Finding Hope In Cryonics, Despite Glacial Progress

biobricks writes: The NY Times covers cryonics and destructive mind uploading, with some news on progress in brain preservation research. Quoting: "Dr. Fahy, a cryobiologist whose research focuses on organ banking, had provided the most encouraging signs that cryonics did preserve brain structure. In a 2009 experiment, his team showed that neurons in slices of rabbit brains immersed in the solution, chilled to cryogenic temperatures and then rewarmed, had responded to electrical stimulation. His method, he contended, preserved the connectome in those slices. But a complication prevented him from entering the prize competition: Brain tissue perfused with the cryoprotectant invariably becomes dehydrated, making it nearly impossible to see the details of the shrunken neurons and their connections under an electron microscope. ... He could fix the brain’s structure in place with chemicals first, just as Dr. Mikula was doing, buying time to perfuse the cryoprotectant more slowly to avoid dehydration. But he lacked the funds, he said, for a project that would have no practical business application for organ banking."

Comments

Re:Hibernation is the first step

[tsotha]

Depends. If there are only a few dozen, those people have a pretty good chance of being revived because of scientific curiosity. But let's say over the course of a century or two a billion people were frozen. Nobody's going to revive even a tiny fraction of that number. Those future people will have their own lives to live.

Destructive scanning

[Iamthecheese]

I'm STILL waiting for a rational explanation for how destructive scanning isn't death. Another person being created at the same time isn't it. Ship of Theseus isn't it. The brain isn't just software, its hardware is inherently part of the program.Destroy the hardware, destroy the program. Even if you made a backup that program is gone. I can buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, but it would be silly to say the other computer IS this one, whether or not I destroy this one. People who think destructive scanning is the same as life extension and people who think cryonics is a scam are both emotionally invested in accepting death or denying its existence.