Cryonics
Cryonics in the news
Links to further information
An open letter by scientists
supporting cryonics
Overview
- The purpose of cryonics is to save lives and restore health.
- Today's medical technology can't always keep us alive, let alone healthy.
- A future medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology should be able
to preserve life and restore health in all but the most extreme circumstances.
- Tissue preserved at the temperature of liquid nitrogen does not deteriorate,
even after centuries of storage.
- Therefore, if current medical technology can't keep us alive we can instead
choose to be preserved in liquid nitrogen, with the expectation that future
medical technology should be able to both reverse any cryopreservation injury
and restore good health.
A common misconception is that cryonics freezes the dead. As the definition
of "death" is "a permanent cessation of all vital functions" the future
ability to revive a patient preserved with today's technology implies
the patient wasn't dead. Cryonics is actually based on the more plausible idea
that present medical practice has erred in declaring a patient "dead." A second
opinion from a future physician – one with access to a fundamentally better medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology
– lets us avoid the unpleasant risk that we might bury someone alive.
Evaluating cryonics
The major reason that cryonics is not more favorably viewed in the medical community
is relatively easy to explain. Medicine relies on clinical trials. Put more simply,
if someone proposes a technique for saving lives, the response is "Try it and
see if it works." Methods that have not been verified by clinical trials are called
"experimental," while methods that have been tried and failed are rejected.
In keeping with this tradition, we would like to conduct clinical trials of
the effectiveness of cryopreservation to determine whether it does (or does
not) work. The appropriate trials can be easily described. Cryonics proposes
to preserve people with today's technology in the expectation that medical technology
of (say) the year 2100 will be able to cure them. Thus, the appropriate clinical
trials would be to:
- Select N subjects.
- Preserve them.
- Wait 100 years.
- See if the technology of 2100 can indeed revive them.
The reader might notice a problem: what do we tell the terminally ill patient
prior to completion of the trials?
While this problem is not entirely unique to cryonics (the plight of a dying
patient who wishes to know whether or not to take a new experimental treatment
is well known), cryonics poses it in a qualitatively more severe fashion: we
must wait longer to determine the outcome and we have no preliminary results
to provide a clue about what that outcome might be. If a new treatment is being
tested we normally have the results of animal trials and perhaps some preliminary
results from human patients. Further, we expect to get reliable results within
a small number of years. In the case of cryonics, we are quite literally awaiting
the development of an entirely new medical technology. Preliminary results,
even on experimental animals, are simply not available; and the final results
won't be available for at least several decades.
Thus, while we can begin the clinical trials required to evaluate cryonics
today, clinical trials cannot provide a timely answer about the effectiveness
of cryonics. It is not possible (utilizing the paradigm of clinical trials)
to draw conclusions today about whether physicians tomorrow will
(or will not) be able to revive someone who was cryopreserved using today's
technology.
Does cryonics work?
The correct scientific answer to the question "Does cryonics work?" is: "The clinical
trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we'll give you a reliable answer."
The relevant question for those of us who don't expect to survive that long is:
"Would I rather be in the control group, or the experimental group?" We are forced
by circumstances to answer that question without the benefit of knowing the results
of the clinical trials.
In order to show that cryonics will not work (or even to show that it's unlikely
to work) it is necessary to show that no future technology, no matter how advanced,
will ever be able to restore the cryopreserved patient. When we consider
what is routine today and how it might have been viewed in (say) the 1700's,
we can begin to see how difficult it is to make a well founded argument that
future medical technology will never be able to reverse the injuries that occur
during cryopreservation.
Is the treatment worse than the disease?
Finally, there is the risk that a proposed treatment might be worse than the disease
(which creates a strong prejudice against the use of experimental treatments on
human beings). Current laws require that cryopreservation begin after "legal death"
(which should be distinguished both from death by current medical criteria and
death by the medical criteria of (say) the year 2100). This presumably implies
a rather small risk. Even with complete patient autonomy and the ability to start
cryopreservation prior to legal death (as could happen in the future) cryonics
will only be used when the patient is terminal and has little remaining life,
either in quantity or quality. There is little need, in the case of cryonics,
to fear that the cure will be worse than the disease.
What to do
|
It works |
It doesn't work |
| Sign up |
Live |
Die, lose life insurance |
| Do nothing |
Die |
Die |
How might we evaluate cryonics? Broadly speaking, there are two available courses
of action: (1) sign up or (2) do nothing. And there are two possible outcomes:
(1) it works or (2) it doesn't. This leads to the payoff matrix to the right.
