152 replies to this topic

[Ghostrider]

Yeah, I agree that it is the best option that we have...it just seems like in order for it to be effective, though, that one would need to begin cyronics while still alive. I don't know that much about biology...but in regards to 2, once oxygen is removed from the brain, does it not immediately ~6 or less minutes expire? And once it expires, it would seem that data is irreversibly lost -- for example, once I cut power to my computer, there is no way to tell what data was stored in the RAM at the instant I cut the power.

It would seem that in order for cyronics to truly work, one would have to go under while still alive. Meaning that once one does not feel confident about being able to live very much longer -- due to old age, that person simply checks into a facility and while still alive (but obviously unconscious) is frozen.

[Live Forever]

Yes, that would be optimal, but would be considered murder under current laws. (also, public perception would be against us) Unfortunately, until laws and attitudes change, this is the best that can be hoped for.

[Ghostrider]

Humm...I don't know if that's necessarily the case. I bet with a good lawyer, one could prove that it's not murder. Well, ok, a few things need to be proven first. First, it needs to be demonstrated that one can be frozen and then brought back from the frozen state, or at least proven that there is no reversible damage that occurs upon being frozen. Once this can be proven, then I don't see how it differs that much from a type of surgery that takes a really, really long time. Actually, in the state that I live in, it is legal for a doctor to kill someone who is terminally ill. These cases would probably be optimal for cyronics -- no loss over what would happen otherwise.

[U_N]

Full-body suspension through Cryonics Institute.

[garethnelsonuk]

Yeah, I agree that it is the best option that we have...it just seems like in order for it to be effective, though, that one would need to begin cyronics while still alive.  I don't know that much about biology...but in regards to 2, once oxygen is removed from the brain, does it not immediately ~6 or less minutes expire?  And once it expires, it would seem that data is irreversibly lost -- for example, once I cut power to my computer, there is no way to tell what data was stored in the RAM at the instant I cut the power. 

It would seem that in order for cyronics to truly work, one would have to go under while still alive.  Meaning that once one does not feel confident about being able to live very much longer -- due to old age, that person simply checks into a facility and while still alive (but obviously unconscious) is frozen.

Memory has been shown to be stored in physical brain structure - the inter-connections of dendrites, not the electrical activity. What this means is that as long as structure survives, memory is still there. Unfortunately with current technology reperfusion damage kicks in after an hour or so of ischemia if CPR is started, this says nothing about future technology.

With regards to the question of murder - unless the process can be fully reversed today and has undergone clinical trials, it would be murder or at least euthanasia.

[Live Forever]

Humm...I don't know if that's necessarily the case.  I bet with a good lawyer, one could prove that it's not murder.  Well, ok, a few things need to be proven first.  First, it needs to be demonstrated that one can be frozen and then brought back from the frozen state, or at least proven that there is no reversible damage that occurs upon being frozen.  Once this can be proven, then I don't see how it differs that much from a type of surgery that takes a really, really long time.  Actually, in the state that I live in, it is legal for a doctor to kill someone who is terminally ill.  These cases would probably be optimal for cyronics -- no loss over what would happen otherwise.

Oh, I totally agree that it should not be classified as murder. I just think it is a can of worms that the cryonics providers can not risk opening up, for the sake of all the patients.

Alcor already ran into some legal trouble for claims of "murder" and/or "assisted suicide", even without actively pursuing it. (imagine how much trouble they would be looking at if they actively pursued assisted suicides):
http://www.alcor.org...galbattles.html
(also, you could google "Dora Kent", there is a lot of information on that case out there on the web)

Also, some other reading on the boundaries between cryonics and what some might call "murder":
http://www.jetpress....f#search=murder

[bgwowk]

It would seem that in order for cyronics to truly work, one would have to go under while still alive.

This is a common misunderstanding. Unfortunately this misunderstanding is virtually universal among the general public. See the article

http://alcor.org/Lib...arySupport.html

which explains what legal death is really is. It's merely a legal event in which contemporary medicine makes a decision to terminate care. Although it is typically correlated with some degree of cerebral ischemia (stopped blood circulation to the brain), it usually has no bearing on the absolute survival status of the patient, or even whether they could be resuscitated using *present* technology. That is why anesthesia is used in cryonics, even after legal death. Similarly, anesthesia is often used when harvesting organs from donors declared dead based on cardiac death (so-called DCD). Death is not what people think it is.

