Archive for the ‘Cryonics’ Category

Patient Care Bay (Bigfoot dewar being filled with liquid nitrogen), Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. October 2006. From The Prospect of Immortality Murray Ballard

As his project goes on show at Newcastle's Side Gallery, we republish an article on Ballard's eye-opening series first printed in BJP's July 2011 Ones to Watch issue

As debut projects go, Murray Ballard could scarcely have chosen a more intriguing subject than cryonics. The practice of preserving dead bodies at very low temperatures, in the hope of bringing them back to life far in the future, is commonly thought to exist only in science fiction, where it is generally known by its technically inaccurate name of cryogenic freezing.

Yet as Ballard (no relationto his namesake, the sci-fi author JG) discovered during his five- year investigation, hundreds of people around the world have alreadyinvested in what he has calls The Prospect of Immortality.

The 27-year-old began documenting cryonicists while studying photography at the University of Brighton, after he discovered there was a group of British believers based just along the Sussex coast in Peacehaven. He was soon making much longer excursions, his work taking him to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona three times, the rival Cryonics Institute in Michigan twice, and the burgeoning Kriorus facility just outside Moscow on a further two occasions.

Portable perfusion kit. Home of Alan and Silvia Sinclair. Peacehaven, East Sussex, UK. May 2007. From The Prospect of Immortality Murray Ballard

Having worked as an assistant to Magnum photographer Mark Power for four years, Ballard is now looking at biotechnology for his first commission, which will be shown as part of the British Science Festival. He revels in the honesty that working with a large format camera allows.

Youre not saying, Look at this bit of the picture, youre saying all of it is equally as important, and all of the details are there to piece together meaning and narrative, he explains.

Power was on hand last month to formerly open Ballards first major solo exhibition at Impressions in Bradford, featuring Ballards images of the people involved in this pursuit of real-life resurrection, and the equipment to which they are entrusting their dreams of everlasting life.

Margaret Kiseleva, holding a photograph of her mother, Ludmila, KrioRus facility, Alabushevo, Moscow. September 2010. From The Prospect of Immortality Murray Ballard

The Prospect of Immortality by Murray Ballard is on show at Side Gallery from 0 March 30 April. The images in the exhibition are taken from a larger touring show, which was originally commissioned by Impressions Gallery and curated by director Anne McNeill. http://www.amber-online.commurrayballard.comBallard also published a book of the project last year with GOST Books

This textwas originally published as part of the Ones to Watch series of articles on emerging photographers in July 2011. This issue is now sold out, but other back issues can be bought atwww.thebjpshop.com

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Murray Ballard shoots cryonics in The Prospect of Immortality - British Journal of Photography

The company proposing Australia's first cryonics lab has gained approval to build in Holbrook, southern NSW, and plan to begin freezing and stories bodies next year.

Approval has been granted for the world's second cryonics facility outside the United States to be built in Holbrook.

Building is set to start now the plans have been given the tick by Greater Hume Shire Council and by next year Southern Cryonics plans to begin storing and freezing dead bodies in the expectation that in the future science will be able to bring them back to life.

Company secretary Matt Fisher and his team of four had hoped to unveil a facility in 2014 under the company name Stasis Systems, but ran into difficulties.

In the intervening years, despite there still being no scientific guarantee of revival, Australians had warmed to the idea of cryonics.

"We have had quite a lot of people express interest, perhaps a dozen at this stage, that want to sign up as clients once we are up and running," he said.

A price has not been set for the service but Mr Fisher said whole body preservation would cost $A80,000-$90,000.

The facility will have the capacity to store 40 bodies in 10 specialised stainless steel vessels.

It is hard to get a clear picture of how many people have been cryopreserved to date as there is no system of recording this information. However, there are estimated to be several hundred in the US and Russia where facilities exist.

It has been a long road, but Mr Fisher said it was essential to find an appropriately zoned site for cemetery and mortuary use, in a location with low risk of disaster and bushfire.

Safeguarding the facility was a priority, as was developing a corporate structure to survive as long as the built one.

