Would cryogenics put you into suspended animation or would it just kill you? The crew looks into what happens when you're put on ice.
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Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey Laren, welcome to Forward Thinking. Well that podcast that let's in the future and says, have you ever seen a turtle get down? I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. That that is a good one. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's like a you have to make a hop from from the to the artist to the topic. So our other host, Lauren voc Obamba, is not with us today. She is off exploring the wonders of the sewers of New York City to find that mystical turtle gang. But she will be back with us next time, hopefully with pizza. Right, you never pay full price for late pizza, you don't. So let's uh, let's let's let's transition smoothly, if we will, into the actual topic for today. This is the least smooth thing that has ever happened. That's fine, I am used to that. At this point, we want to talk a little bit about a topic that plays into something we've chatted about many times before. It kind of taps back into that that idea of how could you attain immortality and we've talked about in lots of episodes. There was the Future of Blood Um, there was Who Wants to Live Forever? There was Human plus Transhumanism episode, and most recently in the Anti Aging Debate episode. And uh, there's this whole idea about how can we attain immortality. There are a lot of people who think that that actually is within our grasp. Ray kurtzwell as the person that we talked about a lot on this show as one of those people. Or whether whether or not immortality is possible at least radical life extension, right, yeah, And if not immortality, the idea of living perhaps indefinitely. And and uh, one of the fears that people have is that what if we do figure out how to do that, But I'm dead before that happened. I missed the window. So it's only my my darn kids that get to live forever. And I die before I get the chance. I paid for those jerks to go through school, and I don't get to live forever. Right, this is something that comes up. So the obvious solution here is put me on ice, you know, freeze me, buddy. And so today we're gonna be talking about cryonics. The idea of using extreme low temperatures and cooling to preserve the human body, or more specifically the human brain and sometimes the body, with the hopes that in the future it could be defrosted and brought right back to life. Right. And then the important thing here is that we are talking about freezing someone after they have been declared dead, as opposed to your entering some sort of suspended animation alien style. Right. That might be a cool topic to do a whole other time, like general suspended animation. Can can they put you in the tube and let you go to sleep for sixty seven years on the way to some other planet? It? Can you rip Van Winkle it? That's a that would be a great companion episode to this one. So we thought it might be interesting to kind of go through the history of cryonics as well as the theory behind it, and then some discussion about is it at all plausible? Um. But before we do that, we have to address it. It's not in our notes, but we have to address it. One of the most well known urban legend stories about cryo preservation Walt Disney, Oh, frozen under Pirates of the Caribbean. I should have known you were going this direction. That's not true. It's not true at all. I don't think he was kryo preserved in any manner. No, he was not. But that's one of those enduring urban legends I remember. Maybe it's not enduring today. I remember hearing it when I was a kid. But that is not the case. He was not cryo preserved in any way. Um, But that is one of those stories that you would hear and I love the audacity of but not just that he was put into cryogenic preservation, but that he he is under a major tourist attraction. Well. I love how this is a story that gets repeated in different variations throughout our culture, which is the famous or powerful person is not actually dead or not dead in the way you thought they were. You know, Elvis is still alive, Hitler is still alive, right, Yeah, anybody who's I mean, whether they were loved or hated, powerful or just well known, these these public figures. Uh we we we tend to want to come up with stories for why they're not actually dead and just rotting in the ground. There there's something that happened. And and the cryopreservation version is a new uh is a new technological take on this, because it used to just be like, oh, you know that there was a body double who died and they're secretly alive somewhere. But now you can tell the same legend while accepting the fact that they did die. You just say, well, they're frozen and they could come back, right, So this idea dates back quite a way. Is actually, the idea of resuscitating a preserved human being is a really old one, particularly if you take into account certain religions, and they're fact that the the important factors of those religions. Sure, and that's not what we're gonna be talking about today. And now, that, of course is a very old idea and uh, and there are lots of different ways you could believe in that. Some people believe in sort of the spiritual survival of death and you know platonic dualism idea where you have a soul that leaves the body on death and survives in some way. And some religions also believe in physical reanimation of the corpse at some kind of resurrection events or something like that, or reincarnation. There are lots of ways to go at it. Today we're gonna be focusing on the scientific idea of reanimation of the body and the brain, and and one of those early ideas. Uh. I mean, obviously you could sit there and think of like Frankenstein being an example of that. But there is also a nineteenth century short novel titled The Man with the Broken Ear. It's written by a French author, in which a biology professor puts a person in suspended animation by drying him out, removing the water, and then turning him into into exactly just becomes the the macho man Randy Savage's worst nightmare in that case. Yeah, yeah, So at any rate, that this was an idea being thought about well before anyone came up with the notion of cryo preservation. But the first really serious proposal to use refrigeration, or actually even beyond refrigeration we're talking about vitrification to preserve humans dates back to Robert Ettinger, who published a book in nineteen sixty two called The Prospect of Immortality. And uh, in that you can actually read that book, including an updated version of that book in PDF format on the Cryonics Institute's website. Who is the Cryonics Institute? What do you think? It's an organization that was founded by it and uh, and obviously it's an organization that that promotes and performs cryo preservation. I guess what I was asking was, when you get a sense of them, do you feel like they're a strong, legitimate scientific organization or maybe a little cranky. That's a difficult thing to answer. My personal belief we're getting a little ahead of this, but my personal belief is that cryonics is uh perhaps goes beyond optimistic into wishful thinking based upon just what we know right now. And so I think that their practices are based upon the most comprehensive scientific knowledge we have at this time, but there are huge gaps in that scientific knowledge that make