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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!
clawrockz wrote:
...and the crystals that form expand so that cell walls become torn.
1 2.html
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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.
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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?
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.
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.
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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.
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,
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"?
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.
Interesting side note, the movie Iceman didn't just ignore the issue of cryoprotectants; they came up with a clever explanation. The caveman had a habit of eating a certain type of flower that acted as a natural cryoprotectant, which saved his cells from bursting, thus allowing him to be revived after thousands of years. That was a pretty good flick; it had a surprisingly intelligent script.
Free Hans!
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..
For the rest of you, I have to rely on observed behavior and similarity of physiology. In that respect, the evidence that, say, dogs, are sentient ("capable of sensation and consciousness") is just as strong as the evidence that a pre-verbal child is sentient: both have sophisticted nervous systems, and behave in a way consistent with an internal emotional and (rudimentarily) intellectual experience.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I agree that the evidence for dogs and pre-verbal children are similar, but I'm not comparing individuals, but rather species. (Is that the right plural of "species"?) Humans, as a whole, are sentient as far as I can tell. Other animals aren't. I draw the line there. Where do you draw yours? Animals large enough to see? Only cute ones? Mammals?
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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
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!
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
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
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...
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 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.
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
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.
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Impossible means no one's done it yet.