technology market.

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The global Cryonics Technology market research report covers market attractiveness analysis, where each segment of the market is benchmarked based on its market size, growth rate and general appeal. The global Cryonics Technology marketis expected to achieve market growth as well as upcoming market opportunities or challenges in the forecast period of 2020 to 2027. The company researcher analyses the market is mounting at a vigorous CAGR in the forecast period.

Moreover, the global Cryonics Technology market research analysis report also provides the complete details on the major elements of the market like mergers and acquisition of the major key players, research and development activities, new product launches, product pricing and Covid-19 impact on the major players of the market. The global Cryonics Technology market research report covers estimation of the market from 2020-2027 and historical information from 2015-2019.

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The Market Coverage chapter in the market research report provides an important assessment of market segments like market types, application and region, also provides application view, significant makers, product offerings and measure period.

The Outline chapter in the market research report emphases on all the key market drivers, restrains and market limitations, which helps the growth of the global Cryonics Technology market in the current and forecast period. Along with this, this chapter also provides market development rate, drive market patterns and major market viewpoints.

The Regional Analysis chapter in the market research report focuses on all the division and sub-division across the globe. In this chapter, the marketers analyze and evaluate the most recent market import and fare patterns, along with this, the report also provides information on the production and utilization quantities of the Cryonics Technology products. The market major parts in every area and income period details are also covered in the global Cryonics Technology market research report.

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Global Cryonics Technology Market (2020) to Witness Huge Growth by 2026 | Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics, Cryotherm, KrioRus, VWR, and more -...

Author : Roy Phillips, MD, CryoCoax

05 January 2021

Its early origins were in the late nineteenth century when Faraday et al experimented with the liquefaction of various gases and has developed tremendously over the subsequent 140 years or so. (Note: it not to be confused with cryonics, the science of freezing dead bodies!).

Today Cryogenics has become a key part of our scientific and engineering present and is set to become an even bigger part of our future.

A key emerging market for cryogenics in the electronics industry is being created by the immense interest in quantum computing, while other applications include medical, space, defence, aerospace, education, test and measurement, biological research, chemistry and more.

The use of electronics, particularly RF, within cryogenic applications is especially interesting and involves a phenomenon called superconductivity.

Superconductivity occurs within certain materials at ultra-low temperatures when a charge or signal moves through the material without resistance. The obvious benefits of this are a massive increase in capacity, efficiency and the signal integrity of an RF system.

One of the biggest challenges in this market is the very the narrow supply chain for the exotic materials required to manufacture cryogenic products and the new technology required to combine components into a working system or sub-assembly. While not insurmountable, this remains the biggest challenge to successfully create manufacturable products with reliable and repeatable performance.

As conventional soldering is not possible with some cryogenic cable materials Intelliconnect has designed a solderless connector and other low temperature hardware to create assemblies which work to below 2 K (-271.15C) at bandwidths up to 40GHz.

Technical specifications, both electrical and mechanical are significantly different in the cryogenics world and product design engineers will be working with scientists outside of the customary world of electronics, rather than their traditional customer base of RF and electronics engineers, which presents a new set of challenges.

The enormous investment in equipment and stock required was the first major hurdle. Specialised test equipment, self-designed manufacturing equipment, hugely expensive materials and even additional manufacturing space has had to be procured.

Relationships with many seats of learning in UK, USA and elsewhere were essential and Intelliconnect has developed a large network of University partnerships which has helped immeasurably with product development and elevating technical expertise.

In such a specialised vertical market brand recognition becomes extremely important. In an industry where physical and electrical tolerances are very low, quality expectations are incredibly high, and product and supply reliability are paramount, it has been essential to create a new brand which was synonymous with all of these customer requirements. Intelliconnect has created a specialised subsidiary business CryoCoax dedicated to the cryogenics industry.

CryoCoax are members of the British Cryogenics Council, the Cryogenics Society of Europe and the Cryogenics Society of America. An ISO9001 manufacturer CryoCoax is also SC21 accredited to a Silver standard. SC21 is a business quality and improvement qualification designed to provide a continuous improvement programme and assure supply chain performance. Silver Award proves >96% on time delivery and 99.5% quality.

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Intelliconnect (Europe) Ltd. - Cryogenics and connecting the cold bits - Design Products & Applications

The recent report titled Global Cryonics Technology Market Size, Status and Forecast 2020-2026 offered by Researchmoz.us, comprises of a comprehensive investigation into the geographical landscape, industry size along with the revenue estimation of the business. Additionally, the report also highlights the challenges impeding market growth and expansion strategies employed by leading companies in the Cryonics Technology market.

This is the most recent report inclusive of the COVID-19 effects on the functioning of the market. It is well known that some changes, for the worse, were administered by the pandemic on all industries. The current scenario of the business sector and pandemics impact on the past and future of the industry are covered in this report.

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In market segmentation by manufacturers, the report covers the following companies : Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics, Cryotherm, KrioRus, VWR, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Custom Biogenic Systems, Oregon Cryonics, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Osiris Cryonics, Sigma-Aldrich, Southern Cryonics and among others.

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Business owners looking to scale up their business can refer this report that contains data regarding the rise in sales within a given consumer base for the forecast period, 2020 to 2026. Product owners can use this information along with the driving factors such as demographics and revenue generated from other products discussed in the report to get a better analysis of their products and services. Besides, the research analysts have compared the market growth rate with the product sales to enable business owners to determine the success or failure of a specific product or service.

Cryonics Technology Market is segmented as below:

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Global Cryonics Technology Market Report 2020 Market Size, Share, Price, Trend and Forecast is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Cryonics Technology industry.