a lot of very optimistic assumption. Yeah, it makes me think of of the underpants gnomes number one, Underpant's number two something, number three profit. It feels like there's a lot of some things in that. Well, we'll we'll talk about those missing steps in this episode. But yeah, the the version here would be step one free as you step two, uh, step three. Yeah. So Edinger was a physicist and mathematician. I say was because he has passed on. He is crow preserved, who not only wrote about chronics, but he founded that cryonics Institute as well as the Immortalist Society. So he was a futurist who was really thinking about the stuff, including trans humanism, so covering a lot of the topics that we've talked about here on forward Thinking. He died in twenty eleven at the age of nine two and was cryo preserved. UM and Edinger's premise in the book is as follows. This is a direct quote from chapter one of his book. The fact, at very low temperatures it is possible right now to preserve dead people with essentially no deterioration indefinitely. Number two, the assumption, if civilization endures, medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other cause of death. It is that second part, the assumption that a lot of people take exception to write the idea that um, just because civilization endures, that this is presupposing that what you are saying is actually possible. And if it is possible, then we agree, yes, we will one day figure it out. But what if it is not possible, that's the problem. Well. Also, just as stated, I'm sure Eddinger in some way anticipates this, but just in the simple way it was stated here. I might also take issue with the first part, the fact that it's possible to freeze people with essentially no deterioration, because I think what that's talking about there is it prevents the onset of natural decay. Your body does not go into sell death and continue to rot essentially. But they're the freezing process inherently does introduce uh quality of tissue preservation problems on its own. Yes, we'll talk a little bit more about those. Not only that, but there's no substantiation to the belief that that deterioration wouldn't have some other manifestation, like if the brain is an active that long, would would you be able to revive a person like you might be able to revive tissue and make and the body could technically live again, but there might not be a person there anymore. That's a that's a good point. I will also bring that up later, but we should for a moment take the cry onsts point of view, is that the cryonics advocates point of view, and say, what is the service claim to offer? So the basic claim is that cryo preservation will keep a body intact long enough for medical science to advance to the point where any damage that was endured by the body, including death itself, can be reversed. In fact, it has to include death, because cryo preservation is really about suspended death, not suspended life. And uh and so not only do you have to reverse the cryo preservation process itself, which is a tall order, but then also reverse anything that led to the person dying in the first place, whether it was a terminal illness or some other organ failure or whatever it might be. Right. Um, the important element here is preservation. The body and particularly the brain has to be preserved in order to give the future doctors the chance to revive the patient. And this does make sense because I mean, if you just if you have somebody die, you can't just leave them at room temperature and say we'll see if we can revive them later, because you're going to come back and they won't be there anymore. Well, what is there to revive except their bones? Right right? The actual deterioration will continue, bacterial will will break things down, so you have to slow all that or stop it as much as you can. So if you assume that the essence of the person is in some sense contained in the brain and the nervous system. Then the ability to preserve the person's ability or potential to come back to life rests in keeping the brain and the nervous system from changing from the state it was in dr life right, right, If it changes, then obviously that and we've seen this right, People who suffer brain damage can have different personality issues or intelligence issues depending on you know, where the damage was sustained. And uh, and that shows that there is this link between the brain and the self. I mean, that is that is important. Obviously. I think that is a robust finding of modern sciences. I'm trying to be respectful of people's beliefs here as well, but I mean science would show that the self, the self, and the brain are very closely tied together. If not, yeah, I mean I think pretty much, no matter what you believe about dualism or whatever, the brain is the seat of the self in the body. Yes, yes, so clearly you have to have a way of preserving that. And so crownics depends upon, like I said, an unsubstantiated premise, actually more than one unsubstantiated premise, but one big one, and that is that long term memory can be preserved if the brain is kept at a low enough temperature. Obviously, you want to have long term memory preserved because of the wise the person is not the person when they come back, right, they don't have any memory of who they are, then they are not you know, we brought Jack back, but Jack's not Jack anymore. This again features into some strange questions that I want to ask towards the end. Excellent, I can't wait to hear them. So there are some surgeries in which doctors will cool a patient's brain in order to reduce the metabolic rate that the brain is going through. So typically this isn't around twenty five degrees celsius, which is seventy seven degrees fahrenheit. That's boiling hot compared to the temperatures of cryopreservation. So cryonic says, hey, if we can slow metabolic processes and see patients make a recovery even after their their brains have been put into hypothermia, then if there's no or very little negative impact to their long term memory, maybe what we could do is freeze the brain. Essentially, vitrify is a better word, and we'll get into why that isn't later. You don't really want the brain to freeze to preserve long term memory indefinitely. And people would say like, oh, you made a big jump there to say that, because we can cool the brain down to slow down the metabolic processes and the person can make a recovery with little to no impact on the long term memory, it's an enormous jump to suggest that we could stop or essentially stop the metabolic process and bring it back and there'll be no effect. Um. The prevailing theory and messine is that the brain needs to be continuously active for memory to survive. So even in the surgery example I was giving, the brain is still active. It's just slowed down significantly, but it's not like it's stopped. And so it could very well be that the people who are arguing for cryonics are absolutely correct in their assumption, but we don't have the scientific evidence to prove that yet. Yeah. Now, we mentioned at the beginning that this is a fundamentally different idea than the idea of suspended animation, like sending the body into some form of Often the idea of cold temperatures is involved, but not necessarily they're they're just different ideas about how you might make a human hibernate to stop their metabolism so they don't age, they don't need to eat, and stuff like that. Demolition Man, the amazing documentary