Greater Hume Council general manager Steven Pinnuck said there were no objections to the development but to satisfy the terms of the approval, Southern Cryonics needed to seek licenses from NSW Health to hold and store remains on site.

"It is certainly a different type of activity. We are quite comfortable with it," he said.

"It's going to be in an industrial area and as it turns out, it will be almost adjacent to the local cemetery so we don't see it as being out of character with the area."

"The patient has to be declared legally dead for any cryopreservation procedures to begin," Mr Fisher said.

"The patient is put in an ice bath and medications are administered to prevent blood clotting."

Bodies are brought down to dry ice temperature (-78.5 Celsius) as a temporary phase.

"Once they get to the facility, Southern Cryonics would take over and bring that down further to liquid nitrogen temperature which is -196 Celsius."

The rule of thumb with cryonics was the faster the better and the colder the better.

The focus of cryonics is to preserve the brain to the highest fidelity so deaths with trauma to the brain or head or degenerative conditions such as dementia were problematic.

Mr Fisher said while there were known concerns which would limit the success of a possible future revival, clients would not be medically assessed by Southern Cryonics.

The elderly and others with illnesses had made inquiries but Mr Fisher said a growing number of young people were keen to know more, particularly as it was soon to be a real third end-of-life option.

Mr Fisher, a software engineer, had his father's brain frozen - or what's called neurally coded - at a facility in Sydney.

His passion for cryonics stems from the assumption that medical technology will improve to the point where people can live "in a healthy physical state in perpetuity", meaning theoretically that life expectancy would become open-ended.

"Anyone who has died in the years leading up to that point is going to miss out on the amazing opportunity of experiencing being fit and healthy for however long that they want to," he said.

"I would like to be on the other side of that transition and want everyone I know and care about to be on the other side of that transition as well."

The story Building set to start on Australia's first cryonics lab first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Building set to start on Australia's first cryonics lab - Cowra Guardian

Cryopreservation

Cryopreservation is the process of freezing organs and tissues at very low temperatures in order to preserve them. While it sounds simple in theory, only a handful of cells and tissues have survivedthis method. This is because while science has successfully developed ways to cool organs to the very low temperatures required for preservation, thawing them out has proven far more difficult. As the specimen thaws, itforms ice crystals, which can damage the tissue and render organs unusable.

Right now, the process is only a viable option for small samples, such as sperm or embryos. Previous efforts using slow warming techniques have proven to be effective on samples of that size, but havent worked forlarger tissue samples, like whole human organs. The inability to safely thaw the tissue has also precluded the theoretical concept of cryogenically preservingentire human bodies, with the intention of reanimating them later. The concept has roots in cryogenic technology, but is actually referred to as cryonics, and the scientific community generally considers it to be more science fiction than science fact at least for the time being.

A recentstudy has made a significant breakthrough which may well begin closing that gap even more. Using a new technique, scientists were able to cryopreserve human and pig samples, then successfully rewarm it without causing any damage to the tissue.

As lead researcher John Bischof from the University of Minnesota notes:

This is the first time that anyone has been able to scale up to a larger biological system and demonstrate successful, fast, and uniform warming of hundreds of degrees Celsius per minute of preserved tissue without damaging the tissue.

By using nanoparticles to heat the tissues at an equal rate, scientists were able to prevent the formation ofthose destructive ice crystals. The researchers mixed silica-coated iron oxide nanoparticles in a solution and applied an external magnetic field to generate heat. The process was tested on several human and pig tissue samples, and it showed that nanowarming achieves the same speed of thawing as the use of traditional convection techniques.

One theoretical application for this discovery would be, of course, bringing cryogenic life-extension techniques out of the realm of science fiction and into reality. But were not quite there yet.

A more practical application for the technique wouldbeto safely preserve and store organs for extended periods, thus improving the logistical challenges behind organ transplantation.

According to statisticsfrom the United Network for Organ Sharing, 22 people die every dayin the US while waiting for organ transplants. Contrary to popular belief, this isnt because there is a shortage of organs being donated its because organs cannot be preserved for more than a few hours. So, while there are available organs ready to be transplanted, the time it takes to find a matching recipient and transport the organ safely to their location often exceeds the window of time in which the organ remains viable for transplant.