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The Cryonics Technology market report focuses on the economic developments and consumer spending trends across different countries for the forecast period 2020 to 2026. The research further reveals which countries and regions will have a better standing in the years to come. Apart from this, the study talks about the growth rate, market share as well as the recent developments in the Cryonics Technology industry worldwide. Besides, the special mention of major market players adds importance to the overall market study.

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To summarize, the global Cryonics Technology market report studies the contemporary market to forecast the growth prospects, challenges, opportunities, risks, threats, and the trends observed in the market that can either propel or curtail the growth rate of the industry. The market factors impacting the global sector also include provincial trade policies, international trade disputes, entry barriers, and other regulatory restrictions.

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Cryonics Technology Market Key Trends, Drivers, Challenges and Standardization To 2020-2026 - PRnews Leader

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).

Freezing of a human corpse

Cryonics (from Greek: kryos meaning 'cold') is the low-temperature freezing (usually at 196C or 320.8F or 77.1K) and storage of a human corpse or severed head, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future.[1][2] Cryonics is regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community. It is generally viewed as a pseudoscience,[3] and its practice has been characterized as quackery.[4][5]

Cryonics procedures can begin only after clinical death, and cryonics "patients" are legally dead. Cryonics procedures may begin within minutes of death,[6] and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation.[7] It is, however, not possible for a corpse to be reanimated after undergoing vitrification, as this causes damage to the brain including its neural networks.[8] The first corpse to be frozen was that of Dr. James Bedford in 1967.[9] As of 2014, about 250 dead bodies had been cryopreserved in the United States, and 1,500 people had made arrangements for cryopreservation of their corpses.[10]

Economic reality means it is highly improbable that any cryonics corporation could continue in business long enough to take advantage of the claimed long-term benefits offered.[11] Early attempts of cryonic preservations were performed in the 1960s and early 1970s which ended in failure with companies going out of business, and their stored corpses thawed and disposed of.[12]

Cryonicists argue that as long as brain structure remains intact, there is no fundamental barrier, given our current understanding of physical law, to recovering its information content. Cryonics proponents go further than the mainstream consensus in saying that the brain does not have to be continuously active to survive or retain memory. Cryonics controversially states that a human survives even within an inactive brain that has been badly damaged, provided that original encoding of memory and personality can, in theory, be adequately inferred and reconstituted from what structure remains.[10][13]

Cryonics uses temperatures below 130C, called cryopreservation, in an attempt to preserve enough brain information to permit future revival of the cryopreserved person. Cryopreservation may be accomplished by freezing, freezing with cryoprotectant to reduce ice damage, or by vitrification to avoid ice damage. Even using the best methods, cryopreservation of whole bodies or brains is very damaging and irreversible with current technology.

Cryonics advocates hold that in the future the use of some kind of presently-nonexistent nanotechnology may be able to help bring the dead back to life and treat the diseases which killed them.[14] Mind uploading has also been proposed.[15]

Cryonics can be expensive. As of 2018[update] the cost of preparing and storing corpses using cryonics ranged from US$28,000 to $200,000.[16]

When used at high concentrations, cryoprotectants can stop ice formation completely. Cooling and solidification without crystal formation is called vitrification.[17] The first cryoprotectant solutions able to vitrify at very slow cooling rates while still being compatible with whole organ survival were developed in the late 1990s by cryobiologists Gregory Fahy and Brian Wowk for the purpose of banking transplantable organs.[18][19][20] 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;[21] cellular damage was due to dehydration and toxicity of the cryoprotectant solutions.

Costs can include payment for medical personnel to be on call for death, vitrification, transportation in dry ice to a preservation facility, and payment into a trust fund intended to cover indefinite storage in liquid nitrogen and future revival costs.[22][23] As of 2011, U.S. cryopreservation costs can range from $28,000 to $200,000, and are often financed via life insurance.[22] KrioRus, which stores bodies communally in large dewars, charges $12,000 to $36,000 for the procedure.[24] Some customers opt to have only their brain cryopreserved ("neuropreservation"), rather than their whole body.

As of 2014, about 250 corpses have been cryogenically preserved in the U.S., and around 1,500 people have signed up to have their remains preserved.[10] As of 2016, four facilities exist in the world to retain cryopreserved bodies: three in the U.S. and one in Russia.[2][25]

Taking into account the lifecycle of corporations, it is extremely unlikely that any cryonics company could continue to exist for sufficient time to take advantage even of the supposed benefits offered: historically, even the most robust corporations have only a one-in-a-thousand chance of surviving even one hundred years.[11] Many cryonics companies have failed: as of 2018[update] all but one of the pre-1973 batch had gone out of business, and their stored corpses have been defrosted and disposed of.[12]

Without cryoprotectants, cell shrinkage and high salt concentrations during freezing usually prevent frozen cells from functioning again after thawing. Ice crystals can also disrupt connections between cells that are necessary for organs to function.[26] The difficulties of recovering large animals and their individual organs from a frozen state have been long known. Attempts to recover frozen mammals by simply rewarming them were abandoned by 1957.[27] At humanity's present level of scientific knowledge, only cells, tissues, and some small organs can be reversibly cryopreserved.[18][28]

Large vitrified organs tend to develop fractures during cooling,[29] a problem worsened by the large tissue masses and very low temperatures of cryonics.[30]

Actual cryonics organizations use vitrification without a chemical fixation step,[31] sacrificing some structural preservation quality for less damage at the molecular level. Some scientists, like Joao Pedro Magalhaes, have questioned whether using a deadly chemical for fixation eliminates the possibility of biological revival, making chemical fixation unsuitable for cryonics.[32]

In 2016, Robert L. McIntyre and Gregory Fahy at the cryobiology research company 21st Century Medicine, Inc. won the Small Animal Brain Preservation Prize of the Brain Preservation Foundation by demonstrating to the satisfaction of neuroscientist judges that a particular implementation of fixation and vitrification called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation[33] could preserve a rabbit brain in "near perfect" condition at 135C, with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact in electron micrographs.[34][35] Brain Preservation Foundation President, Ken Hayworth, said, "This result directly answers a main skeptical and scientific criticism against cryonicsthat it does not provably preserve the delicate synaptic circuitry of the brain.[36] However the price paid for perfect preservation as seen by microscopy was tying up all protein molecules with chemical crosslinks, completely eliminating biological viability.