Demolition Man has a lot of that in there, or as we said, alien And in these cases it's it's not cryo preservation because you're not being preserved. You're sort of going into hibernation. You don't die first, right, So crime preservation it does involve suspending a person after they have died, suspended death as as Attinger argued, it should be thought of as as opposed to suspended animation because it was it's it's easier to do. For one thing, there are fewer ethical concerns, right because the person is already dead. So the biggest ethical concern is is it ethical for you to ask for money first too, for the service that you cannot guarantee will work. So you're you're selling something and you don't know for sure that what you're selling will ever pay off in the long run. That's the only real ethical concern is So, I mean, I think that's fine as long as you're perfectly clear with people what what the risks are sure. I'm just saying that it's it's more ethical. That approach is more ethical than saying, hey, uh, you want to live, you want to live to see you know, just go ahead and jump into this chamber. We're gonna lower your body temperature to minus hunter ninty six degrees celsius. Then that's gonna kill you, right like, that will kill you, and then maybe you can be brought back. That's where the ethical concern is, you could not get No one's gonna let that fly right. No one's gonna say, sure, go ahead, start killing people so that they can come back in a hundred years time. Um So, suspended death actually makes more sense, and it's easier to achieve from a social point of view. Not easier necessarily technologically, but perhaps culturally. Um and Inger in his book pointed out that there are different classes of death. He identified five, which miracle max would end up being three short because he said there's mostly dead, and then there's all dead. As it turns out, Inger says, no, no, no, there are quite a few. There's clinical death, which typically is when someone has stopped breathing and their heartbeat has stopped. That's often referred to his heart death. Yeah. Uh, there's biological death that Inger would argue in which he said, that's the state from which resuscitation is impossible under our current capabilities. There's maybe some ambiguity in there purposefully so and I'll get to why. Then there's cellular death. That's the actual degeneration of cells in our bodies. Uh. There's legal death. That's the condition that um uh so discouraging that a an attending physician will sign off on a death certificate, so essentially saying that a physician has determined that resuscitation is no longer possible and signs of death certificate. Then there's religious death um. And that definition depends upon the religion in question, and it relates to cryonics and how the religion frames death, because in some religions it might be considered um taboo to even think about cryo preservation. So ed Sure argued that clinical death is sometimes reversible, the idea that I'm gonna stopped breathing their hardest stopped, they can sometimes be resuscitated. Uh, And that the starting point for biological and cellular death isn't static. In other words, what might have been impossible, it might have been impossible to resuscitate someone under certain conditions twenty years ago, but today it is now possible. So he says though there therefore, the definition of biological death is fluid. It can change over time. It gets more and more narrow because we find new ways to bring people back. He also argues, this is this is evidence to support the idea that cryonics works, because if we keep pushing that that limit back further and further, why should we ever think that there's a limit to what we can do. Well, I think there's something to that, but then again, you will again, if we imagine someone dead and then left at room temperature, you will immediately start to encounter issues because somebody dead and left at room temperature is going to start to go through the degradation of tissues from which you cannot recover. You go through the process of cell death. Like we talked about, the individual tissues at every level throughout the body start to degrade in such a way that it's not just kind of like we don't have a way to fix that. Yet. You look at somebody who's been dead at room temperature for several days, and there's nothing you can think of that you could do that would bring this person back. It's like without without having some sort of perfect map of their neural Yeah, you'd essentially just need to reprint them from scratch. Yeah, if you at that point you're talking about cloning anyway. Uh. And it's and then you have the argument of well, is this the person or is just a copy of a person they actually have the experiences that the person had. That's a totally different realm of sci fi that we're not going to go into in this particular episode. But these are these are questions that remain unanswered. Uh. And obviously cryonics is all about getting the person into cryo preservation as quickly as possible after clinical death. So that doesn't happen really after legal death, I should say, yeah, exactly, so that you don't have this deterioration of tissue that would be at least problematic and at most a complete preventative from ever bringing the person back, no matter how advanced our technology gets in the future. So the first person to ever undergo cryogenic preservation, I mean true cryo preservation was James Bedford, and that happened in nineteen sixty seven. Now that actually happened a couple of years after, a guy named Evan Cooper published a book similar to Ettinger's. His book was titled and More Tality Physically Scientifically Now. Cooper founded the Life Extension Society and tried to convince someone, anyone, to undergo cryo preservation after death. He didn't. He was getting really of antsy about it. He was like, fifty million people die every year. Couldn't one of you say that I want to be cry o preserved? Uh? It starts out like he had a little air of desperation around him because it took a couple of years before he finally had an opportunity. Um he uh. He actually even said that the the organization would pay for the cryo preservation so the family of the deceased would not have to foot the bill for it, because he just wanted to get things started. One other person had actually been placed in crowd genning suspension temporarily. So there was a woman whose identity was never revealed, so we don't have a name, but the time between her death and the crowd preservation process was considered too great that she had spent too long out in uh In and sort of I think she was in a mortuary. So she wasn't like she had um, it wasn't like she was being stored at room temperature, but still wasn't a temperature cold enough for a cryo preservation. And it was it was cold enough to slow deterioration, but not to stop it. And so she was eventually removed from suspension and buried. So she doesn't really count as far as people in the cryonics field are concerned. Bedford was a psychology professor who passed away at the age of seventy three before being frozen. The Chronic Society of California performed the procedure and it's a it's kind of interesting, Um, he is still frozen. Uh he You can read all about James Bedford and they actually did a transfer I think in n which involved a thorough check to make sure that everything was as it should be and acording to the stuff I read, Uh, he was in good