CRYONICS UK

Cryonics

 By William O'Rights

There is little dispute that the condition of a person stored at the temperature of liquid nitrogen is stable, but the process of freezing inflicts a level of damage which cannot be reversed by current medical technology. Whether or not the damage inflicted by current methods can ever be reversed depends both on the level of damage and the ultimate limits of future medical technology. The failure to reverse freezing injury with current methods does not imply that it can never be reversed in the future, just as the inability to build a personal computer in 1890 did not imply that such machines would never be economically built. I will consider the limits of what medical technology should eventually be able to achieve (based on the currently understood laws of chemistry and physics) and the kinds of damage caused by current methods of freezing. 

So what were talking about here is essentially stopping biological time. Contrary to the usual impression, the challenge to cells during freezing is not their ability to endure storage at very low temperatures, rather it is the lethality of an intermediate zone of temperature (-15 to -60 degrees C.) that a cell must traverse twice. No thermally driven reactions occur in aqueous systems at liquid N2 temperatures (196 degrees C), the refrigerant commonly used for low temperature storage. The only physical states that do exist at -196 degrees C, are crystalline or glassy, and in both states the viscosity is so high that diffusion is insignificant over less than geological time spans. Moreover, at -196 degrees C, there is insufficient thermal energy for chemical reactions. 

The only reactions that can occur in frozen aqueous systems at -196 degrees C are photophysical events such as the formation of free radicals and the production of breaks in macromolecules as a direct result of hits by background ionizing radiation or cosmic rays. Over a sufficiently long period of time, these direct ionizations can produce enough breaks or other damage in DNA to become deleterious after rewarming to physiological temperatures, especially since no enzymatic repair can occur at these very low temperatures. The dose of ionizing radiation that kills 63% of representative cultured mammalian cells at room temperature is 200-400 rads. Because terrestrial background radiation is some .1 rad/yr,, it ought to require some 2,000-4,000 years at -196 degrees C to kill that fraction of a population of typical mammalian cells.

Needless to say, direct experimental confirmation of this prediction is lacking. but there is no confirmed case of cell death ascribable to storage at -196 degrees C for some 2-15 years and none even when cells are exposed to levels of ionizing radiation some 100 times background for up to 5 years. Furthermore. there is no evidence that storage at -196 degrees C results in the accumulation of chromosomal or genetic changes.

Stability for centuries or millennia requires temperatures below -130 degrees C. Many cells stored above -80 degrees C are not stable, probably because traces of unfrozen solution still exist. They will die at rates ranging from several percent per hour to several percent per year depending on the temperature, the species and type of cell, and the composition of the medium in which they are frozen.

Most implications and applications of freezing to biology arise from the effective stoppage of time at -196 degrees C. Tissue preserved in liquid nitrogen can survive centuries without deterioration. This simple fact provides an imperfect time machine that can transport us almost unchanged from the present to the future: we need merely freeze ourselves in liquid nitrogen. If freezing damage can someday be cured. then a form of time travel to the era when the cure is available would be possible.

As you know, this option, far from being idle speculation, is available to anyone who so chooses. Of course the most important question in evaluating this option is its technical feasibility.

 Given the remarkable progress of science during the past few centuries it is difficult to dismiss cryonics out of hand. The structure of DNA was unknown prior to 1953, the chemical (rather than “vitalistic”) nature of living beings was not appreciated until early in the 20th century, it was not until 1864 that spontaneous generation was put to rest by Louis Pastur, who demonstrated that no organisms emerged from heat-sterilized growth medium kept in sealed flasks, and Sir Isaac Newton’s principal established the laws of motion in 1687, just over 300 years ago. If progress of the same magnitude occurs in the next few centuries, then it becomes difficult to argue that the repair of frozen tissue is inherently and forever infeasible. Ultimately cryonics will either (a) work or (b) fail to work. It would seem useful to

know in advance which of these two outcomes to expect. If it can be ruled out as infeasible, then we need not waste further time on it, if it seems likely that it will be technically feasible, then a number of nontechnical issues should be addressed in order to obtain a good probability of overall success. Here, we will focus on technical feasibility. 

While many isolated tissues (and a few particularly hardy organs) have been successfully cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen arid rewarmed, further successes have proven elusive. While there is no particular reason to believe that a cure for freezing damage would violate any laws of physics (or is otherwise obviously infeasible), it is likely that the damage done by freezing is beyond the self-repair and recovery capabilities of the tissue itself.. This does not imply that the damage cannot be repaired, only that significant elements of the repair process would have to be provided from an external source. In deciding whether such externally provided repair will (or will not) eventually prove feasible, we must keep in mind that such repair techniques can quite literally take advantage of scientific advances made during the next few centuries. Forecasting the capabilities of future technologies is therefore an integral component of determining the feasibility of cryonics.

 Such a forecast should, in principle be feasible. The laws of physics and chemistry as they apply to biological structures are well understood and well defined. Whether the repair of frozen tissue will (or will not) eventually prove feasible within the framework defined by those laws is a question which we should be able to answer based on what is known today.

 Current research supports the idea that we will eventually be able to examine and manipulate structures molecule by molecule and even atom by atom. Such a technical capability has very clear implications for the kinds of damage that can (and cannot) be repaired. The most powerful repair capabilities that should eventually be possible can be defined with remarkable clarity. The question we wish to answer is conceptually straight forward; will the most powerful repair capability that is likely to be developed in the long run (perhaps over a few centuries) be adequate to repair tissue that is frozen using the best available current methods? There if no implication here that the most powerful repair method either will (or will not) be used or be necessary. The fact that we can kill a gnat with a double-barrelled shotgun does not imply that a fly-swatter won’t work just as well. If we aren‘t certain whether we face a gnat or a tiger, we’d rather be holding the shotgun than the fly-swatter. The shotgun will work in either case.. but the fly-swatter can’t deal with the tiger. In a similar vein, we will consider the most powerful methods that should be feasible rather than the minimal methods that might be sufficient. While this approach can reasonably be criticized on the grounds that simpler methods are likely to work, it avoids the complexities and problems that must be dealt with in trying to determine exactly what those simpler methods might be in any particular case and provides additional margin for error.

There is widespread belief that such a capability will eventually be developed though exactly how long it will take is unclear. Sources include Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler. “Nanotechnologey: Wherein Molecular Computers Control Tiny Circulatory Submarines”, “Foresight Update”, a publication of the Foresight Institute, “Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy: Application to Biology and Technology, “Molecular manipulation using a tunnelling microscope. Molecular Engineering: An Approach to the Development of General Capabilities for Molecular Manipulation.” by K. Eric Drexler, “Rod Logic and Thermal Noise in the Mechanical Nanocomputer,” Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Molecular Electronic Devices. “Machines of Inner Space’ Yearbook of Science and the Future. “A Small

Revolution Gets Underway”, by Robert Pool, “Positioning Single Atoms with a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope”, by D.M. Eigler. “Nonexistent technology gets a hearing.” by I. Amato Science News. “The Invisible Factory,” Nanosystems, Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation, John Wiley. Atom by Atom, Scientist Build Invisible Machines of the Future, Andrew Pullack “Theoretical Analysis of a Site-Specific Hydrogen Abstraction Tool” by Charles Musgrave and William A. Goddard III. Nanotechnology, Jason Perry. Nanotechnology Research and Perspectives, B.C. Crandall and James Lewis. “Self Replicating Systems and Molecular Manufacturing” by Ralph C. Merkle. “Computational Nanotechnology” by Ralph C. Merkle. “NASA and Self Replicating Systems” also by Ralph C. Merkle.

Nanotechnology 1991. special issue on Molecular manufacturing.

Although how long is unclear, New York University Scientists recently announced the development of a machine made out of a few strands of DNA, representing the first step toward building nanorobots capable of repairing cell damage at the molecular level and restoring cells, organs and entire organisms to youthful vigour.

The long storage times possible with cryonic suspension make the precise development time of such technologies no critical. Development anytime during the next few centuries would be sufficient to save the lives of those suspended with current technology.

You are already familiar with nanotechnology so I will just clarify the technical issues involved in applying it in the conceptually simplest and most powerful fashion to the repair of frozen tissue.