Over half of donated hearts and lungs are thrown out each year because they dont make it to patients in time. They can only be kept on ice for four hours, and while some organs can last longer than others without a blood supply during transport, its still not a longenough in many cases.

If only half of these discarded organs were transplanted, then it has been estimated that wait lists for these organs could be extinguished within two to three years, Bischof adds. With the help of cryopreservation technology, we may be well on our way to keeping donated organs viable for longer meaning they could be transported to patients who need them even if distance and time stands between them.

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Scientists Make Huge Breakthrough In Cryogenics - Futurism

A B.C. man who is challenging the provinces laws on the preservation of the body after death has signed a groundbreaking cryonic contract. Keegan Macintoshis believed to be the first person to sign a deal with a Canadian provider to keep his body in a state of permanent suspension.

The four-page contract between Keegan Macintosh and the Lifespan Society of B.C. is accepted to be the first run through a Canadian has marked with a neighborhood supplier to keep their body in a condition of lasting suspension.

The agreement is the most recent turn in a strange B.C. Preeminent Court confrontation over the regions Cremation, Interment and Funeral Services Act.

Macintoshs claim says the province is the only place on theplanet to fugitive cryonics.

The issue of cryonics increased overall consideration this month when a British judge allowed the last wishes of a 14-year-old who composed a letter before kicking the bucket of malignancy asking the court to let her mom cryogenically safeguard her body.

The decision made room for the young ladys remaining parts to be taken to an office in the U.S. to begin the conservation procedure at a cost of more than $62,000.

Various Canadians have marked cryonic safeguarding manages U.S. suppliers, however, Lifespan president Carrie Wong says the agreement with Macintosh is accepted to be the first of its kind in Canada.

Mac has altered his unique explanation of claim to mirror the marking of an agreement. Wong said the general public is currently holding up to perceive how the Crown reacts.

Wong said, If theyre really not interested, then anyone in B.C. can go into a cryonics arrangement.

As indicated by the terms of the arrangement, Lifespan will supplant Macintoshs blood with a sort of liquid catalyst to avoid ice gems framing when the body is cooled.

The general public additionally consents to suspend Macintoshs remaining parts at ultra-low temperatures.

Consequently, Macintosh will pay $30 a year.

The agreement gives a progression of capabilities around revival, beginning with the finishing date.

However, Lifespan additionally concurs that when in Lifespans best judgment, it is determined that attempting resuscitation is in the best interests of the cryopreserved member, Lifespan shall attempt to resuscitate (Macintosh).

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Keegan Macintosh-British Columbia Guy Signs First Canadian Cryonic Contract - E Canada Now

Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue successfully raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ. Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Alamy

Scientists have succeeded in cryogenically freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue for the first time, in an advance that could pave the way for organs to be stored for months or years.

If the technique scales up to work for entire organs and scientists predict it will it could save the lives of thousands who die each year waiting for transplants.

The work is being hailed as a major development in the field of cryopreservation as it marks the first time that scientists have been able to rapidly rewarm large tissue samples without them shattering, cracking or turning to a pulp. The US team overcame this challenge by infusing the tissue with magnetic nanoparticles, which could be excited in a magnetic field, generating a rapid and uniform burst of heat.

Kelvin Brockbank, chief executive officer of Tissue Testing Technologies in Charleston, South Carolina and a co-author, said: It is a huge landmark for me. We can actually see the road ahead for clinical use and getting tissues and organs banked and into patients.

Currently, donor organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys must be transplanted within hours because the cells begin to die as soon as the organs are cut off from a blood supply. As a result, 60% of the hearts and lungs donated for transplantation are discarded each year, because these tissues cannot be kept on ice for longer than four hours.

Recent estimates suggest that if only half of unused organs were successfully transplanted, transplant waiting lists could be eliminated within two to three years. The latest paper has been hailed as a significant step towards this goal.