shape. Um, still frozen or vitrified as we should say. I keep saying that. I mean frozen is kind of like the layman term that you always hear when it comes to cryogenic preservation. Well, let's get into the actual specifics. Then, what do they do to you? And what's the deal with this vitrification. Sure, so there's a company called Alcore that does this, and they have a pretty thorough PDF that explains the process. So I'm going to use them as an example. Keeping in mind that cryonics companies there are few out there, and they all generally follow the same sort of approach. One thing I should point out is that way back in the day, the woman I was talking about who was put into cryogenic suspension, she wasn't actually treated with any chemicals to counteract ice crystal formation because she was she was really cryonically she was really not cryonically frozen. She was dipped in liquid nitrogen essentially um so that was a major difference. But today cryo preservatives are definitely part of the procedure. So first, Alcore says their first step is deployment and stand by, which is where they get a notification that a customer is uh is near death or has passed away, and they send a team to wherever that that customer happens to be there. The patient is how they refer to them to wherever the patient is as soon as they are aware of it, and at the moment that the patient is declared legally dead, assuming it has not already happened. The team can then take action UM and that reduces the amount of time between the pronouncement of death and cryo preservation, which is critical. Just as you were saying earlier, Joe, you know you can't waste any time or deterioration starts to happen. UM. So they then jump into stage two, which is stabilization. So the al core team begins to cool the patient's body to just above freezing to depress metabolism, and they restore circulation. They actually cause blood to circulate again in order to have oxygenated blood feed into the brain UM and they may as part of this also ventilate the lungs. They also administer anti clotting medications, very important in order to get the blood to continue to flow through the circulatory system. UM and if it will take any a long time to get the patient to olt cores facilities, they might replace the patient's blood with an organ preservation solution to protect against cold schemia. So cold schemia that's actually something that happens with organ transplants UM. It's the chilling of a tissue or organ during decreased blood perfusion or in the absence of blood supply. Uh So, when you are are removing an organ for transplant purposes and you're cooling it, that is the the cold is schemia. Um. And then you alsh have warm a schemia. That's when you have the process when you're warming the organ up and then and then performing the surgery to transplant into a patient. Yeah. But at this stage in the process, if we were not to introduce some certain types of chemicals, we would really encounter problems because the body has a lot of water content of it. Yeah. Have you ever noticed, Jonathan that say, if you get some food out of the freezer, like some fresh vegetables or fruits or meat or something like that, and then you cook it up, doesn't quite have exactly the same texture it would have if you just had it fresh. Yeah. Are you somehow moving this to cannibalism discussion. No no, no, no, no, no, that you can tell just at that level without any kind of scientific analysis, that something happens to organic tissues that are frozen to have water content. And one of the main things that's going on here that scientists have identified is the problem of ice crystal formation. Yeah, ice crystals. If they form in your in your tissues, what happens is the ice crystals end up squishing cells, damaging cells, and killing cells. So if ice crystals are forming in your blood, in your in your tissue, then you're you're suffering tissue damage and that's bad. Obviously, you know, you're creating more work for the amazing scientists of the future to reverse when they're trying to revive somebody. So one of the way, and obviously you don't want, Yeah, you don't want your prefrontal cortex to be like that frozen ocra that you got out of the freezer that was so soggy and gross. So instead you need to undergo some kind of procedure to prevent ice crystals from forming in the body when you go to these super cool temperatures. That brings us to phase three, which is the cryo protectant perfusion process. Uh So, in that stage, which takes place at the alcore facility, the patient's blood is replaced with vitrification solutions. So now we're going to finally talk about vitrification. So the standard meaning of the word is to turn into a glass. Essentially that that you're turned into glass through some process. You're not actually turned into glass now, but in this case, the alcre uses the term vitrification rather than frozen because the chemicals used to UH in this in this phase actually protect water from solidifying into ice um. So this actually allows the the the tissues and water to to not form ice crystals, thus preserving the cells, or at least that's the plan. So in this process the water in cells is partially replaced with these chemicals, and that is hopefully something that could be reversed in the future when you're being revived. Now, there are some problems with this process as well, the injection of the cryoprotectants, and I'm going to talk about a recent study towards the end of this episode that I think sort of addresses this problem. Okay, and then you have the final phase of this process, phase four, which is the cryogenic cool down UM. So the patient has cooled, usually in a series of cooling periods, because if you do it too fast then you can have really bad tissue damage. But the patient is cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, which is at the warmest negative three forty four degrees fahrenheit. Or nearly negative one six degrees celsius. And that's how they're kept at that temperature until there it's time to thaw them out. And uh, either that means that we figured out until the power goes off, Yeah, the money runs out something like that. But at any rate, that's how they stay and or barring any technical or financial failure. Uh. And at that temperature, physical decay is pretty much stopped. It is as so minor as to be negligible. And that's kind of what they talk about, as you know, indefinitely preserved until we're able to fix whatever the problems were. Now. Being preserved doesn't necessarily mean that you have your own space. You might be in a chamber with somebody else. And by chamber I mean no, but it's like it's like, think about, you know, a tube large enough to hold a couple of bodies, maybe as many as four in one case that I read about, Uh, and sometimes this requires some creative placement. One of the things I read sounded like the four people have been had to be placed very very carefully into a single chamber, and it was like putting together a puzzle to see which bits could fit where. Yeah, um, not pleasant to think about, definitely not dignifying to think about, but especially in the early days, there were some limitations because there weren't very many chambers in existence, so you kind of had to buddy up at any rate. Um Uh, you know, you're dead, so you might not really care at that point. But it's definitely another part of the reason that a lot of people don't necessarily think about because they're thinking