Outside the cryonics community, many scientists have strong skepticism toward cryonics methods. Cryobiologist Dayong Gao states that "we simply don't know if (subjects have) been damaged to the point where they've 'died' during vitrification because the subjects are now inside liquid nitrogen canisters." Biochemist Ken Storey argues (based on experience with organ transplants), that "even if you only wanted to preserve the brain, it has dozens of different areas, which would need to be cryopreserved using different protocols."[37]

Revival would require repairing damage from lack of oxygen, cryoprotectant toxicity, thermal stress (fracturing), freezing in tissues that do not successfully vitrify, finally followed by reversing the cause of death. In many cases extensive tissue regeneration would be necessary.[38]

Historically, a person had little control regarding how their body was treated after death as religion held jurisdiction over the ultimate fate of their body.[39] However, secular courts began to exercise jurisdiction over the body and use discretion in carrying out of the wishes of the deceased person.[39] Most countries legally treat preserved individuals as deceased persons because of laws that forbid vitrifying someone who is medically alive.[40] In France, cryonics is not considered a legal mode of body disposal;[41] only burial, cremation, and formal donation to science are allowed. However, bodies may legally be shipped to other countries for cryonic freezing.[42] As of 2015, the Canadian province of British Columbia prohibits the sale of arrangements for body preservation based on cryonics.[43] In Russia, cryonics falls outside both the medical industry and the funeral services industry, making it easier in Russia than in the U.S. to get hospitals and morgues to release cryonics candidates.[24]

In London in 2016, the English High Court ruled in favor of a mother's right to seek cryopreservation of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter, as the girl wanted, contrary to the father's wishes. The decision was made on the basis that the case represented a conventional dispute over the disposal of the girl's body, although the judge urged ministers to seek "proper regulation" for the future of cryonic preservation following concerns raised by the hospital about the competence and professionalism of the team that conducted the preservation procedures.[44] In Alcor Life Extension Foundation v. Richardson, the Iowa Court of Appeals ordered for the disinterment of Richardson, who was buried against his wishes for cryopreservation.[39][45]

A detailed legal examination by Jochen Taupitz concludes that cryonic storage is legal in Germany for an indefinite period of time.[46]

In 2009, writing in Bioethics, David Shaw examines the ethical status of cryonics. The arguments against it include changing the concept of death, the expense of preservation and revival, lack of scientific advancement to permit revival, temptation to use premature euthanasia, and failure due to catastrophe. Arguments in favor of cryonics include the potential benefit to society, the prospect of immortality, and the benefits associated with avoiding death. Shaw explores the expense and the potential payoff, and applies an adapted version of Pascal's Wager to the question.[47]

In 2016, Charles Tandy wrote in favor of cryonics, arguing that honoring someone's last wishes is seen as a benevolent duty in American and many other cultures.[48]

Cryopreservation was applied to human cells beginning in 1954 with frozen sperm, which was thawed and used to inseminate three women.[49] The freezing of humans was first scientifically proposed by Michigan professor Robert Ettinger when he wrote The Prospect of Immortality (1962).[50] In April 1966, the first human body was frozenthough it had been embalmed for two monthsby being placed in liquid nitrogen and stored at just above freezing. The middle-aged woman from Los Angeles, whose name is unknown, was soon thawed out and buried by relatives.[51]

The first body to be frozen with the hope of future revival was James Bedford's, a few hours after his cancer-caused death in 1967.[52] Bedford's corpse is the only one frozen before 1974 still preserved today.[51] In 1976, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute; his corpse was cryopreserved in 2011.[50] Robert Nelson, "a former TV repairman with no scientific background" who led the Cryonics Society of California, was sued in 1981 for allowing nine bodies to thaw and decompose in the 1970s; in his defense, he claimed that the Cryonics Society had run out of money.[51] This led to the lowered reputation of cryonics in the U.S.[24]

In 2018, a Y-Combinator startup called Nectome was recognized for developing a method of preserving brains with chemicals rather than by freezing. The method is fatal, performed as euthanasia under general anethesia, but the hope is that future technology would allow the brain to be physically scanned into a computer simulation, neuron by neuron.[53]

According to The New York Times, cryonicists are predominantly nonreligious white males, outnumbering women by about three to one.[54] According to The Guardian, as of 2008, while most cryonicists used to be young, male and "geeky" recent demographics have shifted slightly towards whole families.[40]

In 2015 Du Hong, a 61-year-old female writer of children's literature, became the first known Chinese national to have their head cryopreserved.[55]

Cryonics is generally regarded as a fringe pseudoscience.[3] The Society for Cryobiology have rejected as members those who practiced cryonics,[3] and have issued a public statement saying that cryonics is "not science", and that it is a "personal choice" how people want to have their dead bodies disposed of.[56]

Russian company KrioRus is the only non-US vendor of cryonics services. Yevgeny Alexandrov, chair of the Russian Academy of Sciences commission against pseudoscience, said there was "no scientific basis" for cryonics, and that the company's offering was based on "unfounded speculation".[57]

Although scientists have expressed skepticism about cryonics in media sources,[24] philosopher Ole Martin Moen has written that it only receives a "miniscule" amount of attention from academia.[10]

