Search Immortality Topics:

Page 11234..1020..»


Category Archives: Cryonics

About Cryonics – The Cryonics Institute

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.

Original post:
About Cryonics - The Cryonics Institute

Posted in Cryonics | Comments Off on About Cryonics – The Cryonics Institute

Cryonics: Could you live forever? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

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.

See original here:
Cryonics: Could you live forever? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Posted in Cryonics | Comments Off on Cryonics: Could you live forever? | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Introduction to Cryonics – Alcor

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.

Visit link:
Introduction to Cryonics - Alcor

Posted in Cryonics | Comments Off on Introduction to Cryonics – Alcor

Need Some Podcasts To Listen To In 2023? Five Exciting New Podcasts To Keep Your Ears Happy In The New Year. – Forbes

Need Some Podcasts To Listen To In 2023? Five Exciting New Podcasts To Keep Your Ears Happy In The New Year.  Forbes

Link:
Need Some Podcasts To Listen To In 2023? Five Exciting New Podcasts To Keep Your Ears Happy In The New Year. - Forbes

Posted in Cryonics | Comments Off on Need Some Podcasts To Listen To In 2023? Five Exciting New Podcasts To Keep Your Ears Happy In The New Year. – Forbes

The week in audio: Capitals Jingle Bell Ball; The Most Streamed Christmas No 1s; Lights Out; Frozen Head and more – The Guardian

The week in audio: Capitals Jingle Bell Ball; The Most Streamed Christmas No 1s; Lights Out; Frozen Head and more  The Guardian

Read the original here:
The week in audio: Capitals Jingle Bell Ball; The Most Streamed Christmas No 1s; Lights Out; Frozen Head and more - The Guardian

Posted in Cryonics | Comments Off on The week in audio: Capitals Jingle Bell Ball; The Most Streamed Christmas No 1s; Lights Out; Frozen Head and more – The Guardian

Suspended animation – Wikipedia

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]

Go here to see the original:
Suspended animation - Wikipedia

Posted in Cryonics | Comments Off on Suspended animation – Wikipedia