Archive for the ‘Cryonics’ Category

Freezing your body after death with the hope of coming back to life one day sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.

Southern Cryonics, the first body-freezing facility in the Southern Hemisphere, tries to turn this idea into reality.

Were sort of in a race against time, says Southern Cryonics director, Peter Tsolakides, to Neos Kosmos.

Cryonics, coming from the Greek word kros for icy cold, involves the preservation of legally declared dead bodies at extremely low temperatures for potential future revival.

The facility in Holbrook, New South Wales, uses this practice, with the expectation that one day, advancements in medical technology and science will restore patients to health and in the young body.

But the timeframe of this future remains uncertain.

Tsolakides says once you preserve a body, you can keep it (stored) for thousands of years, but the chance of coming back depends on when you freeze it.

A matter of life after death

He says, currently 50 people, are willing to take the risk for a chance at life after death, and the number is growing.

This group consists of 35 investors each contributing $50,000 to $70,000, and 15 subscribers or customers who have paid $150,000 through life insurance.

Tsolakides says there are no guarantees, despite how great the dream of being brought back from the dead might be for some people.

Most of them know something about it (cryonics), but they also look at it and say, look, theres no guarantees, but theres a chance.

And that chance versus being buried in the ground or cremated is a much higher chance coming back.

He estimates the chance of a well-preserved body being revived in 200 years to be around 20%.

He says although its hard to predict what the world will be like in be like in 1,000 years, bodies might be revived when technological advancements have found the key to immortality.

In the real world, nobody will be dying, and most diseases will be cured. So, we will know how to prevent death in a sense, and the next step is to bring back those who have already died, but in a good condition.

Tsolakides says that while they dont know how to bring a person back to life, current developments give you inklings, of what the future is going to be like.

He says progress has to start somewhere, and right now billions are invested in medical research aimed at disease cures.

This includes groups working on brain revival, organ regeneration, cloning, and advancements in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

How does cryonics work?

When a person is declared legally dead at the hospital, a cooling process begins.

Chemicals are used to stabilise the body, lowering it to about ice temperature.

Once taken to the funeral home, the body is further cooled and infused with an antifreeze substance until it reaches about -80C.

Next, it goes to the cryonics facility, gradually cooled to -180C and preserved below that temperature, in a large vacuum flask container filled with liquid nitrogen.

Southern Cryonics Greek-Australian director says, theres a brief window of a few hours after legal death, where no deterioration occurs to the body.

Once preserved in liquid nitrogen, it can be stored for thousands of years due to almost no chemical or biological activity at that temperature.

Its a race against time to keep the temperature going down, he says.

But is it possible to freeze a human brain to revive it later?

If you catch them (bodies) under our optimal time, very little damage is occurring to the brain, but that doesnt mean that 200 years from now, that damage cant be repaired, Tsolakides says.

The facility can currently hold up to 40 patients, with each container fitting 4 bodies, but can expand to hold up to six or seven hundred patients if necessary.

The birth and evolution of Southern Cryonics

Tsolakides got interested in cryonics from a young age.

When he came back to Australia around 2012 after working overseas, he saw there were only cryonics facilities in the US and Russia.

He connected with like-minded people and talked about building one in Australia.

We started getting what we call founding members, says Tsolakides, each contributing $50,000 to kickstart the project, eventually totalling 35 members of a non-profit organisation.

We started the facility and that was how it sort of developed.

He says, they chose Holbrook, a small town with about 1,500 people, for a few reasons.

Land there wasnt expensive, and it was halfway between Melbourne and Sydney, making it accessible to over half of Australias population.

Holbrooks nearby Albury airport is crucial for quick patient transportation, and the support from the local council made the decision easier.

Another advantage is its proximity to liquid nitrogen suppliers along the Hume Highway, crucial for the facility.

Holbrooks low history of natural disasters made it a safe choice after a thorough analysis of several years.

The legalities

Tsolakides says Southern Cryonics got all the official approvals from the NSW Department of Health and the local council, to operate as a cemetery but uses a recognised funeral home for mortuary work.

The government groups that we work with helped us a lot. It wasnt like we got resistance or anything like that.

A good idea but not for everyone

Tsolakides was born in Israel to Greek parents.

His mother was from the Greek island of Syros, and his father from Athens.

They briefly lived in Greece before moving to Australia in 1955 when Tsolakides was five years old.

He has a degree in Chemistry and later pursued one in Business Administration.

Throughout his career, he worked primarily in marketing for an oil company.

He grew up and lived in Melbourne for many years before moving to Sydney, a place he now calls home.

His passion in cryonics sparked at about18 after reading Robert Ettingers book, The Prospect of Immortality.

At that age, he didnt worry much about death.

He assumed this will be everywhere, by the time he got old, but soon realised that very few people worldwide were interested in it.

He says that while some are intrigued by cryonics, most view it as a good idea but not for themselves.

Even the US organisation have about five to six thousand members only, with 400 or 500 people suspended, and theyve been going for 50 years.

But that didnt stop him for pursuing his curiosity around cryonics.

Keeping an eye on scientific developments

Tsolakides is determined to improve their techniques and increase success chances, despite challenges or doubts about cryonics.

He says Southern Cryonics along with overseas organisations is monitoring the best way to store a body, leaving the revival work to other scientists.

Its (suspending the body) physically possible to do it now, he says, but of course, you can always improve the processes.

While cryonics remains a controversial field and the chances of revival seem low now, it is yet to be seen whether future technology will ever be able to bring the dead back to life.

Read this article:
Is it possible to come back from the dead? Australia's first body-freezing facility explores the boundaries of mortality - Neos Kosmos

This story is a collaboration with

Sixty years ago this month, on April 22, 1964, the New York Worlds Fair opened in Flushing MeadowsCorona Park in Queens, New York. The Fair had the theme of Peace Through Understanding, and was dedicated to Mans Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe, as symbolized by the 140-foot-tall stainless-steel globe, known as the Unisphere, that towered over a massive reflecting pool.

The 1964 Worlds Fair wasnt the first one held in Flushing Meadows; the Unisphere was built on the same ground once occupied by the similarly spherical Perisphere, which was constructed for the 1939 Worlds Fair. To kick off the 1964 Fair, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered opening remarks that evoked the 39 edition, which imagined the 1960s of the future:

But Johnsons reflections on human progress werent all positive. No one prophesied that half the world would be devastated by war, or that millions of helpless would be slaughtered, the President noted, just months after he approved the controversial National Security Action Memorandum 288 escalating the U.S.s involvement in the Vietnam War. No one foresaw power that was capable of destroying man, or a cold war which could bring conflict to every continent.

Overhead view of the 1964 Worlds Fair, showing the Unisphere and surrounding pavilions in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York.

Johnsons presence at the 1964 Worlds Fair underscored the somber reality facing America at the time. After all, an assassins bullet killed the intended speaker, his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, thrusting hima representative of Washington D.C.s old guardinto the role intended for JFK, a symbol of the New Frontier.

So, who could Fair attendees turn to for hopeful visions of Peace Through Understanding, and Mans Achievement on a Shrinking Globe? Only one man: Walt Disney.

Disney, who had been a weekly presence in American homes for the last decade through his television show, Walt Disneys Disneylandlater titled Walt Disney Presentscreated four attractions for the 64 Worlds Fair. These exhibits were a hit, drawing 135,000 visitors per day during the first season alone, according to The Walt Disney Family Museum.

Walt Disney at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair

Visitors line up to enter Its A Small World at the Worlds Fair in 1965.

Disneys attractions included Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at the Illinois Pavilion, an animatronic replica of another President who represented hope, and who was also assassinated; Fords Magic Skyway for the Ford Motor Company, where guests rode in Ford vehicles past animatronic dinosaurs; and the now-iconic its a small world, which Disneys Imagineers built in collaboration with Pepsi-Cola as a tribute to UNICEF.

But it was the Carousel of Progress, located in General Electrics Progressland pavilion, that most epitomized Walt Disneys vision of the future. The rotating animatronic show guided audiences through the history of human innovation and provided a comforting escape with its optimistic theme song by the Sherman Brothers, promising, Theres a great, big, beautiful tomorrow/Shining at the end of every day.

In the aftermath of a national tragedy, Walt Disney became a beacon of optimism for fairgoers, and for Americans. His presence fostered a belief in a great big beautiful tomorrow.

Perhaps its that enduring optimism that fuels the persistent conspiracy that Disney, who died in 1966, might still be among us, secretly preserved in hopes of one day being revived.

In 1964, besides contributing to the Worlds Fair, Disney also released his most acclaimed live-action film yet: Mary Poppins. Just a few years earlier, during a screening of To Kill a Mockingbird, Disney had reportedly lamented, Thats the kind of film Id like to make, but I cant. Now, his tender musical adaptation of P.L. Travers novel had achieved the same milestone as Universals adaptation of Harper Lees seminal work: a nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Poster for Mary Poppins, touting the film as "Walt Disney's Greatest Achievement."

With his status finally solidified in the entertainment industry, Disney turned his sights to the futurenot of his film studio, but of humanity. Intent on using his renowned imagination to forge a brighter tomorrow, Disney envisioned a utopia designed to last forever. In 1964, the future looked bright for Walt Disney.

In less than three years, he would be dead.

On December 15, 1966, Walt Disney died as a result of complications from lung cancer. As Biography notes, a private funeral was held the next day, and on December 17, his body was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Some conspiracy theorists, however, believe that Disneys remains arent actually at Forest Lawn. Theyll tell you, according to Biography, that Disneys body is instead suspended in a frozen state and buried deep beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, awaiting the day when medical technology would be advanced enough to reanimate the animator.

The rumored cryonic freezing of Walt Disney has no clear origin point that Biography could confirm. But its first documented mention is in a 1969 Ici Paris article, reportedly as a prank concocted by disgruntled animators who once worked for Disney seeking to have a laugh at their late taskmasker employers expense. Their motive was seemingly revenge for Disneys strict oversight, an aftermath of a labor uprising in the late 1930s that is chronicled in depth in The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animations Golden Age.

Initially, whispers suggested Disneys entire body was preserved in a secret facility, but soon the tale focused on the animators head alone, frozen beneath iconic Disneyland attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean, the Matterhorn, the Partners statue at the center of the park, and even the Magic Kingdom castle. Over time, it seems every corner of Disneyland has been rumored to shelter its founders frozen head.

The notion of Walt Disneys icy remains hiding within park attractions might stem from the actualsecrets of Disneyland. There is indeed a hidden space at the top of the Matterhorn, but its home to a basketball court for bored Disney staff, not a frozen former CEO. And while early versions of Pirates of the Caribbean did feature real skeletons from UCLAs medical school, according to SFGate, none belonged to Disney himself.

The grim idea that only Walt Disneys head was placed in cryostasis might have caught on due to its eerie, sci-fi feel, with modern cryonics offering both full-body and head-only preservation options. That singular detail adds a creepy wrinkle to the conspiracy, evoking images more akin to the 1962 horror flick The Brain That Wouldnt Die than the reality of a Hollywood moguls legacy.

Nevertheless, the tale of Walt Disneys frozen head persisted, specifically resurfacing in two biographies released years after his death: Leonard Moselys 1986 Disneys World and Marc Eliots 1993 Walt Disney: Hollywoods Dark Prince, which further embedded the legend into popular culture.

Eliots controversial biography, which was criticized by Disneys family and historians alike for its speculative content, included unfounded allegations against Disney, including claims that he was an FBI informant (which evidence suggests he was not), and that he refused to have flags at half mast at Disneyland when JFK died (which photographic evidence disproves). Nevertheless, Hollywoods Dark Prince fed into a desire to find the dark side of a man often propped up as the symbol of Americana, pushing both the cryonics rumor and the assertions of Disneys rampant antisemitism (also notably debunked) into the mainstream.

Disneys family has firmly denied the rumor that he was cryogenically frozen, and as Biography points out, it has been further discredited by those pointing to the existence of signed legal documents that indicate Disney was in fact cremated and that his remains are interred in a marked plot (for which his estate paid $40,000) at Forest Lawn, the exact location of which is a matter of public record. Plus, the first instance of a person being cryopreserved after his death, James Bedford, didnt occur until nearly a month after Disneys cremation, debunking the timeline of the rumor that Disney was frozen.