While some neuroscientists contend that all the subtleties of a human mind are contained in its anatomical structure,[58] few neuroscientists will comment directly upon the topic of cryonics due to its speculative nature. Individuals who intend to be frozen are often "looked at as a bunch of kooks".[59] Cryobiologist Kenneth B. Storey said in 2004 that cryonics is impossible and will never be possible, as cryonics proponents are proposing to "over-turn the laws of physics, chemistry, and molecular science".[60] Neurobiologist Michael Hendricks has said that "Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry".[24]

William T. Jarvis has written that "Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery".[4][5]

According to cryonicist Aschwin de Wolf and others, cryonics can often produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists. James Hughes, the executive director of the pro-life-extension Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, chooses not to personally sign up for cryonics, calling it a worthy experiment but stating laconically that "I value my relationship with my wife."[54]

Cryobiologist Dayong Gao states that "People can always have hope that things will change in the future, but there is no scientific foundation supporting cryonics at this time."[37] As well, while it is universally agreed that "personal identity" is uninterrupted when brain activity temporarily ceases during incidents of accidental drowning (where people have been restored to normal functioning after being completely submerged in cold water for up to 66 minutes), some people express concern that a centuries-long cryopreservation might interrupt their conception of personal identity, such that the revived person would "not be you".[10]

Many people say there would be no point in being revived in the far future if their friends and families are dead.[47]

Suspended animation is a popular subject in science fiction and fantasy settings. It is often the means by which a character is transported into the future.

A survey in Germany found that about half of the respondents were familiar with cryonics, and about half of those familiar with cryonics had learned of the subject from films or television.[61]

Corpses subjected to the cryonics process include those of L. Stephen Coles (in 2014),[62] Hal Finney[63] (in 2014), and Ted Williams.[64]

Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein wanted to have his head and penis frozen after death so that he could "seed the human race with his DNA".[65][66]

Television host Larry King has arranged to have his body frozen.[67] Other notable people who have arranged for cryopreservation include Oxford philosophers Anders Sandberg[68] and Nick Bostrom[69], as well as venture capitalist Peter Thiel.[70]

The urban legend suggesting Walt Disney's corpse was cryopreserved is false; it was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.[71][a] Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote enthusiastically of the concept in The Door into Summer (serialized in 1956), was cremated and had his ashes distributed over the Pacific Ocean. Timothy Leary was a long-time cryonics advocate and signed up with a major cryonics provider, but he changed his mind shortly before his death, and was not cryopreserved.[73]

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Cryonics - Wikipedia

Cryonics is the practice of preserving human bodies in extremely cold temperatures with the hope of reviving them sometime in the future. The idea is that, if someone has "died" from a disease that is incurable today, he or she can be "frozen" and then revived in the future when a cure has been discovered. A person preserved this way is said to be in cryonic suspension.

To understand the technology behind cryonics, think about the news stories you've heard of people who have fallen into an icy lake and have been submerged for up to an hour in the frigid water before being rescued. The ones who survived did so because the icy water put their body into a sort of suspended animation, slowing down their metabolism and brain function to the point where they needed almost no oxygen.

Cryonics is a bit different from being resuscitated after falling into an icy lake, though. First of all, it's illegal to perform cryonic suspension on someone who is still alive. People who undergo this procedure must first be pronounced legally dead -- that is, their heart must have stopped beating. But if they're dead, how can they ever be revived? According to scientists who perform cryonics, "legally dead" is not the same as "totally dead." Total death, they say, is the point at which all brain function ceases. Legal death occurs when the heart has stopped beating, but some cellular brain function remains. Cryonics preserves the little cell function that remains so that, theoretically, the person can be resuscitated in the future.

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What Is Cryonics? - How Cryonics Works | HowStuffWorks

I woke up on Saturday to a heartbreaking front-page article in the New York Times about a terminally ill young woman who chooses to freeze her brain. She is drawn into a cottage industry spurred by transhumanist principles that offers to preserve people in liquid nitrogen immediately after death and store their bodies (or at least their heads) in hopes that they can be reanimated or digitally replicated in a technologically advanced future.

Proponents have added a patina of scientific plausibility to this idea by citing the promise of new technologies in neuroscience, particularly recent work in connectomicsa field that maps the connections between neurons. The suggestion is that a detailed map of neural connections could be enough to restore a persons mind, memories, and personality by uploading it into a computer simulation.

Science tells us that a map of connections is not sufficient to simulate, let alone replicate, a nervous system, and that there are enormous barriers to achieving immortality in silico. First, what information is required to replicate a human mind? Second, do current or foreseeable freezing methods preserve the necessary information, and how will this information be recovered? Third, and most confounding to our intuition, would a simulation really be you?

I study a small roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, which is by far the best-described animal in all of biology. We know all of its genes and all of its cells (a little over 1,000). We know the identity and complete synaptic connectivity of its 302 neurons, and we have known it for 30 years.

If we could upload or roughly simulate any brain, it should be that of C. elegans. Yet even with the full connectome in hand, a static model of this network of connections lacks most of the information necessary to simulate the mind of the worm. In short, brain activity cannot be inferred from synaptic neuroanatomy.

Synapses are the physical contacts between neurons where a special form of chemoelectric signalingneurotransmissionoccurs, and they come in many varieties. They are complex molecular machines made of thousands of proteins and specialized lipid structures. It is the precise molecular composition of synapses and the membranes they are embedded in that confers their properties. The presence or absence of a synapse, which is all that current connectomics methods tell us, suggests that a possible functional relationship between two neurons exists, but little or nothing about the nature of this relationshipprecisely what you need to know to simulate it.

