Slashdot Mirror
Freeze Recovery Drug - Step Toward Suspended Animation?
arete writes "Apparently a simple injection (in rats and mice so far) can revive body functions before warming. Since you're cold, your brain isn't using oxygen, and doesn't go into oxygen deprivation. But it lets breathing and autonomic functions (like shivering) restart even in the absence of a brain restart. Sounds to me like a big leap towards suspended animation. Of course, you can't be frozen below 0 C using this techique, because all your cells explode when the water freezes. Plausibly with some mild oxygen influx you wouldn't need to be below 0 C, though. " I think I'll wait a while before planning my interstellar trip, tho'.
I imagine that cellular chemical reactions will still take place even very close to freezing, so you could not last indefinitely at this temperature, even with this drug to help revive you.
I think the article mentionned that without this drug people have been successfully revived after an hour with no ill effects. I think beyond an hour they tend not to even try. How long could you last with this drug? Someone needs to try this with a large mammal, a dog perhaps, and see how long he can hang out at just this side of 0degC and still be revived with this drug.
-josh
DUDE! What an EXCELLENT game! I'm glad to hear someone else knows of it! Have you also played the first one? Both of 'em are my favourites!
trust me... your head cut off is a better thing
// what do you mean that was the only copy...
clawrockz wrote:
...and the crystals that form expand so that cell walls become torn.
1 2.html
...
This has been addressed:
http://www.mailgate.org/sci/sci.cryonics/msg001
Newsgroups: sci.life-extension,sci.cryonics
From: Tom Matthews
Subject: Re: a different type of life extension?
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 08:20:52 GMT
Organization: Longevity Unlimited
Lou Pagnucco wrote:
>
> Good information, Doug.
>
> Cryonic approaches to suspending animation (in hopes of revival
> in the future) involve the freezing of organs or organisms at liquid
> nitrogen temperatures which, although inhibiting most chemical
> activity, cause significant ice damage to the cells.
Not if you vitrify the patient, which is where the current research is
now heading.
> The type of
> "freezing" in your abstract must avoid this difficult to repair ice
> damage.
>
> It would be interesting to know how long an organism (i.e., hibernating
> ground squirrels) can tolerate this temperature.
The answer is: no more than one year (in fact mostly only one normal
length winter).
This is only reasonable. Why would evolution have produced anything more
robust than it needed?
And this is why all of these natural animal hibernation/freezing models
are quite useless for cryonics purposes.
> After all cryonic
> freezing advocates seem to believe that cryonic freezing will be
> required for many years. However, given the hyper-exponential increase
> in biotechnical knowledge, maybe just a couple of decades may be
> enough to get us to the point where we can cure nearly any known
> disease (or the problems of aging) - and reviving an organism kept
> relatively inert using the same techniques that these squirrels use
> seem much, much less difficult.
However, there will always be accidents/diseases/disorders that are
beyond our reach to repair and need some from of long-term suspended
animation if the inflicted person is to remain alive.
Vitrification research is proceeding slowly but surely to eventually
provide us with fully-reversible, long-term suspended animation.
Still, like any major operation it will never be 100% and I for one am
trying very hard to stay alive until the biotechnical advances in
life-extension for existing adults come forth, so that I don't every
have to be cryopreserved.
> Doug Skrecky wrote in message
> >Title
> > Freeze avoidance in a mammal: body temperatures below 0 degree C in an
> > Arctic hibernator.
> >Source
> > Science. 244(4912):1593-5, 1989 Jun 30.
> >Abstract
> > Hibernating arctic ground squirrels, Spermophilus parryii,
> > were able to adopt and spontaneously arouse from core body temperatures
> as
> > low as -2.9 degrees C without freezing. Abdominal body temperatures of
> ground
> > squirrels hibernating in outdoor burrows were recorded with
> > temperature-sensitive radiotransmitter implants. Body temperatures and
> soil
> > temperatures at hibernaculum depth reached average minima during February
> of
> > -1.9 degrees and -6 degrees C, respectively. Laboratory-housed ground
> > squirrels hibernating in ambient temperatures of -4.3 degrees C
> maintained
> > above 0 degree C thoracic temperatures but decreased colonic temperatures
> to
> > as low as -1.3 degrees C. Plasma sampled from animals with below 0 degree
> C
> > body temperatures had normal solute concentrations and showed no evidence
> of
> > containing antifreeze molecules.
