Cryonics

The year is 1967. A British secret agent has been "frozen," awaiting the day when his arch nemesis
will return from his own deep freeze to once again threaten the world. That day finally arrives in 1997.
The agent is revived after 30 years on ice, and he saves the world from imminent destruction.
You'll probably recognize this scenario from the hit movie, "Austin Powers: International Man of
Mystery" (1997). Cryonics also shows up in films like "Vanilla Sky" (2001), "Sleeper" (1973) and
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). But is it pure Hollywood fiction, or can people really be frozen and
then thawed to live on years later?
The science behind the idea does exist. It's called cryogenics -- the study of what happens to
materials at really low temperatures.Cryonics -- the technique used to store human bodies at
extremely low temperatures with the hope of one day reviving them -- is being performed today, but
the technology is still in its infancy.
In this article, we'll look at the practice of cryonics, learn how it's done and find out whether humans
really can be brought back from the deep freeze.

What is Cryonics?
Cryonics is the practice of preserving human bodies in extremely cold temperatures with the hope of
reviving them sometime in the future. The idea is that, if someone has "died" from a disease that is
incurable today, he or she can be "frozen" and then revived in the future when a cure has been
discovered. A person preserved this way is said to be incryonic suspension.
To understand the technology behind cryonics, think about the news stories you've heard of people
who have fallen into an icy lake and have been submerged for up to an hour in the frigid water before
being rescued. The ones who survived did so because the icy water put their body into a sort of
suspended animation, slowing down their metabolism and brain function to the point where they
needed almost no oxygen.
Cryonics is a bit different from being resuscitated after falling into an icy lake, though. First of all, it's
illegal to perform cryonic suspension on someone who is still alive. People who undergo this
procedure must first be pronounced legally dead -- that is, their heart must have stopped beating. But
if they're dead, how can they ever be revived? According to scientists who perform cryonics, "legally
dead" is not the same as "totally dead." Total death, they say, is the point at which all brain function
ceases. Legal death occurs when the heart has stopped beating, but some cellular brain function
remains. Cryonics preserves the littlecell function that remains so that, theoretically, the person can be
resuscitated in the future.

How is Cryonics Performed?

If you decide to have yourself placed in cryonic suspension, what happens to you? Well, first, you
have to join a cryonics facility and pay an annual membership fee (in the area of $400 a year). Then,

when your heart stops beating and you are pronounced "legally dead," an emergency response team
from the facility springs into action. The team stabilizes your body, supplying your brain with enough
oxygen and blood to preserve minimal function until you can be transported to the suspension facility.
Your body is packed in ice and injected with heparin (an anticoagulant) to prevent your blood from
clotting during the trip. A medical team awaits the arrival of your body at the cryonics facility.
Once you are transported to the cryonics facility, the actual "freezing" begins. Cryonics facilities can't
simply put their patients into a vat of liquid nitrogen, because the water inside their cells would freeze.
When water freezes, it expands -- this would cause the cells to simply shatter. The cryonics team
must first remove the water from your cells and replace it with a glycerol-based chemical mixture
called acryoprotectant -- a sort of human antifreeze. The goal is to protect the organs and tissues
from forming ice crystals at extremely low temperatures. This process, called vitrification (deep
cooling without freezing), puts the cells into a state of suspended animation.
Once the water in your body is replaced with the cryoprotectant, your body is cooled on a bed of dry
ice until it reaches -130 C (-202 F), completing the vitrification process. The next step is to insert your
body into an individual container that is then placed into a large metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen at
a temperature of around -196 degrees Celsius (-320 degrees Fahrenheit). Your body is stored head
down, so if there were ever a leak in the tank, your brain would stay immersed in the freezing liquid.
Cryonics isn't cheap -- it can cost up to $150,000 to have your whole body preserved. But for the
more frugal futurists, a mere $50,000 will preserve your brain for perpetuity -- an option known
asneurosuspension. Hopefully for those who have been preserved this way, technology will come up
with a way to clone or regenerate the rest of the body.
If you opt for cryonic suspension, expect to have some company. Several bodies and/or heads are
often stored together in the same liquid-nitrogen-filled tank.

A FAMOUS HITTER IS FROZEN IN TIME

Since his death in 2002, baseball legend Ted Williams has been stored in a 10-foot-tall, stainless steel container
at Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, the world's largest cryonics facility. His head is reportedly being
stored in a separate container.
But the story doesn't end there. After his death, the famous slugger became embroiled in a rather bizarre
custody battle. His daughter, Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell, fought in court to get her father's body back so that
she could have him cremated and his ashes sprinkled over the Florida Keys, which she claims was his wish.
She accused her half-brother John-Henry Williams of wanting to preserve their father's body so that he could
cash in on his famous DNA. But John Henry and his sister Claudia said they had signed a pact with their
father in 2000 promising to have all of their remains frozen. The three siblings finally reached a settlement:
Ted Williams was allowed to stay where he was, and John-Henry promised not to sell any of his father's DNA.