like, oh, it's in those you know, clear acrylic chambers where you can look in and you see the face of the person. Like, no, that's not really the case. Um. And also we mentioned Joe, you mentioned about the brain being really important, and sometimes that's the only important thing people are really concentrating on. If you're looking at cryo preservation and you realize, like that price tag is really high, like that's gonna be a huge drain on finances, you look at the price tag and then you look at your body, you're like, well, does all this really matter all that much? Yeah, so you could go in for I didn't take care of it anyway. You can go in for neuro cryo preservation, which is a fancy way of saying they'll freeze your head and nothing else. So essentially you get surgically decapitated. It's a bargain and they, yeah, you don't need nearly as much space for neuro cryo preservation as you do for full cryoud preservation. And of course the idea behind that is that our brains have all the interesting stuff in them that makes us who we are, and hopefully, by the time we're able to start throwing people out, we'll also have the medical science necessary to create a new body, either through cloning or three D printing or some other means that we don't even anticipate right now. Yeah, so you would have your head sewn onto the body of your new dog or whatever body. No, yeah, hopefully you get a robot, a very very strong and powerful robot. This is sounding a lot like almost every episode of Futurama, right, That's another reason why I get a little skeptical. So yeah, so, so everything we've said before that is what is supposed to happen. It's so sort of like what the claim is, what would work in theory if everything goes according to plan and how the preservation process works. Now we enter the section of our outline titled but uh, yeah, how do you how do you wake up? Yeah? Yeah, like that's that's a big question. So, oh, um, has anyone figured out how to how to do that? No, No one has even close to figured out how to revive a dead person from a frozen state. The freezing does not keep you in a state. I mean, I think some people kind of think about it like this. Okay, if you freeze them, you just warm them back up. It's like you reverse the process and then they wake up. No, then you just have a warm dead body, not a dead body. Right, So, no one has figured out how to revive a dead person. I mean, we've figured out how to people. Yeah, people who might go into cardiac arrest or something like that, and there are some cases in which they can be brought back through through interventions. But yeah, this kind of dead person, we don't know what you do with that. The really most sincerely dead, as the Munchkins would say. Yeah, So not only have we not figured out that at this point, as of right now, no mammals have ever been cooled to cry o preservation temperatures and revived. Now, there have been some kind of weird, creep but interesting experiments. Yeah, and those experiments usually involve mammals that have been uh operated on so that their blood has been swapped out for some sort of protective solution, and then the animals were cooled to blow freezing, then rewarmed and revived, and that has worked out. I think dogs and monkeys largely have. I think it doesn't work out all the time. Doesn't work out all the time. It's not a successful but it's one of those things where there has been some success. But cooling down to freezing and cooling down to minus one celsius is that's a pretty significant gap. So yeah, So we we mentioned earlier all the different assumptions that cry preservation depends on. So it depends on the ability to successfully and safely reverse the freezing process and revive the brain. It also depends on medical advancements, advancements to cure whatever problem killed you in the first place, or else this will be a very brief and unpleasant revival. It makes me think of the sim sins like like looking for a cure for nineteen stab wounds in the back. We're exactly, yeah, um, And then of course there's imagine you only got your head preserved, you've got the problems to deal with their Yeah, yeah, none, there may be a shortage of robotic bodies at the time you wake up, which would be very unfortunate. None of these are terribly trivial, right, These are all pretty tough problems. But we mentioned also problems associated with the freezing itself and then apart from whatever killed you naturally. Yeah, so freezing tissues to this temperature sometimes results in fracturing. It can actually be fractures that happen, and I mean even with the vitrification. Yes, it's it's when you're getting two temperatures that low, it's something that can happen. And uh, you know, the cryonics groups strive very hard to try and preserve people without any damage, but it's difficult to predict and even if you're taking very great care, it can still happen. Some of the organs in our body are quite large, and when they get cool to those temperatures, there could be these fractures, which that's definitely a problem. Um. There are several kronos companies that are exploring other options that would allow for the preservational bodies at higher temperatures to reduce the chance of these fractures forming in the first place. So some vapor uh techniques that are being experimented on, but as far as I know, I haven't been deployed in any way. But the idea being that you could preserve bodies at a higher temperature still be below freezing, significantly below freezing, but well above minus one celsius. And uh. There's also been some pretty big black eyes on the history of croyonics, some some notable and tragic failures. Well, I mentioned earlier about the power going off. I know that's been a problem before, right, Yeah, So here's the deal. We're gonna talk about some pretty awful stuff here, and I just wanna I want to preface this by saying that reading about these was really hard on me because I just put myself in the mindset of a family member, someone who who agreed perhaps to a wish or let's say that that that the deceased person wanted to be crygenically frozen, and the family members honoring this wish and thinking about going through the grieving process once when the person passes away, and then again after a failure is a really tough thing to think about. Now, not everyone had that reaction. Some people say I went through and made my peace after they died, and to me, this was an unfortunate thing, but it was something that they had wanted. It wasn't something I believed and I did all of the sense of obligation. I am at peace with what has happened, even though it was unfortunate, that kind of stuff they might have had, might have had an understand from the beginning that this was a you know, an outside chance anyway, an optimistic long shot that was likely to fail, and possibly a long shot that would pay off well after they themselves had passed away, right Like it could be like, yeah, it's gonna be sixty more years before this even has a chance to pay off, meaning that the children of the people who were putting them to cryos storage at the beginning may not live to see it actually pay off in the end. Well. First of all, everyone who was frozen before nineteen seventy four, with only one exception, has since been thought and buried or cremated. So every single person who was put into cryonic suspension before nineteen seventy four is dead dead, except for James Bedford, that first person who was put into cryo