Broadly speaking, the central thesis of nanotechnology is that almost any structure consistent with the laws of chemistry and physics that can be specified can in fact be built. This possibility was first advanced by Richard Feynman when he said, “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of manoeuvring things atom by atom”.

This concept is receiving increasing attention in the research community. There have been two international research conferences directly on molecular manufacturing as well as a broad range of conferences on related subjects.

The ability to design and manufacture devices that are only tens or hundreds of atoms across promises rich rewards in electronics, catalysis, and materials. The scientific rewards should be just as great, as researchers approach an ultimate level of control-assembly matter one atom at a time.

Within the decade, John Foster at IBM, Almaden or some other scientist is likely to learn how to piece together atoms and molecules one at a time using the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope.

Eigler and Schweizer at IBM reported on the use of the STM at low temperatures to position individual xenon atoms on a single-crystal nickel surface with atomic precision. This capacity has allowed us to fabricate rudimentary structures of our own design, atom by atom. The processes I describe are in principle applicable to molecules also. In view of the device-like characteristics reported for single atoms on surfaces, the possibilities for perhaps the ultimate in device miniaturization are evident.

J.A. Armstrong, IBM Chief Scientist and Vice President for Science and Technology will be central to the next epoch of the information age, and will be as revolutionary as science and technology at the micron scale have been since the early 70’s. Indeed, we will have the ability to make electronic and mechanical devices atom-by-atom when that is appropriate to the job at hand.

Scientists are beginning to gain the ability to manipulate matter by its most basic components, molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and that ability, while now very crude, might one day allow people to build almost unimaginable small electronic circuits and machines, producing for example, a super computer invisible to the naked eye. Some futurists even imagine building tiny robots that could travel through the body performing surgery on damaged cells.

Drexler has proposed the assembler, a small device resembling an industrial robot which would be capable of holding and positioning reactive compounds in order to control the precise location at which chemical reactions take place. This general approach should allow the construction of large atomically precise objects by a sequence of precisely controlled chemical reactions.

You have already read what is possibly the best technical discussion of nanotechnology that has recently been provided to mankind. The engines of creation by Drexler. 

The plausibility of this approach can be illustrated by the ribosome. Ribosome's manufacture all the proteins used in all living things on this planet. A typical ribosome is relatively small (a few thousand cubic nanometers) and is capable of building almost any protein by stringing together amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) in precise linear sequence. To do this, the ribosome has a means of grasping a specific amino acid (more precisely, it has a means of selectively grasping a specific transfer RNA, which in turn is chemically bonded by a specific enzyme to a specific amino acid), of grasping the growing polypeptide, and of causing the specific amino acid to react with and be added to the end of the polypeptide.

The instructions that the ribosome follows in building a protein are provided by mRNA (messenger RNA). This is a polymer formed from the 4 bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil. A Sequence of several hundred to a few thousand such bases codes for a specific protein. The ribosome “reads” this “control tape” sequential, and acts on the direction it provides.

In an analogous fashion, an assembler will build an arbitrary molecular structure following a sequence of instructions. The assembler, however, will provide three- dimensional positional and full orientation control over the molecular component (analogous to the individual amino acid) being added to a growing complex molecular structure (analogous to the growing polypeptide). In addition, the assembler will be able to form any one of several different kinds of chemical bonds. not just the single kind (the peptide bond) that the ribosome makes. 

Calculations indicate that an assembler need not inherently be very large. Enzymes typically weigh about 10-5 amu while the ribosome itself is about 3x10-6 amu. The smallest assembler might be a factor of ten or so larger than a ribosome. Current design ideas for an assembler are somewhat larger than this cylindrical arms about 100 nanocomputers in length and 30 nanometers in diameter, rotary joints to allow arbitrary positioning of the tip of the arm, and a worst-case positional accuracy at the tip of perhaps .1 to .2 nanometers, even in the presence of thermal noise. Even a solid block, of diamond as large as such an arm weighs only sixteen million amu, so we can safely conclude that a hollow arm of such dimensions would weigh less, six such arms would weigh less than 10-8 amu. 

The assembler requires a detailed sequence of control signals, just as the ribosome requires mRNA to control its actions. Such detailed control signals can be provided by a computer. A feasible design for a molecular computer has been presented by Drexler. This design is mechanical in nature, and is based on sliding rods that interact by blocking or unblocking each other at locks. This design has 4 size of about 9 cubic nanometers per lock (roughly equivalent to a single logic gate). Quadrupling this size to 20 cubic nanometers (to allow for power, interfaces, and the like) and assuming that we require a minimum of 10-4 locks to provide minimal control results in a volume of 2x10-5 cubic nanometers (.0002 cubic microns) for the computational element. This many gates is sufficient to build a simple 4- bit or 8-bit general purpose computer. For example, the 6502 8-bit microprocessor can be implemented in about l00000 gates, while an individual 1-bit processor in the connection machine has about 3,000 gates. Assuming that each cubic nanometer computer will have a mass of about 2x10-8 amu.

 An assembler might have a kilobyte of high speed (rod-logic based) RAM.. (Similar to the amount of RAM used in a modern one-chip computer ) and 100 kilobytes of slower but more dense “tape” storage-this tape storage would have a mass of 10-8 amu or less (roughly 10 atoms per bit). Some additional mass will be used for communications (sending and receiving signals from other computers) and power. In addition5 there will probably be a “tool kit” of interchangeable tips that can be placed at the ends of the assembler’s arms.. When everything is added up, a small assembler, with arms, computer, “took kit” should weigh less than 10-9 amu.

 E. Coli (a common bacterium) weighs about 10-12 amu. So you‘re talking about an assembler being much larger than a ribosome, but much smaller than a bacterium.

 It is also interesting to compare Drexler ‘s architecture ‘for an assembler with the Von Neumann architecture for a self replicating device. Von Neumanns “universal constructing automation” had both a universal tuning machine to control its functions and a “constructing arm” to build the “seconder automation,” The constructing arm can be positioned in a two-dimensional plane, and the “head” at the end of the constructing arm is used to build the desired structure. While Von Neumann's construction was theoretical (existing in a two dimensional cellular automata world), it still embodied many of the critical elements that now appear in the assembler.

 Further work on self-replicating systems was done by NASA in 1980 in a report that considered the feasibility of implementing a self-replicating lunar manufacturing facility with conventional technology.. One of their conclusions was that, “The theoretical concept of machine duplication is well developed. There are several alternative strategies by which machine self-replication can be carried out in a practical engineering setting.” They estimated it would require 20 years (and many billions of dollars) to develop such a system. While they were considering the design of a macroscopic self-replicating system (the proposed “seed” was 100 tons) many of’ the concepts and problems involved in such systems are similar regardless of size.

 Chemists have been remarkably successful at synthesizing a wide range of compounds with atomic precision. Their successes, however, are usually small in size (with the notable exception of various polymers), Thus, we know that a wide range of atomically precise structures with perhaps a few hundreds of atoms in them are quite feasible. Larger atomically precise structures’ with complex three-dimensional shapes can he viewed as a connected sequence of small atomically precise structures. While chemists have the ability to precisely sculpt small collections of atoms, there is currently no ability to extend this capability in a general way to structures of larger size. An obvious structure of considerable scientific and economic interest is the computer. The ability to manufacture a computer from atomically precise logic elements of molecular size, and to position those logic elements into a three dimensional volume with a highly precise and intricate interconnection pattern, would have revolutionary consequences for the computer industry.

 A large atomically precise structure, however, can be viewed as simply a collection of small atomically precise objects which are then linked together. To build a truly broad range of large atomically precise objects requires the ability to create highly specific positionally controlled bonds. A variety of highly flexible synthetic techniques have been considered by Drexler. I shall describe two such methods here to give you a feeling for the kinds of methods I believe will eventually be a reality. Feel free to accept or reject any or all of my interpretations of future reality. Where we differ, one of us will suffer negative consequences to the degree to which he is incorrect in his perception. To the degree either of us is correct in his perception of a future reality, his result will be increasingly positive. But remember, the one thing that will be completely unaffected by our views is future reality itself.

I have heard that Cryonics will not work because water expands as it turns to ice. Therefore water in the cells will rupture the cells as the temperature is lowered below zero degrees Celsius. This would cause irreparable damage to the cells, preventing any possible resuscitation.

