Before undergoing true cell death, the tissues of their brains were suspended using an ice-free process called vitrification. All are legally deceased, but if they could speak, they would likely argue that their remains do not constitute dead bodies at all.
Instead, in a sense, they are just unconscious. Around 1, people who are still legally alive are on cryonics waiting lists, and new facilities are opening in Oregon, Australia and Europe soon. What would it be like to know that everyone you had ever met was long gone? Credit: iStock. But many researchers believe that it is a credible field of inquiry, and cryobiologists are slowly chipping away at the possibility of revival.
Most recently, a team succeeded at thawing a previously vitrified rabbit brain. Even after several weeks of storage, the synapses that are thought to be crucial for brain function were intact. The rabbit was still dead, though — the researchers did not attempt to resuscitate the animal afterwards.
While a thawed out rabbit brain does not a fully revitalised person make, some believe that cryogenic revival might someday be as commonplace as treating a case of the flu or mending a broken arm.
But assuming cryonics does wind up working, for the newly reborn citizens of the past there would be more to their stories than simply opening their eyes and declaring a happy ending. Instead, they would immediately face the challenge of rebuilding their lives as strangers in a strange land.
How that would play out depends on a host of factors, including how long they were gone, what kind of society they returned to, whether they know anyone when they are brought back and in what form they return. Answering these questions is a matter of pure speculation, but experts have spent time turning them over — not the least so some can better prepare for their own potential return.
Some enthusiasts are optimistic, using the law of accelerating returns to justify predictions that within the next 30 to 40 years we could develop medical technologies capable of enhancing biological systems, preventing disease and even reverse-engineering aging.
The bodies preserved today are considered legally dead, but our descendants might not see it that way Credit: iStock. If such advances take longer, on the order of or more years, however, patients would not have such immediate social support in the contemporary world. Some, like Kowalski, are getting around this by simply sticking together: he, his wife and their children have all signed up for cryogenic suspension.
It involves cooling legally-dead people to liquid nitrogen temperature where physical decay essentially stops, in the hope that future scientific procedures will someday revive them and restore them to youth and good health. A person held in such a state is said to be a "cryopreserved patient", because we do not regard the cryopreserved person as being inevitably "dead". Legally, not yet. We hope that one day it will be, under carefully controlled conditions, for terminally ill patients. But this is not critical to the premise of cryonics.
At legal death, most of a person's tissues are still alive. Thousands of people have been revived after they have stopped breathing or their hearts have stopped. Legal death is the point at which - under the current state of medical science - the doctor gives up. But just as many people living today have been revived after what would have been considered irreversible death even 50 years ago, the doctors of the future will not give up so quickly.
Cryonics attempts to transport our patients - preserved at or near the instant of legal death - to those doctors for treatment. Not to cryogenic temperatures. Although a whole mammal has not yet been cryopreserved to cryogenic temperatures and revived, science is moving in that direction. However, the success of cryonics does not depend on the status of current cryopreservation technology.
We believe that the damage caused by current cryopreservation is limited and can someday be repaired in the future. Molecular repair technologies like nanotechnology will provide techniques in the future that are not available today.
The cryonic cryopreservation state is sometimes described as "cryonic suspension," because the patient's state is unchanging and therefore "suspended in time. We don't believe so. Cryonics is based on the evidence of emerging technologies that are in development today.
This includes nanotechnology — the manipulation of individual atoms or molecules, which we believe will eventually allow mankind to build or repair virtually any physical object, including human cells and biological tissue. When will that happen? Robert A. Freitas, author of three-volume text Nanomedicine — selections from which are available via our Links page — has publicly stated, "I would not be surprised if the first cryonics revival was attempted by Ralph Merkle, in his essay 'The Molecular Repair Of The Brain' , observes, "Interestingly and somewhat to the author's surprise there are no published technical articles on cryonics that claim it won't work A literature search on cryonics along with personal inquiries has not produced a single technical paper on the subject that claims that cryonics is not feasible.
On the other hand, technical papers and analyses of cryonics that speak favorably of its eventual success have been published. It is unreasonable, given the extant literature, to conclude that cryonics is unlikely to work. Good news: you heard wrong!
And though the fee can be paid in cash, usually a member has a life insurance policy made that pays the amount to CI upon death. Members at a distance may have to pay local funeral director fees and transportation costs to Michigan to be cryopreserved. These payments are not made to CI, and are not included in the figures outlined above. Take a look at our Membership FAQ and the membership application forms to find out more.
And if you've got any questions, or want to talk about making special arrangements? Give us a call at or drop us an email at CIHQ aol. We're more than happy to help. Prices vary greatly. CI has by far the lowest prices of any cryonics organization.
Our procedures are deliberately cost-conscious, but they are based on experiments and professional evaluation, and in our judgment likely to give our patients the best chance possible for future recovery. The theory is that only the information contained in the brain is of any importance, and that a new body could be cloned or regenerated at some point in the future.
Neurocryopreservation requires less space and maintenance, and so costs less. We do not offer the neuro option because we believe that whole body preservation could certainly enhance the chances of successful revival. The process would probably kill an adult. In Switzerland, though, that could potentially be passed off as "euthanasia. However, cryonics is unregulated , controversial and unproven to work.
Technically, though, cryogenic freezing of non-humans can be used for less science-fictiony endeavors and is not synonymous with cryonics.
According to its website, KrioRus is the first Eurasian company to preserve people and pets, hosting 50 human bodies or heads and 20 animals in tanks in Moscow and St. They have so far only worked with people who have been declared legally dead and not Walt Disney.
There's no guarantee that the Swiss pursuit of pre-mortem freezing will go anywhere, let alone conquer mortality. Perhaps the field of cryonics is just trading one eternal, icy embrace for another. Newsweek magazine delivered to your door Unlimited access to Newsweek.
0コメント