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The Cryonics Institute Offers a Chance at Immortality (Video #2)
Today's interviewee is Cryonics Institute (CI) Director Andy Zawacki, who takes Slashdot's Robert Rozeboom into the facility where they keep the tanks with frozen people in them. Yesterday, Rob talked with David Ettinger, who is both the group's lawyer and the son of CI founder Robert Ettinger. For those of you who are obsessed with the process of vitrification, here's a link to a story about The Cryonics Institute's 69th Patient and how she was taken care of, starting at the moment of her deanimation (AKA death). The story has anatomical drawings, charts, and color pictures of Andy carrying out the actual procedure. But Cryonics, while endorsed as a concept by numerous scientists, may not be as good a way to insure immortality as transplanting your brain into a fresh (probably robotic) body, as Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov hopes to do by 2035. There are also many groups that claim to offer spiritual (as opposed to corporeal) immortality. Which method of living forever works best? That remains to be seen, assuming any of them work at all. Perhaps we'll find out after the Singularity.
Care to explain immortality after death to me? Just how does that work? I die, yet I'm immortal?
The religious answer is generally that there is some essential component of you (i.e. a soul) that persists after death and enjoys some sort of continued existence after death, most commonly with an element or reward or punishment for how you lived in life. It isn't "you" that dies when your flesh does.
The scientific answer is that death is merely a broad word for a set of bodily failures that lead to the breakdown and dissolution of the biological machinery that sustains your consciousness and/or metabolism. As science advances, we roll back those defects and in some cases cure them.
Many wounds that were inevitably fatal are imminently curable now. Gut wounds used to ensure a horrible death due to sepsis. Antibiotics stopped that. Heart wounds used to ensure bleeding to death. Blood transplants and open-heart surgery stopped that. We are now at the point that we have to base death on the cessation and decay of the brain.
Soon, we may have to refine that to a question of information loss. If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it, then we may later be able to restore it or copy the information (i.e "you") off of it to another medium. And given advances in repairing the body, even "irreversible" may be subject to redefinition over time. The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
And once restored in a new body, what reason is there to expect that you can't be periodically backed up in case of the worst? If you can die and still live, then are you not immortal for all practical purposes?
But this is, of course, all highly unproven technology. Scientific or not, it's still essentially a leap of faith. However, if you don't have a religious reason to believe that you will live on in some other fashion after death, and you've got the money to spare for it then it seems like a much fairer wager than Pascal's.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There really is nothing TO discuss because if they haven't come up with some magical potion that keeps 100% of the ice crystals from forming AND a way to unfreeze without damage all they are gonna end up with when they thaw it is mush anyway. The way it was explained to me its not the flash freezing that is the biggest problem, after all you dunk a head in liquid nitrogen and it'll flash freeze alright, the problem is in the thawing as THAT is where all the damage occurs.
Actually, it's typically done these days using organ vitrification, which prevents ice crystals from forming. For most crypoprotectants used in the process of vitrification, you are limited to one cell type one which it has best effect. The CI folks mostly try their best to preserve the brain without freezing damage, at the expense of some of the other cell types. This has been successfully used on laboratory animal organ transplants for mammalian livers, kidneys, and hearts; the first reference is a patent on the method of prepping the organ, which the second is a PubMed article case study dealing with a rabbit kidney vitrification and subsequent live transplant.
https://www.google.com/patents/US5723282
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
There has also been some interesting work in the last 5 years using in Japan using a 0.01 mT magnetic field. This prevents ice crystals from forming. The technique was originally developed by ABI, a Japanese company using a technique they call the "Calls Alive System", for storing sushi at cryogenic temperatures without permitting formation of ice crystals by triggerning through the glass phase change without normal expansion you would typically have with ice. The technique is currently being used for long term storage of live teeth, and has shown some merit for other larger organs:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20478291
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011224010000854