Walt Disneys grave site at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Diane Disney, Walts daughter, wrote in a 1972 biography about her famous father that she doubted her father had even heard of cryonics.

Nonetheless, even skeptics who reject the frozen head story might concede that Walt Disney, a famously forward-thinking futurist, could have been aware of cryonics. The concept gained attention in 1964, the same year Disney shifted his focus from film to envisioning his utopian future.

If you were browsing the New Releases shelf at a bookstore in 1964, you might stumble upon an intriguing non-fiction book in between copies of Ernest Hemingways A Moveable Feast and the Warren Commissions The Warren Report: Robert Ettingers The Prospect of Immortality.

Most of us now living have a chance for personal, physical immortality, Ettinger claims in the very first sentence. All you need to do, Ettinger says, is join one established fact with one reasonable assumption.

The fact: At very low temperatures it is possible, right now, to preserve dead people with essentially no deterioration, indefinitely.

The assumption: If civilization endures, medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other cause of death.

Six decades later, while we havent mastered the art of repairing all human body damage, our cryopreservation methods have advanced significantly, particularly with the introduction of vitrification by Greg Fahy and William F. Rall in the 1980s. And recent scientific advancements suggest that what we currently understand as death might be more reversible than previously thought.

Some excerpts from Ettingers book resonate with the futuristic optimism of Walt Disneys Tomorrowland. For example, Ettinger writes,If civilization endures ... if the Golden Age materializes, the future will reveal a wonderful world indeed, a vista to excite the mind and thrill the heart. However, even if Disney had encountered Ettingers work, his imagination had already been sparked by another piece of literature before he died.

In May 1960, Horizon magazine published Out of a Fair, a City, an article in which architect Victor Gruen envisioned transforming the 1964 Worlds Fair site into a domed city to test solutions for societal challenges. According to Imagineer Marty Sklars 1999 book, Remembering Walt, Gruens philosophy (further elaborated in Gruens 1964 work, The Heart of our Cities: The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure,) was a significant influence on Disney during his final yearsso much that he began an ambitious plan to build a community in Florida that would never cease to be a living blueprint of the future.

Disney, utilizing land his corporation discreetly bought in Florida, set out to build an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow adjacent to his planned East Coast theme park. The community aimed to eliminate traffic jams, offer abundant green spaces, and showcase efficient public transportation with the use of a monorail system.

EPCOT world showcase at Walt Disney World Resort, 1982

After Walt Disneys death, the Florida land earmarked for his future city was transformed into EPCOT, the second theme park at Walt Disney World Resort. EPCOT features a Future World section with educational attractions and a World Showcase with international pavilions, operating as a perpetual Worlds Fair.

In his last years, Walt Disney was introspective, focusing not on the prospect of immortality, but on a different sentiment. While the 1964 song Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow planted the seed in millions of young minds, it was another tune by the Sherman Brothers from the same year that resonated deeply with Disney as he reflected on his life. Richard Sherman recalls:

There is little left of the 1964 New York Worlds Fair in Flushing MeadowsCorona Park. The spot where the Carousel of Progress once played in GEs Progressland is now an athletic field. The Vatican pavilion has been replaced by a stone bench. The Unisphere, however, still remains, towering over a park whose occupants have little memory, or even awareness, of the Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow promised at the park 60 years ago.

The Unisphere in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in March 2024.

For the Baby Boomers who experienced Disneys contributions to the 1964 Worlds Fair, the event offered hope and a last optimistic vision of the future from Uncle Walt. And while today, these visitors can encounter preserved pieces of the Fair at the Queens Museum and experience its a small world at Disney parks worldwide, they cant turn that athletic field back into Progressland. And they cant bring back the man who made it possible.

Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse at the Rose Parade in 1966.

Walt Disneys legacy extends far beyond his films and theme parks. He symbolizes something greater than a sprawling entertainment empire. As biographer Neal Gabler put it in the final pages of Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, he demonstrated how one could assert ones will on the world at the very time when everything seemed to be growing beyond control and beyond comprehension.

For conspiracy theorists who want to believe Walt Disney is a frozen head, waiting for revival, perhaps its because they want to believe he asserted his will over the one thing no one has been able to do before. That maybe, if the Golden Age materializes, Walt Disney could even come back to life. And with him would come, once again, the promise of a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. A promise he made in Queens 60 years ago.

Michael Natale is the news editor for Best Products, covering a wide range of topics like gifting, lifestyle, pop culture, and more. He has covered pop culture and commerce professionally for over a decade. His past journalistic writing can be found on sites such as Yahoo! and Comic Book Resources, his podcast appearances can be found wherever you get your podcasts, and his fiction cant be found anywhere, because its not particularly good.

See the rest here:
The Truth About Walt Disney's Frozen Head and His Quest to Live Forever - Popular Mechanics

The cryonics industry and those who support cryonics refer to those who undergo the procedure after death as "cryonauts." ValentynVolkov /iStockPhoto

To some, its the possibility of another life for themselves or a loved one. To others, its science fiction.

Whatever it is, cryonicsdefined by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation as the science of using ultra-cold temperatures to preserve human life with the intent of restoring good health when technology becomes available to do so has now been around for 60 years, since the death of retired psychology professor James H. Bedford. Alcor, the company that still has his body in a frozen chamber, calls him the first cryonaut. (Cryonics is sometimes incorrectly referred to as cryogenics.)

Bedford was frozen long before Alcor was formed in 1976, but today thats where he rests with 148 others, in the Patient Care Bay in Scottsdale, Arizona. After his death, aged 73, of kidney cancer, his body was put on ice, The New York Times Magazine wrote in 1997. Then his body was processed by experts from the Cryonics Society of California, the Times wrote.

Sam Shaw of This American Life got a little more detail on what happened when the first cryonaut was frozen. He interviewed Bob Nelson, a TV repairman who became president of the society, a nonprofit consisting mostly of people who wanted to be cryonically preserved. What he discovered: like Nelson, most of the societys members were amateurs, and the scientists they had persuaded to work on the theoretical question of cryonics were skeptical. They wanted to take things slow, conduct research, publish papers, Shaw says. Then James Beford asked to be frozen, and they decided to go for it in spite of the fact that theyd lose the scientific communitys support.

When Dr. Bedford died on January 12, 1967, they were all caught off guard. Dr. Bedfords nurse had to run up and down the block collecting ice from the home freezers of neighbours. Cryonics was still just a theory, and the proceedings had the slightly manic quality of a local theater production, forced to open a couple of weeks early.

Bedford has been frozen ever since, although both his container and the place where he rests have changed. After his body was preserved, Alcor writes, he was handed over to family. His very devoted son stored him at a succession of locations over some two decades before transferring both his care and custody to Alcor, the foundation writes. According to the Times, his body was kept at a warehouse in Anaheim, a cryonics facility in Emeryville, somewhere else undisclosed and Fullerton before coming to Alcor. The reason for so many moves: fifty years ago, there was no cryonics industry and it was a fringe idea at best.

Around Bedfords body, the landscape of cryonics has also transformed dramatically, but despite Alcors strict protocols, theres no proof that its method of cryopreservation is actually working, writes George Dvorsky for Gizmodo. For all we know, every single person at the facility is a goner. Cryonics is still only the hope of a future for those preserved, even, as Dvorsky writes, when theyre terminally ill children.

If Bedford is ever re-animated, he will be in some strange company, writes Stacy Conradt for Mental Floss: mathematician Thomas K. Donaldson, a man who changed his name to FM-2030, Alcor vice president Jerry Leaf and both baseball player Ted Williams and his son John-Henry Williams are on ice at Alcor.

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Excerpt from:
The First Cryonic Preservation Took Place Fifty Years Ago Today

Cryonics: advancements, ethics, and skepticism  Kevin MD

See the rest here:
Cryonics: advancements, ethics, and skepticism - Kevin MD

The CI AdvantageStability, Safety, And Security

We have a proven track record of financial security and stability, as well as price stability. CI is the only cryonics organization with no debt, no stockholders, and no landlords. We own our patient care facilities outright, and all of our member officers and directors donate their services voluntarily. Were one of the oldest cryonics organizations in existence and the only such organization that has never raised its prices, even in high-inflation times like the late 70s and early 80s. Adjusting for inflation, our prices have actually steadily declined, and we hope to continue that trend.

As members, each and every one of us has a vested interest in the long-term viability of our organization our facilities, cryostats and finances are built to last into the future were striving toward.

We have a flexible and rapid system of emergency patient care based on widely available networks of mortuary assistance. This means that in the critical early stages, we can bring qualified professionals to you throughout most of the world. In particular, London-based F.A. Albin & Sons funeral directors are trained, practiced, equipped, and prepared to fly a team anywhere in Europe on short notice to help European CI members, tourists or business travellers.

Our prices are lower than any other organization in fact, the most affordable prices anywhere in the world. This is in keeping with our membership philosophy to provide ourselves reliable cryonic services at a reasonable and affordable cost. If we were to raise prices, wed only be charging ourselves more.

Our minimum whole-body suspension fee is $28,000. (For members at a distance, transportation costs and local help will be additional.) Our $28,000 fee is a one-time only payment, with no subsequent charges.Its easily funded by insurance or other means. (For last-minute cases, where the patient was not signed up beforehand, we ordinarily charge $35,000 rather than $28,000, if arrangements can be worked out at all.)

Does that lower fee mean lower quality patient care or services?Absolutely not.We believe that our non-profit status allows us to more successfully control costs. We believe that specific methods and research offered by alternative cryonics organizations differ only slightly from ours and that our procedures and policies give an equal or better chance for patient survival than competing organizations.

See for yourself. Read ourFAQand review The CI Advantage. Remember, many CI members could afford the higher prices of other organizations for themselves and their families, but weve chosen CI because we know its our best bet. And yours.

Read the rest here:
About CI - The Cryonics Institute

When an 87-year-old Californian man was wheeled into an operating room just outside Phoenix last year, the pandemic was at its height and medical protocols were being upended across the country.

A case like his would normally have required 14 or more bags of fluids to be pumped into him, but now that posed a problem.

Had he been infected with the coronavirus, tiny aerosol droplets could have escaped and infected staff, so the operating team had adopted new procedures that reduced the effectiveness of the treatment but used fewer liquids.

It was an elaborate workaround, especially considering the patient had been declared legally dead more than a day earlier.

He had arrived in the operating room of Alcor Life Extension Foundation located in an industrial park near the airport in Scottsdale, Ariz. packed in dry ice and ready to be cryopreserved, or stored at deep-freeze temperatures, in the hope that one day, perhaps decades or centuries from now, he could be brought back to life.

As it turns out, the pandemic that has affected billions of lives around the world has also had an impact on the nonliving.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit andlog intoyour Times account, orsubscribefor all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?Log in.

Want all of The Times?Subscribe.

Read more from the original source:
Cryonics During the Pandemic - The New York Times

1976 ROBERT ETTINGER FOUNDS THE CRYONICS INSTITUTE

Then in 1976 a separate organization was formed: the Cryonics Institute, to offer cryostasis services: careful preparation, cooling, and long term patient care in liquid nitrogen.

Our goal was maximum reliability and affordability. And we achieved it. The Cryonics Institute offers clear-cut advantages over all other providers. Such as:

Our prices are lower than any other organization in fact, the most affordable prices anywhere in the world. Our minimum whole-body suspension fee is $28,000. (For members at a distance, transportation costs and local help will be additional.) Our $28,000 fee is a one-time only payment, with no subsequent charges. Its easily funded by insurance or other means, and funds the best care available for our member patients. (For last-minute cases, where the patient was not signed up beforehand, we ordinarily charge $35,000 rather than $28,000, if arrangements can be worked out at all.)

Does that lower fee mean lower quality patient care or services? No. The major part of other organizations fees are earmarked for investment provisions totally unrelated to patient care and preparation. Methods and research differ, but overall we believe our procedures and policies give a better chance for patient survival than any other organizations and this web site will show you the detailed reasons why.