> >
--Tom
Tom Matthews
The LIFE EXTENSION FOUNDATION - http://www.lef.org - 800-544-4440
A non-profit membership organization dedicated to the extension
of the healthy human lifespan through ground breaking research,
innovative ideas and practical methods.
LIFE EXTENSION MAGAZINE - The ultimate source for new
health and medical findings from around the world.
I was watching Discovery a long time ago (1997, i think), and they said that if a head is fed (HEY THAT RHYMES!) oxygen and neccesary food, it will regrow a body. Weird, huh? -Rob
I saw that also, and I think the moderator was looking at the fact that Josh was mentioning using a big dog as a test subject. The moderator must've been an animal rights activist or somethin' eh?
Shurely the military want efficient revival methods as well (there usually happens a lot of not so fun stuff to soldiers bodies during warfare), but this could also be used to artificially increase divers tolerance for cold water. Imagine a diver swimming around in cold water, with a computer watching over bodily functions and automatically injecting small doses of EDTA in the bloodstream if the diver experiences cramps, loss of consciousness or other unwanted effects of cold water. This could make it possible to have divers stay much longer under water in a normal dry suit without damaging the mission (or the diver of course, if you care about those sorts of things).
A syringe of EDTA plus a barrel of an 18 yr old single malt Scotch.
Please excuse me while I lie down in the snow.
(By the way I think the traditional beverage for Saint Barrels is brandy)
I should definitely get around to getting my SB a barrel
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I think its a different story for mammals which tend to be more delicate than insects. Not to mention hibernation is only good for so long, just because this animal can stay near frozen for 1 year doesnt mean it can do 20.
The hypothied components of again are metabolism and programed cell-suicide.
Aging appears corrolated with the speed of your metabolism. Body fuel (atp) is very reactive, just as any good fuel should be. It seems that carring it around create regular damage that has constantly has to be repaired. However, every so often an important piece of dna gets broken which reders that particular cell les efficient, but also all it upcomming child-cells.
It is no surprise in that case that that all 100+ year elders describe they diet as 'frugal'.
The second component relates to a protein that repairs the buffering tips of the dna string after each copy. That particular protein is only present in the 'immortal' cells, sperms, ovulas and associated gametes. In other cell, copying strips some length of the buffers each time until it eats important dna code.
Lowering the body temparature stops problem one and, since a doubt cells can split in such cold conditions, would also stop problem two: effective body suspention.
As far as consciousness goes, if your brain can't process, you can't be concious. It would fell similar to passing out on boze: you would be terribly confused about where you are, but with a reason.
-
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Sure if you're trying to freeze your head until they find a cure for cancer you'll want to be frosen solid I guess. But for space travel aren't we really only concerned about slowing down life functions?
For a 60 year trip, the time it might take for a nuclear impulse rocket to reach the nearest stars, it wouldn't kill the crew if there bodies aged 6 years.
I guess everyone focuses on freezing because they want to come back in a thousand years and fight those damm dirty apes!
Well, you have to draw the line somewhere.
Do you ever wash your hands? Every time you apply soap, you're killing millions of bacteria. Odds are that some activity in your daily life ultimately results in the death of some animal (even if you're a vegan). I, personally, draw the line at humans. That is, if you're human, you have a fundamental right to live. Otherwise, it's nice, but I won't worry about it. If another animal is proven to be sentient, then I'll include it. Until then,sorry.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Pedantic academics and graduate students have to do something. Icemen are going to be a friggin gold mine. You might not like being the first 10,000 mistakes. Imagine:
1. Being alive and well but having a gorilla body.
2. Being alive and well and finding yourself in culture whose language you don't know and conventions you cannot grasp. If its 1million years into the future you may never even come close to understanding what life means to them and you'll end up in a cage somewhere.
3. Half-dead coma state, coming in and out for a few hundred years.
4. Finding yourself in a robot body that has about 1% functionality of the human body, etc.
The way cryogenics is practiced now most people get embalmed and sit around for a few days then get frozen, instead of freezing immediately.