 O'Rights, The idea that we already have bio stasis techniques may seem surprising, since powerful new abilities seldom spring up overnight. In fact, the techniques are old-only understanding of their reversibility is new. Biologists developed the two main approaches for other reasons.

 For decades, biologists have used electron microscopes to study the structure of cells and tissues. To prepare specimens, they use a chemical process called fixation to hold molecular structures in place. A popular method uses glutaraldehyde molecules, flexible chains of five carbon atoms with a reactive group of hydrogen and oxygen atoms at each end. Biologists fix tissue by pumping a glutaraldehyde molecules to diffuse into cells. A molecule tumbles around inside a cell until one end contacts a protein (or other reactive molecule) and bonds to it. The other end then waves free until it, too, contacts something reactive. This commonly shackles a protein molecule to a neighbouring molecule.

 These cross-links lock molecular structures and machines in place; other chemicals then can be added to do a more thorough or sturdy job. Electron microscopy shows that such fixation procedures preserve cells and the structures within them, including the cells and structures of the brain.

 The first step of a bio stasis procedure involve simple molecular devices able to enter cells, block their molecular machinery, and tie structures together with stabilizing cross-links. Glutaraldehyde molecules fit this description quite well. The next step in this procedure involved other molecular devices able to displace water and pack themselves solidly around the molecules of a cell. This also corresponds to a known process.

 Chemicals such as propylene glycol, ethylene glycol, and dimethyl sulfoxide can diffuse into cells, replacing much of their water yet doing little harm. They are known as "cryoprotectants," because they can protect cells from damage at low temperatures. If they replace enough of a cell's water, then cooling doesn't cause freezing, it just causes the protectant solution to become more and more viscous, going from a liquid that resembles this syrup in its consistency to one that resembles hot tar, to one that resembles cold tar, to one as resistant to flow as a glass. In fact, according to the scientific definition of the term, the protectant solution then qualifies as a glass; the process of solidification without freezing is called vitrification. Mouse embryos vitrified and stored in liquid nitrogen have grown into healthy mice.

 The vitrification process packs the glassy protectant solidly around the molecules of each cell; vitrification thus fits the description of bio stasis.

 Fixation and vitrification together seem adequate to ensure long-term bio stasis. To reverse this form of bio stasis, cell repair machines will be programmed to remove the glassy protectant and the glutaraldehyde cross-links and then repair and replace molecules, thus restoring cells, tissues, and organs to working order.

 Fixation with vitrification is not the first procedure proposed for bio stasis. In 1962 Robert Ettinger, a professor of physics at Highland Park College in Michigan, published a book suggesting that future advances in cryobiology might lead to techniques for the easily reversible freezing of human patients. He further suggested that physicians using future technology might be able to repair and revive patients frozen with present techniques shortly after cessation of vital signs. He pointed out that liquid nitrogen temperatures will preserve patients for centuries, if need be, with little change. Perhaps, he suggested, medical science will one day have "fabulous machines" able to restore frozen tissue a molecule at a time. His book gave rise to the cryonics movement.

 Cryonicists have focused on freezing because many human cells revive spontaneously after careful freezing and thawing. It is a common myth that freezing bursts cells; in fact, freezing damage is more subtle than this-so subtle, that it often does no lasting harm. Frozen sperm regularly produces healthy babies. Some human beings now alive have survived being frozen solid at liquid nitrogen temperatures-when they were early embryos. Cryobiologists are actively researching ways to freeze and thaw viable organs to allow surgeons to store them for later implantation.

 The prospect of future cell repair technologies has been a consistent theme among Cryonicists. Still, they have tended to focus on procedures that preserve cell function, for natural reasons. Cryobiologists have kept viable human cells frozen cells frozen for years. Researchers have improved their results by experimenting with mixes of cryoprotective chemicals and carefully controlled cooling and warming rates. The complexities of cryobiology offer rich possibilities for further experimentation. This combination of tangible, tantalizing success and promising targets for further research has made the quest for an easily reversible freezing process a vivid and attractive goal for Cryonicists. A success at freezing and reviving an adult mammal would be immediately visible and persuasive.

 What is more, even partial preservation of tissue function suggests excellent preservation of tissue structure. Cells that can revive (or almost revive) even without special help will need little repair.

 The cryonics community's cautious, conservative emphasis on preserving tissue function has invited public confusion, though. Experimenters have frozen whole adult mammals and thawed them without waiting for the aid of cell repair machines. The results have been superficially discouraging: the animals fail to revive. To a public and a medical community that has known nothing about the prospects for cell repair, this has made frozen bio stasis seem pointless.

After Ettinger's proposal, a few cryobiologists chose to make unsupported pronouncements about the future of medical technology. As Robert Prehoda stated in a 1967 book: "Almost all reduced metabolism experts... believe that cellular damage caused by current freezing techniques could never be corrected." Of course, these were the wrong experts to ask. The question called for experts on molecular technology and cell repair machines. These cryobiologists should have said only that correcting freezing damage would apparently require molecular-level repairs, and that they, personally, had not studied the matter. Instead, they misled the public on a matter of vital medical importance. Their statements discouraged the use of a workable bio stasis technique.

Cells are mostly water. At low enough temperatures, water molecules join to form a weak but solid framework of cross-links. Since this preserves neural structures and thus the patterns of mind and memory, Robert Ettinger has apparently identified a workable approach to bio stasis. As molecular technology advances and people grow familiar with its consequences, the reversibility of bio stasis (whether based on freezing, fixation and vitrification, or other methods) will grow even more obvious to ever more people..

 Robert Ettinger proposed a biostasis technique in 1962. He stated that Professor Jean Rostand had proposed the same approach years earlier, and had predicted its eventual use in medicine. Why has biostasis by freezing fail to become popular? In part probably because of its initial expense, in part because of human inertia, and in part because means for repairing cells remained obscure. Yet the ingrained conservation of the medical profession has also played a role. Let’s consider the history of anesthesia.

In 1846, Morton and Warren amazed the world with the ‘discovery of the age,’ ether anesthesia. Yet two years earlier, Horace Wells had used Nitrous Oxide anesthesia, and two years before that, Crawford W. Long had performed an operation using ether. In 1824, Henry Hickman had successfully anesthetized animals using ordinary carbon dioxide. He later spent years urging surgeons in England and France to test nitrous oxide as an anesthetic. In 1799, a full forty-seven years before the great "discovery,” Sir Humphry Davy wrote, “As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may possibly be used during surgical operations.” Yet as late as 1839 the conquest of pain still seemed an impossible dream to many physicians. Dr. Alfred Velpeau stated! “The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera, it is absurd to go on seeking it today. Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves."

Whether people choose to use biostasis will depend on whether they see it as worth the gamble. This gamble involves the value of life (which is a personal matter), the cost of biostasis (which seems reasonable by the standards of modern medicine)! the odds that the technology will work (which seem excellent) and the odds that humanity will survive, develop the technology, and revive people.
This final point accounts for most of the overall uncertainty.

Assume that human beings and free societies will indeed survive. (No one can calculate the odds of this! but to assume failure would discourage the very efforts that will promote success). If so, then technology will continue to advance. Developing assemblers will take years. Studying cells and learning to repair the tissues of patients in biostasis will take still longer. At a guess, developing repair systems and adapting them to resuscitation will take three to ten decades, though advances in automated engineering may speed the process.

The time required seems unimportant, however, most resuscitated patients will care more about the conditions of life, including the presence of their friends and family, than they will care about the date on the calendar . With abundant resources, the physical conditions of life could be very good indeed. The presence of companions is another matter.

In a recent. published survey, over half of those responding said that they would like to live for at least five hundred years, if given a free choice. Informal surveys show that most people would prefer biostasis to dissolution if they could regain good health and explore a new future with old companions. A few people say that they “want to go when their time comes,” but they generally agree that, so long as they can choose further life, their time has not yet come. It seems that many people today share Benjamin Franklins desire, but in a century able to satisfy it. If biostasis catches on fast enough (or if other life-extension technologies advance fast enough), then a resuscitated patient will awake not to a world of strangers, but to the smiles of familiar faces.

But will people in biostasis be resuscitated? Techniques for placing patients in biostasis are already known, and the costs could become low, at least compared to the costs of major surgery or prolonged hospital care. Resuscitation technology, though, will be complex and expensive to develop. Will people in the future bother?

