I've been saying for a while that the cryonics industry will benefit from mainstream medical adoption of spin-off technologies. Today, Wired is covering the work of BioTime, a company working on therapeutic hypothermia - cooling the body to allow major surgery with less trauma. A quote: "Right now, we can easily bring animals back from two hours of absolute clinical death. No pulse, no respiration, no measurable brain activity." These animals show no signs of physical or neurological damage - interesting stuff. BioTime is a company working on extending cryonics technology from the more accepted end of the business, but there are clearly strong synergies with cryopreservations at Alcor and other cryonics providers.
Link: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/biotime.html?tw=wn_tophead_7