In using such a payoff matrix to evaluate the possible outcomes, we must decide
what value the different outcomes have. What value do we place on a long and healthy
life? (It is important to realize that the kinds of medical technology required
to restore today's cryonics patients will almost certainly be able to restore
good health for an extended period). What (presumably negative) value do we place
on being dead? And finally, in the absence of direct experimental results in one
direction or the other, what estimate do we make of the chances that it will work?
While different people will answer these questions in different ways, this
provides a useful framework in which to consider the problem.
Present successes
It is worth
pointing out that a fairly wide range of simple tissue types have been successfully
cryopreserved and then rewarmed, including very early human embryos, sperm, skin,
bone, red and white blood cells, bone marrow, and others. Glycerol (anti-freeze,
see molecular structure at left) has historically been used to greatly reduce
freezing damage. New cryoprotectants in combination with ice blockers are now
able to eliminate ice formation in a process called vitrification.
Summary
Cryonics proposes to use an experimental treatment on human patients with no expectation
that clinical trials will be completed anytime in the near future. This has created
some controversy. Despite this, cryopreservation is the medically conservative
course of action (in the best sense of the word "conservative.") Conventional
medical criteria pronounce the cryonics patient "dead." These criteria are disputed
by those who support cryonics, who argue that (at the very least) this diagnosis
might be in error. If there is a debate about whether or not a patient is dead
it would seem inappropriate to resolve the dispute by placing the patient in a
furnace, particularly if this course of action is against the wishes of the patient.
If we wish to gain some insight today about the chance that cryonics will
or will not work we must consider (a) the kinds of damage that are likely to
occur during cryopreservation and (b) the kinds of damage that future medical
technologies might reasonably be able to repair. Those interested in pursuing
this subject can read The
Molecular Repair of the Brain.
Recent
coverage about cryonics is available from Google's news search.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, November 5, 2008: "A
Science Without a Deadline" – "“If sceptics don’t want to pursue
this area, that’s fine, but I ask them not to interfere with my own efforts
to save the lives of myself and the people I love”"
Yahoo News, November 3, 2008: "Frozen
mice cloned - are wooly mammoths next?" – "There is hope in
bringing Ted Williams back, after all"
BBC News,October 20, 2008: "Doctors
get death diagnosis tips" – "...there is enough ambiguity
in diagnosing death that doctors need guidance" "...like low body
temperature when it is inappropriate to confirm death." (audio)
Newsweek, July 23, 2007: "Back
From the Dead" – "The other is to scan the entire three-dimensional
molecular array of the brain into a computer which could hypothetically reconstitute
the mind, either as a physical entity or a disembodied intelligence in cyberspace."
Newsweek, May 7, 2007: "To
Treat the Dead" – ""After one hour," he says, "we couldn't
see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In
fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later."
The Wall Street Journal, January 21st 2006: "A
Cold Calculus Leads Cryonauts To Put Assets on Ice" – "At
least a dozen wealthy American and foreign businessmen are testing unfamiliar
legal territory by creating so-called personal revival trusts designed to
allow them to reclaim their riches hundreds, or even thousands, of years into
the future."
This Is London, May 25th 2004: "Sperm
'can be kept for thousands of years'" – "...sperm could
survive 5,000 or 6,000 years stored in liquid nitrogen."
The Arizona State Legislature is not
regulating cryonics.
Reasononline, February 25th 2004: "Regulating
the Biggest Chill" – "Arizona's state legislature is about
to consider one of the silliest pieces of "consumer protection"
legislation ever devised."
Guardian Unlimited, January 23rd 2004, "House
of the temporarily dead" – "Officially, the building is
"the world's first comprehensive facility devoted to life extension research
and cryopreservation", a six-acre structure that will house research laboratories,
animal and plant DNA, and up to 10,000 temporarily dead people."
Science News, December 21st 2002: "Cold
Comfort: A futuristic play of cryogenic proportions" – an amusing
story in which Ted Williams, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman awake in 2102
and find they are wards of the Martha Stewart Living Foundation. Says Ted:
"...the Red Sox should have won a World Series by now."
The Fifth Alcor Conference
on Extreme Life Extension resulted in several articles:
Wired News, November 18th 2002: "Ray
Kurzweil's Plan: Never Die" – "Ray Kurzweil, celebrated
author, inventor and geek hero, plans to live forever."
Wired News, November 20th 2002: A
Few Ways to Win Mortality War – "Discussions among leading
researchers in nanotechnology, cloning and artificial intelligence focused
on much more than cryonics, the process of freezing the body in liquid nitrogen
after death to be later reanimated. Cryonics is basically a backup plan
if technology doesn't obliterate mortality first."