Additionally, neurons and other cells in the brain are in constant communication through signaling pathways that do not act through synapses. Many of the signals that regulate fundamental behaviors such as eating, sleeping, mood, mating, and social bonding are mediated by chemical cues acting through networks that are invisible to us anatomically. We know that the same set of synaptic connections can function very differently depending on what mix of these signals is present at a given time. These issues highlight an important distinction: the colossally hard problem of simulating any brain as opposed to the stupendously more difficult task of replicating a particular brain, which is required for the promised personal immortality of uploading.

The features of your neurons (and other cells) and synapses that make you you are not generic. The vast array of subtle chemical modifications, states of gene regulation, and subcellular distributions of molecular complexes are all part of the dynamic flux of a living brain. These things are not details that average out in a large nervous system; rather, they are the very things that engrams (the physical constituents of memories) are made of.

While it might be theoretically possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that certainly is not happening now. The technology to do so, let alone the ability to read this information back out of such a specimen, does not yet exist even in principle. It is this purposeful conflation of what is theoretically conceivable with what is ever practically possible that exploits peoples vulnerability.

Finally, would an upload really be you? This is unanswerable, but we can dip our toes in. Whatever our subjective sense of self is, lets assume it arises from the operation of the physical matter of the brain. We could also tentatively conclude that such awareness is substrate-neutral: if brains can be conscious, a computer program that does everything a brain does should be conscious, too. If one is also willing to imagine arbitrarily complex technology, then we can also think about simulating a brain down to the synaptic or molecular or (why not?) atomic or quantum level.

But what is this replica? Is it subjectively you or is it a new, separate being? The idea that you can be conscious in two places at the same time defies our intuition. Parsimony suggests that replication will result in two different conscious entities. Simulation, if it were to occur, would result in a new person who is like you but whose conscious experience you dont have access to.

That means that any suggestion that you can come back to life is simply snake oil. Transhumanists have responses to these issues. In my experience, they consist of alternating demands that we trust our intuition about nonexistent technology (uploading could work) but deny our intuition about consciousness (it would not be me).

No one who has experienced the disbelief of losing a loved one can help but sympathize with someone who pays $80,000 to freeze their brain. But reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the cryonics industry. Those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt.

Michael Hendricks is a neuroscientist and assistant professor of biology at McGill University.

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The False Science of Cryonics | MIT Technology Review

(Inside Science) Early in the 1960s, a group of enthusiasts advanced the concept of freezing humans as soon as they die, in hopes of reviving them after the arrival of medical advances able to cure the conditions that killed them. The idea went into practice for the first time 50 years ago.

On Jan. 12, 1967, James Bedford, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, became the first person to be "cyropreserved." A small team of doctors and other enthusiasts froze him a few hours after he died from liver cancer that had spread to his lungs.

A few days later the team placed the body into an insulated container packed with dry ice. Later still, Bedford was immersed in liquid nitrogen in a large Dewar container. Fifteen years on, after a series of moves from one cryopreservation facility to another, his body found a home at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it still resides.

By current standards of cryonics, the procedure was remarkably untidy and disorganized. Nevertheless, a visual evaluation of Bedford's condition in 1991 found that his body had remained frozen and suffered no obvious deterioration.

"There's no date set for another examination," said R. Michael Perry, care services manager at Alcor.

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But as promoters of cryopreservation celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bedford's death and freezing known to some as "Bedford Day" they emphasize improvements to the freezing and preservation procedures that Bedford's experiences advanced.

The community is also undergoing a significant change in its expectations for reviving frozen patients. Rather than planning for a Lazarus-like resuscitation of the entire body, some proponents of the technology focus more on saving individuals' stored memories, and perhaps incorporating them into robots.

Beyond the cryopreservation community, however, an aura of scientific suspicion that surrounded Bedford's freezing remains.

"Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry," neuroscientist Michael Hendricks of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, wrote in Technology Review.

Scientists aren't the industry's only critics.

Families of individuals designated for freezing including Bedford's own family have gone to court to protest or defend loved ones' decisions to undergo freezing.

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In a more recent case, in 2011, a Colorado probate judge upheld a contract that Mary Robbins had signed with Alcor over objections from Robbins' children. And last year the High Court of England upheld a mother's right to seek cryonic treatment of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter after her death, despite the father's wishes.

Public reaction to the technology reached its nadir in New England in 2002, when court documents revealed that Boston Red Sox baseball icon Ted Williams was frozen in the Alcor facility, with his head severed from his body. Williams' son John Henry, who arranged the process, was himself frozen after he died of leukemia.

Politics has also impacted the technology's progress. In 2004, for example, Michigan's state government voted to license a facility called the Cryonics Institute, located in Clinton, as a cemetery. That move, reversed eight years later, prevented the institute from preparing bodies for cryopreservation on its own, because applying such procedures to a dead body required the services of a licensed funeral director.

The cryonics industry flatly disagrees with its critics.

Alcor asserts on its website that "[t]here are no known credible technical arguments that lead one to conclude that cryonics, carried out under good conditions today, would not work." The company adds: "Cryonics is a belief that no one is really dead until the information content of the brain is lost, and that low temperatures can prevent this loss."

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Certainly the controversies have not discouraged candidates for cryopreservation.

Worldwide, more than 250 individuals are now housed in cryonic facilities, at a minimum per-person cost of about $28,000 in the U.S.

Russia's KrioRus company offers a cut-rate level starting at $12,000, with the condition that it stores several human bodies and assorted pets and other animals in communal Dewar containers. Individual contracts can specify the length of storage. At present, the U.S. and Russia are the only countries with facilities that offer human cryopreservation.

The first attempt at cryopreservation did not go particularly smoothly.