It seems likely that they will. They may not develop nanotechnology with medicine in mind-but if not, then they will surely develop it to build better computers. They may not develop cell repair machines with resuscitation in mind, but they will surely do so to heal themselves. They may not program repair machines for resuscitation as an act of impersonal charity, but they will have time, wealth, and automated engineering systems, and some of them will have loved ones waiting in biostasis. Resuscitation techniques seem sure to be developed.
 

A new scientific truth is not usually presented in a way to convince its opponents. Unfortunately opponents die off, and a rising generation is familiarized with the truth from the start. Those who view death as always and forever certain will have a much different view of cryonics from those holding the opposite opinion. One man’s foolish desperation will be another’s well-calculated and reasonable gamble. And, as with politics and religion, arguing about the matter probably won’t change many opinions. I am prepared to be considered odd at best and even death obsessed (when in reality I am life obsessed). But "he who laughs last laughs best” was never more appropriate as a consoling thought.

 Apparently fear of death is not the main motivating force for people to sign up for cryonic suspension. If it were, those signing up would primarily be the old. In fact, most arranging to be suspended are the baby-boomer generation, not the elderly. To me this suggests that faith in technology may be a more important motivating factor than fear of dying. In any case, cryonicists are people with a strong desire to live, not die. 

Though their names are not known to me, there are a group of people who are of historical importance for being the last of their kind. Who, for instance, was the last person to die of smallpox? This disease has now been eradicated and the smallpox virus exists only in a safeguarded laboratory. Someone had the distinction of being its last victim. Diphtheria which used to cause 15,000 deaths a year in the United States has almost been eradicated. Polio has been eliminated in the western hemisphere. It is predicted that a cure for cystic fibrosis will be available within the next ten to fifteen years.

 Because of poverty and lack of medical care there are still people dying from diseases which could easily have been prevented. From the point of view of inevitability, these people are dying needlessly. But, one can optimistically assume that in the not too distant future adequate medical care will be available to everyone. Someone now alive, for instance, could well be the last person to die of a pneumonia which could have been cured with a simple antibiotic.

 Now, imagine that you were a person dying of pneumonia before the discovery of penicillin and all the other antibiotics. Further imagine that someone offered to put you to sleep until a cure could be found for your pneumonia. Would you have accepted that offer?

If the promise of cellular repair nanotechnology is fulfilled, there will someday be a person who will be the last to die with no chance of being resurrected in a new body with all memories intact. Given the current lack of popularity of cryonics and the current lack of knowledge about the potential of nanotechnology, undoubtedly billions are yet doomed to die. Now that we are gaining in knowledge, we could be among the first to avoid the distinction of having died just before the dawning of the era of immortality.

At first thought, I might expect that many religious people will be repelled by a cryonics program, refusing to share in it and even denouncing it as immoral. After all, there are several obvious ways in which the program may seem incompatible with religion, if one thinks hastily and superficially.

 First, the idea that death is not absolute and final, but a matter of degree and reversible, seems to do violence to the notion of ‘soul,” to the duality of body and spirit which plays an important part in most religions. Might it not be claimed that a freeze, after revival, would create a soulless monster? Or that to revive a corpse, and thereby recall a soul from its resting place, would be an act of blasphemy?

 Second, there is implicit in the cryonics program the view that modern man is not the acme of development, but represents only a rung on the evolutionary ladder, and that we not only evolved from lower forms of life, but will continue to ascend, through manifold biological and bio-engineering techniques, both racially and individually, changing profoundly in both outward and inward nature.

 Does this not put a severe strain on the idea that man was created in God’s image? In particular can a Christian accept the notion that Jesus, in his human form, did not represent the pinnacle of development?

 Third, some will see looming larger the specter of creeping secularism. With unlimited physical life in prospect, will the flocks forget about spiritual immortality? Will they turn en masse to materialism? Will they worship only the Golden Calf?

Several related questions also present themselves. Forbidding as these questions may appear, I believe they will evaporate rather quickly.

 Hundreds of people have already been resurrected from the dead, with no fuss or question as to the abode of the soul during and after death. These were the victims of drowning, asphyxiation, heart failure, and the like, who suffered clinical death but were revived by the use of artificial respiration, heart massage, chemical stimulation, electrical stimulation, and other methods of modern medicine.

An especially interesting case is that of Roger Arnsten,a Norwegian boy who drowned in 1962 and was dead for about

2 1/2 hours, including an estimated twenty-two minutes under water.

 Roger, five, fell into an icy river on a cold winter’s day. After drowning, his body temperature continued to fall, probably getting below 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and of course this hypothermia prevented swift deterioration of his brain. Dr. Tone Dahl Kvittingen applied artificial respiration with a tube down the windpipe, and rhythmic pressure on the chest to force blood circulation. At the hospital, an electrode needle pushed through the chest wall into the heart revealed no beat, but the attempt at resuscitation was continued, including exchange blood transfusions, and about 2 1/2 hours after drowning a natural heartbeat resumed. Roger remained unconscious for about six weeks, and even went temporarily blind, and at times appeared demented, but finally made a nearly complete recovery, with slight impairment of some muscular coordination and peripheral vision.

The point here is that nobody worried about little Roger’s soul. If the boy did leave his body temporarily, was he conscious or unconscious? No one knows, and no one seems inclined to make an issue of it.

 Why, then, should anyone be concerned about the souls of the frozen? The mere length of the hiatus can hardly be critical. 200 years should present no more difficulty than 2 1/2 hours.

 Except quantitatively, then, the problem is not new, and the religious communities have already made their decision. They have implicitly recognized that resuscitation, even if heroic measures are employed, is just a means of prolonging life, and that the apparent death was spurious.

 Some may quarrel that freezing is unnatural and that it was not intended for people to be revived.

Their is an old joke, a querulous lady objects to astronauts attempting to leave God’s green earth for outer space. “It’s against the will of God,” she says, “for man to try to live in the sky, going to the Moon and Mars and such. Why can’t those people just stay quietly at home and watch TV, like God intended?”

 A somewhat earlier version concerns objections to Henry Ford’s Model T. “If God had intended man to go forty miles an hour, he would have provided him with wheels instead of legs.”

 This attitude is less amusing in the case of certain sects said to oppose the interference of physicians in the course of nature, even forbidding the use of silver nitrate in the eyes of the newborn, on the ground that God intended the child of a gonorrheal mother to be blinded.

 It is exactly man’s nature to “go against nature.” Beasts live, even though miserably, in “harmony” with nature, but man must strive to improve both himself and his environment.

What kind of future technology will be required to reverse cryonic suspension? Two broad capabilities are likely to be essential, an ability to repair cells, and an ability to replace cells. Fortunately, those are two capabilities already demonstrated in nature, We know that repair and replacement of tissue is possible because our bodies do this all the time. What we presently lack is volitional control of these processes. 

The growth and behavior of cells is determined by the content and expression of their genetic code-their DNA. Driven by tremendous commercial and medical incentives, scientists are beginning to develop the tools and the understanding to manipulate this code. Once this understanding is complete, the development of cells will be open.

 The medical consequences of such an ability will be profound. Within the realm of cell growth and development lie the bases of many of today’s deadliest diseases, including heart disease, cancer, and even aging itself. With complete control over cell growth and differentiation, it will likely be possible to heal injured arteries, turn off cancer cells, renew aged tissue, and reverse many, now irreversible injuries.

 Indeed, it is in the area of treating injuries that medicine has yet to make some of its greatest strides. Why is it that small children can sometimes regrow lost fingertips (including the fingernail), but adults cannot? Why can our bodies naturally replace injured liver tissue, but not brain tissue? An understanding of cell development will answer these questions and many more. Knowing these answers will allow medicine to design new healing processes where none were present before.

 Even today, with our understanding of the mechanisms of growth and development, still in a very primitive state, significant advances are being made. A variety of researches have already demonstrated a limited ability to induce regeneration of severed spinal cords in a variety of mammals. Similarly, a large and rapidly expanding body of research is demonstrating that successful regeneration of injured brain tissue is possible through the use of development-controlling nerve cell growth chemicals, the transplantation of fetal nervous tissue, and several other approaches. Indeed, even very conservative publications such as science are expressing optimism about the prospects of regeneration and repair of brain and spinal cord. Already, researchers are able to replace lost or damaged neurons, reversing Parkinson’s disease in both animals and man.