Its a scam and a fraud, ice crystals will make you unrepairable regardless. Even the finest nanomachine cannot know exactly where this broken neuron went and so on. If perfected, you would be lucky to be functionally retarded. Why don't you ever hear about the hundreds of animals that should have been frozen now side by side with the humans? Would you like to be the first one they tried to bring back? Unless you're bringing a few gorillas, chimps, and a few hundred mice along with you, you'll be the guinea pig. Be scared, some things are worse than death.
I'd much rather see more articles and work done on short time hibernation for spacetravel that lasts maybe 6 months to a year and work your way up. And if its ever perfected then you can move up to humans.
Just the fact that these companies start with humans and shrug when you ask how exactly are they going to revive a rotted then frozen corpse should make you very suspicious.
See (1) Mammal vs. Amphibian vs. Insect
I think if we were to thaw him out, Disney could get a lot of people into the parks to see him!
--- Speaking only for myself,
This is NOT hibernation. These animals are friggin chunks of ice! You could store them in liquid nitrogen indefinetly like sperm and eggs are. The cricket freezes solid every night when the sun goes down, and thaws in the morning. That is not hibernation. They had a really cool fast-time version of the cricket freezing. It had a shitload of iceicles hanging of of it, and then it just walked away after it had thawed out.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Does that mean they have to cut the head off another body in order to sew mine on? I don't think that's very nice. Maybe a robotic body would be just as good.
They will unfreeze you for your body parts.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Ack! Common misconception! Freezing does not actualy cause cells to rupture! If it did, all frozen food would just turn to goo. Instead, freezing often damages orgonels, and denatures protiens, and stuff.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
It's not for everybody
Has anyone read the book "Heart of the Comet"
In it, one of the main characters dies, but its "uploaded" into the computer. they then acknowledge that this is no longer who they knew but a "copy" of the person.
If your conciousness is dupicated, it isn't you; in the same way that if you close yourself, that clone isnt you, is it? its a copy of you.
something to think about
It's not for everybody
That would be episode #506: Eegah
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The point is that the money is not needed until a person is beyond medical help. At that point the choices are 1. burning 2. rotting 3. cryopreservation There are no other alternatives. Once choices 1 or 2 are taken then money is a meaningless concept. Now in the society in which we live lawyers have made it very difficult to leave money reliably for this or anything else. Therefore some money odes have to be spent during life in order to set up a trust and/or take out life insuranmce. But it need not be a lot. Cryonics is reliant on technology progress - all you need do is to invest in technology and if enough progress is there to make cryonics work, then a relatively small amount invested in a technology mutual fund will do the trick. For more on this and investment in general, please see http://www.geocities.com/longev ity rpt/shares.htm whicvh includes lots of outlinks to technology companies' corporate home pages.
When water freezes it expands (that is bad for cells) and forms crystalline lattices (which are sharp) so basically cells do 'burst'.
Although I'm not a biologist, I would assume that the aging process would slow down severly simply because aging is a low chemical trick and chemical reactions occur slower at lower temperatures and therefore at a tem of say 3C (for saftey so one wouldn't become too cold) one's chemical reactions would slow down by a great factor (espically because most of one's reactions are catazlyzed by enzymes that are temperature dependant and they would not function properly at such a low temperature)... Since we really don't have a clue how memory works I'm not going to venture a guess, other then if one was to go to sleep prior to being frozen one would probably not know the difference (if you take a two hour nap or a twenty hour doze after a long hacking run and don't look at an alarm clock or outside and feel exactly the same degree of tiredness afterwards do you know how long you slept, no you do not. I see no reason why freezing would be any different although one might have to wake up every (amount of years that is = to one of normal body functiong) or so to eat (and exercise 1/virtual week) something so one didn't starve to death or have their muscles atropy. I'd love to beta test this, but it still appears to be in the alpha stages.
