“I lead a cryonics team and freeze people's brains for a living”

http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/what_do_you_do/213599-cryonics-interview

by Mclhuman • 11 years ago

54 51 11 years ago

_ihaque• 11 years ago

  If somebody’s been pronounced dead and then you start CPR, you don’t want the
  embarrassing situation where they start to wake up again. For older people that
  are really far gone it’s not a concern, but sometimes life can start
  to come back a bit so general anesthetic takes care of that.

That someone is coming back to life is considered "embarrassing", and ought to be stopped with a general anesthetic? That doesn't sound like someone I'd want in the emergency room by my bed...

mmastrac• 11 years ago

The idea here is that you know you are in your final days, so coming back to life for a few more hours or days isn't ideal. What you want is to be frozen as close to the time as you are pronounced dead (and preferable pronounced dead as quickly as possible).

diziet• 11 years ago

This person's purpose is to store the patient/client's brain in cold storage in the hope that future technology will allow the personality to be recovered. Their job starts after people are clinically dead. Struggling through reviving someone might cause more damage to the brain compared to the anesthetic approach.

lassoman• 11 years ago

That's exactly what I though! Holly cow......maybe I should take my name off the organ donors list. Have heard of people 'coming back to life' after being incorrectly pronounced dead (even young ones) and from memory there has been a few cases where people were buried alive, waking up in the coffin only to find out that they will come out of it alive again. If that is the common practice I think that medical practitioners should start questioning their suitability for this job!

zachrose2• 11 years ago

This just reminded me of a short story called "Guilt" by Judy Budnitz. This American Life has a transcript of a reading, scroll down to "Act Four."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/256/t...

coldtea10• 11 years ago

That's exactly what I though! Holly cow......maybe I should take my name off the organ donors list.

Heh, doctors have been known to be eager to "be done" with organ donors in some cases that look dead or dying enough. What's a seemingly dying person compared to all those that get to get new body parts, after all?

Combine it with stories of people coming back from comas or near-death, and it doesn't sound that good.

vvdcect• 11 years ago

There are stories of people who ate fugu and were presumed to be dead but woke up after a few days

pan69• 11 years ago

What I don't really get from the article is, why? The article seems to be a technical explanation of the procedure to freeze someone's brain. but it doesn't really explain why you'd do that in the first place (probably being revived in the future) and what the actual possibilities of this are.

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

Insurance. You're betting technology will come far enough to build you a replacement body. You have nothing to lose because your other option is irreversible death.

Sivart13• 11 years ago

Nothing to lose except the money you're spending on an icebox that you could've spent bettering the world you're leaving.

tene• 11 years ago

It's last-chance life support. It probably won't work, but it's a hell of a lot more likely to help me survive than leaving my corpse to rot in a box underground. It's a long bet, and not very likely, but it's still better than all the alternatives, at least for me.

It's entirely possible that I might choose not to live forever someday if I have the choice, but I'd prefer for it to be my choice when I opt out of the rest of forever, rather than being left up to whenever my body happens to fall apart or be sufficiently damaged.

bennettfeely• 11 years ago

When you're rich, it's pretty hard to accept the fact that you're eventually going to die and you can't take any of it with you.

It would make an interesting theme for a novel, waking from a dreamless sleep only to face again the pains, disappointments and inevitable deterioration of this life, and this time separated from the people who once gave some solace. Don't sign me up.

beeworker• 11 years ago

You don't need to be rich. It costs very little to fund a $30k life insurance policy, which will get your whole body suspended with Cryonics Institute. Alcor is more, $80k for just the head.

zachrose2• 11 years ago

I'm curious about the finances and the practical aspects of resuscitation. Do you stipulate when you want to be resuscitated and for how much money? Do some people volunteer to be early resuscitation subjects? Is there a discount for that?

beloch2• 11 years ago

Ideally, the process of cryonically preserving someone's brain would be like an extreme form of the stasis we hope to be able to put people in for long space voyages. You might be legally dead by today's standards, but just asleep in practice.

This is where things get incredibly weird for cryonics. Any competent practitioner is going to amass a large number of people who are legally dead today, but may be viewed as "just sleeping" in the future. Where is the boundary between these two states? At what point do these frozen brains transition from specimens with no rights to human beings?

Say that, in the not too distant future, the technology is invented to resurrect the frozen. At this point, the cryonics company will have something clearly different from medical specimens in their tanks. However, what if the resurrection tech is prohibitively expensive? Even at cryogenic temperatures there is atomic movement and, necessarily, slow and subtle degradation. Some frozen "sleepers" might not survive long enough for resurrection to become affordable enough for them, assuming the assets they set aside for resurrection weren't wiped out by bad investments. Do these doomed sleepers have any rights? Will the cryonics company be obligated to revive them at a loss? What if the company goes bankrupt? Could people be brought back as indentured "heads in jars" and expected to work off their debt? Will brains frozen today even have any skills or knowledge the future will want?

Cryonics raises a lot of questions for the present and, potentially, even more problems for the future to solve.