Mehmet Toner, a professor of bioengineering who is working on cryopreservation at Harvard Medical School, said: Its a major breakthrough. Its going to catalyse a lot of people to try this in their laboratories. Im impressed.

Cryopreservation has been around for decades, but while it works well for red blood cells, sperm and eggs, scientists have come up against a barrier for samples with a volume larger than around one millilitre.

Previously, larger samples have been cooled successfully using a technique known as vitrification, in which the tissue is infused with a mixture of antifreeze-like chemicals and an organ preservation solution. When cooled to below -90C (-130F), the fluid becomes a glass-like solid and prevents damaging ice crystals from forming.

The real problem has been the thawing process. Unless the rewarming occurs rapidly and uniformly, cracks will appear in the tissue and tiny ice crystals suddenly expand, destroying cellular structures.

We can freeze tissue and it looks good, but then we warm it and there are major issues, said Toner.

The latest work scales up cryopreservation from one millilitre to about 50ml, and the scientists said they believe the same strategy is likely to work for larger skin transplants, sections of ovarian tissue and entire organs.

John Bischof, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and the senior author of the study, said: We have extremely promising results and we believe that were going to be able to do it but we have not yet done it.

Brockbank and colleagues previously attempted and failed to use microwave warming to generate an even thawing. It failed dreadfully due to the development of hotspots in the tissue, he said.

In the latest paper, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the team describe the new nano-warming technique. Pig heart valves and blood vessels were infused with a cryoprotectant solution mixed with iron oxide nanoparticles, coated in silicon to make them biologically inert, and the samples were cooled in liquid nitrogen to -160C (-256F).

For thawing, the sample was placed inside an electromagnetic coil, designed to generate an alternating magnetic field. As the magnetic field is flipped back and forth, the particles jiggle around inside the sample and rapidly and uniformly warm tissue at rates of 100 to 200C per minute, 10 to 100 times faster than previous methods.

In tests of their mechanical and biological properties, the tissues did not show any signs of harm, unlike control samples rewarmed slowly over ice. The researchers were also able to successfully wash away the iron oxide nanoparticles from the sample following the warming although said that further safety testing would be required before the technique could be used in patients.

The team are now testing the technique on rabbit kidneys and human allografts, which are combinations of skin, muscle and blood vessels from donors.

That will be our first trial with human tissues, said Brockbank. If that is successful, we would then progressively move to structures such as the human face for banking and for hands for banking as well as digits.

However, he added that it was difficult to put a timeline on when the developments might have a clinical impact, as this depended on regulatory approval as well as overcoming significant scientific challenges.

The scientists acknowledged that their work may attract interest from the cryonics industry, which promises to freeze the bodies or heads of clients after their death in the hope of bringing them back to life in the future, when medicine has advanced.

There is a certain intellectual connecting of the dots that takes you from the organ to the person... I could see somebody making this argument, said Bischof, but added these ambitions were not science-based as unlike with organs, the person would already be dead when frozen.

Clive Coen, professor of neuroscience at Kings College London, described the technique as ingenious. If the technique can be scaled-up to large organs such as kidneys, the contributions to the field of organ transplantation could be immense, he said. Such painstaking and careful research is to be applauded and must not be confused with wishful thinking about sub-zero storage and subsequent reanimation of a human body, as envisaged by the cryonics industry

Almost 49,000 people in Britain have had to wait for an organ transplant in the past decade and more than 6,000, including 270 children, have died before receiving the transplant they needed, NHS statistics reveal.

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Heart tissue cryogenics breakthrough gives hope for transplant patients - The Guardian

Transhumanism is one of those technologies that boggles most peoples minds. Do not be mistaken in thinking this has anything to do with being transgender, as transhumanists seek to improve their human capacities beyond what is assumed to be possible. They do so by using top-of-the-line technologies, rather than gadgets or other electronics. Most of these technologies go by unnoticed, which is why we have compiled a brief list below.

Some people may have heard of this technology before. Cryonics is a high-fidelity preservation of the human body after death. The primary reason why anyone would enter a cryogenic sleep is to anticipate a potential future revival. This technology has been widely available for some time, albeit it is rather on the expensive side. Through cryonics, it is feasible to stop cells from decaying. Moreover, the process requires no electricity to do so.