Nick
Let's see... In a thousand years when mankind is capable of unfreezing these carcasses and reviving them back into living people, what will honestly be their reason for doing so? They'll look back in their history "books" and see that our generation was characterized by people who over-consumed, over-polluted, intellectually under-performed (for the most part), and was also characterized by many people who become more excited by the entrance music of some WWF wrestler than by fantastic scientific discoveries that accomplish real work and have practical applications. Right...I'm sure they'll be quick to unfreeze the carcasses circa 20th century - early 21st century:)
Worse yet, you could be stuck in that dark tunnel between your body and "the Light" for 1000 years. Sure it's fun to go sliding through it really fast, but after a few decades, it gets rather boring just sitting there watching the souls go by.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Age is a measure of cell oxidation and generations of cell division. Neither's going on if you're frozen, so you're fine at that level.
-- Anne Marie
HOw do we just assume that a poor animal's life is expendable? How can we be sure that the animals that died did not face the same death pangs or that their close family did not miss them? Even animals seem to protect their kin. And is the number of animals killed less than the number of people going to be saved? You kill 10 poor souls and save 2, is that balanced?
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Human popsicles? Where would the wooden stick go? (ouch...)
Looks like all they need now is an injection that can prevent water from freezing...
:-)
For example, salt water freezes at a lower temperature than pure water, but not really low enough to be significant here. It seems to me that what they need to develop is something that would would get into all of the water in the cells, and lower its freezing point. I'm sure this is easier said than done, but it seems like that could break down one of the main barriers in cryonics.
Of course, they would probably also have to develop another injection to be given during the revival process to remove this from the body, but I suppose that can wait until they're actually ready to start thawing people out.
--Ariston
"I'm never wrong--sometimes reality just disagrees with me."
"Of course, you can't be frozen below 0 C using this techique, because all your cells explode when the water freezes."
And after the first lab rat exploded in a frozen mass of blood and guts (like when taking the entire blast of a double barrel at point blank in Quake 1), the scientists said:
"Huh huh. That was cool. Do it again. Make him explode. Now, use FIRE FIRE".
Save the lab rat campaign anyone?
This is interesting. Have the adaptations that these animals have that allow them to freeze without consequences been identified? Do you know where to find more information?
The article mentions using this to revive victims of hypothermia, but try this one on for size. The patient is in deep in shock for no apparent reason. Lab tests will tell for sure what's going on. It could be anaphylaxis. Could be poisoning, or something else. The doctors don't know what's causing it or how to counteract it. The patient will be dead inside of five minutes, but the lab tests will be ready in fifteen minutes at the earliest--if they're lucky and depending on which test shows positive. What do they do? Chill the patient rapidly to 16 degrees C and buy themselves some time. The lab tests come in, the doctors ready whatever treatment is appropriate--adrenallin and cortico steriods in the case of anaphylaxis--and revive the patient with the drug in the article.
I dunno how practical this would really be. Still, based on my own near death experience, I would certainly consider freezer burn to be an acceptable side effect of such a treatment.
The article has nothing to do with cryonics. Typical Slashdot!
Obviously you have seen the grim vision of the future that is Futurama too!
The thing to remember is that damage from freezing is not the critical question: the question is whether or not such damage is repairable. Cell structure is the main thing, and structure may be preserved even if full function (for the moment) is not. If, for instance, temperatures fall way below zero in the winter, your car may very well may not start, and if it's left that way long enough, damage may occur and it may not start even when things warm up. But that doesn't mean your car is utterly and completely demolished and unrepairable, as though it had been buried and rusted into particles over the course of centuries. Studies indicate that freezing damage is rather like that: it disarranges brain cells somewhat so that brain activity stops. But it doesn't pulverize a brain cell into dust, so totally that its original, functioning, form is completely obliterated and unrecoverable. On the contrary! It preserves the original structure, which is precisely why the cell - and the brain -- is repairable. Not quite at the moment, granted; but methods currently being developed are bringing that moment closer and closer..
I would personally have killed a million monkeys, if it would have advanced science enough to have saved my 5 year old sister from dying of lukemia.
Milek
--
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
Stomachs, and livers, even skin - grows to have a taste for it's environment. People have had stomach transplants only to find they prefer the donor's favourite food - there was an article on this in New Scientist a few months ago.
It's a memory, and it's part of a person.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Ok, test on pigs, better?