Wired News, November 20th 2002: Who
Wants to Live Forever? – "Gregory Benford, of the University
of California at Irvine, believes the public should know that 'cryonicists
aren't crazy, they're just really great, sexy optimists.'"
KurzweilAI.net, November 22nd 2002: The
Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension – "Bringing together
longevity experts, biotechnology pioneers, and futurists, the conference
explored how the emerging technologies of biotechnology, nanotechnology,
and cryonics will enable humans to halt and ultimately reverse aging and
disease and live indefinitely."
Small Times, December 6th 2002: Cryonics
Conference Brings Out Nanotech's Extreme Optimists – "Sound
far-fetched? Maybe, but the only way to really find out whether nanomedicine
is achievable is give it a try."
Coverage of cryonics related to the Ted Williams case has been voluminous.
Here are links to a few articles:
Sports Illustrated, August 2nd 2003: "Splendid
Splinter chilling in Scottsdale"
Sports Illustrated, June 30th 2003: "Chillin'
with the Splinter"
The New York Times, September 26th 2002: "Fight
Over Williams May End"
CNN Sports Illustrated, August 13th 2002: "Williams'
eldest daughter asks judge to keep jurisdiction"
USA Today, July
28th 2002: "Vitrification
could keep tissue safe during the big chill"
The New York Times,
July 16th 2002: "They've
Seen the Future and Intend to Live It"
The New York Times, July 9th 2002: "Even
for the Last .400 Hitter, Cryonics Is the Longest Shot"
(Note that
the Boston Globe links and others that have gone dead have been deleted).
Howard Lovy's blog August 27th 2003: "Unfrozen
Cave Men"
Reason Online, August 2002: "Forever
Young: The new scientific search for immortality"
New Scientist, September 2nd 2002: "New Scientist offers prize to die for." – "When the
winner of the New Scientist promotion is pronounced legally dead, he or she
will be ... suspended in liquid nitrogen at –196°, in a state known as cryonic
preservation[sic]."
KRON 4 News, Nightbeat, May 3rd 2001: "Frozen
for Life" – “…[medical] advances are giving new credibility
to cryonics.”
Wired News, July 20th 2001: "Cryonics
Over Dead Geeks' Bodies"
Scientific American, September 2001: "Nano
nonsense and cryonics"
Search PubMed for published
articles on cryonics.
Those interested in joining the experimental group can contact:
No action is needed to join the control group. (Quite a few people well known in the fields of computer science, software development,
and other high tech areas have joined the experimental group. "... we've
discovered a new Silicon Valley trend." Dan Gillmor, Mercury News Technology
Columnist, July 19 1998).
Alcor gives a succinct
description of its procedures, and also describes some common
myths about cryonics.
Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation discusses biostasis and cryonics
KurzweilAI.net
discusses cryonics and related concepts. It provides an excellent overview
of the multiple cascading technological changes that will transform our lives
in the coming decades.
The molecular repair
of the brain discusses the technical issues surrounding the feasibility
of cryonics.
Large scale
analysis of neural structures reviews the issues involved in high resolution
imaging of the human brain. While not directly applicable to cryonics, it
provides useful background about the neuronal structures that we wish to preserve.
Nanomedicine by Robert
A. Freitas provides a technical overview of expected medical applications
of nanotechnology.
The Prospect of Immortality
(1965) by Robert C. W. Ettinger, is now available on the web. This book started
the cryonics movement.
Jim Halperin's 1998 novel, The
First Immortal, is a well researched and entertaining introduction
to the subject.
Cryonics, cryptography,
and maximum likelihood estimation discusses the surprisingly close relationship
between cryptanalysis of World War II rotor machines and the problem of inferring
neuronal wiring given partial information.
The
society for the recovery of persons apparently dead by Steven B. Harris.
An essay on people's remarkable ability to ignore new ideas for decades and
even centuries, and its relevance to cryonics.
A page on
Nanotechnology and Medicine discusses some of the improvements in medicine
that should be feasible with a mature nanotechnology.
The DMOZ open directory project has many
links related to cryonics.
Timeship Cryonics will pursue research
in life extension, vitrification (cryopreservation without ice), and related
areas.
The growing movement for increasing autonomy and control by the terminally
ill patient will likely improve the conditions under which cryopreservation
can be performed. The
Oregon Death With Dignity Act is one manifestation of this movement.
Anyone interested in a long and healthy life will also be concerned about
the regulatory environment and its impact
on health care.
This
page is part of
Ralph C. Merkle's web site.
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