Tampering with the human bodys genes sounds rather risky, but significant advancements have been made in recent years. Gene therapy effectively replaces bad genes with good ones, which allows us to manipulate our genetic code. Scientists have discovered a way to remove genes coding for specific metabolic proteins, ensuring the host remains slim and fit at all times.

Anti-aging therapy is heavily influenced by gene therapy as well and it is believed scientists will eventually reach the longevity escape velocity soon. As a result, humans may become subject to indefinite lifespans. Whether or not that is a positive development, remains to be seen, though.

Introducing cyber enhancements to the human body remains a very risky business to this very day. Implants and other electronics can address a lot of problems our bodies are faced with. Cybernetics are designed in such a way they will be invisible to the casual observer, as they reside beneath the hosts skin. Most current bio modifications are all external, as we have covered in a previous article. Cybernetic systems will improve our everyday experience and even boost the economy as humans will be able to do more work in less time.

While a lot of people are concerned over what the future will bring in terms of robotics, self-replicating robots may be the least of our concerns right now. Replacing manual labor with robots doing the task for us seems like a no-brainer, albeit it will cause some job losses. Self-replicating robots, on the other hand, would be quite beneficial. For example, they can turn uninhabitable areas into living spaces, clean up waste generated by us humans, or even pave the way for human colonization of space.

As creepy as this concept may sound at first, mind uploading or nonbiological intelligence can be quite valuable to our society. Implementing cognitive processing on anything that is not human would be a massive breakthrough. The general public is not too keen of this concept, even though our minds are by far our greatest assets. Synthetic brains are not impossible to achieve by any means, although a lot of research is required before this can become a reality.

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Top 5 Transhumanist Technologies With Major Implications - The Merkle

The strangest place writer Mark OConnell has ever been to is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation where dead bodies are preserved in tanks filled with nitrogen, in case they can be revived with future technology. There was a floor with the stainless steel cylinders and all these bodies contained within them and corpses and severed heads, he tells The Verge. That imagery is something that I will take with me to a grave, whether thats a refrigerated cylinder or an actual grave.

OConnell, 37, visited Alcor while writing To Be a Machine, which comes out February 28th. The nonfiction book delves into the world of transhumanists, or people who want to transcend the limits of the human body using technology. Transhumanists want to be stronger and faster; they want to be cyborgs. And they want to solve the problem of death, whether by freezing their bodies through cryonics or uploading their consciousnesses. Transhumanists have been around since at least the 1980s, but have become more visible in the past decade as technology advances have made these ideas seem more feasible and less like sci-fi.

OConnell had known about transhumanists for years, but they stayed in the back of his mind until his son was born and he became more preoccupied by questions of mortality and death. I was looking for a topic that would allow me to write about these things, he says. Even when I was writing specifically about the movement, I was also writing about just how weird it is to be alive in a body thats decaying and dying.

He ended up visiting the Alcor cryonics lab, talking to researchers who want to save us from artificial intelligence, hanging around with biohackers in Pennsylvania, and following transhumanist presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan on his campaign trail. The Verge spoke to OConnell about the philosophy behind the movement, his experiences in the transhumanist world, and whether his own beliefs and hopes for humanity have changed since writing the book.

How exactly do you define transhumanism? Doctors, for example, are interested in extending human life, but you could hardly say that all doctors are transhumanists.

Right, theres a way of defining transhumanism thats so broad that youre almost just describing a scientist. There are lots of different definitions, but for me its someone who thinks that we should incorporate technology into ourselves, to use technological evolution to push forward the evolution of the human animal. These people want to not be human in a very sort of radical and thoroughgoing way. They want to be literally machines.

I can identify with wanting to not die, but I cant with wanting to live indefinitely.

Its a disparate movement with many different beliefs. For example, not all of them buy into cryonics. Its almost like talking to a Catholic who goes, I dont take communion, dont go to Mass, but Im still basically Catholic. They believe in the general principle but dont sign up for all the things along the way. [Then} you get people saying, I should really sign up for Alcor, should get the paperwork done and provide for my future almost like you talk to people of my generation who are like, I really need to get started on a pension.