For cryonics, there is also a deeper issue. From the standpoint of information theoretic death (the ultimate limit beyond which no technology could recover a patient), the way death is regarded in contemporary medicine and culture is completely arbitrary. People are trained by our culture to believe there is a deep metaphysical signficance to several minutes of cerebral ischemia, when in fact there is nothing biologically special about it at all. It's an injury, like any other injury, and is fixable in both principle and sometimes fact.

The belief that there is a specific well-defined event called "death" is a cultural ritual. Through this ritual, medicine stops care, bereavement begins, and personal religious beliefs take effect. The biological reality is that death really happens slowly over many hours after the heart stops, during which medicine is powerless to stop it. That's a horrible thought, which is why the death-as-an-event ritual is so much more comfortable. The problem is that today we *do* have a way to stop this process, at whatever stage it is at when a patient is found, but the old death-as-an-event ritual blinds people to this fact.

An article on "death" as a pathology:

http://alcor.org/Lib...reForDeath.html

Edited by bgwowk, 25 August 2006 - 01:02 AM.

[lunarsolarpower]

I think a good argument against neuropreservation at present is the fact that the body may have many clues about a person's personal history which could assist in reconstructing the personality. The strongest argument against neuropreservation at CI is the political environment (within CI and within society). On the other hand, I have long favored preserving the body and head separately (although this is not feasible in the current political environment). Until we come close to the time where reversible whole body cryopreservation is within sight, perfusing a whole body will necessarily compromise the quality of perfusion of the brain. I think that the brain should be the main objective. In that sense, CI procedures amount to a neuropreservation to the extent that our initial perfusion with vitrification mixture concentrates on the brain (even though the body remains attached and may subsequently be perfused with etylene glycol).

I agree with all of this 100%. However what makes it politically unfeasible to preserve and store the brain and body separately? It seems that this method of suspension would be everyone's first choice. It would allow the best possible preservation of the brain and presumably personality and memories. It would preserve the phenotypic information of the body resulting from the process of development rather than DNA. In addition in cases of extreme emergency the cryonics organization could transport the brains more easily and if absolutely necessary disgard the bodies without losing their patients compeletely.

The belief that there is a specific well-defined event called "death" is a cultural ritual. Through this ritual, medicine stops care, bereavement begins, and personal religious beliefs take effect. The biological reality is that death really happens slowly over many hours after the heart stops, during which medicine is powerless to stop it. That's a horrible thought, which is why the death-as-an-event ritual is so much more comfortable.

A thought-provoking perspective... It's actually quite obvious when you think about it, but our culture would much rather think as little about the beginning and end of life as possible.

[razor]

I am a journalism student and am working on a news feature about cryonics and people that sign up for it or have family members that have undergone the treatment.

If you are any of the following and you live in the Los Angeles area and would like to share your story/beliefs/experiences with me on camera please e-mail at:

helprazor@gmail.com

Are you any of these?

1. Are you signed up for cryonics?

2. Do you have a family member that has already undergone the process of cryonics?

3. Are you an employee at a cryonics center?

4. Are you a doctor that can speak authoritatively about cryonics on camera?

If you can answer 'yes' to any of the above and you live in the LA area please contact me at : helprazor@gmail.com
I would greatly appreciate your help!

***This is for a student project and has the potential to air on our school television station.***

Thanks.

[Ghostrider]

This is a common misunderstanding. Unfortunately this misunderstanding is virtually universal among the general public. See the article.

From the article:

First Aid courses teach that the brain begins to die four minutes after the heart stops. However research has shown that resuscitation without brain injury is possible after up to ten minutes of cardiac arrest (plus another ten minutes of low flow CPR) if cooling is started at the same time as CPR [2].

Ten minutes is not much time.

[Live Forever]

Ten minutes is likely a guess, I would think. Until the procedure has began to be reversible, there is likely little way to know exactly how much brain function is lost per minute (or second, or hour, or what have you).

[garethnelsonuk]

10 minutes is the limit of current technology after which reperfusion damage is likely, and without any calcium channel blockers or high-pressure thumper support. Dendrite structure has been shown to survive far longer, and even viable cells can be cultured for many hours following cardiac arrest.

[JediMasterLucia]

Which are you signed up for, or which are you planning to sign up for? There are certain benefits to either choice, Neuropreservation or Full Body preservation, or so it seems. If you feel strongly about one way or the other, please state why.

If I would let freeze me, I would choose for Full Body preservation.
Because not only my head is a part of me, but my whole body is.