Has Anyone Been Preserved Using Cryonics?

Dozens of people are being stored in cryonic facilities. Probably the most famous of them is baseball
legend Ted Williams (see below). But no one has actually been revived, because the technology to do
so still does not exist.
Critics say companies that perform cryonics are simply bilking people out of their money with the
promise of an immortality they cannot deliver. Even scientists who perform cryonics say they haven't

successfully revived anyone -- and don't expect to be able to do so in the near future. One of the
problems is that, if the warming process isn't done at exactly the right speed, the cells could turn to ice
and shatter.
Even though people in cryonic suspension haven't yet been revived, living organisms can be -- and
have been -- brought back from a dead or near-dead state. Defibrillators and CPR bring accident
and heart attack victims back from the dead on an almost daily basis. Neurosurgeons often cool
patients' bodies so they can operate on aneurysms -- enlarged blood vessels in the brain -- without
damaging or rupturing them. Human embryos that are frozen in fertility clinics, defrosted and
implanted in a mother's uterus grow into perfectly normal human beings.
Cryobiologists are hopeful that a new technology called nanotechnology will make revival a reality
someday.Nanotechnology uses microscopic machines to manipulate single atoms -- the tiniest units
of an organism -- to build or repair virtually anything, including human cells and tissues. The hope is
that, one day, nanotechnology will repair not only the cellular damage caused by the freezing process,
but also the damage caused by aging and disease. Some cryobiologists predict that the first cryonic
revival might occur somewhere around the year 2040.

The History of Cryonics

The first person to be cryogenically frozen was a 73-year-old psychologist, Dr. James Bedford, who
was suspended in 1967. His body is reportedly still in good condition at Alcor Life Extension
Foundation.
The idea that a person could be frozen and then brought back to life when the technology had evolved
far enough originated with the book "The Prospect of Immortality," written by physics teacher Robert
Ettinger in 1964. The word "cryonics" is derived from the Greek term for "cold."
By the late 1970s, there were about six cryonics companies in the United States. But to preserve and
then maintain each body indefinitely was so expensive, many of these companies wound up closing
shop by the following decade.
Today, only a handful of companies offer full cryosuspension services, including Alcor Life Extension
Foundation in Arizona and the Cryonics Institute in Michigan. In early 2004, Alcor had more than 650
members and 59 patients in cryopreservation.
For more information on cryonics and related topics, check out the links on the next page.

Cryonics and Nanotechnological Repair and Replacement

Another technology that may eventually challenge our death concepts is cryonic
suspension, the freezing of heads, or whole bodies, for eventual reanimation. All
diagnostic protocols for the determination of brain death call for ruling out

hypothermia, but what if the brain is being intentionally and permanently frozen.
Our current concepts of death don't very well address the status of a person who
might eventually be brought back to life.
Unfortunately for those who wish to undergo this procedure, American law
requires that they be pronounced clinically dead first. Cryonicists believe that
future reanimation will be more successful if they could initiate the freezing before
somatic death, and certainly before cerebral death. Cryonics firms have already
been accused (and acquitted) of murder for having failed to have a physician
pronounce death before they began the suspension procedure. In 1993, the
California Supreme Court ruled that a man with a terminal brain tumor could not
have his head removed before he died. Like the Non-Heart-Donor-Protocol, the
cryonicists, or rather the physicians present, are forced to make a rapid diagnosis of
death, and then initiate suspension.
Cryonicists acknowledge that the freezing process results in the rupture of many
cellular membranes, and that micro-cellular repair will be the principal challenge
of future reanimators. Cryonicists have therefore enthusiastically embraced the
new field of nanotechnology (Drexler 1986; Drexler and Peterson 1991) (Regis
1995), which promises to eventually create microscopic, self-replicating robots
capable of moving through frozen tissue without further disrupting cell walls,
identifying damaged tissue, and repairing it. Cryonicists expect this level of
nanotechnology to be available within the next hundred years.
Of course, nanotechnology holds promise in all fields of medicine and industry, not
just for the reanimation of the frozen. Nanotech visionaries predict the convergence
of molecular medicine, genetic therapy and nanotechnology to create tools to treat
any disease, and immune system boosters capable of identifying and eliminating
disease before it occurs. In combination with the neural-computer trends discussed
above, increasing numbers of nano-enthusiasts believe that the brain structures and
activities can eventually be replaced entirely by nano-machines, and/or read into
new media. This is known in science fiction and cyber-culture
as "uploading" (Dery, 1996).