See for yourself. Read our FAQ and see The CI Advantage that compares the different cryonics organizations and why we think CI gives you and those you love the best possible chance for future survival. Remember: most CI members can afford the higher prices of other organizations for themselves and their families and often do give more, in bequests and donations. But weve chosen CI because we know its our best bet. And yours.

We have a unique, proven track record of financial security and stability. Price stability too. CI is the only organization with no debt, no stockholders, and no landlords. We own our patient care facilities outright, and all our officers and directors donate their services voluntarily. Were one of the oldest cryonics organizations in existence and the only such organization that has never raised its prices, even in high-inflation times like the late 70s and early 80s. Adjusting for inflation, our prices have actually steadily declined, and we expect this to continue.

Financially, we are the soundest cryonics organization in existence.

We have a uniquely flexible and rapid system of emergency patient care based on universally available networks of mortuary assistance (and often medical assistance). This means that in the critical early stages, we can bring qualified professionals to you faster than any other system to you, and to travelers, vacationers, and members throughout most of the world. In particular, London-based F.A. Albin & Sons funeral directors are trained, practiced, equipped, and prepared to fly a team anywhere in Europe on short notice to help European CI members or tourists and business travelers.

And finally, we provide a comprehensive source of information here on CIs website. The site youre reading will lead you to everything you need to know about the subject of cryonics, and more. It offers you free information, free books, the latest news, hundreds of links to thousands of sources covering health, science, cutting-edge medicine, nanotechnology, financial help and resources, and supportive people and organizations. And if thats not enough? We personally will answer any question you might have about cryonics or the Cryonics Institute directly by email, or direct you to someone who can. In the world of cryonics, this is the source to visit, and the place to be.

More:
History Timeline - The Cryonics Institute

The environment was something of a shift for Drake, who had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Though it was the longtime leader in cryonics, Alcor was still a small nonprofit. It had been freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976.

The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. Typically shunned by the scientific community, cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But its adherents have held on to a dream that at some point in the future, advances in medicine will allow for resuscitation and additional years on Earth. Over decades, small, tantalizing developments in related technology, as well as high-profile frozen test subjects like Ted Williams, have kept the hope alive. Today, nearly 200 dead patients are frozen in Alcors cryogenic chambers at temperatures of 196 C, including a handful of celebrities, who have paid tens of thousands of dollars for the goal of possible revival and ultimately reintegration into society.

But its the recent involvement of Yinfeng that signals something of a new era for cryonics. With impressive financial resources, government support, and scientific staff, its one of a handful of new labs focused on expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and trying anew to bring credibility to the long-disputed theory of human reanimation. Just a year after Drake came on board as research director of the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute, the subsidiary of the Yinfeng Biological Group overseeing the cryonics program, the institute performed its first cryopreservation. Its storage vats now hold about a dozen clients who are paying upwards of $200,000 to preserve the whole body.

Still, the field remains rooted in faith rather than any real evidence that it works. Its a hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology, says Clive Coen, a neuroscientist and professor at Kings College London.

Even if one day you could perfectly thaw a frozen human body, you would still just have a warm dead body on your hands.

The cryonics process typically goes something like this: Upon a persons death, a response team begins the process of cooling the corpse to a low temperature and performs cardiopulmonary support to sustain blood flow to the brain and organs. Then the body is moved to a cryonics facility, where an organ preservation solution is pumped through the veins before the body is submerged in liquid nitrogen. This process should commence within one hour of deaththe longer the wait, the greater the damage to the bodys cells. Then, once the frozen cadaver is ensconced in the cryogenic chamber, the hope of the dead begins.

Since its beginnings in the late 1960s, the field has attracted opprobrium from the scientific community, particularly its more respectable cousin cryobiologythe study of how freezing and low temperatures affect living organisms and biological materials. The Society for Cryobiology even banned its members from involvement in cryonics in the 1980s, with a former society president lambasting the field as closer to fraud than either faith or science.

In recent years, though, it has grabbed the attention of the libertarian techno-optimist crowd, mostly tech moguls dreaming of their own immortality. And a number of new startups are expanding the playing field. Tomorrow Biostasis in Berlin became the first cryonics company in Western Europe in 2019, for example, and in early 2022, Southern Cryonics opened a facility in Australia.

More researchers are open to longer-term, futuristic topics than there might have been 20 years ago or so, says Tomorrow Biostasis founder Emil Kendziorra.

Here is the original post:
Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died - MIT Technology Review

International Cryonics Museum has been chosen as the Sight of the Week by the editors of Roadside America.  Estes Park Trail-Gazette

More:
International Cryonics Museum has been chosen as the Sight of the Week by the editors of Roadside America. - Estes Park Trail-Gazette

In case you missed it, link below to the CBS Sunday Morning segment about the Cryonics Museum  Estes Park Trail-Gazette

Read more:
In case you missed it, link below to the CBS Sunday Morning segment about the Cryonics Museum - Estes Park Trail-Gazette

cryonics, the practice of freezing an individual who has died, with the object of reviving the individual sometime in the future. The word cryonics is derived from the Greek kros, meaning icy cold.

Cryonic preservation can be performed only after an individual has been declared legally dead. The process is initiated shortly after death, the body being packed in ice and shipped to a cryonics facility. There the blood is drained from the body and is replaced with antifreeze and organ-preserving compounds known as cryoprotective agents. In this vitrified state, the body is placed in a chamber filled with liquid nitrogen, where it will theoretically stay preserved at -196 C until scientists are able to find a way to resuscitate the body in the future.

A chamber filled with liquid nitrogen in which individuals are preserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.(more)

Cryonic preservation is expensive, full-body preservation potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nonetheless, by 2023 about 500 individuals had been cryonically preserved, the majority of them in the United States. Dozens of pets had also been preserved. Some individuals chose to have their entire bodies frozen, whereas others wanted only their heads preserved, a process known as neuropreservation. The option to cryonically preserve only a persons head is based on the belief by many cryonics adherents that cryonically preserved personalities may one day be downloaded into robot bodies or be transferred into entirely new bodies grown from stem cells.

The concept of cryonic preservation was popularized in The Prospect of Immortality, a book by Robert Ettinger that was initially released in 1962 and formally published in 1964. Ettinger subsequently became known as the father of cryonics. His body was cryonically preserved upon his death in 2011 and was stored at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan. The first human to be cryonically preserved was James Bedford. On January 12, 1967, Bedford died from liver cancer that had metastasized to his lungs. Bedford died before all the arrangements for his cryonic preservation could be completed. As a result, his body was injected with cryoprotective agents without first draining his blood, and his body was then packed in dry ice. Bedfords body was later immersed in liquid nitrogen and transferred from one facility to another, finally ending up at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The rest is here:
Cryonics | Description, Process, Popularization, & Facts

It is most important that the cryonics patient is a CI member and has completed all of the necessary documents with their funding arrangements in place. This will allow CI to accept the patient without hesitation or delay. Time is of the essence for a successful cryopreservation and being prepared before an emergency arises can make all the difference. If a patient is near death, the Cryonics Institute should be notified immediately at 1-586-791-5961 and kept updated of any changes.

It is also suggested that, if possible, a cryonics patient relocate themselves to Michigan, near the CI facility, before death occurs. Delay in transfer to the facility can be avoided this way. If this is not an option, it is strongly advised that the CI member, or their next of kin, make arrangements with a local funeral director before the time of need. The funeral directorcan then be better prepared to act during an emergency.

Initial Cool-down and Transport.

If possible, CI Members should arrange to have a cryonics standby team standing by their bedside when they are in a terminal condition. Such a team can initiate rapid cool-down and provide other helpful stand by procedures.

The patient should be pronounced dead as soon as possible after clinical death (which usually means after cessation of heartbeat and breathing). The patient should then be cooled immediatelyespecially the headby application of ice. A slurry of ice water can cool much faster than ice cubes alone, so an inflatable basin for giving shampoos can be filled with ice and water to cool the head. Even better would be cooling the entire body of the patient in a body bag filled with ice water. The best scenario is for the patient to die at home under hospice care, with trained personnel morticians or Cryonics Institute (CI) volunteers on hand. (No guarantee is made that CI volunteers can be found.)

An anticoagulant should be injected to prevent the blood from clotting, which will help to improve the patients perfusion. When using the anticoagulant, Heparin, a dose of 30,000 units is given for patients weighing up to 200 lbs. and a dose of 40,000 units is given for patients weighing 200 lbs. or more. Once the heparin is injected, Cardio Pulmonary Support (CPS) (chest compressions) is required for at least 5 minutes to circulate the heparin throughout the body.

During transportation from the place of death to the funeral home if the patient dies outside of Michigan, or to the CI facility if the patient dies in Michigan, CPS should be given, if feasible, manually or by machine (thumper or Lucas) in order to minimize deterioration, help cool the patient, and to help distribute the heparin.

If the patient can be moved to Michigan near the CI facility before death occurs, this will eliminate transportation delays. Patients living outside of Michigan will require the services of a funeral director near them to cool the patient in ice and arrange for transportation to Michigan. The out of state funeral director will obtain the necessary transit permits and arrange for the patient to be transported to Michigan, by airline or vehicle, whichever is fastest, while keeping the patient in ice. If the patient is flown to Michigan, CI personnel will arrange to have the patient picked up from the Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) and brought back to the CI facility.

Perfusion

Upon arrival at CIs facility, the patients blood is removed as CryoProtectant Agents (CPAs, substances that prevent ice formation) are introduced to replace the patients blood and body water, a process known as Perfusion. Blood vessels are accessed and cannulated for the perfusion and a licensed funeral director performs the perfusion.

The cryoprotectant used by CI is called CI-VM-1, a Vitrification Mixture which was developed by CIs former in-house cryobiologist, Dr.Yuri Pichugin. Vitrification solutions can completely eliminate ice formation. The perfusion with vitrification solution is done at increasing concentrations, until a target concentration of 70% CI-VM-1 is reached. The patient is kept cold through the process, as the lower concentration CPAs are stored and introduced at refrigerator temperature. The 70% CI-VM-1 has been stored in a freezer, so it is below freezing temperature. Thermocouples are placed in the nasopharynx for monitoring the patients brain core temperature through the perfusion.

CI protocol is to perfuse the entire body, by way of the carotid arteries. The funeral director gains access to the blood vessels by small incisions along the clavicle. The right and left carotid arteries are carefully incised for the insertion of the cannulas required for perfusion. Both arteries are cannulated towards the heart and towards the brain to achieve a full body perfusion. To protect the integrity of the vascular system and ensure a successful perfusion, the pressure and speed at which the cryoprotectant is introduced into the patient is monitored very carefully.

The right and left jugular veins are also cannulated for drainage and for sampling of the effluent. A refractometer is used to measure the refractive index of the effluent from the jugular veins. Perfusion continues until the refractive index of the effluents is matched with the refractive index of CI-VM-1. Once this is achieved, the perfusion is halted. Perfusion will be halted before the refractive index of CI-VM-1 is reached only if there is considerable edema evident in the patients brain.

When the perfusion is complete, the incisions are sutured by the funeral director. The patient is then sheathed with a light weight cover for dignity and placed in an insulation pouch before being moved from the operating table to a stretcher where they are secured to a backboard for support. The stretcher is used to transport the patient from the perfusion room to the computer controlled cooling unit, inside the CI facility.

Further Cool-Down and Storage

The patient is carefully placed in the cooling unit on their backboard. The insulation pouch is opened slightly to allow for consistent cooling. The appropriate program is selected to steadily cool the patient to liquid nitrogen temperature. The process of cooling the patient to -196c takes five and a half days. The cooling is done by CIs computer-controlled cooling unit. The computer-controlled cooling unit constantly monitors the temperature inside the cooling unit via a thermocouple.

At the end of the cooling process, the patient is carefully removed from the cooling unit and the insulation pouch is closed. Once ID tags are attached to the patient for identification purposes, the patient is ready to be transferred to the cryostat (long term storage unit). The patient transfer is done quickly, but carefully, while the insulation pouch is saturated with nitrogen, so there is no appreciable warm-up during transfer. The ropes that are attached to the patients backboard are secured to an electric lift and the patient is safely lowered into the cryostat. Cryostat liquid nitrogen levels are monitored daily to ensure the safety of the patients. CI staff adds liquid nitrogen from the facilitys bulk tank to the cryostats when needed.