[MichaelAnissimov]

Head only. Your body can be rebuilt based on your genetic information. Easy as pie.

[Infernity]

If I would let freeze me, I would choose for Full Body preservation.
Because not only my head is a part of me, but my whole body is.

..That means no head, and no head means no brain- means there is no you..

Head only. Your body can be rebuilt based on your genetic information. Easy as pie.

Michael- I agree on every word


-Infernity

[Infernity]

OMFG, more to full body?!

-Infernity

[bgwowk]

From the article:

http://www.alcor.org...arySupport.html

"First Aid courses teach that the brain begins to die four minutes after the heart stops. However research has shown that resuscitation without brain injury is possible after up to ten minutes of cardiac arrest (plus another ten minutes of low flow CPR) if cooling is started at the same time as CPR [2]."

Ten minutes is not much time.

The above article was written with the purpose of refuting the argument cryonics cannot work under any circumstances after legal death. It makes that refutation by pointing out that brains remain neurologically viable even by present-day criteria for the first several minutes (~10 minutes) after cardiac arrest, and blood circulation can be restored to maintain neurological viability if cryonics stabilization procedurs are begun during this time window. But there is a deeper point made in the second link I gave

http://www.alcor.org...reForDeath.html

and in much other cryonics literature. That point is that the brain changes that causes resuscitation to fail after a few minutes of ischemia are fundamentally minor and reversible with advancing technology. This is already happening with stroke. If therapies can be developed to reverse injuries caused by focal ischemia, there is no basic reason that therapies cannot be developed to reverse changes caused by global ischemia.

The role of cultural prejudice in resuscitation research should not be underestimated. Focal ischemia (stroke) is considered an injury to be treated. Global ischemia (whole brain "stroke", aka clinical death) is a THEOLOGICAL EVENT. This is nonsense. Global ischemia, even hours of global ischemia, is ultimately a disease or injury state that can be treated like any other. Someday it will be treated and reversed to within the limits of whatever information can be salvaged, which for the first few hours of clinical death is a lot of information. Living neurons have been cultured from human brains as long as 8 hours after clinical death.

[Jonathan Hinek]

I don't have the finances now, and I'm not eligible for insurance, so my prospects are limited. That said, I think neuro is more than a less expensive alternative.

Preserving a single organ, such as a brain, seems far more practical when you consider the limitations of contemporary techniques. In fact, I've seen cryobiologists often object to cryonics because of the effort to vitrify full bodies, which are far too complex to perfuse evenly. We know that current technology can vitrify simple organs, however, such as rabbit kidneys. The brain could be the next logical progression, just a few steps away. Whole body vitrification, on the other hand, seems like a jump in several orders of magnitude of complexity.

Of course it could also be argued that a poorly preserved body is better than no body at all. In my case, that just isn't true, my body's pretty useless. I'd rather wait for an upgrade.

--
Jonathan
The Cold Filter
A forum dedicated to reporting on and discussing cryonics and cryo related topics.

[tomjones]

Allthough I do not know if I ever will go for Cryonics... If I were, I would go for Neuropreservation.

~Jack

[AgentNyder]

Head only.  Your body can be rebuilt based on your genetic information.  Easy as pie.

Do you remember that scene in The Fifth Element?

[Jonathan Hinek]

The role of cultural prejudice in resuscitation research should not be underestimated.  Focal ischemia (stroke) is considered an injury to be treated.  Global ischemia (whole brain "stroke", aka clinical death) is a THEOLOGICAL EVENT.  This is nonsense.  Global ischemia, even hours of global ischemia, is ultimately a disease or injury state that can be treated like any other.  Someday it will be treated and reversed to within the limits of whatever information can be salvaged, which for the first few hours of clinical death is a lot of information.  Living neurons have been cultured from human brains as long as 8 hours after clinical death.

Btw, does anyone have any references to support this line of thought? Preferably references from a third-party not related to cryonics. I'm trying to convince a friend of mine who's a paramedic.

[bgwowk]

The role of cultural prejudice in resuscitation research should not be underestimated.  Focal ischemia (stroke) is considered an injury to be treated.  Global ischemia (whole brain "stroke", aka clinical death) is a THEOLOGICAL EVENT.  This is nonsense.  Global ischemia, even hours of global ischemia, is ultimately a disease or injury state that can be treated like any other.  Someday it will be treated and reversed to within the limits of whatever information can be salvaged, which for the first few hours of clinical death is a lot of information.  Living neurons have been cultured from human brains as long as 8 hours after clinical death.