Bedford died before all preparations for his cryopreservation were complete. So instead of draining his blood and replacing it with a customized antifreeze solution to protect the body's tissues from freezing damage, the team simply injected the antifreeze into Bedford's arteries without removing the blood.

The team then surrounded the body in dry ice, and started it on a series of transfers from one container to another that ended up in a Dewar container in Alcor's facility.

Because of those difficulties, cryonics experts feared that the body had suffered serious damage. But the examination in 1991 quelled those concerns.

"We were really relieved that he was not discolored," Perry recalled. "And corners of the ice cubes [around him] were still sharp; he had stayed frozen all the time."

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In recent years, cryonics promoters have borrowed from medical advances in such fields as cryobiology and nanobiology.

To prevent ice crystals from damaging cell walls in the frozen state, cryopreservationists replace the body's blood supply with mixtures of antifreeze compounds and organ preservatives a technique developed to preserve frozen eggs for fertility treatments.

Another emerging approach accounts for the separation of Ted Williams' head and body. Based on studies of roundworms, promoters of cryonics argue that freezing can preserve the contents of individuals' brains even if their bodies can't be revived. That opens the possibility of downloading cryopreserved personalities into a robotic future body.

Hendricks disagrees. "While it may be possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that is certainly not happening now," he pointed out in Technology Review.

Scientists such as Barry Fuller, a professor of surgical science and low temperature medicine at England's University College, London, emphasize that even preserving body parts in such a way that they remain viable on thawing remains a distant dream.

"There is ongoing research into these scientific challenges, and a potential future demonstration of the ability to cryopreserve human organs for transplantation would be a major first step into proving the concept," he told The Guardian. "But at the moment we cannot achieve that."

Nevertheless, Perry expresses optimism about a timeline for the revival of frozen humans.

"We think in terms of decades," he said. "Sometimes we say fifty to a hundred years."

David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University Medical Center in Michigan, takes a darker view.

"Fifty years from now," he said, "it's likely that all that will remain of my existence will be some scientific papers and a faint memory held by my nieces and nephews and maybe, if I'm lucky, a few of my youngest readers."

Reprinted with permission from Inside Science, an editorially independent news product of the American Institute of Physics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing, promoting and serving the physical sciences.

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Here's How Far Cryonic Preservation Has Come in the 50 ...

In 2016, Jang Ji-sung's young daughter Nayeon passed away from a blood-related disease. But in February, the South Korean mother was reunited with her daughter in virtual reality. Experts constructed a version of her child using motion capture technology for a documentary. Wearing a VR headset and haptic gloves, Jang was able to walk, talk and play with this digital version of her daughter.

"Maybe it's a real paradise," Jang said of the moment the two met in VR. "I met Nayeon, who called me with a smile, for a very short time, but it's a very happy time. I think I've had the dream I've always wanted."

Once largely the concern of science fiction, more people are now interested in immortality -- whether that's keeping your body or mind alive forever (as explored in the new Amazon Prime comedy Upload), or in creating some kind of living memorial, like an AI-based robot or chatbot version of yourself, or of your loved one. The question is -- should we do that? And if we do, what should it look like?

In Korea, a mother was reunited with a virtual reality version of her young daughter who had passed away years before, as part of a documentary project.

Modern interest around immortality started in the 1960s, when the idea of cryonics emerged -- freezing and storing a human corpse or head with the hope of resurrecting that person in the distant future. (While some people have chosen to freeze their body after death, none have yet been revived.)

"There was a shift in death science at that time, and the idea that somehow or another death is something humans can defeat," said John Troyer, director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath and author of Technologies of the Human Corpse.

However, no peer-reviewed research suggests it's worth pouring millions of dollars into trying to upload our brains, or finding ways to keep our bodies alive, Troyer said. At least not yet. A 2016 study published in the journal PLOS ONE did find that exposing a preserved brain to chemical and electrical probes could make the brain function again, to some degree.

"It's all a gamble about what's possible in the future," Troyer said. "I'm just not convinced it's possible in the way [technology companies] are describing, or desirable."

There's a big difference between people actively trying to upload their brain to try and live on forever and those who die whose relatives or the public try to resurrect them in some way through technology.

In 2015, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of software company Replika, lost her best friend Roman after he was hit by a car in Moscow. As part of the grieving process, she turned to tech. Kuyda trained a chatbot on thousands of text messages the two had shared over the years -- creating a digital version of Roman that could still "talk" to family and friends.

The first time she messaged the bot, Kuyda said she was surprised at how close it came to feeling like she was talking to her friend again. "It was very emotional," she said. "I wasn't expecting to feel like that, because I worked on that chatbot, I knew how it was built."

If this sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, it's because it was. The 2013 episode Be Right Back centers on a young woman whose boyfriend is killed in a car accident. In mourning, she signs up for a service that allows her to communicate with an AI version of him based on his past online communications and social media profiles -- ultimately turning it into an android version of her boyfriend. But he's never exactly the same.

Eugenia Kuyda created a chatbot based on text messages from her friend Roman after he passed away in a car accident.

However, Kuyda says her Roman chatbot was a deeply personal project and tribute -- not a service for others. Anyone trying to do this on a mass scale would run into a number of barriers, she added. You'd have to decide what information would be considered public or private and who the chatbot would be talking to. The way you talk to your parents is different from the way you'd talk to your friends, or to a colleague. There wouldn't be a way to differentiate, she said.

The digital version of your friend could potentially copy the way they speak, but it would be based on things they had said in the past -- it wouldn't make new opinions or create new conversations. Also, people go through different periods in life and evolve their thinking, so it would be difficult to determine which phase the chatbot would capture.