Here is the original post:
Guide to Cryonics Procedures - The Cryonics Institute

"I think of it more as an ideological statement."Anti-Death Activist

Billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel says he's freezing his body when he dies if only as a moment of anti-death activism.

Thiel explained his "just in case" cryonics aspirations to journalist and former Twitter Filer Bari Weiss on Weiss' podcast, Honestly, in a lengthy podcast episode published last week.

"I think of it more as an ideological statement," Thiel told Weiss, as quoted by Fortune.

"I don't necessarily expect it to work," he continued, "but I think it's the sort of thing we're supposed to try to do."

In other words: cryo might not ultimately work, but as one of the most vocal leaders on the immortality-seeking technological crusade, he's duty-bound to freeze his ol' bag o' bones nonetheless. Gotta walk the walk if you talk the talk.

As for where he's seeking to freeze himself, Thiel told Weiss that he's eyeing Alcor, the prominent cryo firm that back in 2009 was accused of both accidentally decapitating and accidentally freezing what appeared to be a can of tuna to the icy head of baseball great Ted Williams.

Thiel's cryo plans aren't all that surprising, as the billionaire's enthusiasm for immortality tech has been widely documented. Along with making some notable investments into immortality tech firms, Thiel was famously accused of seeking blood infusions from young donors. And back in 2014, the VC took anti-aging to a whole new level when he declared to the Telegraph that he was "against" the concept of mortality.

"People have a choice to accept death, deny it or fight it," Thiel told Telegraph. "I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it."

Thiel reiterated a version of that 2014 argument in his recent conversation with Weiss, saying that we should at least understand whyhumans are doomed to toil away in our mortal meat suits.

"We haven't even tried," the PayPal and Palantir cofounder lamented. "We should either conquer death or at least figure out why it's impossible."

Of course, the answer to that latter point may well be answered by simple biology. And to that end, immortality-seeking cryo has been decried by some experts as something along the lines of a pseudoscientific hail mary.

Regardless, whether Thiel's anti-death investments will one day pay off remains to be seen. But even if he's ultimately unable to attain immortality, at least he'll die trying.

More on immortality tech: Elon Musk Says That Immortality Tech Would Be Very Dangerous

Read more from the original source:
Billionaire Peter Thiel Says He's Freezing His Body After Death Just in ...

Despite movies like Passengers, the science behind cryonics is still a long way from reviving people who have been frozen after theyve died.

What if you had a life-threatening disease and someone offered an ambulance ride to a hospital that may hold the cure? Youd take it, right?

What if that ambulance was actually a cryonic state that kept you preserved and that hospital existed 200 years from now? Would you still go?

Cryonics, in the simplest terms, is the act of freezing someone whos been declared legally dead. The idea is to conserve the body until science can catch up and provide treatment to whatever caused the person to die.

When that scientific breakthrough occurs, the person is then revived, given the necessary medical treatment, and goes on living.

The practice recently made headlines when a 14-year-old United Kingdom girl with cancer sought the legal right to be frozen. Her parents were divorced and her father didnt agree with her intentions. The teenager asked the court to designate that only her mother could dispose of her remains so she could get her wish. In October a judge ruled in her favor.

Im only 14 years old and I dont want to die, but I know I will. I think being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured, even in a hundred years time I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up, she wrote to a judge before her recent death.

Read more: Facing death at an early age

The theory of cryonics was first broached more than 50 years ago by Robert Ettinger.

In 1964, his book, The Prospect of Immortality, first introduced the idea on a mass scale. A dozen years later, he founded the Cryonics Institute.

Over the past five decades, cryonics has held on to a small but dedicated group of supporters. Today, hundreds if not thousands of people are betting on the science.

Dozens of institutions, nonprofits, and businesses around the world offer cryonic services to anyone who can afford it. Ettingers Cryonics Institute in Michigan and Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona are two of the better known cryonics providers in the United States.

Those who are in favor of it say cryonics is ultimately about scientific exploration. Those who are opposed to the say it takes advantage of people in vulnerable positions.

In order for a body to get to a preserved, frozen state, a person must first be declared legally dead. Once that is determined, the freezing process involves a complex set of protocols. Its designed to cool the body, so that everything slows down at a molecular level, according to Dennis Kowalski, chief executive officer of the Cryonics Institute.

Once the blood is pumped out of the body, its cooled even further but in a way that preserves the organs and hinders tissue damage. The body is then placed into a large thermos-type bottle of liquid nitrogen where it stays indefinitely. Or until science can provide a viable cure.

I guess its about optimism. Its also about hope, Kowalski told Healthline.

But hope is not cheap. At Cryonics Institute, cryonic services costs $28,000. That price, Kowalski said, is competitive.

Part of the funds go the groups endowment, which is used to cover the long-term expenses of keeping bodies frozen for potentially hundreds of years. Kowalski does not take a salary for his work at the institute. Instead, he works full time as an emergency medical technician.

He added that if someone is interested in cryonics and is quoted a cheaper price, hed be skeptical about that organizations ability to keep a body preserved in a proper way with all the safeguards intact.

Read more: The changing definition of what is brain dead

If cryonics sounds like the stuff of science fiction, thats because it is.

A number of well-known films such as Sleeper, Space Odyssey 2001, and the soon-to-be-released Passengers starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence all employ some version of cryonics as the crux of their story line.

In these movies, the protagonists are put to sleep or frozen and wake up in the distant future to an entirely new world.

Usually these movies scenes unfold as if these people are waking up from a really good nights sleep. Waking up is the crucial part of a cryonics equation. But Kowalski readily admits, science has yet to figure out how that will unfold for people who are in a cryonic state.

We are not even close to being able to revive people, he said.

Modern medicine does currently employ freezing methods to treat patients. Its the preferred technique to store stem cells, embryos, and small tissues.

Kowalski added that all three examples are capable of being restored free of damage from the subzero temperatures. Even hospital emergency rooms are starting to see the benefits of a lowered body temperature, he noted. Sometimes its used in the treatment of gunshot wounds and heart attacks.

He says these examples show that its only a matter time before the human body will be able to endure similar treatment.

The trend certainly seems to be heading that way, he said. Could be 20 years from now. Could be 2,000 years.

Detractors say the science and technology needed to revive and treat people are far into the future. Encouraging people to spend thousands of dollars on a yet to-be-proven medical procedure calls into question the ethics behind the industry.

I can understand why people are interested, Ryan F. Holmes, assistant director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, told Healthline.

His concern is that people get lost in the hope of cryonics and dont really ever consider that it isnt going to work.

It seems overly hopefully and that for me is the hardest ethics part, he said.

He doesnt advocate that people should be prevented from choosing cryonics when they die, such as the case with the United Kingdom girl. But anyone who does make this choice must understand that there are a multitude of unknown factors about the science and technology.

This wouldnt even qualify as a phase 1 trial, he said. This falls into the category of experimental treatment.

Whats more, he said potential candidates should be made aware that revival if it can even occur doesnt guarantee that quality of life will be what it once was before they were sick.

We have no evidence that theyd be who they were in a very meaningful sense, he said.

Read more: Where we die: Less in ER and more at home

Kowalski said the nonprofit does not guarantee to its clients that cryonics will work.

We make every effort to educate people about their choices and what we offered. We also understand the potential for misunderstanding and misconception about what we are doing, he said. We try very hard to explain our position and provide as ethical a service as possible.

Right now they have about 1,400 people as members and around 150 bodies are frozen.

Kowalski said that people usually come to the institute in two ways.

The first group is people who are interested in cryonics and sign up by their own free will. These clients are required to fill out extensive paperwork and are given an interview as well.

Others are the result of a person dying and family members scrambling to have them embalmed.

The nonprofit adheres to a list of rules when they get an urgent cryonics request. In these situations, if they accept the body it will be held for two weeks to ensure that cost and paperwork are completed. Anyone who has been declared dead for up to 48 hours is turned away. Kowalski said overall theyve turned down about half of the post-mortem requests.

We have returned funding many times when [a] family cannot agree on disposing remains, he said. There is a series of events that must be followed or we back out to protect both ourselves and the family from mistakes.

For Kowalski, signing up for cryonics is something he got interested in as a kid. He and his family are all on board. When asked what he thinks the future will be like should the revival process work, he said he envisions a world that will be even better than today.

Im excited to see the future, he said.

Go here to read the rest:
Cryonics: The Science Behind Freezing Bodies - Healthline

When he was 14, Kai Micah Mills brought home a long-haired tabby cat and named it Cat. Growing up in Utah, they were inseparable. Mills, a soft-spoken, antisocial teenager, had dropped out of high school and earned an income running Minecraft servers from his basement. He didn't have many friends, but he always had Cat.

Cat is getting on in years. But if his owner's new business works out the way he hopes, Cat will never die.

These days, Mills has turned his sights to something more macabre than gaming. He is a rare entrepreneur in the field of cryonics: the process of storing humans and animal remains at deep-freeze temperatures with the hope that scientific advances can one day revive them.

The startup he founded, Cryopets, aims to establish a network of veterinary clinics that provide regular check-ups and emergency care, and upon a pet's death, owners would have the option to preserve their companions. The pets would then be shipped to a Utah facility, where they wait in metal vats for resurrection day. In doing so, Cryopets embodies a "full-stack" approach to care, encompassing life, death, and the possibility of return.

Though the idea might seem far-fetched, Peter Thiel the billionaire investor who's funded artificial intelligence, reusable rockets, life extension, and seasteading would beg to differ.

In February, Thiel's foundation announced Mills and 19 others as the next class of Thiel Fellows. Each receives $100,000 over two years to start a company, on the condition they pause their college studies. Mills is one of the few high school dropouts ever admitted.

At 24, with a slim build and hair past his shoulders, Mills has spent the better part of a decade planning for a future where there is no death. Cryopets, he said, is part one.

Someday, he hopes to expand to human preservation, as the science matures and pet owners warm to the idea. "It's a gateway drug to humans," he said of his startup.

"In the end I'm interested in keeping people from dying," he explained, "not just for a little bit, but completely."

Mills' plan is starting to come together. He's spent the last year and a half fundraising, buying equipment, and assembling a scientific advisory board. Cryopets' waitlist now includes about 500 dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, and one monkey. Later this year, Cryopets will kick off the search to hire its first veterinarian and begin research into organ-warming methods.

The timing feels right to Mills. The longevity sector, according to a report by the British news outlet Longevity.Technology, clinched $5.2 billion in financing last year. Sam Altman poured $180 million into Retro Biosciences, which aims to extend the healthy human lifespan up to a decade. And Laura Deming, a venture capitalist focused on longevity, is quietly working on advancing organ cryopreservation. Deming's new startup, Lorentz Bio, hasn't been previously reported.

With backing from the tech world's top transhumanist, Mills now has to convince people to take a gamble on his animal hospital for immortal pets. And here's the rub: He may be long dead by the time they can be revived.

Growing up in the Mormon church, Mills always figured he'd live forever. Even after he fell out of religion in his teens, he didn't give up on the idea of everlasting life.

On YouTube, he came across Russian millionaire Dmitry Itskov, who had sold his media empire and funded research with the goal of cheating death. "Eternal life not through faith but science," Mills said. "I really loved that approach."

For years Mills sat on the idea. He sold his server business at 16 and started another company, Branch, making virtual offices where workers moved around rooms like a video game. Branch rode pandemic trends to the tune of $1.6 million from investors like Homebrew and Naval Ravikant. But the company felt more like his cofounder's brainchild than his, and, in 2021, Mills left to dig into longevity.

He joined an incubator and spoke to many experts in aging, but his conversations left him with a sense of dread.

"We have such a long way to go to curing aging," Mill said. "It didn't seem like something that was plausible in my lifetime."

He started to think about how he could buy himself more time. Then he thought about Cat.

For any number of reasons, animals make better cryonics-guinea pigs than humans. It's cheaper to freeze pets because of their small size, Mills explained, and it avoids hairy legal battles. But their big advantage is that there's higher predictability around their deaths.