 Medicine today is largely bound by the limits of the body’s natural healing capacities, but this will not always be the case. Future medicine will take over control of cell growth to bypass current limitations on healing. By adjusting cell growth programs, it probably will be possible to mend severed spinal cords, regenerate injured brain tissue. and even regrow damaged limbs and organs. In cases of extreme injury, it is even possible to imagine directing a surface cell from an isolated brain to regrow an entire body from itself (much as a child’s body grows from a single cell in its mother’s womb). 

How will these technologies repair freezing injury and recover cryonic suspension patients? Whether we employ organ transplantation or regeneration or some form of cloning, it should be clear that the primary prerequisite to success is preservation and recovery of the brain. 

It’s likely that present brain cryo-preservation techniques, employed under optimum conditions, are sophisticated enough to preserve the structures that encode memory and personality. However, the impact of aging and disease, imperfect preservation, and preservation under suboptimal conditions, will necessitate some means of actual cell repair (not just replacement) capability. Fortunately, advanced biotechnology should bring about a variety of repair possibilities.

For cells able to spontaneously resume metabolism after thawing, virus like organisms could be used to insert genetic instructions for special repair algorithms not normally present in human cells. Such processes could include healing of moderate ischemic injury (injury caused by inadequate or absent blood flow) regrowth of cell connections disrupted by freezing, and reversal of age-related changes. All these healing and repair objectives seem achievable by directing a patient’s cells to perform the kinds of repair activity already observed in nature.

 When injuries preventing resumption of cell function are present. autonomous repair organisms could be introduced. Just as natural white blood cells roam through tissue detecting and disposing of damaged cell debris, more sophisticated cells produced by genetic engineering may act to re-assemble and repair damaged cells. Such a technology could reverse brain injuries with sophistication far surpassing that of natural repair and recovery mechanisms, while preserving the patient’s memories and personality. 

There are many naturally evolved examples of the kind of repair algorithms that might be marshalled and adapted for use on cryonic suspension patients. It is well established that many lower invertebrates and vertebrates can regenerate severely damaged or even completely missing body parts (starfish, lizards. salamanders). Some vertebrates, such as the salamander, a punctatum and newts such as pleurodeles wait can recover from transplantation of their brains and spontaneously (and properly!) reconnect millions of severed axons in their spinal cords and forebrains. What’s more, the transplanted brain retains memories of task learned prior to the surgery. 

There is also experimental evidence of our growing ability to control and modify the developmental programs of living systems. Consider the work of Douglas Melton and his coworkers at Harvard University. They removed a section of frog embryo cells normally destined to differentiate into skin. Incubating these cells in tissue culture, the researchers added cultured mouse cells. The embryonic frog cells underwent a radical transformation, dividing rapidly and elongating. Within twenty four hours, an amphibian mouth took shape at one end of the tissue mass and the other end began twitching. A Short while later an entire eye differentiated, complete with supporting muscles and a primitive nervous system. Such re-direction of secretion of growth factors by the mouse cells. This kind of experiment demonstrates that modification of and control over the developmental program is in principle possible.

 Similarly, we know from recent work on human fetal surgery that human beings, early in their development, have an enormous capacity for complete regeneration and repair. Second and third trimester fetuses subjected to extensive in womb surgery (who survive to birth) show no signs of the surgery. They are completely free of the scarring and adhesion that normally would be expected after such procedures. Early clinical work on the regeneration of missing body parts in humans is also underway, and the outlook for regenerative healing as an alternative to prosthetic replacement seems bright. Thus, the natural world provides us with operating proofs of principle (and even generalized programs) for engineered biotechnologies capable of reversing the kinds of injuries sustained by suspension patients.

 These foreseeable biotechnoloqies establish cryonics as a rational pursuit with a reasonable chance of success, Yet these repair processes, based on algorithms found in nature, are not the only technologies to consider. Beyond the bounds of conventional biology lie even more powerful possibilities. I am of course referring to the technology of protein engineering, described as nanotechnology (the ability to design and construct machines which use individual molecules as operational components). Such machines could be smaller than cells, while being just as complex as today’s largest computers. 

The medical implications of such a technology are amazing. Progress in nanotechnoloqy has been rapid. With the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) in 1981 by Binnig and Roher, it became possible for the first time to see and to purposely manipulate individual atoms of electrically conductive materials. With the development of the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) in 1989, exploration and manipulation of biomolecules and subcellular components on the molecular level became a reality. The general development of Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPM) is ushering in a new era in our ability to see and manipulate atoms. While it must be emphasized that nanotechnology is in its infancy, these emerging capabilities serve as powerful proofs-of-principle. 

It has now been demonstrated that it is possible to purposely manipulate individual atoms and to examine and characterize biological molecules such as DNA almost atom by atom. In principle, this means that ultimately it should be possible to characterize and repair the biomolecules and larger structures that comprise living systems. While it will not be possible to use single, macroscopic devices such as STMs or AFMs for this purpose, these devices should enable us to develop small, autonomous and semi-autonomous cell and tissue repair devices.

The implications for repair of damaged tissues with such nanotechnological devices are profound. A technology which could dexterously manipulate individual atoms could restore virtually any injured tissue to a state of healthy function, as long as sufficient damaged structure remained to allow for the inference of what the healthy, functioning tissue should be like. Unlike today’s crude medicine, nanotechnology should always be able to fully repair and recover people who retain sufficient brain structure and genetic information.

The view of life, so commonly accepted in clinical medicine today, has implications sometimes not considered by those who accept it. One of these is that living organisms can be stopped by putting them into suspended animation (by freezing or by dehydration). Later, the organism can be revived at the scientist’s leisure. Many different cells and tissues can be frozen in liquid nitrogen at hundreds of degrees below zero, and even stored in liquid helium at nearly absolute zero. In the frozen state (at the temperature of liquid nitrogen) there is no metabolism. The ‘machine” has stopped, life has stopped. And yet the “machine” can be made to run and live again.  

The most extreme examples of the suspension of life are the tardigrades, tiny animals which can be dried out and then rehydrated like a back packer’s dinner, to return to life from apparent death. What’s more, thousands of healthy babies have been born in recent years from embryos which had been stored frozen much like cryonic suspension patients are.

 The understanding that uninterrupted function or metabolism is not a requisite for the continuation of life, when applied to biology, has further interesting consequences. One of these is that if life is viewed as the operation of a complex machine, then death is a word which needs to be redefined. Clearly the absence of operation, or metabolism, is not sufficient for a determination of death. If the word death is to retain its familiar connotation of permanence, then we need some form of clarification. For example, a frozen or dehydrated cell with no metabolism clearly has not experienced “death” in the usual permanent sense, if it can be brought to life on demand. How, then, can we more accurately define death?

 If life is seen in terms of information, then death may usefully be defined as the permanent loss of that information. In a parallel sense, the true death of a person (destruction of his personal identity) corresponds with loss of the information in his brain, which specifies who he is. Physically, then, this view implies that death comes to a person (as an individual) with irretrievable destruction of whatever brain structures specify memory, intelligence, and personality.

 Now we come to an even more difficult question, if the death of a person happens when the structural identity information in his brain is destroyed, then at what point in the dying process does this loss take place?

 An examination of the evidence suggests that the death of an individual does not happen until many hours after what doctors call clinical death (when heartbeat and breathing stop). The reason for this is that brain structures, down to the structure of individual brain cells, are known to stay reasonably intact for at least that long after clinical death. Thus, the critical structural information which determines personal identity continues to be preserved for a relatively long time.

 Neurons (electrically active brain cells) are sometimes said to die within a handful of minutes of being without oxygen. Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. What happens is that a few minutes without oxygen selectively damages the circulatory system of the brain, so that neurons are doomed to disintegrate and be destroyed many hours later as a consequence. Thus, after a few minutes without oxygen, the brain as a whole passes a point at which it cannot be revived by present techniques, yet the individual neurons are still fully capable of metabolism long after the traditional four to six minutes.

 There is more. Even at the point where individual neurons cease most of their metabolism, it is difficult to say that they are dead. It is generally impossible to tell exactly when any cell dies, and neurons are no exception.