"We leave an insane amount of data, but most of that is not personal, private or speaks about us in terms of what kind of person we are," Kuyda said. "You can merely build the shadow of a person."

The question remains: Where can we get the data to digitize people, in full? Kuyda asks. "We can deepfake a person and create some nascent technology that works -- like a 3D avatar -- and model a video of the person," she added. "But what about the mind? There's nothing that can capture our minds right now."

Perhaps the largest barrier to creating some kind of software copy of a person after they die is data. Pictures, texts, and social media platforms don't typically exist online forever. That's partially because the internet continues to evolve and partially because most content posted online belongs to that platform. If the company shuts down, people can no longer access that material.

"It's interesting and of the moment, but it's a great deal more ephemeral than we imagined," Troyer said. "A lot of the digital world disappears."

Memorialization technology doesn't typically stand the test of time, Troyer said. Think video tributes or social media memorial pages. It's no use having something saved to some cloud if no one can access it in the future, he added. Take the story of the computer that Tim Berners Lee used to create HTML on the web with -- the machine is at CERN, but no one knows the password. "I see that as sort of an allegory for our time," he said.

"We leave an insane amount of data, but most of that is not personal, private or speaks about us in terms of what kind of person we are. You can merely build the shadow of a person."

Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of software company Luka

One of the more sci-fi concepts in the area of digitizing death came from Nectome, a Y Combinator startup that preserves the brain for potential memory extraction in some form through a high-tech embalming process. The catch? The brain has to be fresh -- so those who wanted to preserve their mind would have to be euthanized.

Nectome planned to test it with terminally ill volunteers in California, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for those patients. It collected refundable $10,000 payments for people to join a waitlist for the procedure, should it someday become more widely available (clinical trials would be years away). As of March 2018, 25 people had done so, according to the MIT Technology Review. (Nectome did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The startup raised $1 million in funding along with a large federal grant and was collaborating with an MIT neuroscientist. But the MIT Technology Review story garnered some negative attention from ethicists and neuroscientists, many of whom said the ability to recapture memories from brain tissue and re-create a consciousness inside a computer is at best decades away and probably not possible at all. MIT terminated its contract with Nectome in 2018.

"Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind," according to a statement from MIT. "It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person's consciousness."

It's currently impossible to upload a version of our brain to the cloud -- but some researchers are trying.

Meanwhile, an app in the works called Augmented Eternity aims to help people live on in digital form, for the sake of passing on knowledge to future generations. Hossein Rahnama, founder and CEO of context-aware computing services company FlyBits and visiting professor at MIT Media Lab, seeks to build software agents that can act as digital heirs, to complement succession planning and pass on wisdom to those who ask for it.

"Millennials are creating gigabytes of data on a daily basis and we have reached a level of maturity where we can actually create a digital version of ourselves," Rahnama said.

Augmented Eternity takes your digital footprints -- emails, photos, social media activity -- and feeds them into a machine learning engine. It analyzes how people think and act, to give you a digital being resembling an actual person, in terms of how they react to things and their attitudes, Rahnama said. You could potentially interact with this digital being as a chatbot, a Siri-like assistant, a digitally-edited video, or even a humanoid robot.

The project's purpose is to learn from humans' daily lives -- not for advertising, but to advance the world's collective intelligence, Rahnama said.

"I also like the idea of connecting digital generations," he added. "For example, someone who is similar to me in terms of their career path, health, DNA, genomics. They may be 30 or 40 years ahead of me, but there is a lot I could learn about that person."

The team is currently building a prototype. "Instead of talking to a machine like Siri and asking it a question, you can basically activate the digital construct of your peers or people that you trust in your network and ask them a question," Rahnama said.

In the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University in Japan, director Hiroshi Ishiguro has built more than 30 lifelike androids -- including a robotic version of himself. He's pioneered a research field on human-robot interactions, studying the importance of things like subtle eye movements and facial expressions for replicating humans.

"My basic purpose is to understand what a human is by creating a very human-like robot," Ishiguro said. "We can improve the algorithm to be more human-like if we can find some of the important features of a human."

Ishiguro has said that if he died, his robot could go on lecturing students in his place. However, it would never really "be" him, he said, or be able to come up with new ideas.

"We cannot transmit our consciousness to robots," Ishiguro said. "We may share the memories. The robot may say 'I'm Hiroshi Ishiguro,' but still the consciousness is independent."

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro (right) poses with the robotic version of himself (left).

However, this line is only going to get blurrier.

"I think in the near future we're going to have a brain-machine interface," Ishiguro said. This will make the boundary between a human and a computer very ambiguous, in the sense that we could share part of a memory with the computer.

"Then, I think it's quite difficult to say where is our consciousness -- is it on the computer, or in our brain?" Ishiguro said. "Maybe both."

Despite what you may think, this won't look anything like a science fiction movie, Ishiguro said. In those familiar examples, "they download the memory or some other information in your brain onto the computer. We cannot do that," he said. "We need to have different ways for making a copy of our brains, but we don't know yet how we can do that."

Humans evolved thanks to a biological principle: Survival of the fittest. But today, we have the technology to improve our genes ourselves and to develop human-like robots, Ishiguro said.

"We don't need to prove the biological principal to survive in this world," Ishiguro said. "We can design the future by ourselves. So we need to carefully discuss what is a human, what is a human right and how we can design ourselves. I cannot give you the answers. But that is our duty to think about the future.

"That is the most important question always -- we're looking for what a human is," Ishiguro said. "That is to me the primary goal of science and engineering."

This story is part of CNET'sThe Future of Funerals series. Stay tuned for more next week.