When a pet is close to death, it may be euthanized at an animal hospital, which is ideal for getting the body ready for cryopreservation. The process includes cooling the body in an ice bath, pumping out the blood, and replacing it with an antifreeze solution that prevents cold damage.

It's important, according to Alcor, a leading cryonics organization, to start the preparations shortly after death to prevent decay. "Longer delays place a greater burden on future technology to reverse injury and restore the brain to a healthy state," Alcor's website says.

"Humans don't get euthanized," Mills said. "We die in some sudden death fashion."

So, he decided to tackle cryonics for pets first.

The plan for Cryopets is to open an animal hospital for piloting this model of caring for pets in life and death, plus a storage facility. Eventually,it wants to partner with other hospitals, training them on how to prepare the bodies and then storing them at its facility.

Cryopets is not the first to market. The Cryonics Institute in Detroit, Michigan, and Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona, will preserve the furry friends of its human members, for an additional cost that ranges up to $132,000. The price comes down if the person opts to have only the head stored. Cryopets, however, will only offer full-body cryopreservation.

Mills hasn't figured out a pricing structure yet, but says pet owners will make a payment that covers their pet's storage for as long as necessary.

Insider asked Mills what happens when a pet's owner dies too. They might have arranged for their own cryopreservation, he explained, so they can come back at a future date with their pet. If not, Mills says Cryopets will put the frozen animal up for adoption. He imagines a time-traveling critter would be quite popular.

"Can you imagine," Mills said, "the line of people who would be more willing to take care of a cat from the 1800s?"

Continued here:
Pet owners will freeze their dying animals to one day bring them back ...

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Human and pet preservation by freezing

Cryonics Institute (CI) is an American nonprofit foundation that provides cryonics services. CI freezes deceased humans and pets in liquid nitrogen with the hope of restoring them with technology in the future.[1][2]

The Cryonics Institute was founded by the Father of Cryonics Robert Ettinger on April 4, 1976, in Detroit, Michigan, where he served as president until 2003. Ettinger introduced the concept of cryonics with the publication of his book The Prospect of Immortality published in 1962.[3][4][5] Operations moved to Clinton Township, Michigan in 1993,[6] where it is currently located.

The cryonics procedure performed by the Cryonics Institute begins with a process called vitrification where the body is perfused with cryoprotective agents to protect against damage in the freezing process. After this, the body is cooled to -196C over the course of a day or two days in a computer-controlled chamber before being placed in a long-term storage container filled with liquid nitrogen. The Cryonics Institute utilizes storage units called cryostats, and each unit contains up to eight people.[citation needed] The process can take place only once the person has been declared legally dead. Ideally, the process begins within two minutes of the heart stopping and no more than 15.[7][8][9]

The Cryonics Institute also specializes in Human Cryostasis, DNA/Tissue Freezing, Pet Cryopreservation, and Memorabilia Storage.[10][11]

See the original post here:
Cryonics Institute - Wikipedia

Philip Rhoades plans to be on this earth far beyond his natural expiry date.

"If I got hit by a bus tomorrow then a number of people in various organisations would do what they could to cool me down quickly,"he said.

The 71-year-old is an avid follower of the cryonics movement the practice of deep-freezing human remains in the hope they will be thawed out and reanimated in the future.

The Southern Hemisphere's first cryonics facility, Southern Cryonics,opened its doors last week in Holbrook, in the NSW Riverina.

Mr Rhoades is a member of the American-based Cryonics Institute, where heplans to be frozen.

But as an inaugural employee of Southern Cryonics, henow hopes to become a member and befrozen at the facility when the time comes.

"There's a 70 to 80 per cent chance I'll end up at Holbrook,"Mr Rhoades said.

Human remains will be deep frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored in large, steel chambers at the facility for what Mr Rhoades hopes willbe a future defrosting.

There is currently no method or technology that allows for the reanimation of frozen human remains.

The practice is also costly newer customers at the Holbrook facility have beenasked to take out a life insurance policy worth about $200,000.

Deakin UniversityHuman Ethics Advisory Group faculty chairNeera Bhatia described cryonics as a mixture of "hype and hope"that ethically posed"lots and lots of red flags".

"There is little to no scientific evidence to my mind that suggests it's possible to revive a person and reanimate a person to a living state," Dr Bhatiasaid.

She said while there was an argument a person couldmake their own decisions about how they wanted remains to be disposed of, there were a range of ethical concerns that needed to be considered.

"Do we actually have an obligation at some point to die and hand over the world to the next generation," she said.

Mr Rhoades said he and other members accepted the possibility they may never be revived, and swallowed the cost because they preferred the unknown of freezingover the finality of burial or cremation.

"Even though there's no guarantee about what's going to happen in the future, at least if you're frozenyou're still in the game to some extent,"he said.

Mr Rhoades said he hoped to be reunited with his parents, Gerald and Dorothy, if he was ever thawed.

With their consent, Mr Rhoades had his mother and father's brain tissue preserved at his foundation, the Neural Archives Foundation, after their deaths in 2016.

He said he hoped his parents' consciousness could return to the world in some form, be it a "biological brain in a biological body, or a synthetic brain in a synthetic body, or even a virtual person in a virtual world".

Dr Bhatia described the idea of a virtual world as "a step too far out of reality".

"It just beggars belief that they would not only be preserved and brought back to life, but that even further, they would wake up to an entirely different world to the one you and I and we all live in," she said.

"I think this is probably something for science fiction novels rather than reality."

She said in the unlikely scenario that a person could be reanimated, other factors such as the likelihood of brain damage or the consciousness being "trapped in uncontrollable pain" needed to be considered.

"I don't see how that would be hopeful to wake up to that world, I think it would be a hellish world to be trapped in that kind of consciousness," she said.

Mr Rhoades said he hadweathered years of jokes about "being a popsicle" for his outspoken support of cryonics, but with the opening of the new facility, he believedpublic perception wasshifting.

"Over the last couple of decades people have started to think that anything might be possible," he said.

More:
Inside Philip Rhoades' bid to be frozen in a new Australian cryonics ...

A Brief Overview of the History of Cryonics

Robert Ettinger(The Father of Cryonics) introduced the concept of cryonics in 1962 with the publication of his seminal book,The Prospect of Immortality.The visionary new concept attracted worldwide attention when Doubleday published the first of several successful commercial editions, including several foreign language editions. Ettinger delved deeper into the subject of cryonics and life extension with his next book,Man Into Superman,further advancing the cryonics movement.

The idea of greatly extending lifespans through the science of cryonics captured peoples imaginations and organizations quickly sprang up in support of the concept. Ettinger himself formedThe Immortalist Society(originally the Cryonics Society of Michigan, and later the Cryonics Association) in 1967 to further promote and explore the concept of cryonics.

Less than a decade later, in 1976, Ettinger and other members of The Immortalist Society took the next logical step and formed a new organization to put the concept of cryonics into actual practice. Their goal was to offer The Prospect of Immortality to the public through reliable and affordable cryonics services.The Cryonics Institutewas formed in 1976 featuring the worlds first fully-operational cryonics facility, located in Clinton Township, Michigan.

Since then, The Cryonics Institute has been dedicated to advancing the concept and practice of cryonics, attracting members world-wide. Membership has grown to over 1,000 members in dozens of countries, including 117 patients cryopreserved at the Michigan facility.

Read More for the complete history of The Cryonics Institute.

Link:
About Cryonics - The Cryonics Institute

For centuries, the worlds physicists, writers and philosophers have argued over whether time travel is possible, with most coming to the conclusion that its never going to happen.

But on an 800-acre plot of land just outside the small town of Comfort, Texas, a group of architects, engineers and scientists are building a Timeship that they say could transport tens of thousands of individuals to a far-distant future.

Their approach does not involve the use of flux capacitors, or zooming at light-speed through black holes.

Instead, the Timeship aims to store people at such low temperatures that their bodies are preserved for a future civilisation to reanimate them, a concept known as cryonics.

Read more about cryonics:

Just as a spaceship allows people to move through space, Timeship will allow people to travel to another time in the future, explains Stephen Valentine, who is the director and principal architect of the Timeship project.

Valentine has been given a multimillion-dollar budget from anonymous donors to develop a Mecca for cryonics and life extension.

As well as a fortress-like building that can store frozen people, Timeship plans to store other precious biological samples such as organs, stem cells, embryos, and even the DNA of rare or threatened species.

The site will also house the worlds largest life extension research centre, the Stasis Research Park.

This concept shows how Timeship might look. The inner region is used for liquid nitrogen storage. The eight square-shaped structures house hundreds of frozen patients Timeship

The entire facility will be off-grid, using wind and solar energy to avoid potential power outages, and the location has been carefully chosen to be far from earthquakes, tornadoes, snowstorms and any other turmoil the world might throw at it in the next few hundred years.

You dont want to be near a military base or nuclear plant either, says Valentine, who speaks at a frantic pace with a theatrical Boston drawl.

He spent five years finding and designing the site, while studying pyramids, ancient tombs, bank vaults and medieval fortresses anything that has stood the test of time. He has even consulted experts on how to protect frozen time-travellers from the effects of a nearby two-megaton nuclear bomb.

The resulting design is an epic spaceship-castle hybrid, with thick, low, circular walls surrounding a central tomb-like chamber, where thousands of storage pods will be held under high security.

The exact technique that will be used to cool the bodies is not yet clear, but it is likely to involve the bodily fluids being drained and replaced with a solution that helps protect tissue from the formation of ice crystals.

The storage pods will use the cooling power of liquid nitrogen to keep the bodies at around -130C, and should be able to maintain low temperatures without power or human maintenance for up to six months, says Valentine.

More like this

He hopes to start testing the first prototype pods next year.

The idea of freezing people in the hope of reawakening them is not new.

In January 1967, cancer patient James Bedford became the first person to be cryogenically frozen, and his body remains in cold storage to this day, in a capsule designed by American wigmaker and cryopioneer Edward Hope.

Various organisations and companies have offered similar services over the past decades, often using hopelessly crude freezing techniques or failing to store the bodies properly.

Edward Hope's cryocapsule deisgned to freeze James H. Bedford. Getty Images

Today, the cryogenic freezing of human stem cells, sperm, eggs, embryos and other small tissue samples is a routine part of scientific research and reproductive medicine in many countries.

Vitrification, a process that turns samples into a glass-like state rather than ice, was developed in the early 2000s as a way of overcoming the problems of ice formation in and around cells. Ice formation is an issue because it can cause dramatic differences in concentration inside and outside the cell, sucking water out and destroying it.

In late 2002 and early 2003, a team led by vitrification pioneer Gregory Fahy used a cocktail of antifreezes and chemicals to cryopreserve a whole rabbit kidney. The organ appeared to function normally after it was thawed and transplanted back into its donor.

Several other breakthroughs have encouraged Valentine, and the wealthy entrepreneurs backing Timeship, that freezing a person properly is now feasible. In 2015, a team from the company 21st Century Medicine claimed to have developed a new vitrification technique that preserved pig and rabbit brains without any visible damage.

Freezing embryos, eggs and sperm has become a normal part of modern science and medicine Getty Images

That same year, scientists from Alcor, a company associated with Timeship, found that when microscopic worms were deep-frozen and thawed, they not only survived but could remember associations they had learnt before they were frozen.

For Valentine and the cryonics community, these studies are proof that if the most advanced scientific techniques are used, then human organs, brains, and even memories and personalities could survive being frozen.

However, cryonics is unique in that it is utterly reliant on technology that does not exist yet. Even if so-called patients are frozen perfectly after death, they are simply guessing that scientists will one day be able to reanimate them and cure their illnesses and will want to.

Prof Brian Grout, chairman of the Society for Low-Temperature Biology, says that cryonics has become more credible in recent years, and that it would be wrong to dismiss the idea of whole-body freezing.

Read more about extending life:

But he does have one big problem with the central idea of the Timeship mission: the preservation of dead bodies.

The biggest difficulty is not whether it is possible to recover a whole person from ultra-low temperatures there is a reasonable chance that will happen in the future. It is the fact that they will be dead. If they were dead when they were frozen, they will still very much be dead when you thaw them out.