 Given the above observations, it isn’t clear how a term like “cell death” is to be defined, except (again) in terms of information. If a cell is a complex assembly of atoms, then describing “cell death” is in a sense like trying to describe “automobile death.” But death must carry the idea of permanence, and an automobile cannot be said to be gone beyond any recall or restoration until it is so badly damaged that the original shapes and structures are impossible to infer from what remains. Or, in other words, until its information is gone. That the function of the automobile has been interrupted is of little consequence, given the original structure, or the means to deduce that structure and restore it, we can restore the function whenever we like.

 So, presumably, with a cell. Or a brain composed of cells. Or a human being. Life is a function of a given structure, an interruption of function (cryonic suspension) should not be confused with the annihilation of structure (death )

 In the early 1960’s Robert Ettinger took this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. Specifically, he argued that what we now call “dead” neurons might one day be repairable and revivable given the proper science-just as a badly damaged automobile, unfixable in a average home garage, might still be repairable if taken to a master mechanic. Ettinger noted, a dead person with reasonable intact neurons (personal identity information still present) might only be as dead as the technology of his society was ignorant. Inability to resuscitate, warned Ettinger, should never be held up as conclusive proof that resuscitation was theoretically impossible.

 There was, of course, precedent for this warning. In the years before electrical cardioversion (electrical shock to the heart) was invented, medical science considered a human being “dead” when his or her heart stopped. With later advances in technology, however, things changed. People in medical states previously classed as “dead” suddenly became “dead” no longer, and this was because new technology had changed the definitions, not the condition of the patient. In fact, in certain circumstances a person whose heart had just stopped came to be considered only “very sick.’ 

This was strong stuff, because for Ettinger the question of exactly when forever irreversible death occurred was not settled. He argued that a person might be frozen, after the doctors of the present give up but before the doctors of the future would be forced to give up if confronted with the identical problem. The extra damage of the freezing process, when the latter was carried out properly, might also be repairable. And if identity resides primarily in the physical arrangement of the atoms of the brain, then that arrangement, and thus the person’s identity, would be preserved by freezing.

 Once repaired and revived, a frozen person would have diseases cured and youth restored by the same cell repair technology used in the revival. Then, presumably, he or she would embark on the good life in a future world of plenty.

It would, after all, need to be a world of plenty to be able to afford luxuries like reviving frozen people. If one woke up, it would be to a world of high-tech wonders. What could there possibly be to lose in trying?

Cell repair technology implies that ability to recover patients far past the resuscitation limits (and, hence, criteria for pronouncing death) of present medicine. To understand how this is possible, it is necessary to understand the confusion that has come to surround the issues of resuscitation and death in medicine today. 

The word death is usually taken to mean irreversible loss of life. As medicine has advanced in its ability to reverse formerly fatal conditions, the specific conditions determining irreversible loss of life have changed. A century ago, death was simply a matter of cessation of heartbeat and breathing, since technology then could not reverse such a condition. Today, other physical conditions limit resuscitation, although they are not as straight forward as one might suppose. Exactly when today’s patients can be considered dead has become a very complicated issue, one to which cryonics adds even another level of complexity. 

Consider the ominous declaration of legal death in the modern clinical setting. In most cases this declaration is not a statement of a patient being beyond resuscitation as much as it is a statement that resuscitation should not be attempted. A patient suffering from a terminal illness is often assigned a “no code” status (also known as ‘DNR” or “Do Not Resuscitate”), meaning that if his heart stops; he should be declared dead on that basis; and no further action should be taken. Though seldom discussed; this is de facto euthanasia, since in most cases such patients could be successfully resuscitated or restored to conciousness. (Of course, such measures would be just a prolongation of suffering, and as such are avoided.) 

So even by the standards of today’s resuscitation technology, many patients declared dead are not really dead at all (although in the absence of continued care they soon become so). 

This is an important point to understand for cryonics purposes because it means that people declared dead can possibly be saved by prompt suspension. (In fact, official declaration of death is currently a legal prerequisite for starting suspension procedures. ) This situation underscores the importance of a careful examination of the physical changes following the onset of clinical death, so as to determine the true limits within which a patient could still be saved by suspension.

 After cessation of heartbeat and breathing, the next major milestone in the process of dying is so-called brain death. After several seconds without blood flow, brain function will cease, and after four to six minutes, contemporary medicine will be unable to restore it. This development is presently regarded as the ultimate limit of resuscitation and the final dividing line between life and death. 

But what exactly is brain death? From the status the event is presently accorded in medicine, it might be presumed to involve some kind of immediate and cataclysmic destruction of brain cells. Yet for all the grief it causes, the onset of brain death occurs as a result of comparatively trivial changes at the cellular level. Several minutes of circulatory arrest (ischemia) lead to a variety of metabolic upsets within the brain, such as the accumulation of waste products, the release of excessive amounts of toxic neurotransmitters (nerve signal control chemicals), and a failure of the cells to regulate the level of calcium and other critical ions. This in turn leads to cell swelling and to spasm arid constriction of the blood vessels, which can ultimately result in failure of blood circulation in the brain,The brain cells themselves remain able to resume most functions long after the onset of the medically accented 4-6 minute limit on brain viability. 

Certainly vessels spasm, cellular injury, and ultimately blood clotting are not fundamentally irreversible conditions. Advanced cell repair technology could, if necessary, completely replace injured blood vessels by growing new ones in place of old. In fact, progress is already being made in rolling back brain resuscitation limits. While it was once thought impossible to restore brain function after five minutes of circulatory arrest at normal body temperature. recent experimental work with dogs and monkeys using calcium blocking drugs has succeeded in pushing this limit back to at least 17 minutes. 

Clearly then, the onset of “brain death” does not constitute true death any more than cardiac arrest did a century ago.

Although an overwhelming obstacle to resuscitation today, it is a condition that foreseeable technologies may easily reverse. Therefore, cryonic suspension is still applicable to-and sensible for-patients who have suffered this injury. (Initial suspension procedures nevertheless involve aggressive measures to Prevent ischemic brain injury, because associated brain swelling and blood clotting can compromise the introduction of the cryoprotective agents used to minimize freezing damage. 

Of course, the derangement in metabolism that characterize injury to the brain from inadequate or absent circulation are only the beginning of a minutes and hours long chain of events that follows cessation of heartbeat and breathing. Although future medicine will be able to reverse some of these changes more effectively than we can today, eventually, if the patient is left untreated, damage will occur which no technology, Present or foreseeable, could repair with results that would conserve the Patients identity, When this occurs, when a Patients identity slips beyond reach of even an advanced cell repair technology, true death has occurred. 

Exactly when this happens depends on when brain structure critical to personal identity disappears. In the absence of full knowledge of how the brain works, we cannot know the point at which this happens, evidence suggests that it may not occur for as long as several hours after blood circulation stops. Tomorrow’s medicine may well be able to recover patients after hours of absent circulation and breathing at moderate temperatures. Although cultural conditioning may make such a feat seem incredible, it would not involve any magic at all. All it would imply is that most past and current pronouncements of death have been premature, as a result of limited medical technologies. 

Not knowing precisely where the boundary between life and death will be for future medicine, but understanding that it will be considerably beyond the limits of today’s medical capabilities, it seems appropriate to consider cryonic suspension a potential life-saving measure even after prolonged periods of so called clinical death.

There are many reasons why cryonic suspension isn’t a standard medical procedure (or even a medically respected one) and probably will not be for many years to come.

 The most obvious is that suspension methods are irreversible by present technology. Damage done to whole organs and bodies during cryopreservation is devastating by today’s medical standards. Until cryopreservation is perfected, the reversal of this procedure will require future cell and tissue repair technology, a novel theoretical concept virtually unknown to medicine at present and only discussed in scientific and technical journals of little interest to most physicians.

 Complicating the situation is the fact that the information supporting the viability of cryonics is scattered across several unrelated fields. These include neurobiology, cryobiology, and nanotechnology (which itself is still small and interdisciplinary). It’s rare for any individual scientist or medical professional to possess knowledge in all three of these fields unless he is already interested in cryonics. Yet information from all of these fields is essential to proper evaluation of the concept.