Its common to be frustrated by what our bodies cant do. But its another thing to implant electronics under your skin, or plan to preserve your body after you die. What drives people who consider themselves transhumanists?

They all have a similar origin story, all came to it in a similar kind of way. When you talk about their childhoods, most of them were already obsessed with not just death, but the sort of general limitations of being human, of the frustrations of not being able to do certain things, not being able to live infinitely, not being able to explore space, not being able to think at the level they wanted. All obsessed with human limitations. And most of them shared a similar moment where they went online, they discovered that there was this whole community of people who had the same concerns and philosophies, and they became transhumanists, even though they were without knowing the name.

Theyre all largely tech people and science people. Its hugely a white male thing and it tells you a lot about privilege. Its very difficult to be concerned that youre going to die someday if youre dealing with structural racism or sexism or just feeding your family. Transhumanism seems to come from a position of privilege. Big proponents like Elon Musk have sort of conquered all the standard human problems through technology, and they have infinite amounts of money to spend.

What were some of the transhumanist ideas that seemed the strangest to you? Did any of that change after writing the book?

When I started to look into what the basic ideas were around transhumanism, the thing that I found most alienating and weird and completely speculative was the idea of becoming disembodied and uploading your brain. Its called whole brain emulation. Its the endpoint of a lot of transhumanist thought.

But then I met Randal Koene [who runs Carboncopies, a foundation that supports research on whole brain emulation]. I find him incredibly charismatic. I was really struck by the tension between what seems to be the complete insanity of what he was saying to me the madness of the idea that he might be able to eventually convert the human mind into code and talking to this normal, really smart guy who was explaining really clearly his ideas and making them seem, if not imminently achievable, quite sensible. I was quite swayed by him and in a weird way Randals work seems like some of the least crazy stuff.

Were you swayed by the overall philosophy? You mention in the book that you dont consider yourself a transhumanist. Why?

When I was with the Grindhouse biohackers in Pittsburgh, one night we were in the basement trying to envision our futures. One of them talked about wanting to become this disembodied infinitely powerful thing that would go throughout the universe and encompass everything.

When you talk to transhumanists, in one way or another, they all aspire to knowing everything and to being gods basically. And I just sort of thought, this is actually something I cant relate to at all. The idea of being that all-powerful and omnipresent, its almost indistinguishable from not existing and I cant quite justify that.

Theyd say, youve got Stockholm syndrome of the human body. But that kind of idea is very unappealing to me. I cant see why that would be your idea of your ultimate human value. I was always trying to come to grips with these ideas and come to grips with what it meant for these people to be post-human, and just wind up getting more confused about what it meant to be a human at all in the first place. I can identify with wanting to not die, but I cant with wanting to live indefinitely.

Hanging out with all these people and spending time with all these weird ideas about mechanism and human bodies forced me into a position [to identify myself] as not even a human, but as an animal, a mammal. To me, what it means to be human is inextricably bound with the condition of being a mammal, being frail and weak and loving other people for their frailty and weakness.

Speaking of limitations of the human body, what about disability? When youre so focused on transcending the human body and its limitations, does that mean denigrating disability?

Transhumanists see disability in a completely opposite way. The people I talked to said, Look, were all disabled in one way or another. For example, there was a proposal to make Los Angeles cities more wheelchair accessible. And [transhumanist presidential candidate] Zoltan Istvan wrote this bizarre, wrongheaded editorial about how this was a crazy use of public funds, which should be putting it into making all humans superhuman. What he was getting at was that being physically disabled should not be a barrier to being superhuman anyway, so whole-body prostheses should be the thing that were investing money into. A huge number of people in the disability community were horribly offended and he couldnt quite see why.

Do you think transhumanist ideas are going to gain credence and become a lot more mainstream?

I have no crystal ball, so I dont know any more about the future now than when I started looking into this. But I can see that maybe human life will change so radically in the future that all of this will come to pass. And it wont have come to pass because of transhumanists agitating for it but just because technology has this internal momentum that keeps moving, and theres nothing we can do about it.