Timeship wouldn't tell us what these glacial pods would be used for Timeship

Freezing people alive could mean they can be placed in suspended animation for, say, long-term space flights, says Grout.

Technology that may be able to cure what are now incurable illnesses is also not hard to imagine, he says, but overcoming death is another matter.

The technology they will need is not cryotechnology, its reversing death. Thats a pretty big leap for me.

Valentine refuses to be drawn into a debate on whether Timeship would accept living patients if the authorities allowed such a thing, saying that it is a matter for the medical and legal professions.

But he and others believe that various technologies such as gene editing and nanotechnology could one day change how we perceive death, and reverse it.

Other futurists believe that it may one day be possible to upload our minds onto a computer, freeing humanity from the restraints of a physical form entirely.

Read more about death:

Banking on these future technologies may seem like a pretty big gamble, especially when the costs of cryonic preservation start at around $30,000. Yet for people whose lives are cut short by illness, a miraculous breakthrough may literally be the only hope they have.

An example is the 14-year-old British girl known as JS who made global headlines in 2016 after writing, before she died of cancer, that she wanted to be frozen. A judge ruled that her wishes must be respected, and her body was sent to the US to be frozen.

She wrote: Im only 14 years old and I dont want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years time.

What the world will look like in hundreds of years time is anyones guess, but there are many logistical challenges for anyone is woken from the dead.

For a start, all your money, friends and family would be long gone, and youd probably struggle to find work in whatever hyper-advanced society has managed to resurrect you.

And there are bigger questions about how the planet would cope with a human population living far longer than it does now.

We are not going to have to worry about all that right now, says Valentine, frustrated by questions he sees as pointless hypothesising. The world may have changed in ways we cant even imagine! We could be inhabiting other planets or have modified ourselves to live in other environments.

Futurist body modification Getty Images

Its certainly hard to dismiss these ideas completely, given the remarkable progress our species has made in just the last few decades. And Valentine is confident that a change of mindset is just round the corner.

If scientists one day freeze a rabbit and bring it back to life, then the idea will spread so fast. People will start to think: why am I being buried in the ground? Why am I being cremated? Ill get frozen, and then one day, who knows. There could be many of these places around the world. This might become the norm.

Valentine himself is not currently signed up to be frozen at the Timeship he says it would distract from his architectural mission and could look like he was designing some kind of monument for myself. But his excitement and enthusiasm for this ambitious project is clear.

Will the travellers in the Timeship find themselves alive and well in the future, freed from the limitations of todays medical science? Or is it an expensive folly, doomed to result in several thousand bodies denied a proper burial?

Theres really only one way to find out and it involves a very long, very cold wait.

1Upload your consciousness to a computer

Getty Images

Some believe that we may one day be able to recreate every detail of our brains on powerful computers, enabling our thoughts and experiences to live on without physical bodies. However, neuroscientists still struggle to simulate the workings of the most primitive animal brains, so it remains a distant prospect.

Read more about cryonics and life extension:

2Hibernate

Hibernation, like this dormouse is enjoying, could be one solution for inter-planetary space flight Getty Images

Doctors sometimes lower the body temperature of patients dying from severe injuries to buy more time while they perform emergency surgery.

Lowering the bodys temperature from 37C to around 10C slows down all biological processes, resulting in a kind of induced hibernation.

A similar technique has been proposed as a way of putting long-distance astronauts into a deep sleep.

3Build a new body for yourself

Vampirism has literary roots in disease, manifesting as a malignant way of cheating death iStock

After research in mice showed that the blood of young animals helped old animals memory, endurance and tissue repair, trials have begun to see if blood transfusions from young people can reduce or reverse ageing in older humans, too.

Scientists hope to identify the blood-borne chemical components of ageing.

4Travel through time

If time machines ever get invented, chances are they won't look like this Getty Images

If it was possible for a person to travel at very close to the speed of light, then time would slow down for them relative to everyone else.

This means that when they return to Earth, thousands of years may have flown by. However, unlike in Back To The Future, there would be no way back to the past.

Go here to see the original:
Cryonics: Could you live forever? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere. For a small group of fervent futurists, it is their lottery ticket to immortality. What are the chances that these bodies will be reanimated? Will baseball legend Ted Williams frozen head be awakened to coach fighter pilots or fused to a robot body to hit .400 again?

Cryonics attempting to cryopreserve the human body is widely considered a pseudoscience. Cryopreservation is a legitimate scientific endeavor in which cells, organs, or in rare cases entire organisms may be cooled to extremely low temperatures and revived somewhat intact. It occurs in nature, but only in limited cases.

Humans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads. Deprived of oxygen at room temperature, the brain dies within minutes. While the body may be reanimated, the person who lives is often in a permanent vegetative state. Cooling the body may give the brain a bit more time. During brain or heart surgery, circulation may be stopped for up to an hour with the body cooled to 20 C (68 F). A procedure to cool the body to 10 C (50 F) without oxygen for additional hours is still at the experimental research stage.

After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable.

This vessel lies within a second outer vessel, separated by a vacuum to avoid heat transfer from the outer room-temperature vessel wall to the cold inner vessel wall. Heat gradually transfers across anyway and boils away the LN, which must be periodically refilled. Bodies were originally, and may still be in some cases, cooled and frozen in whatever condition they were in at death, with better or worse preservation, as we shall see.

The early years of cryonics were grisly. All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality.

Small freezing operations began in the late 1960s. While the practice of storing bodies has become more sophisticated over the past 50 years, in the early days, technicians cooled and prepared corpses with haste on dry ice before eventually cramming them into Dewar capsules. By in large, these preservations did not achieve preservation. They were nightmarish, gruesome failures. Their stories were researched and documented by people within the field, who published thorough and frank records.

The largest operation was run out of a cemetery in Chatsworth, California by a man named Robert Nelson. Four of his first clients were not initially frozen in LN but placed on a bed of dry ice in a mortuary. One of these bodies was a woman whose son decided to take her body back. He hauled (his dead mother) around in a truck on dry ice for some time before burying her.

The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post.

Eventually, the mortician was not pleased with the other bodies sitting around on beds of ice, so a LN Dewar capsule was secured for the remaining three. Another man was already frozen and sealed inside the capsule, so it was opened, and he was removed. Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people who may or may not have suffered thaw damage into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a puzzle. After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

Another group of three, including an eight-year-old girl, was packed into a second capsule in the Chatsworth vault. The LN system of this capsule subsequently failed without Nelson noticing. Upon checking one day, he saw that everyone inside had long thawed out. The fate of these ruined bodies is unclear, but they might have been refrozen for several more years.

Nelson froze a six-year-old boy in 1974. The capsule itself was well maintained by the boys father, but when it was opened, the boys body was found to be cracked. The cracking could have occurred if the body was frozen too quickly by the LN. The boy was then thawed, embalmed, and buried. Now that there was a vacancy, a different man was placed into the leftover capsule, but ten months had elapsed between his death and freezing, so his body was in rotten shape no pun intended from the get-go and was eventually thawed.

Every cryonic client put into the vault at Chatsworth and looked after by Nelson eventually failed. The bodies inside the Dewar capsules were simply left to rot. Reporters visited the crypt where these failed operations had taken place and reported a horrifying stench. The proprietor admitted to failure, bad decisions, and going broke. He further pointed out, Who can guarantee that youre going to be suspended for 10 or 15 years?

The worst fates of all occurred at a similar underground vault that stored bodies at a cemetery in Butler, New Jersey. The storage Dewar was poorly designed, with uninsulated pipes. This led to a series of incidents, at least one of which was failure of the vacuum jacket insulating the inside. The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post. Eventually the bodies had to be entirely thawed to unstick, then re-frozen and put back in. A year later, the Dewar failed again, and the bodies decomposed into a plug of fluids in the bottom of the capsule. The decision was finally made to thaw the entire contraption, scrape out the remains, and bury them. The men who performed this unfortunate task had to wear a breathing apparatus.

Out of all those frozen prior to 1973, one body remains preserved. Robert Bedford was sealed into a Dewar in 1967. Instead of leaving the body to meet a horrific fate under Nelsons care, Bedfords family took custody of the capsule, meticulously caring for it at their own expense. The body was handed off between professional cryonics operations, occupying multiple frozen tanks and facilities for 15 years or so. Eventually it ended up in the hands of the founders of Alcor a modern cryonics outfit one of whom wrote a heartfelt, slightly creepy piece about the body.

Credit: Jeff Topping / Getty Images

Alcor is the leading example of the current state of cryonics. While the ugly events above suggest that your remains might well end up as tissue sludge scraped out of a can, the professionalism of companies like Alcor may offer an increased chance for long-term preservation. This 501(c)(3) organization hosts researchers who work on methods to improve the freezing process, possibly increasing whatever slight odds exist that human popsicles will ever be brought back to life. At a more fundamental level, it appears to be stable and to have deep pockets, so there is a better chance that your corpse will be around long enough for some distant future doctor to recoil in horror at it.

The U.S. industry has consolidated around two main organizations. If not Alcor, your other choice is the Cryonics Institute, which has more than 200 bodies stored in giant tanks and accepts dozens more each year. Apparently, ten years ago, head storage alone at Alcor cost $80,000, while full body storage at the Cryonics Institute was only $30,000. There are international options as well. A Russian cryogenics company stores not only people but pets, including one entry under rodents, a deceased chinchilla named Button.

Modern cryonic preparations at Alcor employ a multistep process to prepare the body for storage. First, they begin to cool the body while anti-clotting agents and organ preservation solutions are injected into the bloodstream and circulated under CPR. The body is then transported to the companys main facility, where the original fluid is replaced with chemicals that vitrify turn to glass the bodys organs. This offers some hope for cutting down on structural damage during the subsequent cooling and storage. Then the body is entombed in its Dewar capsule.

That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, its not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? Thats probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking.

Credit: Annelisa Leinbach / Big Think

While cryonic preparation is now more advanced, the laws of physics demand that the structure of the body will break down rapidly after death, catastrophically upon freezing, and gradually over time, even while frozen. Think of how badly frozen food ages in your freezer. If the medical technology of the future becomes advanced enough, perhaps these corpses can be revived. But thats a big if. Lets say your body remains frozen until the 25th century. Then, lets say that future doctors are interested in reviving you. How much work will they have to do to fix you once youre thawed? The answer lies in the condition of the bodies once theyre thawed. Strangely enough, we know something about this.

In 1983, Alcor needed to lighten three cryonauts, reducing them from bodies to simply heads. (In one transhumanist conception of the future, medical science will be able to revive the brain and then simply make a new body or robot to which to attach it. Neuropreservation is cheaper and easier too.) The three corpses were removed from their Dewar capsules so that the heads could be cut off still frozen, so requiring a chainsaw and stored separately. Once the heads were sawed off and put away, Alcor employees got to work medically examining the state of the bodies. They wrote up their findings in great detail.

At first, things looked reasonably good. While the bodies were still frozen, their skin was only moderately cracked in a few places. But once the bodies thawed, things started to go downhill.

The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured.

Cracks appeared in the warming bodies, cutting through the skin and subcutaneous fat, all the way down to the body wall or muscle surface beneath. One patient displayed red traces across the skin following the paths of blood vessels that ruptured. Two of the patients had massive cutaneous ruptures over the pubis. The soft skin in these areas was apparently quite susceptible to cracking.

While the external damage was extensive, the internal damage was worse. Nearly every organ system inside the bodies was fractured. In one patient, every major blood vessel had broken near the heart, the lungs and spleen were almost bisected, and the intestines fractured extensively. Only the liver and kidneys werent completely destroyed.

The third body, which had been thawed very slowly, was in better condition externally, with only a few skin fractures and no obvious exploded blood vessels. However, the inside was even more annihilated than the others. The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured. The examiners injected dye into an artery in the arm. Rather than flow through blood vessels and into muscles, most of it pooled under the surface in pockets and leaked out of skin fractures.

Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday

The medical examiners extensively detailed the content of the blood, the texture of the muscles, and the extent of the damage. They included pictures. And they earnestly stated their conclusion up front: The tremendous tissue deterioration will require incredibly advanced medical technology to fix. Worse, the probable destruction at the cellular level may require rebuilding the body at the molecular level. Perhaps future medicine might be able to inject swarms of nanobots into your body to repair every bit of tissue, but dont bet on it happening any time soon.