-josh
The storage of sperm and eggs is only possible with highly delicate and specialized use of cryoprotectant agents to prevent freezing damage, Even so the freezing of sperm is only possible because there are so many that a reasonable death rate is still tolerable. The recovery rate of eggs (ova) is still extremely poor mainly because of the macroscopic size of these relatively large cells. Even 8-celled embryos are only still viable because all cells are equipotent and even if 7 die the embryo can still continue.
-- Paul --
More life in quantity and quality for the rational
Nonsense! We have established no such thing because is it not even true! The cells *never* "explode. *If* the freezing rate is too fast then cell membranse may be ruptured since the water cannot escape into the interstitial spaces quickly enough and the small increase in density and the lack of membrane flexibility at low temperatures will cause such rupturing. However, even if human body were thrown into a Dewar of liquid nitrogen without any preparation, only the surface layer of cells would be able to cool that quickly.
In practice what happens is that cryoprotectants are perfused into the body during an operation similar to open heart surgery. These cryoprotectants enter all the cells through the capillaries of the circulation system and together with a controlled cooling rate, *all* the body's cells are prevented from rupturing. At the present time the trade-off involved is between a large cryoprotectant concentration which will totally prevent ice formation and yet will harm cells by toxic biochemical processes, and a smaller cryoprotectant concentration which will give recoverable toxicity but will not completely protect against freezing damage. Fortunately, there is a major effort underway at 21st Century Medicine to find less toxic and more ice controlling cryoprotectants and that effort is having some success.
-- Paul --
More life in quantity and quality for the rational
I'm wonderig... What happens if you go to sleep or pass out? Does your consciousness die and when you wake up you have a new consciousness which is the copy of the one before?
z.
disclaimer: I might be right.
Sure, but remember, such people probably don't expect to be revived anytime in the near future. They freeze their heads, then hope that by the time the technology exists to revive them at all, the technology will exist also to clone you a body to place your head on, and you're good to go.
:)
But then, it seems kind of silly to me that someone thinks that by freezing themsleves without knowing how the whole process has to work, they'll freeze themselves "properly" in order to be revived. But hey, it's their money...
It's not for everybody
remember what happened to Mr. Burns when they reanimated him...
;-)
or what happened to Stallone in Demolition Man... Do you really want to end up in a world where sex is through a helmet and you are doomed to eat rat burgers
- Bill
There has been work on the lysing of cells due to freezing. Antifreeze proteins in Antartic and Arctic fish bind to the ice crystals as they grow allowing them only to grow basally. If anyone is interested I have a few citations for reviews I could find. Ta ta for now ladies!
Ok, but my understanding (which may be wrong, I'll admit) of cells freezing, is that the crystalling structure that forms is not only sharp, which cuts the cell wall, but larger that it was in a liquid state (I know this is true - water expands when frozen)so the charp edges of the lattice cut the cell wall. so basically, the cell 'explodes', partially from being cut by the sharp lattice, and partially from the water's expansion.
Maybe they could inject some that stuff into the US presidential race and put an end to this nepotistic nonsense.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Note that any form of re-animation that involves temperature below 0C would require cellular re-construction due to the tearing of cell walls caused by growing ice crystals on the interior of every cell. Water, as you know, becomes less dense and thus of greater volume as it freezes, and the crystals that form expand so that cell walls become torn. Also, the fat cells surounding nerve inter-connections may cut the nerve, causing massive brain failure.
The simple fact is, without nanotechnology to repair this vast damage, revival of all the 'frozen-in-nitrogen-suspended-animation' people is HIGHLY unlikly.
This is perhaps MUCH more applicable to transporting organs for transport, and perhaps in reviving hipothermia victims who havn't frozen solid yet.
Hemos is correct
Though it's a great advancement
I won't beta test
that freeze solid in the winter, and then thaw and come back to life in the spring? They somehow can save their celluar membranes... I kid you not..
