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Cryonics

Cryonics, would you do it?

  • Yeah! Freeze me

    Votes: 3 17.6%
  • Just my head please

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No way, just let me die

    Votes: 8 47.1%
  • oh I dunno

    Votes: 6 35.3%

  • Total voters
    17
Cryogenically frozen rabbit brain returned 'near-perfectly' from preservation

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/cryogenica...returned-near-perfectly-preservation-1543083?


more at link above

"A cryogenically frozen rabbit brain has been returned from preservation in near-perfect condition. Researchers behind the breakthrough say there is no reason their technique could not be applied to larger mammals, including cows and primates, for long-term cryogenic preservation.

The team at 21st Century Medicine has been awarded the Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize for this achievement. Their study was published in the journal Cryobiology and shows how the neural circuits of an intact rabbit brain could be preserved in long-term storage using a preservation method they developed.

Kenneth Hayworth, president of the Brain Preservation Foundation, which runs the award, said: "Every neuron and synapse looks beautifully preserved across the entire brain. Simply amazing given that I held in my hand this very same brain when it was vitrified glassy solid... This is not your father's cryonics."
"
 
British futurist in charge of US cryogenic facility reveals plans to freeze his own head
Lexi Finnigan
25 December 2016 • 9:00pm

A British 'futurist' in charge of one of the world’s largest cryogenic facilities has compared himself to Leonardo Da Vinci, saying it is just a matter of time before science advances to the point where preserved bodies can be revived after death.

Dr Max More, who was born in Bristol and went to Oxford University, also revealed he has plans to preserve just his head in the future, saying “the rest of my body is replaceable”.
He is the President and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Scottsdale, Arizona - a facility which began storing bodies in 1982.

Earlier this year, a 14-year-old girl who died of cancer became the youngest Briton to be cryogenically frozen in the hope she can be “woken up” and cured in the future after winning a landmark court case.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, arrived at the only other crypto-preservation facility in the US, the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, at the end of October. She is their 143rd patient.

“It’s an unusual job to be running a cryonics organisation,” said Dr More earlier this year in a documentary by Galactic Public Archives.
“It’s impossible to give a date to say when we can revive people…. it could be decades, a century.
“We are like Leonardo Da Vinci who could design wings and helicopter which could work but he didn’t have the tools to build them back then.

“Of course we are developing the technology to reduce the damage done to our patients to get them cryo-preserved but we don’t know exactly how we will reverse that process right now.”

More’s fascination with cryopreservation started in 1972 when he saw a children’s science fiction television show called Time Slip that featured characters being frozen in ice.
He said: “By the time I was sixteen I was interested in life extension - not just health but extending the maximum life span.”

After completing a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Anne’s College, Oxford University, he became an “internationally recognised advocate of the effective and ethical use of technology for life extension and cryopreservation”.

“I really do think it will become a normal practice in the future,” he told the documentary.
“At some point people will look back on the present and scratch their heads and wonder why we threw our loved ones in the ground or into these big oven to incinerate them when they would have been preserved.”

Dr More said rather than having his entire body frozen, he plans to have just his head severed and preserved - a practice called neuropreservation.
“It’s not decapitation. We aren’t taking the head off - we are taking the body off. We don’t try to remove the brain from the skull as this might damage it. All the rest of my body is replaceable.”

Currently there are 149 patients at Alcor’s facility, including the youngest person to ever be cryo-preserved - a two-year-old from Thailand - and also the US baseball star Ted Williams.
In 2003, former Alcor executive Larry Johnson published a damning report of the company and alleged they had mishandled Williams’ severed head - a claim the organisation denies.
But Dr More argues the people held in the Alcor facility have rights and aren’t just corpses.
...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...t-charge-us-cryogenic-facility-reveals-plans/
 
The 1922 Poem That Linked the Russian Revolution to Cryonics
One group of anarchist artists planned on being around a long, long time.

BY ASHAWNTA JACKSON SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

MUCH OF LIFE IN POST-WORLD War I Russia was pretty much what you’d expect it to be: bleak. The country had suffered unimaginable losses during the war, with estimates of those killed climbing as high as 1.8 million. Death hung in the air.