Modern cryonics practices may ward off the horrific failures of the past. And we cant entirely rule out future medicine somehow finding fixes for the terrific damage incurred by the body in freezing, sitting, and thawing. But theres one more hurdle for the future revivification of your frozen form, the last great danger to your immortality: your crazy relatives. Several cases demonstrate the problem.

The family of a man frozen in 1978 eventually got tired of paying for him. The facility offered to cut off his head and store it for free, but the family turned them down. Instead, the body was thawed, submerged in a vat of formaldehyde like a laboratory specimen, and buried in that condition. Two further men were stored by their sons, one of whom had his father thawed, removed, and buried. The other son eventually buried his dads capsule in its entirety with the remains still inside.

Relatives can also go to court and battle over what happens to your corpse. Richard Orvilles family buried him against his wishes and was eventually forced by an Iowa court to dig up his body for preservation. A Colorado womans family went to court to fight Alcor for their mothers head. Alcor eventually got the head, to preserve as best they could. Conversely, another womans will stated that she did not want to be frozen. Her husband froze her anyway, and after a four-year court battle, the State of California ordered that she be thawed and buried.

One particularly well-known family affair is the story of a frozen Norwegian man who was initially stored at a California facility that worked with Alcor. He was removed by his daughter, who stored him in an ice shed behind her house in Colorado. The body was discovered when she was evicted from the property. The small town of Nederland, Colorado now has a Frozen Dead Guy Days celebration every year.

While the chances of immortality may be slim, dozens of people still commit their bodies or brains to cryonics each year. If their remains arent mismanaged or allowed to disintegrate, and if their relatives dont go to court over the body, there is now a good chance that they will remain frozen for decades. Unfortunately, they will come out of the process cracked into a million pieces, and the prospect of putting them back together again is purely science fiction for the foreseeable future. Its a grim practice with ghoulish results; at least it makes for some fascinating stories and a bit of dark humor.

See the rest here:
Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of frozen bodies - Big Think

Cryonics is an effort to save lives by using temperatures so cold that a person beyond help by todays medicine can be preserved for decades or centuries until a future medical technology can restore that person to full health.

Cryonics sounds like science fiction, but is based on modern science. Its an experiment in the most literal sense of the word. The question you have to ask yourself is this: would you rather be in the experimental group, or the control group?

Cryonics is justified by three facts that are not well known:

1) Life can be stopped and restarted if its basic structure is preserved.

Human embryos are routinely preserved for years at temperatures that completely stop the chemistry of life. Adult humans have survived cooling to temperatures that stop the heart, brain, and all other organs from functioning for up to an hour. These and many other lessons of biology teach us that life is a particular structure of matter. Life can be stopped and restarted if cell structure and chemistry are preserved sufficiently well.

2) Vitrification (not freezing) can preserve biological structure very well.

Adding high concentrations of chemicals called cryoprotectants to cells permits tissue to be cooled to very low temperatures with little or no ice formation. The state of no ice formation at temperatures below -120C is called vitrification. It is now possible to physically vitrify organs as large as the human brain, achieving excellent structural preservation without freezing.

3) Methods for repairing structure at the molecular level can now be foreseen.

The emerging science of nanotechnology will eventually lead to devices capable of extensive tissue repair and regeneration, including repair of individual cells one molecule at a time. This future nanomedicine could theoretically recover any preserved person in which the basic brain structures encoding memory and personality remain inferable, which typically occurs well after spontaneous function has been lost.

So

Then cryonics should work, even though it cannot be demonstrated to work today. That is the scientific justification for cryonics. It is a justification that grows stronger with every new advance in preservation technology.

Death occurs when the chemistry of life becomes so disorganized that normal operation cannot be restored. (Death is not when life turns off. People can and have survived being turned off.) How much chemical disorder can be survived depends on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart stopped beating. Today death is believed to occur 4 to 6 minutes after the heart stops beating because after several minutes it is difficult to resuscitate the brain. However, with new experimental treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can now be survived without brain injury. Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making todays beliefs about when death occurs obsolete.

Ultimately, real death occurs when cell structure and chemistry become so disorganized that no technology could restore the original state. This is called the information-theoretic criterion for death. Any other definition of death is arbitrary and subject to continual revision as technology changes. That is certainly the case for death pronounced on the basis of absent vital signs today, which is not real death at all.

The object of cryonics is to prevent death by preserving sufficient cell structure and chemistry so that recovery (including recovery of memory and personality) remains possible by foreseeable technology. If indeed cryonics patients are recoverable in the future, then clearly they were never really dead in the first place. Todays physicians will simply have been wrong about when death occurs, as they have been so many times in the past. The argument that cryonics cannot work because cryonics patients are dead is a circular argument.

More than one hundred people have been cryopreserved since the first case in 1967. More than one thousand people have made legal and financial arrangements for cryonics with one of several organizations, usually by means of affordable life insurance. Alcor is the largest organization, and distinguished among cryonics organizations by its advanced technology and advocacy of a medical approach to cryonics.

Alcor procedures ideally begin within moments of cardiac arrest. Blood circulation and breathing are artificially restored, and a series of medications are administered to protect the brain from lack of oxygen. Rapid cooling also begins, which further protects the brain. The goal is to keep the brain alive by present-day criteria for as long as possible into the procedure. It is not always possible to respond so rapidly and aggressively, but that is Alcors ideal, and it has been achieved in many cases.

In 2001 Alcor adapted published breakthroughs in the field of organ preservation to achieve what we believe is ice-free preservation (vitrification) of the human brain. This is a method of stabilizing the physical basis of the human mind for practically unlimited periods of time. The procedure involves partly replacing water in cells with a mixture of chemicals that prevent ice formation. Kidneys have fully recovered after exposure to the same chemicals in published studies.

Alcors future goals include expanding ice-free cryopreservation (vitrification) beyond the brain to include the entire human body, and reducing the biochemical alterations of the process to move closer to demonstrable reversibility. Based on the remarkable progress being made in conventional organ banking research, we believe that demonstrably reversible preservation of the human brain is a medical objective that could be achieved in the natural lifetime of most people living today.

To learn more, please read our list of Frequently Asked Questions and the many other articles in the Alcor Library.

Figure 1: Pre-1992 freezing damage in brain tissue after treatment with 3 molar glycerol. This light micrograph prepared by freeze substitution in the frozen state shows extensive ice crystal damage. This is the kind of damage that many commentators assume is common in cryonics patients. Their assumption is outdated and incorrect.

Figure 2: Pre-1992 freezing damage in brain tissue after treatment with 4 molar glycerol. This electron micrograph prepared after thawing shows tears surrounding a capillary, and a naked cell nucleus with no cell membrane (dark rounded object). There seems to be less damage in frozen-thawed tissue than in tissue imaged in the frozen state.

Figure 3: 1992-2001 freezing damage in brain tissue after treatment with 7.5 molar glycerol. This electron micrograph prepared after thawing shows tears surrounding a capillary, but otherwise good structural preservation. With this protocol, ice damage occurs at intervals throughout the brain, but with most of the volume remaining ice-free.

Figure 4: Today brain tissue preserved with a modern vitrification solution shows virtually no freezing damage. Whole neurons are visible with intact membranes and well defined structure. This is the excellent brain preservation which Alcor can now achieve in human patients. Most experts who complain about damage caused by cryonics procedures are unaware that such preservation is now possible.

Excerpt from:
Introduction to Cryonics - Alcor

Cryonics is the practice of freezing the body at subzero temperatures, with the hope that future technology will be able to bring it back to life. Many companies have begun offering this service, but there is little to no evidence that cryo-preserved bodies can be revived.

Who doesnt want to live as long as they can? If given the chance, some people would want to live forever!

Humans put a lot of effort into extending our individual stays on this planet. Eating greens, running, intermittent fasting, juice cleansing, turning into a teetotaler the list goes on and on. Unless you live in one of the five blue zones on Earth, where people tend to live the longest, hitting the century mark in life seems to be one hell of a challenging task. No matter how careful you are, disease will eventually come knocking at the door.

However, what if theres a way to cheat nature? What is there was a path to immortality?

For those terrified of aging and death, cryonics might be the answer. Cryonics claims to be the key to immortality. It can help you resume your life after rising from the dead, but not in the way vampires do.

So what is the science behind cryonics? Is it a sham or a scientific breakthrough?

Recommended Video for you:

If you wish to buy/license this video, please write to us at admin@scienceabc.com.

Imagine that youre dying due to a disease with no cure. Doctors are working to find a cure, but you just dont have enough time before it ends your life. What if you could pause the process of dying until medical research caught up with your disease and a cure became available?

This is where cryonics appears as a ray of hope for your dying body. Cryonics is the practice of freezing the body at subzero temperatures, in the hopes that future technology can bring it back to life. It sounds like a good concept for a sci-fi movie, doesnt it? Thats because movies like Passenger and Vanilla Sky have played with this very appealing idea.

Given its experimental nature and the advanced equipment required for the process, it probably wont come as a surprise that cryopreservation can cost a fortune. Then again, whats the use of all that money if it cant buy you a life?

Assuming that you have the millions of dollars required to extend your life after death, how exactly will your body be frozen?

Once youve been declared legally dead, cryopreservation can begin.

To keep the brain tissues protected, blood circulation and breathing are temporarily restored by CPR and an oxygen mask until the specialized medications can be injected into the system. A medical team then cools the body by placing it in an ice water bath, and injecting anticoagulants to prevent the blood from clotting. Within 24 hours of death, the body is taken to the cryopreservation center where the body is safely preserved.

When you fill the ice tray with water and keep it in the freezer, you have probably observed that water expands upon freezing. This is because the water molecules form a hexagonal crystalline structure when frozen, which takes up more space than liquid water.

The average human body is made of 60% water. If not frozen correctly, the water present in our cells would turn into ice. Ice expands in volume and forms crystal lattices, putting pressure on cell walls and blood vessels, which can cause the cells and tissues to crack open. If the ultimate goal of cryonics is to restore your body to a healthy living condition at some time in the future, a body full of ruptured cells wont be very helpful. This is where a process known as Vitrification comes to the rescue. Vitrification allows the body to be frozen in time.

Vitrification is the process of turning a substance into glass, a non-crystalline amorphous solid. The process is done by introducing anti-freeze chemicals known as cryoprotectants into the bloodstream. Glycerol and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) are common cryoprotectants that are used before starting the freezing process.

Cryoprotectants prevent the formation of ice crystals by increasing intracellular solute concentration. This allows the water molecules to be locked in place without turning into ice crystals, even after being frozen below -100 C. No ice formation means no structural damage to the bodys cells. However, with the increase in the concentration of cryoprotectants in the body, the chances of toxicity also increase.

Once your body has been safely vitrified, it will be lowered into a cryopreservation tank, i.e., your new icy home. For the foreseeable future, your body will be kept at a toasty -196C with the help of liquid nitrogen. This will protect the body from any deterioration for potentially thousands of years so to speak.

And then?

Wait and hope that science finds a way to bring you back.

The legitimacy of cryonics is one of the main ethical concerns for practitioners, opponents, and potential people popsicles. There is no proof or guarantee that the body can bounce back to health after being frozen for years. Whos to say that resurrection after being cryogenically frozen is nothing less than a false hope? Freezing your body in the hopes of scientific advancement that will help resume life sounds a lot like science fiction.

Some argue that cryonics may also promote a trend of euthanasia, as people might prefer cryopreservation while their body remains untouched by disease and old age.

Lets consider a scenario where we find a way to bring a person back to a healthy living condition. Will the cryopreserved person retain their original personality and identity? Theres no guarantee that cryopreservation wont permanently alter brain function. Additionally, after waking up after thousands of years, people would find themselves alone, without any family or friends. The prospect of being alone can be frightening for some. Another main concern would be that such resurrected beings would further add to the population on Earth.

A century ago, a trip to outer space was an unimaginable idea. Now, astronauts frequently fly to the International Space Station, so clearly, no one can truly know what the future holds. There is a possibility that coming back to life after being cryogenically frozen for years is the real deal. Or maybe cryonics is nothing but a fantastic notion.