preservation. He is still in cryo preservation, largely because he was transferred to the care of relatives for a while who were able to uh make certain that his his cryogenic chamber was still being serviced with liquid nitrogen to keep it at the right temperature, while some of the other facilities suffered massive problems. So why were the folks before nineteen seventy four thought out in the first place. In some cases, it was because the company that oversaw their care went out of business. That's a huge problem, right, Like, if you are entrusting a company to be a caretaker and keep your your chamber at the proper conditions so that one day you have a chance of coming back, you've got to hope that that company sticks around. And that's not always the case. Um. So here's an example. Cryo Care, which started off as a cosmetic freezing company, was one of those And by cosmetic, I mean they weren't looking for cryo preservation. They were looking to preserve the appearance of a person, but not to preserve their chance to come back to life. So they weren't treated with cryo preservatives necessarily. But some of them, the people who were put into cryogenic suspension were kind of handed over to Cryo Care as the facility to take care of the chamber UM in the meantime, And so Cryo Care went out of business a couple of years after it launched, and the owner ended up turning all the patients over to other companies or back to the family members who more often than not, uh had the body thought so that it could be buried or cremated. Um. Quite a few customers thought out after payments dried up, which is pretty grim to think about. UM, that the money ran out and so they were no longer being cared for, and then they ended up having to be buried. It's pretty It was pretty expensive to keep people in storage, depending upon the company. Now that's not it's not necessarily a continuously paid into system like the Cryonics Institute. I think it's twenty eight thousand dollar dollars. But it's a one time thing. So you pay twenty eight thousand dollars and they will care for the cryogenic preservation indefinitely until such time as it's it's ready to you know, be revived or crouch. The Cryonics Institute no longer exists. Other companies it's like a regular payment that you have to keep up with. And obviously if that money dries up. That's a problem um. In at least a few cases, the chambers holding people or sometimes multiple people have failed and liquid nitrogen boiled off, as obviously it at room temperature, it will just turn into a gas, which meant that bodies would end up warming up to beyond cryod preservation temperatures. One such case involved the remains of a woman named Mildred Harris and an eight year old girl named geneviev De la Potteri, and the two had been placed in a single capsule and stored in a crypt in Chatsworth, and the capsule seal was not vacuum tight, and liquid nitrogen started to boil off, and it left the two without proper preservation for what was quoted as a long interval. Ultimately, Chatsworth was considered to be um like a uh like like like the Boogeyman of the cryonics industry, because nine people were frozen and stored up Chatsworth and all nine were ultimately thought and buried later. And so when people talk about cryonic disaster or chronic failure, Chatsworth is one of the names that pops up because this particular facility just had that kind of issue, And by facility, I mean they were storing these these uh, these chronic chambers in crypts. So it's pretty grim all around. Early work had also been really primitive, like I mentioned where you know, you didn't have the cryod preservatives, so that was it was pretty obvious that that there wasn't going to be any feasible way of bringing those back. So there were a lot of early failures or shortcomings that um definitely created a negative point of view of the cryonics industry, something that a lot of the organizations now are working very very hard to turn around. Obviously, yes, certainly, And one of the things is that cryonics is we We've said the word a few times, but it's sort of inherently optimistic because it says, yeah, I know, we don't have all this stuff figured out now, but we're just gonna put all our faith in the future. The future they'll figure it out. We're gonna hit pause and by the time, uh, we're just gonna wait for a time when they figure out how to fix the problem and then we'll play again and everything will be fine. Yeah, And so that that could be the case, that could not be the case with what we're going to figure out in terms of how to revive people out of thought them safe, how to bring them back, how to cure whatever was the problem with them to begin with, be it nineteen stab wounds to the back or some much more common UH cause of death. But we're also making progress with the cryo preservation process itself, and so that's something that is kind of heartening about the potential future of cryonics is we're learning more about smarter ways to cool people's bodies with the hope that they could one day be resuscitated right to do less damage in the preservation process. So if in fact we do come up with a means of reviving people, we haven't created more work for ourselves exactly, but we do still have a long way to go. And I want to give one example of an interesting study I came across recently. So in December, there were a couple of scientists named Gregory Fahey and that that's the name I've seen come up quite a few times in UH in cronics research and Robert McIntyre working for a company called twenty one Century Medicine, and they published a study in the journal Cryobiology explaining this new technique. They had for super cooling brain tissue without destroying it, and their their technique is called alde hyde stabilized cryo preservation or a s C. Actually first read about this in a New Scientist article by Helen Thompson from February of this year, and that's a that's a good simple explanation if you want to look it up and check it out. But let's say you you want to freeze somebody's brain. How do you do it? Well, as we've mentioned before, you know the body tissues have trouble with with ice crystal formation if you just super cool it, So you've got to go through this process we talked about earlier with vitrification the cryo protectant chemicals, but those need to be spread throughout the brain very quickly in order to prevent decay from setting in while you're doing it, and that causes its own kind of damage. So that's where this new technique comes in, the a s C. So first, in this process, you drain all of the blood from the brain and then you perfuse the brain, meaning that you you spread a liquid all throughout all of the vessels and little nooks and crannies in it. You perfuse the brain with a chemical called gluteralde hyde, and this stops decay from setting in, allowing them to profuse the cryoprotectant chemicals in this case it would be ethylene glycol at a more moderate pace, which prevents the damage from this process. And once the chryo protectants are added, then you can super cool or vitrify the brain down to a hundred and thirty five degrees celsius and storied at this temperature indefinitely minus. Is that not what I said? Now you just said, well, thank you for correcting me. I mean, if you dropped it down to celsius, that's one hot tamali, that's one hot rabbit brain. They tested this on rabbit brains, rabbit brains, and pig brains. So they found that one rabbit brain tissue