Btw, does anyone have any references to support this line of thought? Preferably references from a third-party not related to cryonics. I'm trying to convince a friend of mine who's a paramedic.

This is a real problem because who other than cryonicists (people who believe they have a way of transporting patients to the far future) have enough interest in the disturbing question of human survival long after cardiac arrest to research and write about it? What doctor in his right mind would want to ponder the question of whether someone being wheeled off to the morgue is still "in there" when there is nothing to be done about it? Medicine and society have a vested emotional interest in keeping death simple and tidy, which is partly why ideas of cryonics are greeted with such hostility.

But enough of the perspecution complex. Mainstream medicine has broken though the 4-6 minute brain resuscitation barrier in experimental models going out to 13 minutes of warm cardiac arrest

http://www.ncbi.nlm....st_uids=2298837

Cats have been recovered after ONE HOUR of warm cardiac arrest with only loss of hippocampal and striatal tissue

http://www.ncbi.nlm....st_uids=3819770

Living neurons have been cultured 4 hours

http://www.ncbi.nlm....ist_uids=313541

and 8 hours

http://www.ncbi.nlm....st_uids=9482451

after clinical death. Cryonicists have written essays with copious references to primary literature showing that most of the brain is still "there" long after death

http://www.alcor.org...ldsonBrief.html

http://www.alcor.org...reForDeath.html

The issue has even been raised in mainstream medical literature with specific reference to cryonics

http://ccforum.com/c.../6/538/abstract

with excerpt at

http://www.alcor.org...ry/html/dcd.htm

One of my favorite quotes from a mainstream medical website is this one

http://nhnscr.org/home/faqs_q4.htm

It is quite clear that clinically defined death, which in most states is simply the cessation of cardiac and respiratory activity, does not mean that all of the cells of the body have died. It simply means that the cells required to maintain/sustain life, namely, cardiac muscle cells and diaphragmatic muscle cells no longer function adequately.

[Athanasios]

Hahahhaha. I was just waiting for you, bgwowk, to reply with a list like this. I knew it was coming. Nice.

Most of what I know, and what I have thought/read about cryonics, had stemmed from your writing here and elsewhere. Props!

P.S. I am in the middle of my application process for neuro.

[bgwowk]

Glad to be of service. Congrats on starting the signup process, cnorwood19. Cryonics is still a crude safety net, but it is a net nevertheless.

[Jonathan Hinek]

Yes, thank you, Dr. Wowk. Your posts here and on AU continue to be very enlightening. It's appreciated.

[drus]

I just want to say it's cool being among fellow cryonicists. I'm contracted for wholebody with CI, although I do agree that it's the brain that's the main thing here.

[garethnelsonuk]

Head only.  Your body can be rebuilt based on your genetic information.  Easy as pie.

In response to nootropikiamil's post on the terrence mckenna's writing in general about this:

We can already clone mammals, doing the same for cryonics patients if you ignore the ethical issues is rather simple. Clone them, raise the clone and rip out it's brain then put in the patient'sbrain. Sorting out how to do this in a more ethical manner is the more tricky part but not beyond the limits of physical laws.

[bgwowk]

We can already clone mammals, doing the same for cryonics patients if you ignore the ethical issues is rather simple. Clone them, raise the clone and rip out it's brain then put in the patient'sbrain. Sorting out how to do this in a more ethical manner is the more tricky part but not beyond the limits of physical laws.

I often wonder what it is that gets people so upset with the idea of human cloning. I am coming to the conclusion that a big part of it is just what you articulated: Abuse, or even murder, of clones sanctioned by claimed medical necessity.

Please do not mix cryonics up in this. Cloning has nothing to do with neuropreservation or cryonics. That cloning is somehow necessary for reversal of neuropreservation is a persistent myth. Technologies for reversing neuropreservation are a natural progression of technologies for TISSUE REGENERATION, not cloning. Nothing as crude as cloning or transplants will ever be used in cryonics. Those are primitive 20th century technologies.

[garethnelsonuk]

My point was that we already have the technology to do a main part of it now (reconstructing a body from DNA). This is only one method that could be used however but just happens to be the easiest (yet most unethical).

[bgwowk]

Okay, I see your point. The way I like to say it is, "Generation of whole bodies from a single cell is a technology already demonstrated in nature" or something like that.