 The notorious conservatism of the medical profession must be considered as well. Ingrained thinking and fears of malpractice often greatly delay acceptance of new medical ideas, even ones not particularly unusual. An idea which simultaneously challenges as many medical dogmas as does cryonics is bound to meet intense resistance.

 But perhaps most significantly, there if the sheer outrageousness of this idea. It is being suggested that a means now exists for transporting patients across a century or more of time. The implications are that medicine no longer has to lose most patients and that the social rituals and entire industries that surround medical failure to day are at best obsolete, and at worst murder. This is an incredible assertion. How many people today would even pause to consider such a thing? In a world full of crazy people making crazy claims, it’s far easier to simply dismiss this one as nonsense rather than take the time to properly examine the supporting information.

In the final analysis the greatest barriers to the acceptance (or even honest evaluation) of cryonics are not technical, but social and psychological. Most minds today harbor complex emotional prejudices against such an idea which no amount of scientific argument will overcome. This is typical of radical new ideas, and if history is any guide it may be a long time before this one becomes conventional. 

Regardless of the conventional wisdom, this technology is now available for anyone who desires it. For those individuals with the clarity of vision to appreciate the implications of future technologies, and who prefer to live by their own judgement. not that of others, a form of life insurance unlike any other is now available.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with facts for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life. 

It is a common mistake today to view technological progress as a haphazard process. Progress is often thought to consist of tinkers who occupy themselves by blindly tampering, trying, testing, and occasionally stumbling on new “breakthroughs.” Although many specific achievements and technical methods are indeed arrived at by this kind of hit and miss process, technological progress as a whole is not so random and unpredictable. Existing basic knowledge often allows broad developments to be foreseen with a certainty distinct from idle speculation.

 Our capacity for achievement is determined by the properties of matter. Physics today has advanced to the point where it is able to accurately describe the behavior of matter under many conditions of practical concern. Engineers are able to use this understanding to establish the feasibility of projects well before they are actually undertaken.

 New buildings are regularly designed, constructed, and safely occupied in spite of the fact that they may be of designs that have never physically existed before. On a broader scale, known laws of physics can be used to establish not just the feasibility of specific engineering projects, but also entire new technologies.

 Nearly a century ago, scientists such as Konstantin Tsiolkousky and Robert Goddard began seriously studying the feasibility of space flight. In an era when even aviation was in its infancy (and even before aviation in Tsiolkousky’s case), they assembled sound arguments. supported by calculations based on established physical law, as to why suitable designed rocket systems could carry men to the moon and beyond. Although they could not foresee all the specific materials and devices that would ultimately go into a real spacecraft, they were nevertheless able to use basic physical principles to outline the inherent feasibility of this technology.

 Predictably, they were scoffed at by the public of their horse and buggy era.

 Today scientists are beginning to study a technology that in the coming decades will lead to capabilities as incredible to us today as space travel was to the people of a century ago. Based on known principles of physics and chemistry, we can outline development pathways which should lead to abilities to fabricate materials and devices to atomic specifications. Of the many amazing developments this technology will allow, one of the most profound will be the creation of those devices capable of cell analysis and repair.

Cryobiologist are not generally supportive of cryonics. In fact some of the most vocal and ostensibly authoritative criticism of this procedure has originated from cryobiologists. Yet this criticism seldom bears on the true viability of cryonics. 

First, all the points made a few posts ago with regard to medicine in general also apply to cryobiologists. Cryonics is a proposal that by its nature invites rapid dismissal without proper investigation. Cryobiologists, like most people when confronted with this proposal, more often than not respond with emotional criticism rather than thoughtful comment relevant to the full scientific context of the idea. 

Second, although technologies being developed by cryobiologists today (particularly organ preservation technologies) are central to the practice of cryonic suspension, cryobiology is only one of the fields relevant to the ultimate success of the procedure.

Cryobiologists are experts on low temperature preservation and freezing injury, and they are qualified to speak on the current state of their technology and in the prospects for near term improvement. Most however, do not have any awareness of the future cell and tissue repair technologies which will be available to reverse freezing injury. Without knowledge of the field of molecular engineering, cryobiologists are simply not qualified to appraise cryonics. Yet nanotechnology is a respected field in which experts have already stated that the chances of cryonics working seem excellent. 

Molecular engineering theorist K. Eric Drexler makes a strong scientific case for the future reversibility of present cryonic suspension methods and criticizes many cryobiologists for making “unsupported pronouncements about the future of medical technology, and casually (misleading) the public on a matter of vital medical importance.” 

During the early part of this century there was no shortage of experts willing to testify that rockets couldn’t work in space because “there was no air to push against.” Newspaper editorials “debunking” the concept of space flight were based on such testimony, including a famous one by the New York Times in the 1921 (which it formally retracted in 1969, for obvious reasons). 

That such criticism could have been entertained at all is amazing in retrospect, not because space travel turned out to be possible, but because the criticism was in blatant contradiction of Newton’s third law of motion, which had been known for more than 200 years! Rockets don’t need air to push against because their rapidly retreating exhaust gases in themselves form one side of the action / reaction equation that makes rocket propulsion possible. It wasn’t as though there were no valid reasons for questioning the practical feasibility of spaceflight back then (there were many), but the unsuitability of rockets for the task just wasn’t one of them. Undoubting many physicists knew this, but remained silent lest they also be branded “lunatics” the way Robert Goddart and those who shared his vision were. Unfortunately, much criticism of cryonics today is of the same nature, crude, superficial. and often in basic disregard of established physical and biological principles. Such criticism is not only invalid, misleading, and unbecoming of the critics, but it also detracts from the real issues and problems of cryonics. 

Functional viability is a legitimate issue. Probably the most common criticism of cryonics is the observation that present cryopreservation techniques do not preserve whole bodies or organs in a functionally viable state. Warming will not generally result in spontaneous recovery of normal cell or tissue function. This prompts many people to observe that cryonic suspension preserves meat, not living cells. Yet does this point have any real scientific relevance? 

Cells and organs do not lose the ability to function for mysterious incomprehensible reasons, but because of specific damage. Before the phsiochemical basis of life was understood, it was widely believed that living systems functioned by virtue of a mysterious vital force that irreversibly departed when they ceased function. This vague late century doctrine was called vitalism. It has since been replaced by the modern mechanistic understanding of life brought about by molecular biology. (However, vitalism still persists in both spoken, and unspoken forms in the popular mythos). 

Like any physical system, cells will resume functioning if the damage is repaired. Given the inadequacy of present cryopreservation methods for preserving tissue functions, the goal of cryonics is to preserve sufficient tissue structure so that the future repair of damage that prevents function will result in the recovery of the suspended patients. Functional viability is of concern to cryonics only in as much as it reflects integrity of preserved structure cells that spontaneously resume, or partly resume, function obviously exhibit good structural preservation. In fact, some scientists have even proposed that chemical fixation be employed as part of cryonic suspension procedures to add extra structural stability at the price of completely eliminating functional viability until cell repair technology is developed. Therefore, any criticism of cryonics relating to the fact that preserved tissues are not functionally viable is misguided and irrelevant. The real question is whether preservation damage preverting tissue function today will be reversible by future biological repair technologies. 

Critics often charge that there is no evidence that such technologies are even possible. In fact, proof that such technologies are possible can be found crawling on nearly every square inch of the Earth! All natural organisms, from bacteria to elephants exist by virtue of incredibly complex feats of molecular manipulation, repair, and synthesis. In living systems today one can already find dazzling arrays of ultra sophisticated molecular machinery (so sophisticated that we are only just beginning to understand it all). The reversability of cryonic suspension, then, is not a question of whether molecular-level biorepair of tissue is possible, but rather a question of whether the molecular machinery already found in nature can be adapted and or expanded upon to allow healing of injuries more severe that life has naturally evolved to handle. Criticism of cryonics based on doubts about the ultimate feasibility of molecular-scale devices and molecular-level tissue repair is inadequate and misleading and ignores the capabilities observed in living systems right now. 

Nor do existing biological feats of tissue repair and regeneration have merely abstract proof of concept relevance to cryonics. Only the most conservative and short sighted of biologists would, for example, state that invitro cloning of brain absent human bodies would never be possible. Yet combining natural tissue growth processes with the radical, but not impossible, technology of brain transplantation would be sufficient to eliminate all cryopreservation injury to the body (as well as any other deleterious body conditions), leaving only the problem of repairing the brain. In one fell swoop these two extensions of existing technology and life processes would solve as of the problems of resuscitation from cryonic suspension. 