But hanging there right alongside it was something else—revolution. A growing number of Russians wanted to remake their world, even though they knew, perhaps better than anyone, that it would be a long and hard process. If the war had taught Russians anything, it was that life is finite and fleeting. But what if there was a way to live forever? To stop time? Stop the world from spinning while it’s remade into something better? It was in this spirit that, in the aftermath of the war, a small group of writers, artists, and anarchists published a 14-page poem about cryonics, a fledgling theory mixing science and mysticism that advocated for the ultimate revolutionary tool: immortality.

This group, who called themselves the Biocosmists-Immortalists, felt that humans had two basic rights: the right to exist, and the right of free movementand that these rights came with no expiration date. The group proclaimed in their 1922 manifesto, Izvestiia, that “immortality, resurrection, and rejuvenation” weren’t just ideas, they were the basis of their new movement. Death was just a roadblock on the road to revolution. ...

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/russian-revolution-cryonics-poem
 
In light of failures and scandals of the past, authorities are double-checking the prospects for long-term service provision with the EU's first cryogenic preservation company.

Spanish officials look into company offering to freeze bodies for preservation
Spanish authorities are investigating a company that offers cryogenic preservation of the dead, for 100 years, so "patients" can wait for reanimation by technological and medical advances.

Spanish consumer protection authorities from the autonomous government of Valencia, an eastern region of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea, are looking into the company Cecryon, which is the first of its type in the European Union, El Pais reported Monday.

Authorities seek company information outlining how it plans to meet its commitment for an entire century, and whether it has contingency plans in case of potential trouble, like bankruptcy. ...

The company said it will use some of the $229,000 paid by each customer to set up a fund to guarantee frozen preservation will continue even if the company runs into financial problems. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-...freeze-bodies-for-preservation/4601546883979/
 
Thread and poll titles corrected (Cryogenics ----> Cryonics).

Cryogenics is the branch of physics / engineering addressing very low temperatures, their effects, and how to produce them.
 
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Now (as seen in Phenomenonix in a recent FT) they can revive dead dog brains, will all the frozen folks be returning soon? Will it be a Futurama situation with a bunch of living heads for those who didn't preserve their entire bodies?
 
Now (as seen in Phenomenonix in a recent FT) they can revive dead dog brains, will all the frozen folks be returning soon? Will it be a Futurama situation with a bunch of living heads for those who didn't preserve their entire bodies?

The advertised criteria for revival involved doing so when there was a measure of confidence the frozen customer could be revived and / or medical science had advanced enough to deal with whatever condition(s) the customer suffered at the time of death and freezing.

Dealing with these matters involves a significant measure of legal / contractual stuff - something I doubt many, if any, of the cryonics companies are prepared for. Some of those companies went out of business, and surviving (?) customer corpses are in as much legal as biological limbo.

I don't think anyone's going to get thawed soon, or maybe even ever ...
 
It's very easy to be cynical about the search for immortality, and cryonics is as good a reason as any to be cynical.
 
Here's a news item describing the state of the cryonics business in Russia ...
Brain freeze: Russian firm offers path to immortality for a fee

When Alexei Voronenkov’s 70-year-old mother passed away, he paid to have her brain frozen and stored in the hope breakthroughs in science will one day be able to bring her back to life.

It is one of 71 brains and human cadavers - which Russian company KrioRus calls its “patients” - floating in liquid nitrogen in one of several metres-tall vats in a corrugated metal shed outside Moscow.

They are stored at -196 degrees Celsius (-320.8°F) with the aim of protecting them against deterioration, although there is currently no evidence science will be able to revive the dead.

“I did this because we were very close and I think it is the only chance for us to meet in the future,” said Voronenkov who intends to undergo the procedure, known as cryonics, when he dies.

The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’s Pseudoscience Commission, Evgeny Alexandrov, described cryonics as “an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis”, in comments to the Izvestia newspaper.

It is “a fantasy speculating on people’s hopes of resurrection from the dead and dreams of eternal life”, the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Valeriya Udalova, KrioRus’s director who got her dog frozen when it died in 2008, said it is likely that humankind will develop the technology to revive dead people in the future, but that there is no guarantee of such technology.

KrioRus says hundreds of potential clients from nearly 20 countries have signed up for its after-death service.

