![]() And then there’s desiccation: once you put those chemicals into an organ or a cell, it causes the water to leave the cells and dries them out, which damages cell to cell connections. When the ice forms, it’s going to shear and cut the cells like a knife-it’s basically going to run a knife through the organs you’re trying to preserve. Preventing ice formation at that temperature, throughout a very large tissue, is very, very difficult. But you need to drastically lower the temperature-down to about -196 degrees C, liquid nitrogen temperature. The hardest thing to solve is: how do you freeze things without damaging them? You mix in all these cryoprotectants-like antifreeze for your car, but geared towards biology-in an effort to prevent ice formation within the cells and tissues. There are a ton of barriers here, in both cases. The other method involves freezing the whole body, in the hopes that you could be revived one day when the right technology is available to fix your disease state and repair damage from the process. But storing the brain’s underlying structure, and the connections between cells, is likely much, much harder. One involves freezing just the brain or the head-the thinking here is that there’s a smaller amount of tissue and you should preserve the essence of the person. There are two different ways of cryogenically freezing people. “The chances of cryopreserved individuals ever be revived is low but not impossible.” Mark KlineĬo-Founder and CTO, X-Therma Inc., a company improving cold storage of stem cells, tissues, and whole organs Therefore, it will take huge scientific advances in areas like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine to make cryopreserved individuals alive and healthy again. Under non-optimal conditions (i.e., if a significant time elapses between death and being cryopreserved) much more damage can occur because cells start to die, and brain cells in particular start to die within minutes after cardiac arrest, due to lack of nutrients and oxygen (called ischemia). Vitrifying large organs like the brain can also result in fractures due to different cooling rates in different parts. ![]() In particular, cryoprotectant agents have toxic effects on human tissues with prolonged exposure. Even under optimal conditions (i.e., the procedure starts right after death), there are several problems in cryonics. I’d say that with today’s technology, cryonics severely damages the body’s cells. Honestly it’s not looking good for them just yet-but the future’s main business is to show up the past’s myopia/blinkeredness, so, who knows!īiologist at the University of Liverpool and coordinator of the UK Cryonics and Cryopreservation Research Network ![]() For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of neuroscientists, bioethicists, cryo advocates and skeptics to get some sense of what will happen to those frozen former consciousness-havers. But we can at least start to guess whether-or if-that day will ever come. Only time will tell whether these extremely dead optimists will once more, someday, get stuck in traffic, and/or roam an uncanny Singularity-scape with their AI-abetted computer brains. All of them took a gamble-one that was pretty cheap, metaphysically speaking: the worse case scenario here is just continued death.įor the time being, that is also the only scenario. brain-only)-can currently be found in storage facilities across the country. ![]() Over 300 cold, dead Americans-or dead, cold American brains, depending on which procedure they opted for (whole-body vs. Corpse-freezing hasn’t exactly gone mainstream, but most people are now familiar with the concept: you lay out a ton of cash, sign some papers, and spend a couple post-death decades in a cutting-edge meat locker, calmly awaiting the conditions for your eventual revival.
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