Mahn• 11 years ago

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but if I had to guess I'd say cryonics companies don't give a damn about future ethical and/or legal implications as long as it's a profitable business as it stands today. I very much doubt they have plan on what to do with the brains or bodies they preserve, though I'd love to be proven otherwise.

mhartl• 11 years ago

On the contrary, such concerns are of paramount importance to cryonics organizations. A good place to start is the Alcor Patient Care Trust [1]:

At Alcor, patient storage costs are paid from the Patient Care Trust. This conservative funding arrangement is designed to cover the cost of patient storage solely from the income from the Trust, thereby assuring that such funding will continue indefinitely into the future. The irrevocable Patient Care Trust is included under Alcor's tax-exempt status, but nevertheless is a separate legal entity that provides liability protection for these assets. This arrangement is one of the reasons our members have confidence in Alcor.

It doesn't do any good to use the most advanced techniques to get our members into cryopreservation unless we can keep them there, as well as build capital to eventually fund revival and reintegration. Ongoing care for cryopreservation patients is the number one element of our purpose in being cryonicists, and financial protection for the patients is a critical component of this. There is no use in starting this possibly centuries-long project, if we don't do centuries-long financial planning. Providing this kind of protection through a conservative, long-term view of storage costs is one of the main reasons why cryopreservation costs so much.

[1] http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html

zerooneinfinity• 11 years ago

Could I freeze my brain now and come back in thirty years?

zyxley4• 11 years ago

We don't know. The actual freezing can potentially go extremely well even with current technology, but the problem is the unfreezing process. So far there's no good way to unfreeze someone and get all their cells going again.

This is why the cryonics legal trusts are all designed to be financially self-sufficient in perpetuity: it's a long shot, but if you can get somebody frozen, you can potentially keep them as a meatsicle for Long Enough for somebody to invent medical nanites or machine-brain upload interfaces or whatever.

mdaniel• 11 years ago

So far there's no good way to unfreeze someone and get all their cells going again.

Do we have any non-human examples of this process, or is it 100% hope that the "flying cars" future will have a working process and it will be sufficiently effective to resurrect a human brain?

Also, do we even have a mental model of the steps and just not the technology or are we missing the mental steps, too?

droithomme3• 11 years ago

No, the procedure has never been demonstrated to work. There is no empirical evidence. These companies can not give a single instance of them resuscitating a human after undergoing these procedures. Not one. You are paying to have yourself frozen and stored, and that's it. The entire process is based on a combination of cynical opportunists, PR agents and deluded religious faithful who believe in "the procedure" without a shred of scientific proof, and gullible desperate rubes ignorant of empirical science.

Jach3• 11 years ago

If your bar for evidence is that a human revival process has been shown to work, I don't think you'll see that for quite some time. But to say there's no evidence it can work is pretty out there... 10 years ago they vitrified a rabbit kidney, then warmed it up, and successfully transplanted it.

A kidney's a lot less complicated than the brain, and that was 10 years ago. The research has been pretty underfunded. If you'd actually like the field to progress and uncover evidence for or against the prospect of those who have been suspended up until now ever even having the slimmest chance of revival greater than that of cremation, maybe you should encourage legislation that lets them test on volunteering criminals heading for lethal injection or other end-of-life volunteers who don't want to be preserved but are happy to contribute to Science or large animals. Don't get squeamish over experiments like this: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/bringingdixieback.html

MarkMc2• 11 years ago

I agree that the procedure has never been demonstrated to work, but that says nothing about the future.

For thousands of years people dreamed of powered aircraft that could fly like birds. Many people thought it would aways be impossible, right up until it wasn't.

coldtea10• 11 years ago

Cryonics. A tax on people who are bad on biology.

zyxley4• 11 years ago

It's not like there's much else to spend the money on, what with being dead and all.

cbr• 11 years ago

You don't care about anything that will outlast you?

coldtea10• 11 years ago

No, just the usual things, ending world hunger, helping your city, sponsoring a university, cancer research, your children, etc.

And even if you're that selfish, you could always throw some great parties with models and champagne, or pay to have your enemies killed...

MarkMc2• 11 years ago

I admit my biology is a little rusty, but does the current process of freezing people mean there will never be a future technology to revive them?

Our technology has progressed enormously in the last 300 years and most likely will continue for another 300 years. So to me cryonics seems to be a reasonable investment.

jdnier• 11 years ago

That interview reads like it's written by a character out of Gregory Benford's 1993 novel, Chiller -- only here we are in 2015; it's just like Benford wrote about then.

droithomme3• 11 years ago

Would love to see some articles on statistics regarding the number of people who have been revived after this procedure.

Is it still at 0%, with no scientific basis at all other than the evidence-free religious devotion of the faithful devotees, constantly posting claims without a shred of solid evidence?

zyxley4• 11 years ago

the number of people who have been revived after this procedure

This is going to be zero by default even with perfect preservation, given that the whole point is to freeze people because current medical technology can't keep them reliably alive for whatever reason.

There's no reason to even think about trying to revive people (rather than simply preserving them as thoroughly as possible) until geriatrics, cancer medicine, or whatever have advanced considerably.

“I lead a cryonics team and freeze people's brains for a living”

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