In fact, the most important unknown factor is damage administered to the brain. Cryonics has been touted for many years (I remember when I was much younger, MTV had a big news episode on the fact that Michael Jackson has already payed a company to freeze him when he dies). Though we have lots of people on ICE right now, no-one has ever been brought back. It's generally agreed that the freezing process does damage to brain, but we have no human mice to test the extent of it. It remains to be seen what affects the cyronics (especially a period of time longer than a few minuts) will have on motor functions, short term memory, and long term memory. The article doesn't really mention any of these things. I think the technology is great and has a huge lifesaving potential, but we are no where near the point of suspended animation being a main stream burial practice. Perhaps we have taken the point of the article out of context. It's a huge leap for cyronics, but an even greater discovery for the revival of people caught in such incidents as avalanches, cold weather exposure, or being trapped in near freezing water.
I sorta like
You should really read the page at the link in the parent post, they replace the water with a chemical that doesn't freeze but attains the state of glass (which is a liquid) so there are no crystals to destroy the cells.
I live life on the edge
Actually, your cells don't explode if you're frozen fast enough. It's the ice crystals that harm the cell's structure. That's why you can't freeze vegetables at home and have them as crisp as commercial, fast-freezed ones.
Hugo
Mankind, er, I mean neanderthalkind, must have actually figured it out a long time ago. After all, how else did OOG THE CAVEMAN get here?
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
How long do you think it will be before marathon runners start using this stuff instead of blood doping? It sounds like it would be much safer than blood doping since the user wouldn't have extra blood driving up blood pressure, but instead would be replacing the blood with a more efficient oxygen carrier.
For a good review of the problems that need to be overcome to achieve suspended animation, see The Contributions of Low Temperature Science to Cryobanking and the Prospect of Suspended Animation for Manned Space Travel by Michael J. Taylor, Ph.D., Debra J. Battjes Siler, M.S., John R. Walsh, Ph.D., Kelvin G.M. Brockbank, Ph.D. in Graft, May 2050, volume 3, issue 3 (also known as Volume 3, Issue 3, May/June 2000).
In my opinion, the currently most likely near term pathway to suspended animation lies in the use of vitrification. Vitrification involves introducing a sufficiently high concentration of cryoprotectant into an organ such that upon cooling, the fluid within the organ forms a glass instead of a crystal, thereby avoiding the problem of ice crystallization altogether. Please see this review article Organ Cryopreservation by Greg Fahy, PhD. for a succinct review of the approach and numerous references to the available literature.
Finally, I would caution that the New Scientist is not a particularly discriminating science news source. For example, see the September 28, 1996 New Scientist article (p.22) regarding Olga Visser, a South African perfusionist at the University of Pretoria, who claimed that she had found a technique for successfully cryopreserving rat hearts at liquid nitrogen temperatures. In cryobiology circles, this is like someone claiming a cure for cancer. It is one of the "big problems" in cryobiology, that a number of scientists have spent decades trying to solve. Visser's claim could not be duplicated and were never published in a peer reviewed journal. Even worse, Visser later claimed that the same drug she used to achieve the holy grail of cryobiology, dimethylformamide, was also a cure for AIDS.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Freezing damage to cells is caused by ice crystals. When you freeze something really fast it forms amorphous ice without crystals. A sperm cell is small enough to be frozen instantly when you dip it in liquid nitrogen. A human body is a little bigger. The flow of heat out out the body into the nitrogen is gradual and the temperature of internal parts drops slowly enough for ice crystals to form.
During cryonic freezing of humans they attempt to minimize this damage by replacing most of the water in your body with other fluids. Of course, it's difficult to replace all water so substantial damage is still caused. With current cryonic freezing techniques it will probably take some of Drexler's little helpers to repair the damage for reviving the individual.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Physically, you are correct about the maximum water density taking place at about +4'C. In fact, that is the reason why lakes freeze on the top instead of the bottom (where the water is denser from the pressure). However, the change of density of water even at the freezing point has little relevance to the problems of perfecting suspended animation by means of cryopreservation. The problem is that when ice crystallizes, just as do all other substances, it tends to form a pure substance. In doing so the concentration of all the disolved chemicals is greatly increased and it is this, now-toxic, soup which caused the most damage to the tissue structures around it. Secondary damage is caused by the sharp crystaline needles of ice that are formed. Finally, a third form of damage is caused by the major differences in reaction rates of various body processes which occurs as different temperatures. Please ask questions for more detail. It is a shame to see all these conversations taking place without anyone around who really understands the problems involved. -- Paul --
More life in quantity and quality for the rational
When/if you wake up you will may be chronologically 1040, but you will be biologically still 40. Since antiaging and rejuvenation methods will almost certainly be perfected by that time, in fact, you will wake up as a biological 20 year old in the prime of health and abilities but with the wisdom and knowledge of your original age.
