Cryonics
Cryonics (from Greek: κρύος kryos meaning 'cold') is the low-temperature freezing (usually at −196 °C or −320.8 °F or 77.1 K) and storage of human remains, 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 the "patients" are
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.[12] Early attempts at cryonic preservation were performed in the 1960s and early 1970s; these ended in failure, with all but one of the companies going out of business, and their stored corpses thawed and disposed of.[13]
Conceptual basis
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.[11][14]
Cryonics uses temperatures below −130
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.[15] Mind uploading has also been proposed.[16]
Cryonics in practice
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.[17]
When used at high concentrations,
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.[23][24] As of 2011, U.S. cryopreservation costs can range from $28,000 to $200,000, and are often financed via life insurance.[23] KrioRus, which stores bodies communally in large dewars, charges $12,000 to $36,000 for the procedure.[25] 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.[11] As of 2016, four facilities exist in the world to retain cryopreserved bodies: three in the U.S. and one in Russia.[2][26]
A more recent development is Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH, which is a Berlin-based firm offering cryonics and standby and transportation services in Europe. Founded in December 2019 by Emil Kendziorra and Fernando Azevedo Pinheiro, it partners with the European Biostasis Foundation in Switzerland for long-term corpse storage, with their facility completed in 2022.[27][28]
Considering 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.[12] 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.[13]
Obstacles to success
Preservation damage
Cryopreservation has long been used by medical laboratories to maintain animal cells, human embryos, and even some organized tissues, for periods as long as three decades.[29] Recovering large animals and organs from a frozen state is however not considered possible at the current level of scientific knowledge.[30][19][31] Large vitrified organs tend to develop fractures during cooling,[32] a problem worsened by the large tissue masses and very low temperatures of cryonics.[33] 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.[34]
Some cryonics organizations use vitrification without a chemical fixation step,[35] sacrificing some structural preservation quality for less damage at the molecular level. Some scientists, like João Pedro Magalhães, have questioned whether using a deadly chemical for fixation eliminates the possibility of biological revival, making chemical fixation unsuitable for cryonics.[36]
Outside of cryonics firms and cryonics-linked interest groups, many scientists show strong skepticism toward cryonics methods.
Revival
Revival would require repairing damage from lack of oxygen, cryoprotectant toxicity, thermal stress (fracturing) and 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] This revival technology remains speculative and does not currently exist.[1]
Legal issues
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.
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]
Ethics
In 2009, writing in
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]
History
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 frozen—though it had been embalmed for two months—by 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 cryopreserved and then frozen with the hope of future revival was that of James Bedford, claimed by Alcor's Mike Darwin to have occurred within around two hours of his death from cardiorespiratory arrest (secondary to metastasized kidney cancer) on January 12, 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.[25]
In 2018, a
Demographics
According to The New York Times, cryonicists are predominantly non-religious 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 her head cryopreserved.[55]
Reception
Cryonics is generally regarded as a fringe pseudoscience.[3] The Society for Cryobiology rejected members who practiced cryonics,[3] and 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 first 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]
Scientists have expressed skepticism about cryonics in media sources,[25] and the Norwegian philosopher Ole Martin Moen has written that the topic receives a "minuscule" amount of attention from academia.[11]
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".[8] 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".[25]
Anthropologist Simon Dein writes that cryonics is a typical pseudoscience because of its lack of falsifiability and testability. In Dein's view cryonics is not science, but religion: it places faith in non-existent technology and promises to overcome death itself.[60]
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]
Maastricht University bioethicist David Shaw raises the argument that there would be no point in being revived in the far future if one's friends and families are dead, leaving them all alone; he notes, however, that family and friends can also be frozen, that there is "nothing to prevent the thawed-out freezee from making new friends", and that a lonely existence may be preferable to no existence at all for the revived.[47]
In fiction
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. The characters Philip J. Fry from Futurama and Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek are prominent examples of this trope.
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]
In popular culture
The town of Nederland, Colorado, hosts an annual Frozen Dead Guy Days festival to commemorate a substandard attempt at cryopreservation.[62]
Notable people
Corpses subjected to the cryonics process include those of baseball players Ted Williams and his son John Henry Williams (in 2002 and 2004, respectively),[63] engineer and doctor L. Stephen Coles (in 2014),[64] economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin, and software engineer Hal Finney (in 2014).[65]
People known to have arranged for cryonics upon death include
Disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein wanted to have his head and penis frozen after death so that he could "seed the human race with his DNA".[71][72]
The corpses of some are mistakenly believed to have undergone cryonics – for instance, the urban legend suggesting Walt Disney's corpse was cryopreserved is false; it was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.[73][a] 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.[75]
See also
- Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation
- Brain in a vat
- Cryptobiosis
- Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest
- Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation
- Extropianism
- Hibernation
- Life extension
- Supercooling
- Targeted temperature management
- Technological utopianism
References
Footnotes
- ^ Robert Nelson told the Los Angeles Times that he thought Walt Disney wanted to be cryopreserved, for Walt Disney Studios had called him to ask detailed questions about his organisation, the Cryonics Society of California. However, Nelson clarified that "They had him cremated. I personally have seen his ashes."[74]
Citations
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Cryonics, which began in the Sixties, is the freezing – usually in liquid nitrogen – of human beings who have been legally declared dead. The aim of this process is to keep such individuals in a state of refrigerated limbo so that it may become possible in the future to resuscitate them, cure them of the condition that killed them, and then restore them to functioning life in an era when medical science has triumphed over the activities of the Grim Reaper.
- ^ a b "Dying is the last thing anyone wants to do – so keep cool and carry on". The Guardian. 10 October 2015. Archived from the original on 3 July 2017. Retrieved 21 February 2016.
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- ^ a b Carroll, Robert Todd (5 December 2013). "Cryonics". The Skeptics Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions.
A business based on little more than hope for developments that can be imagined by science is quackery. There is little reason to believe that the promises of cryonics will ever be fulfilled
- ^ Hendry, Robert; Crippen, David (2014). "Brain Failure and Brain Death". ACS Surgery: Principles and Practice critical care. Decker Intellectual Properties Inc. pp. 1–10. Archived from the original on 23 January 2021. Retrieved 3 March 2016.
A physician will pronounce a patient using the usual cardiorespiratory criteria, whereupon the patient is legally dead. Following this pronouncement, the rules pertaining to procedures that can be performed change radically because the individual is no longer a living patient but a corpse. In the initial cryopreservation protocol, the subject is intubated and mechanically ventilated, and a highly efficient mechanical cardiopulmonary resuscitation device reestablishes circulation.
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Further reading
- "Mistakes Were Made". This American Life. Episode 354. 18 April 2008. The Public Radio Exchange (PRX). WBEZ Chicago. Transcript.
External links
- Cryonics at Curlie