It costs $36,000 for a whole body and $15,000 for the brain alone for Russians, who earn average monthly salaries of $760, according to official statistics. Prices are slightly higher for non-Russians.

The company says it is the only one in Russia and the surrounding region. Set up in 2005, it has at least two competitors in the United States, where the practice dates back further.

Voronenkov said he set his hopes on science. “I hope one day it reaches a level when we can produce artificial bodies and organs to create an artificial body where my mother’s brain can be integrated.”

KrioRus’ director Udalova argues that those paying to have dying relatives’ remains preserved are showing how much they love them.

“They try to bring hope,” she said. “What can we do for our dying relatives or the ones that we love? A nice burial, a photo album,” she said. “They go further, proving their love even more.” ...
SOURCE: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...s-path-to-immortality-for-a-fee-idUSKBN1ZD1FN
 
Interesting article on Ettinger, Futurists and Cyroncs.

... One such futurist was Robert Ettinger, the late originator of cryonics, the preservation and freezing of human corpses with the speculative hope of revival in the future.

Ettinger was born in 1918 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. A fan of science fiction as a youth, he found one story particularly thought provoking: The Jameson Satellite, written by Neil R. Jones and published in Amazing Stories magazine in 1931. In the story, Professor Jameson arranges for his corpse to be launched into space in hopes of preserving it as it orbits Earth indefinitely at temperatures approaching absolute zero (−459.67°F or −273.15°C). After no less than forty million years, when the human race is extinct, Jameson is discovered by an advanced race of aliens. Their brains are similar to those of humans, but they have transcended organic bodies for mechanical ones, which allow them to replace broken parts when needed, thereby living indefinitely.

Later in life, Ettinger reflected on how this story inspired him, writing, “It was instantly obvious to me that the author had missed the main point of his own idea! If immortality is achievable through the ministrations of advanced aliens through repairing a human corpse, then why should not everyone be frozen to await later rescue by our own people?”

And thus, cryonics was conceived.

As a young adult, he served as an infantryman during World War II. Severely wounded in battle while in Germany, he received the Purple Heart award. His wounds may have been fatal had it not been for cutting-edge bone-grafting techniques. The procedure was considered experimental at the time, and Ettinger was counted as a success story. Undergoing successful surgery thanks to advanced medical technology and receiving the Purple Heart inspired Ettinger to seriously consider the idea of preservation after death. The hope was that future medical advancements could revive and repair a human’s body, returning him or her to a comfortable and indefinite state of being. Ettinger assumed that someone, perhaps a scientist, would advocate the idea, turning it into an area of research without the need for any active involvement on his part.

He went on to study mathematics and physics and became a professor at Wayne State University and at Highland Park Community College. By 1960, at age forty-two, he began to consider his own mortality. As far as he knew, nobody else had realized his idea for escaping death. If he wanted to pursue the possibility of saving his own life, he’d have to act right away. And so he wrote down his conception of frozen stasis and reversible death and sent the paper out to two hundred people—recipients whom he’d carefully selected from a list of movers and shakers culled from Who’s Who in America. After his attempt failed to conjure any significant support, he wrote that, to his astonishment, “a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!” ...

https://lithub.com/the-science-and-science-fiction-of-cryonic-preservation/
 

Frozen bodies and brains of wealthy Brits and Americans are SNATCHED from Russian lab ...

It turns out this theft was part of a nasty divorce dispute between the KrioRus cryonics firm's top managers - Valeriya Udalova and Danila Medvedev. Things were claimed to be copacetic as of January 2020:
Brain freeze: Russian firm offers path to immortality for a fee

... Valeriya Udalova, KrioRus’s director who got her dog frozen when it died in 2008, said it is likely that humankind will develop the technology to revive dead people in the future, but that there is no guarantee of such technology.

KrioRus says hundreds of potential clients from nearly 20 countries have signed up for its after-death service. ...
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/cryonics.5612/post-1926880
 
It turns out this theft was part of a nasty divorce dispute between the KrioRus cryonics firm's top managers - Valeriya Udalova and Danila Medvedev. Things were claimed to be copacetic as of January 2020:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/cryonics.5612/post-1926880
Well next time I’m thinking about having my brain frozen by a couple of scientists running a resurrection business, I’ll certainly do my homework on their DomesticBliss Index beforehand.
 