Writing the book felt like writing about a very particular cultural moment. Its a very specific cultural phenomenon that has gained quite a foothold in Silicon Valley for reasons that seem quite obvious. My sense is that there are a lot of people out there who would never call themselves transhumanists but share a lot of these ideas about the possibilities for the human future. Silicon Valley has generated this amazing amount of money and cultural power and this sense of possibility around technology. We think we can fix anything with technology, so the idea that we would be able to solve death the human condition seems to be the natural outflow of that.

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'They want to be literally machines' : Writer Mark O'Connell on the rise of transhumanists - The Verge

Eagle-eyed city commuters will have the chance to read a Cheltenham author's book about preserving human life on Monday.

Copies of The Husband Who Refused to Die are being hidden in and around London tube stations as part of the groundbreaking Books On the Underground initiative.

Read: There's a pub in Gloucestershire where you can buy your dog a pint

The debut novel, with its original, and topical, cryonics premise, has had a great response from readers since its launch in December, with one reviewer describing it as 'truly a one-of-a-kind read'.

Andrea Darby, a former journalist who lives near Cheltenham, said: "I'm thrilled to be part of this fantastic initiative and hope that the commuters who find my book will enjoy reading it and pass it on."

Cordelia Oxley, Director of Books on the Underground, said the aim was to get more people reading and sharing books. "Titles are left on seats, benches, station signs and around ticket areas, with finders often keen to share their free discoveries on social media.

"The Book Fairies are excited to be working with Andrea and are looking forward to hiding copies of her amazing book on the London Underground. It's sure to get a big reaction!"

Read: Foo Fighters announce Glastonbury news at secret gig last night

The Husband Who Refused to Die, which Andrea describes as 'a story of love, loss, family and friendship' is about 40-year-old mum Carrie, whose husband Dan dies unexpectedly, just a few years after he revealed his wish to be frozen.

The narrative focuses on the difficult repercussions of this wish for Carrie and her teenage daughter, not least an intrusive media, an interfering sister-in-law and a mystery person with a serious grudge.

The book is available from Waterstones in Cheltenham and Gloucester, the Suffolk Anthology bookshop, as well as from Amazon, WHSmith and other online retailers.

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Going Underground: Cheltenham author's book about cryonics to be used in groundbreaking scheme - Gloucestershire Live

On January 12, 1967, psychology professor James Bedford died due to cancer-related natural causes. Within hours, a team of scientists filled his veins with antifreeze. They packed his body in a container full of dry ice, and in so doing made Bedford the first man ever frozen alive in the name ofwell, if not science, something that aspired to be science one day: cryonics.

On December 23rd, 2009, at 4 a.m., I listened to my neighbors play Forever Young for the fortieth time in a row. Either the partygoers had either left or the DJ had died, and any attendees were either passed out or too blitzed to notice. The song played on repeat:

Forever young, I want to be Forever young.

I aged 10 years that night, while Bedfordtucked away in a fresh liquid nitrogen bath that came complementary with his 1991 inspectionremained immortal.

What is Cryonics, for Crying out Loud? Fifty years have passed since Bedford volunteered to become the first cryogenically frozen man. And while cultural depictions sporadically crop upthink Austin Powers, Futurama and yes, Mel Gibsonin Forever Youngcryonics is often thought to belong more to the realm of science fiction than science, and to put an even finer point on it, an escapist fiction that eludes actionable reality.

Yet cryonics offers grounds just as fertile for ethics as they do the imagination. Just think: people wage fierce wars about when life begins. Cryonics twists, turns and flips that argument around to become a deeper meditation on the moment that life ends.

So when does it?

When a Body Becomes a Patient The Alcor Life Extension Foundation which preserved Bedford describes cryonics as 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. The Foundation tellingly describes its members as patientsnot bodies. The dewars are not coffins, they are the temporary resting place for people who will one day wake up.