-- Paul --
More life in quantity and quality for the rational
I'll agree, the same story goes for teleporation
SpirytSounds like this is better suited to hypothermia patients - it would make recovery less traumatic on the brain.
Hands in my pocket
I can think of quite a few people that could take as many injections as they can give 'em and it would STILL never help their brain to function any differently...
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
stuff
yup.....i think i'll freeze my head so i can be one of those ppl in that futurama episode..........hey you never know
In Chapter 9 of Drexler's Engines of Creation, the author states, "It is a common myth that freezing bursts cells; in fact, freezing damage is more subtle than this - so subtle that it often does no lasting harm. Frozen sperm regularly produces healthy babies. Some human beings now alive have survived being frozen solid at liquid nitrogen temperatures - when they were early embryos."
I personally recommend a read of the entire book (it's all online), but this chapter seems to have the most to do with the discussion.
"Feel a glory in so rolling / on the human heart a stone" --E. A. Poe, "The Bells"
i would never want to live in a world where i couldn't indiscriminately stick my dick in things.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Havn't they ever watched Herbert West's Re-animator?
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
I wonder if St. Bernards will start carrying EDTA instead of rum in their little barrels?
I sorta like
Many frogs will survive below freezing temperatures (during the winter). They can do this because their blood contains a lot of glucose and it can help to lower the freezing point of their flesh and fluids. These techniques have also been used to try to stop larger pieces of mammel tissue, like a rat's, from being damaged during freezing.
Cryo Pod #XjP12 has turned off.
Life functions... ceased.
Have a nice day! :)
It's not for everybody
Suspended Animation: The condition which arises when your Windoze 9X box freezes while attempting to animate your 3DSMAX project.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
>>Of course, you can't be frozen below 0 C using this techique, because all your cells explode when the water freezes. Hell, any good brand uh scotch'll do that fer ya.
I've always thought there is a relatively "simple" solution to this exploding cells problem. Focus your research on "speedy freezing" - if the cells hit 0K fast enough the water won't have time to expand, since everything (almost) stands still att 0K. After that you, ofcourse, need to be able to warm up ppl realy fast to to the correct temperature.
:)
Now this doesn't sound to easy, I'll be the first to say, but relative to much of the other things it shouln't be impossible.
If nothing else, here we have previous art (or what ever it's called) if someone tries to implement it in the future
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
One of the reasons I think the gradual method is better is because your own biological cells are constantly replacing themselves and yet one doesn't have an end of one's consciousness due to the gradual replacement. Like the "if you gradually replace every part of a car (or computer), it's still the same car (or computer)" thing. By replacing the neurons gradually, with functionally-identical technological counterparts, the other neurons could incorporate the replacements into the functioning of the brain, and hence one's consciousness, until the last biological one has been replaced and *you* are still there but with a non-biological brain.
The gradualness is what makes the difference, in my opinion. Another possible method of "soft"-uploading, although even more theoretical, is that if/when direct neuro-computer interfaces become available, there is something of a possibility that if someone were to spend enough time with their mind joined with the computer, their consciousness would gradually "spread" to the computer and remain active even once the original biological brain becomes inactive. (All totally theoretical for now, of course. :-) ) But once again, the gradualness of the process is what I think is the key to *you* being the one in the computer and not merely a duplicate of you. Just my opinion.
---
---
Impossible means no one's done it yet.
Can someone try it on me, bring me back when the stable 2.4 is released :-p
A company called Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp. makes a couple of cool products that would also help out in a situation like this. Oxygent is a blood substitute that transfers oxygen in the blood stream more efficiently. LiquiVent is an Oxygen rich liquid that they pump into your lungs that allows you to not have to breathe (like that mouse in the Movie Abyss).