The question is, who gets to keep the fridge?

1631524949326.jpeg
 
James Hiram Bedford (April 20, 1893 – January 12, 1967(?) ) was (is?) an American psychology professor at the University of California who wrote several books on occupational counseling. He is the first person whose body was cryopreserved after legal death, and remains preserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bedford

I wonder if there is ever any chance of Mr Bedford being thawed out and revived?
It is (as of writing) now over 56 years since they put him on ice. I wonder, were he to be revived today, what he would think of the modern world?

1681396428538.png
1681396477170.png
 

Inside ‘ambulance to the future’ where people are frozen in hope of life after death


Suspended in an indefinite deep freeze, the growing number of ‘patients’ at two facilities in Michigan are taking a dice roll at another life.

Despite the current odds being vanishingly small, they represent an increasing number of people opting for life at -196C after their legal deaths.

The sleek white vats stood in rows at the Cryonics Institute (CI) storage facilities contain bodies, body parts and pets from around the world.

Cryonics_Institue_Cryostats-08-a635.jpg


Those frozen in liquid nitrogen include chefs, students, secretaries and professors, with Brits being the most keen takers outside the US.

It’s more of a waiting game than a place worthy of a sci-fi imagining, with the oldest patient having been in her sub-zero waiting room for more than 40 years.

https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/24/inside-deep-freeze-ambulance-brits-go-life-death-20164112/

maximus otter
 
“Despite the current odds being vanishingly small,”

I’d take issue with that. Surely the odds are simply unknown?
 
“Despite the current odds being vanishingly small,”

I’d take issue with that. Surely the odds are simply unknown?
I think the odds are zero.
They are as dead as dodos when they are put in the cryo chamber.
 
I think the odds are zero.
They are as dead as dodos when they are put in the cryo chamber.
Yes they are dead. But the odds are not zero. The odds would only be zero if the corpse, and more importantly the brain, was physically destroyed.
 
Have my doubts, but mainly because Tim Leary was so into messing with other people's heads, and thus, to my eyes, the story sounds a touch too ironic for credibility.

no, no no no, he's outside, looking in! He'll fly his astral plane....



 
Yes they are dead. But the odds are not zero. The odds would only be zero if the corpse, and more importantly the brain, was physically destroyed.
The brains may have experienced a state of decomposition and a cessation of electrical activity between the moment of death and the moment of cryogenic freezing.
To survive such an event, I'd say the chances are increased if a person was alive at the time of cryogenic freezing. The odds would still be very low, though - unless cryo-hibernation has become perfected, then the odds would be higher.
 
The brains may have experienced a state of decomposition and a cessation of electrical activity between the moment of death and the moment of cryogenic freezing.
To survive such an event, I'd say the chances are increased if a person was alive at the time of cryogenic freezing. The odds would still be very low, though - unless cryo-hibernation has become perfected, then the odds would be higher.
Yes but now you are into the realms of speculation. No adherent of cryonics makes the claim that brains are preserved undamaged. Catastrophic damage is accepted by all sides in this field, and this is not controversial.
The issue is whether some information is recoverable. That’s the nub of it. It only needs to be fragmentary, and some of the person’s essence has in a sense “survived”. That alone would be remarkable.
 
Yes but now you are into the realms of speculation. No adherent of cryonics makes the claim that brains are preserved undamaged. Catastrophic damage is accepted by all sides in this field, and this is not controversial.
The issue is whether some information is recoverable. That’s the nub of it. It only needs to be fragmentary, and some of the person’s essence has in a sense “survived”. That alone would be remarkable.
Once that info is retrieved, could it live on in a cloned body, AI or robotic body?
I guess that might be classed as 'resurrection', if the personality and memories actually made it through the process.
 
Once that info is retrieved, could it live on in a cloned body, AI or robotic body?
I guess that might be classed as 'resurrection', if the personality and memories actually made it through the process.
Well this is where it all becomes mind-bogglingly fascinating. We simply have no idea how preserved brain tissue might be recovered or mapped in the future. But with a whole brain preserved, even in a rudimentary way such as vitrification followed by cryogenic storage (the current state of the art) there will be a gargantuan number of surviving neural interconnections to map, and that’s if only a few percent are intact.
 
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