Fight Aging!

Cryonics Magazine is the in-house publication of cryonics service provider Alcor, available to members of the organization. Articles from recently issues sometimes make their way online to the magazine site, and are usually well worth reading.

What is cryonics? It is the provision of indefinite low-temperature storage for the body and brain immediately following death. For so long as the pattern of fine tissue structures that encode your mind survive intact, there is the chance that future technologies can restore you to life. This should be within the capabilities of a mature molecular nanotechnology industry, able to build sophisticated molecular machines to repair cells, remove cryoprotectant chemicals, and perform all the other myriad tasks needed to restore a cryopreserved individual to life. How long until that industry arrives? The answer to that question doesn't really matter when you are preserved: you have all the time in the world, for so long as the cryonics industry continues forward robustly.

Cryopreserved individuals are vitrified, not frozen, these days. Freezing tends to produce significant ice-crystal damage, while vitrification does not: tissues turn to a glass-like state, suffused by cryoprotectant chemicals, the structure well preserved at all levels. There is still the issue of potential fracturing, but that too can be addressed. Vitrification is under development in the broader cryobiology industry for use in long-term storage of organs for transplant, and reversible vitrification for that use isn't too far from prime time. Undoing vitrification for a human brain in the field is obviously a little way beyond doing so for blood vessels or an animal kidney under laboratory conditions - but it's just an advance.

One of the underlying assumptions in cryonics is that any future society capable of restoring a vitrified individual should have absolutely no problem with building a new body and rejuvenating old tissues - that being a much easier challenge. If you can mass-precision-engineer molecules and molecular robots to the degree needed to undo cryopreservation, then rearranging molecules to undo mere damage to cells is no great issue. That seems reasonable given what we expect to see in the next fifty years of development in medicine, nanotechnology, and related fields. Beyond that, of course, the sky is the limit.

Here are a few recent pieces from Cryonics Magazine, in no particular order. I think that you'll find them interesting:

Resuscitation Research Can Start Now!

A major obstacle to strengthening the case for cryonics is the perception that meaningful research aimed at resuscitation of cryonics patients cannot be done today. Attempts to be more specific than evoking the need for a technology that can manipulate matter at the molecular level are considered to be vague and unproductive. Clearly, such a stance is an open invitation for skeptics to claim that cryonics advocates have not much more to offer than hope and optimism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is there a lot of relevant empirical research that can be conducted today, a focused investigation into the technical and logistical challenges of resuscitation can also define cryonics research priorities and refine the stabilization and cryopreservation procedures that we use today.

[Of interest] is the 1991 article "'Realistic' Scenario for Nanotechnological Repair of the Frozen Human Brain" where the individual forms of mechanical and biochemical damage (ice formation, protein denaturation, osmotic damage, etc.) are catalogued and repair strategies are discussed in biological terms. Describing the various forms of damage at such a detailed level provides a meaningful context within which to discuss the technical feasibility of cryonics in rather specific terms.

Effects of Temperature on Preservation and Restoration of Cryonics Patients

An understanding of probable future repair requirements for cryonics patients could affect current cryostorage temperature practices. I believe that molecular nanotechnology at cryogenic temperatures will probably be required for repair and revival of all cryonics patients in cryo-storage now and in the foreseeable future. Current nanotechnology is far from being adequate for that task. I believe that warming cryonics patients to temperatures where diffusion-based devices could operate would result in dissolution of structure by hydrolysis and similar molecular motion before repair could be achieved. I believe that the technologies for scanning the brain/mind of a cryonics patient, and reconstructing a patient from the scan are much more remote in the future than cryogenic nanotechnology.

Cryonicists face a credibility problem. It is important to show that resuscitation technology is possible (or not impossible) if cryonicists are to convince ourselves or convince others that current cryonics practice is not a waste of money and effort. For some people it is adequate to know that the anatomical basis of the mind is being preserved well enough - even if in a very fragmented form - that some unspecified future technology could repair and restore memory and personal identity. Other people want more detailed elaboration.

What Do We Really Know About Fracturing?

The goal of any credible cryonics organization is to develop reversible cryopreservation to avoid passing on problems with the cryopreservation process itself to the next generation. While there is a lot of recognition for the need to eliminate cryoprotectant toxicity, it is rather obvious that it will not be possible to restore integrated function in a fractured brain. Despite all the articles and discussions that have been devoted to the topic of intermediate temperature storage, we do not seem to know much yet about fracturing in (large) tissues that are well equilibrated with a vitrification solution and subjected to a responsible cooling protocol. While [the] data seem to support the use of the newer vitrification solutions for reducing fracturing, controlled studies of fracturing in vitrified tissues will need to be conducted in a lab to really understand what we can expect under ideal (non-ischemic) circumstances.