Michael Hendrix, neuroscientist and assistant professor of biology at McGill University, describes how the future of cryonics rests upon the promise of new technologies in neuroscience, particularly recent work in connectomicsa field that maps the connections between neurons a detailed map of neural connections could be enough to restore a persons mind, memories and personality by uploading it into a computer simulation.

In other words, cryonics claims that a cryogenically frozen person is not dead. He or she is merely on pause, similar to the way a video game character wont age while the player fiddles through the menu screen. The cycle of life rests upon the ability of scientistsand technologyto catch up to an idea born centuries before its time.

And as far as the science of resuscitation, cryonics does not actually rely upon the preservation of the entire body (as the choice of some people to have just their heads frozen, notably MLB player Ted Williams, testifies to), but upon the ability to map out the neurological connections between the brain, lift that map and recreate it in another bodypossibly a robot, possibly something scientists and dreamers havent yet conceived.

The Grounds for Debate Arguments against cryonics often hinge upon two main points. The first is that at best, the ethical implications of the procedure show a Labradors level of devotion to the promise of science. At worst, they play upon the emotions (and pocketbooks) of the bereaved survivors, who hold out false hope for the resuscitation of their loved one, possibly derailing and even deranging the cycles of the grieving process. The second rawand undeniablefact is that the technology for making a frozen person reenter society as a whole, living human being simply does not exist.

As for arguments for it? The most simple, powerful argument of all: immortality.

In 2014, the total count of cyropreserved bodies reached 250. An estimated 1,500 people total had made arrangements for cryopreservation after their legal death. The New York Times cites nonreligious white males as the main partakers, outdoing females by a ratio of three to one. As the worlds first volunteer, Bedford received a freebie, but most cyropreservation costs at least $80,000. A Russian company, KioRus, boasts the steal at $12,000 a headliterally speaking. But costs all but disappear in the face of a successful experiment. Say someone pays $80,000 now to rejoin the living 200 years later? Forget about calculating inflation differences.

No matter what side of cryonics one comes down uponand science offers arguments for botha central idea remains, both chilling and mesmerizing, depending upon the way its turned. A successful cyropreservation would entail rebirthbut into a world wholly different than the one left behind. If James Bedford came back tomorrow, could he handle the emotionalnot to mention mentaltribulations of adjusting to a world that moved on without him? Would the forever young experience drone on like the song on that December night, an individual sentenced to the eternal return of the same song, Existence?

After my own encounter with Forever YoungI certainly hope not.

Elisia Guerena is a Brooklyn based writer, who writes about tech, travel, feminism, and anything related to inner or outer space.

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50 Years Frozen: Cryonics Today - Paste Magazine

New Delhi: Of late, the science of cryonics seems to have captivated the hearts of scientists and the public alike with some people now opting for cryopreservation after their deaths.

Cryonics is the practice or technique of deep-freezing the bodies of those who have died of a disease, in the hope of a future cure.

In a latest, an author from Scotland has started paying a research institute to preserve his brain cryogenically after his death.

As per reports, DJ MacLennan has been paying 50 pounds ( appriximately Rs 4,000) a month for the past decade to Alcor Institute in Arizona, USA, to preserve his brain in the hope that he can one day be brought back to life.

MacLennan, who lives on the Isle of Skye, has told the institute that when he dies he wants the team of volunteers to fill his body with anti-freezing liquid before plunging it into ice water. His body will then be wrapped in a polyethylene, submerged in alcohol and lowered into ice before being shipped to Arizona. The head will then be removed and frozen in liquid nitrogen before being stored.

According to MacLennan, if organs can be donated and aren't wasted anymore, brains should definitely not be wasted, instead it's the important part to store.

While the full-body procedure costs 75,000 pounds, the author from Skye, has opted for the 40,000 pounds brain freeze.

In November last year, a 14-year old girl who died of cancer became the first child to be cryogenically frozen after death in the UK.

The procedure was carried out after winning a landmark court case shortly before her death. She had written a heartbreaking letter to a judge explaining that she wanted a chance to live longer after suffering from a rare form of deadly cancer.

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Cryonics This Scottish author pays 50 pounds a month to preserve his brain after death - Zee News