preserved in this way could be rewarmed without damage to the neuronal structure or and this was interesting to the synapses between neurons because this uh, this whole preservation of the brain state, including the connections between neurons, has been identified as one of sort of the holy grails of preserving a brain, correctly known as the connectomes sort of you know how everything connects. You don't just want the cells where they were, You want all of the cell connections in place, and this is difficult to do. So they did this to a rabbit brain and then they rewarmed it, looked at it. They examined slices of the brain tissue with an electron microscope, and they said that the preservation level looked excellent. Well that's that's encouraging news. But uh, I see that You've got a lot more notes in this sect. Yes, Well, one thing I found is that cryonics kind of like aging reversal research. I think the link here might be that both both give us the promise of HAPs avoiding death, which we talked about recently. Sometimes that lends itself to inaccurate media coverage. So I saw some headlines referring to this research that made it sound like a rabbit brain had been quote revived after cryopreservation. I just want to make clear nothing of the kind took place. This was a dead rabbit brain that was brought back still quite dead. But what was cool about it was that in the freezing process they've been able to do this with with very strong protection of the cell to cell structure of the brain. So two things that came back dead but intact. Yeah, and the second thing is Joe. Those headlines are going to click themselves. But there's they're more complications too, because, as you might be able to guess, given its properties and what it could do in this research, that glut aalda hide stuff is not something you would ever want to put into the brain of a person or animal who needed to continue living. It's toxic, it's not good stuff. So while this process is a great step forward in terms of what we know about how to preserve brain tissue and it's connect them intact, it doesn't mean that we've discovered the secret to perfect to nero cryo immortality, because you've you've sort of solved one problem but created another one. You've had to fill the brain with this poison in order to keep its structure safe from the process. Clearly, the the cryonics experts of the future will have some sort of brain bath. Well they you know, they do talk about that. So they say, well, maybe we're introducing we're avoiding one problem that cannot be dealt with by future technology, but by introducing another problem that can be dealt with by future technology interesting, Uh, but but ultimately we don't know, you know, we never know if something like this is going to work, So I don't know. Cryonics to me is a very interesting realm of human technological and side different exploration because it leans so heavily on this optimistic impulse it's all it's it's it's a field inherently about what we will be able to do in the future, which we can't know. It actually reminds me a lot of how some of the folks I know, uh, this more relevant several years ago than now, we're almost dismissive of climate change, not because they didn't think it was happening, but because they were convinced we would teck our way out of it. Yeah, we'll engineer our way out of the problem. I've heard this from people yet. So it's one of those things where you you think like you sound to me like you're making an excuse to not change your behaviors exactly. Well, I mean, I certainly hope that we can engineer our way out of climate change, but you shouldn't depend on that, right Whereas if you're talking about cryo preservation, I'm not saying that two are equivalent. Because the person is dead. Right, So the person is dead, and you're either going to bury the person, cremate them, donate them as a science, whatever the person, whatever the person's wishes were, If the person's wishes were for cryogenic suspension and or cryopreservation, if you prefer, and they had set aside the money to have that happen. I don't see it as inherently worse than those other options, because there is Even though you might say like this, this whole vision is optimistic to the point of folly. If you if you think that's true, it's no worse than just burying the person or cremating them or anything else, although except for the cost, which, depending on what your plans are to do with your remains, might be about as expensive. Um. But depending on again, on the cryonics company that you're talking about. I guess you could also argue that you are perhaps funding someone who you can't be entirely certain they sincerely believe that what they're doing will work. That's in other words, you might be worried that you're giving a conman money. Um. Now, well, hopefully you do enough research to be able to sell the difference. Yeah, it's It's weird though, right, because you're talking about something that has an unproven benefit, and so you could argue that, right. But you could argue that exactly because if we had already figured it out, then the person wouldn't have died in the first place. But if you could argue that these these companies, whether they are knowingly engaged in it or not, could all be in the snake oil business, sure, and so that could be your other objection is that you're giving money to people who are selling what could turn out to be false hope. The thing is, we just don't know right now. It could turn out to perfectly work in the future, or it could turn out that it's a complete bust. Can I introduce another weird concern hit me that goes way beyond all of the practical medical stuff we've been talking about. Let's imagine you can do all of this. You can revive, you can freeze them without damage, you can bring their nervous system and brain back online. I still might have some questions, uh, like we'd have to go into some weird territory about death in the nature of conscious experience, uh, And questions like this might be kind of unavoidable in this territory. So how about the assumption of continuity of consciousness? Like, we don't understand exactly how the sense of continuity of consciousness is created, but people are just assuming that if they get their brain presumed preserved for a long period of time, and then they get it thought out, the brain will still be able to somehow reignite that same continuous conscious experience you've always had. Um. I don't know why that wouldn't be true, but do we At the same time, I know that it would be true. Like, on one hand, you go to sleep every night, you wake up in the morning, and you don't get the sense that the person you worry yesterday died and now you're a new person. Right, there's some kind of wait, you don't get that, there's some kind of sense of continuity there. Uh, And the same thing happens. Maybe even if you go under general anesthesia for surgery or some kind of deep dreamless you know, void of consciousness. Still when you come out of it, you do have this sense of there there's continuity from person to person. I'm still the same person. I can give you a perfect example of this that what doesn't date back to very long ago, which was when I had that allergic reaction. I blacked out, and in that I have no memory of anything that happened between the moment when I blacked out in the moment when I regained consciousness. I appeared to be conscious because my eyes were still open, but I was unresponsive. Um, and