While this makes the case that technologies far less crude than cloning and brain transplants will eventually be available to reverse suspension, the possibility of these two technologies can be regarded as setting a lower bound on technology required for reversal of suspension, and therefore an important upper bound on the problems of cryonics. Clearly then, unless medical progress is going to come to a halt very soon, successful cryopreservation of structure would be sufficient to ensure at least the scientific, if not the social and political, validity of cryonics. Therefore, any criticism of cryonic suspension not specific directed at the issue of structural preservation is irrelevant to the basic viability of the procedure. It requires no great leaps of imagination (or even technology) to see how all cryo-injured tissues other than the brain could be completely replaced if necessary.

It would be difficult to find scientists today. qualified to understand and appraise cryonics.

Ideally, such qualifications should encompass all the major elements of cryonics, which range from neurobiological theory and cryobiology to proposed future resuscitation technology (cell repair technology). Yet this sort of expert is seldom available. 

The most common error made in this regard is to consider cryonic suspension as just another form of tissue cryopreservation, and then believe that the "experts", cryobiologists, possess all the requisite expertise to understand cryonics. This view is flawed because the strategies and goals of cryonics are fundamentally different from those of ordinary tissue preservation. 

Who, then, are the appropriate authorities to ask about cryonics? Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question, since cryonics is an interdisciplinary proposal. Arguably the best qualified scientists to comment on cryonics would be those already involved in it, yet this would not be a fair reply for those seeking impartial information. Short of individually investigating all the scientific details of cryonics (the ideal approach), it would make sense to seek out those scientists whose knowledge requires minimum additional supplementation. 

Of all the important aspects of cryonics, probably the most complex, least known, and yet most central is the idea of cell repair technology. The idea of advancing computer and biotechnologies are destined to bring vast improvements in natural healing processes. Without the concept of cell repair technology, suggestions that injurious cryopreservation, aging, or serious ischemic injury can be reversed seem absurd. Yet with the concept of cell repair technology, all these conditions become reversible provided critical brain structure persists for repairs to build on. Clearly, the idea of cell repair is the most radical facet of cryonics and the one requiring the most detailed explanation. 

Scientists familiar with the concepts of nanotechnology and cell repair therefore already possess the largest part of the knowledge base required to understand cryonics. While the issues of the quality of brain preservation and the mechanism of long-term memory encoding are also essential to cryonics, these matters in themselves do not require very lengthy explanation or particularly sophisticated biological knowledge to be adequately understood. The scientists most likely to be familiar with nanotechnology would be those involved in related research areas, such as molecular electrons, protein engineering, or scanning tunneling microscopy. These scientists and engineers would therefore seem to he the most suitable conventional experts for understanding and appraising the technical foundations of cryonics and future cell repair technology. 

It may seem odd that physical scientists and engineers would be better qualified to foresee future medical technologies than biologists or medical professionals, yet this situation is not without historical precedent, if forty years ago one wanted to appraise the prospects of eventually achieving technologies for three dimensional internal imaging of tissue, it would have been more appropriate to ask physicists and mathematicians about the problem than radiologists and x-ray technicians. The ultimate feasibility of CT and MRI scanners then rested more on computing technology trends than information from biology or medicine. This example is very much analogous to the present issue of nanotechnologists vs. cryobiologists as experts in assessing the viability and future reversibility of cryonic suspension.

All of us have some tendency to deny the possibility that time may leave us permanently stranded along the wayside. All of us, at one moment or another, have condemned the previous generations mind set as wrong headed and the next generation’s attitudes as irresponsible. Inevitably, someone will someday consider my current opinions hopelessly out of date. How well will I survive my relative obsolescence? 

I accept the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe such freedoms also include the freedom to die, the freedom to starve, and the freedom to feel disappointment. I do not believe in sustentative rights, such as the right to free healthcare, the right to receive food you haven’t earned, the right to have a job simply because you’re breathing. 

Of course I can imagine acting as though I believed in sustentative rights. If I were hungry and penniless, I would probably beg for a hand-out. Still I would know that I was living off the kindness of strangers. I doubt if I could convince myself that society owed me sustenance for no other reason than the fact of my existence. 

But let’s jump ahead one pretend century or so. 

I awaken from cryonic suspension to find that U.S. society’s nascent belief in sustentative rights has grown to encompass all aspects of life. Not only does every citizen have the right to healthcare, food, and work, but he also takes for granted his right to housing, clothing, and entertainment! A young person could spend his entire life playing in government sponsored virtual reality, without a moment’s thought about how he will earn a living or better himself. As far as I can discern, ninety percent of the population sits around on its lazy collective butt and happily vegetates. 

What’s the point in all this I might ask myself. Why do we need fifty billion worthless drooling idiots taking up space on this planet?

This question would have no meaning because the circumstances of my youth no longer exist. Throughout the 21st century, advances in computers, communications, manufacturing, and power systems created a social system with more wealth than any other in history. Technology gradually made food, clothing, shelter, and even entertainment so cheap that governments could dole out these items as easily as they used to mail out tax forms. The vast majority of people did indeed choose to spend their lives in nothing more ambitious than consumption and reproduction, though a significant (if ridiculed) handful continued to strive, learn, and expand the possibilities of humanity. 

And who could blame slackers for taking advantage of the bounty? No law of physics compels humans to labor for their daily bread. Are digging ditches and shuffling papers fundamentally more important than napping and playing games? 

Maybe this sketchy future bears no resemblance to what will come to pass, but social conditions will change drastically over the next century.

One of the charges leveled at cryonicists, sometimes even by other cryonicists, is that what we are doing is macabre or grotesque. It is a very-difficult charge to counter because cryonics, by its very nature, concerned with the end of life, with death. The handmaidens of death are dissolution and decay; certainly not very attractive subjects and definitely not successful after-dinner conversation. We can of course counter with the argument that despite the fact that we are dealing with death, we are really concerned with the preservation and continuation of life. Despite the logic of such an argument, most skeptics remain unimpressed.

They know what we are doing is horrible and nothing we can or say will change their minds. The fact is that most modern inhabitants of the Western World think that any direct confrontation with death is grotesque. Civilization has made it possible for people to buy their way out of the unpleasant things in life: manual labor, domestic chores, slaughtering our meat, taking care of aged relatives -- and confronting death. Few people today ever see another human being die. All of the unpleasant aspects of death are handled by people who are paid for their services and who disguise their precise duties in a language of euphemism. 

People do not die in hospitals, the “code” or “RHC” (“Respirations Have Ceased”) . Mortuaries have “Slumber Rooms” in which to display the “dearly departed.” Anyone who has worked in a hospital or nursing home will have more than a few stories to tell of relatives who deliberately do not arrive in time to see a loved one die. Many people cannot bear to see a dead relative for even one moment before the mortician carts away the unpleasant reality and replaces it with his cosmetized and plasticized version. This situation represents luxury not yet available to cryonicists. Cryonics has remained a desperately small affair. Probably less than 1000 persons worldwide have made arrangements to be frozen. In such a time, the businesses involved in delivering cryonics services are severely understaffed and overworked just in facing day to day realities of maintenance, readiness and staying in business. As long as cryonics is so small and poorly accepted, its adherents as well as its practitioners are gong to find themselves facing realities that the average man has long ago bought his way out of. While the average man may say “My father died in August,” and be done with it, cryonicists may find themselves much more intimately involved. They may, for safety’s sake, be forced to care for a loved one at home during the final stages of an illness; or, as some of us have had to do, they may find themselves involved with the actual mechanics of perfusing and freezing a friend or relative. And it may not end there: Under present conditions, the concerned cryonicist will probably have to continue to acknowledge his relative’s death by assisting, either directly or indirectly, the cryonics organization in continued maintenance. 

Perhaps someday cryonics will be as neatly packaged as medicine, or life insurance, or funeral service: all of the negative images will be completely out of sight, if not completely out of mind. The established reputations of long-reliable firms will eliminate the difficult decisions and personal involvement which must accompany making arrangements today. But that day is not yet here.

Live Long and Well

William O'Rights

The First Immortal