However, there are a few possibilities that would make cryonically freezing someone a failure. If the body is damaged before or after cryopreservation, it will be impossible to revive the brain function of that person. The most disheartening possibility, of course, is that even in the future, science may never be able to fully revive a cryopreserved body.

Was this article helpful?

YesNo

See the original post:
Is It Possible To Freeze People And Bring Them Back To Life?

On December 15, 1966, animation legend Walt Disney died from complications of lung cancer, for which he had undergone surgery just over a month earlier. A private funeral was held the next day, and on December 17, his body was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. But while Disney undoubtedly lives on through the legacy of the beloved feature films and theme parks that comprise much of his lifes work, shortly after his death, a rumor began to circulate that he might be living on in a more literal sense as well with his body suspended in a frozen state and buried deep beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, awaiting the day when medical technology would be advanced enough to reanimate the animator.

Over the years, proponents of this seemingly absurd rumor have cited the secrecy surrounding Disneys death and burial as evidence of its veracity. They claim that news of his passing was intentionally delayed in order to give his handlers time to place his body in cryonic suspension and that both his funeral and the actual location of his burial plot have been kept secret as a means of further concealing the truth of his interment.

Disneys lifelong interest in the future, projects such as his EPCOT Center (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) and the technical innovations for which he was known throughout his career would no doubt have lent the rumor a certain air of truth, while a Time magazine article about the cryonic freezing of a 73-year-old psychology professor also lent its weight.

The assertions of two separate biographies of DisneyLeonard Moselys Disneys World (1986)and Marc Eliots Walt Disney: Hollywoods Dark Prince(1993)which claimed that an obsession with death led Disney to an interest in cryonics, surely did their part to perpetuate it through the years as well.

In a 1972 biography about her father, Disney's daughter Diane wrote that she doubted he had even heard of cryonics.

Photo: United Artists/Photofest

The exact origins of the rumor are uncertain, but it first appeared in print in a 1969 Ici Paris article in which a Disney executive attributed it to a group of disgruntled animators seeking to have a laugh at their late taskmaster employers expense.

Disneys daughter, Diane, wrote in a 1972 biography about her famous father that she doubted her father had even heard of cryonics. It has been further discredited by those pointing to the existence of signed legal documents that indicate Disney was in fact cremated and that his remains are interred in a marked plot (for which his estate paid $40,000) at Forest Lawn, the exact location of which is a matter of public record.

Further, by all accounts, Disney was known to be a very private man in life, making the quiet circumstances of his cremation and burial far from suspect, and the assertions in Moselys and Eliots biographies have been widely rejected as unfounded.

Yet despite the apparent lack of any credible evidence supporting a connection between it and Disney, the existence of cryonics is very much a reality. Since 1964, when Robert Ettinger published a work discussing the plausibility of freezing human beings for the purpose of bringing them back to life, a significant cryonics industry has developed in the United States.

Today,companies such as Suspended Animation Inc.,Cryonics Institute and Alcor Life Extension Foundation offer their clients the opportunity to have their bodies placed in a large metal tank in a state of deep freeze known as cryostasis, for the purpose of being restored to life and complete physical and mental health at a theoretical point in the future when medical science is advanced enough to do so.

According to reports, there are hundreds of people being kept in cryostasis at facilities around the country and thousands more that have already made arrangements for their own preservation. Following his death in 2004, baseball legend Ted Williams became the highest-profile person to date to be placed in cryostasis.

Cryonics is not without its detractors, however. Its science has been largely dismissed as fantastical. Still, its the futuristic stuff of science fiction that maybe even Disney himself would have appreciated.

Follow this link:
Is Walt Disney's Body Frozen? - Biography

Given that death is one of the things people fear more than anything, its not surprising that weve been thinking for awhile about how we can thwart it.

Cryonics, which is the attempt to freeze the bodies of the recently deceased in the hope that they can be revived and cured later on, has a long and honestly pretty grim history.

An article published in 1992 detailed some of the more gruesome mistakes, probably in the hopes that future scientists would be able to learn from previous miscalculations.

One of the biggest issues is the freezing process itselfthe ice crystals that for in your cells will eventually destroy them beyond repair.

Basically, you remain a popsicle forever, because no one can revive you if you have no working cells.

Cryonics company Alcor defrosted three corpses in 1984 with the intention of checking what damage had been sustained. First, the bodies were converted to neuropreservation, which means their heads were preserved (ew), and then scientists dug in.

From the outside, the damage didnt look all that bad, resembling the type of cracking observed in deteriorating coatings, such as is seen in paint peeling away from a wall. The skin adjoining the fracture fissure was somewhat raised from the underlying fat and gave the appearance of having peeled away slightly.

Again, ew.

Deeper fractures were discovered, however, as the bodies thawed, and there was also plenty of organ damage to go around.

Examination of the internal organs of patient three revealed fractures present in almost every organ. The spinal cord, aorta, thoracic inferior vena cava, pulmonary artery, myocardium, right lung, liver, pericardium, stomach, ileum, colon, mesentery, spleen, skeletal muscle, and pancreas, were all seriously fractured.

Also? The spinal cord had been snapped in three places.

The team believed that all of the damage could be put down to the thawing process.

As cooling proceeds below the glass transition phase of water (TG), different organs and tissues within the patients body will begin to contract at different rates. However, because the system is now in a solid state, these materials, bonded to each other by ice/cryoprotective agent mixtures, will be unable to contract independently.

And this is what happens when everything goesright during the freezing process.

What happens if, for some reasons, bodies are not kept at the optimal temperature in their chambers?

Unsurprisingly, nothing pretty.

We know that because at least one company, started by Robert Nelson, saw too many storage, venue, and payment issues that resulted in him just eventually allowing the bodies in his care to thaw.

The stench near the crypt is disarming, strips away all defenses, spins the stomach into a thousand dizzying somersaults.

Nelson defended himself, though he likely realized they had not realized the best possible outcome.

I havent done anything criminal, anything wrong other than a lot of bad decisions. It didnt work. It failed. There was no money. Who can guarantee that youre going to be suspended for 10 or 15 years.

When malfunctions happen, families usually opt to bury their loved ones traditionally, though the reality of being the mortician in these cases is less than pleasant.

One detailed that they used a breathing apparatus when the capsule on its side had to be entered to remove the remains which had fallen to the bottom and frozen in place in a plug of body fluids.

Ew. Right?

Now that cryonics has garnered more financial backing and interest from those who are invested in its future, proponents are sure all of those hurdles will be overcome.

Only time will tell.

Read more from the original source:
The Gross And Horrifying Early Days Of Cryonics TwistedSifter

Slowing or stopping of life without death

Suspended animation is the temporary (short- or long-term) slowing or stopping of biological function so that physiological capabilities are preserved. It may be either hypometabolic or ametabolic in nature. It may be induced by either endogenous, natural or artificial biological, chemical or physical means. In its natural form it may be spontaneously reversible as in the case of species demonstrating hypometabolic states of hibernation or require technologically mediated revival when applied with therapeutic intent in the medical setting as in the case of deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA).[1][2]

Suspended animation is understood as the pausing of life processes by exogenous or endogenous means without terminating life itself.[3] Breathing, heartbeat and other involuntary functions may still occur, but they can only be detected by artificial means.[4] For this reason, this procedure has been associated with a lethargic state in nature when animals or plants appear, over a period, to be dead but then can wake up or prevail without suffering any harm. This has been termed in different contexts hibernation, dormancy or anabiosis (this last in some aquatic invertebrates and plants in scarcity conditions).

In July 2020, marine biologists reported that aerobic microorganisms (mainly), in "quasi-suspended animation", were found in organically-poor sediments, up to 101.5 million years old, 68.9 metres (226 feet) below the seafloor in the South Pacific Gyre (SPG) ("the deadest spot in the ocean"), and could be the longest-living life forms ever found.[5][6]

This condition of apparent death or interruption of vital signs may be similar to a medical interpretation of suspended animation. It is only possible to recover signs of life if the brain and other vital organs suffer no cell deterioration, necrosis or molecular death principally caused by oxygen deprivation or excess temperature (especially high temperature).[7]

Some examples of people that have returned from this apparent interruption of life lasting over half an hour, two hours, eight hours or more while adhering to these specific conditions for oxygen and temperature have been reported and analysed in depth, but these cases are not considered scientifically valid. The brain begins to die after five minutes without oxygen; nervous tissues die intermediately when a "somatic death" occurs while muscles die over one to two hours following this last condition.[8]

It has been possible to obtain a successful resuscitation and recover life in some instances, including after anaesthesia, heat stroke, electrocution, narcotic poisoning, heart attack or cardiac arrest, shock, newborn infants, cerebral concussion, or cholera.

Supposedly, in suspended animation, a person technically would not die, as long as he or she were able to preserve the minimum conditions in an environment extremely close to death and return to a normal living state. An example of such a case is Anna Bgenholm, a Swedish radiologist who allegedly survived 80 minutes under ice in a frozen lake in a state of cardiac arrest with no brain damage in 1999.[9] [10]

Other cases of hypothermia where people survived without damage are:

It has been suggested that bone lesions provide evidence of hibernation among the early human population whose remains have been retrieved at the Archaeological site of Atapuerca. In a paper published in the journal LAnthropologie, researchers Juan-Luis Arsuaga and Antonis Bartsiokas point out that primitive mammals and primates like bush babies and lorises hibernate, which suggests that the genetic basis and physiology for such a hypometabolism could be preserved in many mammalian species, including humans.[15]

Since the 1970s, induced hypothermia has been performed for some open-heart surgeries as an alternative to heart-lung machines. Hypothermia, however, provides only a limited amount of time in which to operate and there is a risk of tissue and brain damage for prolonged periods.

There are many research projects currently investigating how to achieve "induced hibernation" in humans.[16][17] This ability to hibernate humans would be useful for a number of reasons, such as saving the lives of seriously ill or injured people by temporarily putting them in a state of hibernation until treatment can be given.

The primary focus of research for human hibernation is to reach a state of torpor, defined as a gradual physiological inhibition to reduce oxygen demand and obtain energy conservation by hypometabolic behaviors altering biochemical processes. In previous studies, it was demonstrated that physiological and biochemical events could inhibit endogenous thermoregulation before the onset of hypothermia in a challenging process known as "estivation". This is indispensable to survive harsh environmental conditions, as seen in some amphibians and reptiles.[18]

Lowering the temperature of a substance reduces chemical activity by the Arrhenius equation. This includes life processes such as metabolism. If cryonics are ever perfected, it would then be a form of long-term suspended animation.[19]

Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR) is a way to slow the bodily processes that would lead to death in cases of severe injury.[20] This involves lowering the body's temperature below 34C (93F), which is the current standard for therapeutic hypothermia.[20]

In June 2005, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh's Safar Center for Resuscitation Research announced they had managed to place dogs in suspended animation and bring them back to life, most of them without brain damage, by draining the blood out of the dogs' bodies and injecting a low temperature solution into their circulatory systems, which in turn keeps the bodies alive in stasis. After three hours of being clinically dead, the dogs' blood was returned to their circulatory systems, and the animals were revived by delivering an electric shock to their hearts. The heart started pumping the blood around the body, and the dogs were brought back to life.[21]

On 20 January 2006, doctors from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced they had placed pigs in suspended animation with a similar technique. The pigs were anaesthetized and major blood loss was induced, along with simulated - via scalpel - severe injuries (e.g. a punctured aorta as might happen in a car accident or shooting). After the pigs lost about half their blood the remaining blood was replaced with a chilled saline solution. As the body temperature reached 10C (50F) the damaged blood vessels were repaired and the blood was returned.[22] The method was tested 200 times with a 90% success rate.[23]

The laboratory of Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and institutes such as Suspended Animation, Inc are trying to implement suspended animation as a medical procedure which involves the therapeutic induction to a complete and temporary systemic ischemia, directed to obtain a state of tolerance for the protection-preservation of the entire organism, this during a circulatory collapse "only by a limited period of one hour". The purpose is to avoid a serious injury, risk of brain damage or death, until the patient reaches specialized attention.[24]

More here:
Suspended animation - Wikipedia