I have no memory of that that that what could have been five seconds, it could have been five minutes, it could have been an hour. I have no clue. And uh, and yet I definitely feel like I'm the same person that I was before the allergic reaction, except for the fact that now I can't eat trump. Yeah, yeah, okay. But so this is the same kind of question we've talked about before with like could you transfer your mind into a hard drive? Well, I mean what if you could, But you couldn't create a continuous conscious experience. So yeah, there's a copy of your brain and it can behave like you did, but you're just gonna die and that's just the end of your consciousness and you're dying. Thought might be gosh, I'm kind of a jerk. Yeah that's a possibility, right, And now's yourself. Now there's another jerk in a computer somewhere, and you don't get to be that jerk, just like not only do I not get to be that jerk, but that jerk is effectively immortal, right yeah, okay, yeah, And so now we've never vitrified somebody's brain for two hundred years and brought it back to life. I guess it's just seems reasonable to assume that that if you brought that brain back to life, somehow, the first person ex perience of the owner of that brain originally would somehow be reignited, it would come back with it. But I don't know. I mean, is that the case. That's what happens when you go under general anesthesia for a certain number of hours. But can we just assume the same thing would happen if you are dead for two hundred years? Well, I mean I think if you were to preserve the connect home, yes, because I would believe that the self would be represented in that that connection, of that series of connections within your neural system. I mean, I don't have any problem understanding that it would be that it would be like you, that it would have your memories, that it would behave like you. But I guess what I'm talking about is that continuity of conscious experience? I think I think it, Assuming it all works the way they envision it working, I would imagine it would be not unlike the experience of waking up after what you perceived to be dreamless sleep, where you have no memory of the sleeping part, but you remember what happened the day before, Only in this case it would be two hundred years in a day ago. I mean, I don't think that. I think that's not an unreasonable assumption. But it's just weird that we've we've never experimented within saying even there's to know, right it's in another way right now for us to know. The only way to ever find out is if we in fact reach a point where we can revive someone from cryo preservation and then say, so, tell me about yourself. On a similar note, can you imagine how alien and weird it would be to be revived in a time decades removed from your own, where everyone you have known is gone, and perhaps even two or three generations after everyone you have known is gone, they're also gone because it's been that long. Depending upon how long it takes us to get to a point where assuming this is possible, we figure it out. Yeah, I mean, what if you're cryo preserved and then you're brought back after the singularity or something like that, and you the world is just unrecognizable and you're like, well, great, I'm gonna be a janitor, except I can't be because all the robots have all the jobs and I'm really just a sack of meat that's been left behind by everybody else. And congratulations, you'll You'll live as obsolete forever. It's it's a weird thing to consider. I mean, it's one of the things that is interesting about this show is that we get to look at all of these different ideas and hypotheses um and when you take each one in in turn and you just examine it, you know, completely secluded from all others, you can start making some pretty broad statements about your opinion whether or not it's feasible or not feasible. And then if you start to say, well, let's just assume that these other things we've talked about do become reality, how does that impact this other thing that we're talking about now, And you start to realize that if in fact, all the topics we cover and forward thinking all word to come a pass, it would be a really weird future. Yeah, I mean I feel like sometimes when we're trying to think about what the future implications of a certain technology or line of research would be, it's almost as if everything else stayed the same as it is today, but just that one thing works out. And this is why predicting the future is is so difficult to do, right, because not only can some other element come in and affect what you're thinking about, and it's completely impossible to anticipate. Therefore, there's no way to make an accurate prediction because you cannot anticipate this other event, but you're also often taking this thing out of context, the context of the world that we live in and the other things that can affect it. Uh and and thus it makes it even more difficult to make predictions of what the future will be. Um. But if we didn't do that, we wouldn't have this gig, so we kind of have to. But yeah, it's I propose it that we replace it with a ultimate fighting gig. Yeah, I'm gonna need to get into some shape. Then. I'm in a shape right now, but it's not one that's good for ultimate fighting. Uh. Well, you could just could be cryo preserved and come back at a time where it's easy to get in shape instantly, right, right, Or maybe come back at a time where everyone is just physically weaker than I am. Mentally they're all there, but physically they're just pathetic. And then I could just run rampant over the finally year time to be a total bully. Right, It's what I've dreamed of for all these years, so so much lunch money. Who knows how, maybe that's what I would dream of. Cry preservation. Actually that's the thing, the other thing, right, Like, if you're freezing someone to the point or vitrifying them to the point where you have halted the metabolic process, well, I guess we can be pretty certain that you wouldn't have like decades long dreams. Everything, I mean, everything would be done. I mean, if you don't dream under general anesthesia, I can't see why you would dream after being dead and frozen. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't have to worry about waking up and like, because I think there's probably some science fiction story out there where someone wakes up from uh probably more likely suspended animation than crywd preservation and talks about the horrors that they saw that they witnessed while they were in that. Um. If you want to watch an incredibly goofy movie about this, you should watch Sleeper, which is a early Woody Allen movie in which he is put into he has woken up after being in cryod preservation for decades and finds out that all the things that we believed in the in the early seventies about health and wellness are are false and uh and that he should have been smoking and drinking the whole time. Um. Yeah, fantastic. It's a very goofy, goofy movie. But at any rate, guys, if you have any thoughts about this, or you have suggestions for future episodes, you get in touch with us and let us know our email addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. At Twitter we are FW thinking, and if you search fw thinking in Facebook search bar, we'll pop right up. You can leave us some essenge there and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, I'll visit forward thinking dot com. 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