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Disrupting death: Could we really live forever in digital form? - CNET

Global Cryonics Technology Market 2020 to 2026, is a comprehensive report which provides a detailed overview of the major driver, opportunities, challenges, current market trends and strategies impacting the global Cryonics Technology market in conjunction with calculation and forecast of size, share, and growth rate analysis. Combining the analysis capabilities and knowledge integration with the relevant findings, the report has foretold the robust future growth of the Cryonics Technology market all told its geographical and merchandise segments.

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Key Players of the Global Cryonics Technology Market

Praxair, Cellulis, Cryologics, Cryotherm, KrioRus, VWR, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Custom Biogenic Systems, Oregon Cryonics, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Osiris Cryonics, Sigma-Aldrich, Southern Cryonics.

Segmentation by product type

Slow freezingVitrificationUltra-rapid

Segmentation by application

Animal husbandryFishery scienceMedical sciencePreservation of microbiology cultureConserving plant biodiversity

Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers 2019-2025:

North America(United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe(Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific(China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America(Brazil, Argentina, Colombia etc.)Middle East and Africa(Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)

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Market Overview:The report begins with this section where product overview and highlights of product and application segments of the global Cryonics Technology Market are provided. Highlights of the segmentation study include price, revenue, sales, sales growth rate, and market share by product.

Competition by Company:Here, the competition in the global Cryonics Technology Market is analyzed, taking into consideration price, revenue, sales, and market share by company, market concentration rate, competitive situations and trends, expansion, merger and acquisition, and market shares of top 5 and 10 companies.

Company Profiles and Sales Data:As the name suggests, this section gives the sales data of key players of the global Cryonics Technology Market as well as some useful information on their business. It talks about the gross margin, price, revenue, products and their specifications, applications, competitors, Manufacturing base, and the main business of players operating in the global Cryonics Technology Market.

Market Status and Outlook by Region:In this section, the report discusses about gross margin, sales, revenue, production, market share, CAGR, and market size by region. Here, the global Cryonics Technology Market is deeply analyzed on the basis of regions and countries such as North America, Europe, China, India, Japan, and the MEA.

Application or End User:This part of the research study shows how different application segments contribute to the global Cryonics Technology Market.

Market Forecast:Here, the report offers complete forecast of the global Cryonics Technology Market by product, application, and region. It also offers global sales and revenue forecast for all years of the forecast period.

Research Findings and Conclusion:This is one of the last sections of the report where the findings of the analysts and the conclusion of the research study are provided.

Appendix:Here, we have provided a disclaimer, our data sources, data triangulation, market breakdown, research programs and design, and our research approach.

The research includes historic data from 2015 to 2020 and forecasts until 2026 which makes the reports an invaluable resource for industry executives, marketing, sales and product managers, consultants, analysts, and other people looking for key industry data in readily accessible documents with clearly presented tables and graphs.

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Research Report, Growth Trends and Competitive Analysis 2020-2026 - Cole of Duty

Ted Williams was one of the greatest hitters in MLB history. The two-time Triple Crown winner and 17-time All-Star remains the last batter to finish a season with an average above .400. Sadly, since the Hall of Famer died in July 2002, his name is associated more with the things done to his body after death than his innumerable baseball accomplishments. Why was Ted Williams decapitated after his death?

The list of accomplishments in Ted Williams 19-year career is long. He won six batting titles and led the American League in home runs and RBIs four times. In 1941, the 22-year-old Williams hit .406 for the season and that included 37 home runs and 120 RBIs. He was the last hitter to ever hit above .400.

Williams followed up in 1942 with another stellar performance becoming the first-ever player to win the Triple Crown leading the league with a .356 average, hitting 36 homers, and driving in 137 RBIs. Unbelievably, he finished second in MVP voting that season.

After three years of military service in World War II, Williams returned to baseball and resumed right where he left off. He finished the 1946 season with a .342 average and won the first of two MVPs in his career. He also played in his only World Series that season. He won the Triple Crown for a second time in 1947 and retired in 1960 with a lifetime average of .344.

Williams was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966.

When Ted Williams died in Florida on July 5, 2002 at age 83, things got weird fast. Despite his wishes to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the Florida Keys, his son John Henry and youngest daughter Claudia opted to have his body sent to Scottsdale, Arizona to be frozen at the Alcor cryonics facility.

Cryonics is a process done with the hope that someday scientists will be able to bring the subjects back to life. The heads and bodies are stored in stainless steel containers at extremely cold temperatures.

When Williams oldest daughter, Bobby-Jo Ferrell learned about the plan of her siblings, she sued. John Henrys lawyer produced a family pact signed by Ted, Claudia, and John Henry, where the three agreed to be placed into biostasis after death. While there was legal wrangling back and forth between the siblings questioning the authenticity of Williams signature, Ferrell eventually dropped her lawsuit due to a lack of funds.

Several months later his death made headlines for a second time when it was discovered that Williams head had been decapitated by surgeons and stored separately from his body at the Alcor facility.

In 2009, the bizarre circumstances of the Splendid Splinters death and actions that followed took an even stranger twist with the release of a book from a former Alcor employee. In Larry Johnsons book Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death, he offered up details on how employees at Alcor allegedly mistreated the Hall of Famers body.

Johnson wrote in one incident where an empty tuna can was used as a pedestal to support the batters head and had stuck to it during transportation from one container to another. An Alcor employee allegedly decided to use a monkey wrench in an attempt to dislodge the can from the head.

Then he grabbed a monkey wrench, heaved a mighty swing, missing the tuna can completely but hitting the head dead center, Johnson wrote. Tiny pieces of frozen head sprayed around the room. The author detailed how a second swing knocked the can loose.

Alcor denied all allegations that there was any mistreatment of Ted Williams. John Henry died just two years later in 2004 from leukemia. His body was transported to Alcor.

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Why Was Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams Decapitated? - Sportscasting