Cryonics: A Science Possibility or Future Failure
You must have heard of cases of people who were in freezing states for sometime and miraculously they came back to life such as in the case of John Smith who was submerged in a frozen lake for 15 minutes and was found with heart stopped and no breathing, or Michelle Funk who was submerged in a frozen lake for 66 minutes and was found with stopped heart and no breathing, or Justin Smith who was buried under snow and when he was found, his heart stopped with no breathing. In this post, I am not talking about people who survived staying in extreme cold environment, rather, I am discussing people who intentionally have decided to freeze themselves with the intention to be awoken in the future, and to do so, they are using Cryonics.
Cryonics which is the process of freezing and storing a corpse until a time in the future theoretically when technology has been advance to help bring them back to life. It sounds funny right! Actually, billions of dollars has been invested into this technology, you know when you have a lot of money to throw around, trying to buy another life in the future might come as thought. Actually with cryogenics freezing, the process is different from how we store edible meats in our freezer, it is another level of freezing which can get up to -204.8 degree Fahrenheit compared to the freezer's temperature at 32 degree Fahrenheit.
If you saw the TV show "Futurama, or the movie "The Brain That Wouldn't Die " then you might have an understanding of what Cryogenics is trying to accomplish although they have negative representation in the movies. Asides from the negative representation of Cryogenics, a lot of peope who have the Money have been able to use this technology.
One was a 14 year old girl with cancer who died in 2016 and decided she was going to be cryopreserved after death. She was cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute of Michigan, in the United States. Although cryopreservation has been for a very long time, it was first proposed for humans in the 1960s by Robert C.W. Ettinger in the book "The Prospect of Immortality" where he claimed that being frozen after Deanimation, whether of old age, disease, or accident could be revived or rejuvinated by technology in the future. Acually, when he died, he was frozen, and this was the same for his mother and wives.
After Robert Ettinger wrote about Cryonics, Evan Cooper founded the Life Extension Society in 1964 where he offered to freeze a person free of charge but didn't get anyone. So who was the first to be cryopreserved you might want to know? Well in 1967, James Bedford, A psychology professor at the University of Carlifonia was the first to cryopreserved because he wanted to be kept until we could treat kidney cancer because we were not able to do so at the time and he died from Cancer whifch affected his kidneys but has metastasized to his lungs. While we can now place in the list of donors and we can now treat cancer, we haven't been able to bring him back to life.
To understand how the preservation works, we will pick it from when a person a clinically dead. After the death, the team uses a heart-lung resusitator to keep circulation so the brain is supplied with blood and oxygen, after which the body is packed in eyes and injected with blood thinners, and taken to a cryogenic chamber. To store the body in the low temperature, Vitrification is done where blood is removed and replaced with an antifreeze solution which allows the body to be cooled without the water in the body freezing or damaging the cell. After which the body is put on a bed of dry ice till it cools to -202 degree Fahrenheit after which it is stored in a tank of liquid nitrogen at -321 degree Fahrenheit.
While a lot of peoplw have registered to be cryotized, and so many people have been cryopreserved, there has been no complete reviving or irejuvination of a body or human but in 2004, the kidneys of a cryotized rabbit was removed and transplanted into another rabbit and it functioned and a study by Gregory Fahy confirmed that 8 rabbits survived vitrification.
With all of this, a lot of scientists have their skepticism with their criticisms ranging from neuronal damage that would have occured in the brain during the transfer from the hospital to the cryogenic chamber. Some scientists are saying that the body is complexed and should be cryopresserved at different temperature and at different conditions, some also say that if it is possible to cryopresserve the body, then the process of cooling have to be at different temperature so some organs or nerves do not get distroyed and some even say that the body can fracture due to thermal stress.
A lot of science communities and individuals do not believe in Cryonics, and tackle how cryonics companies are selling hopes to people for the purpose of profit but then we cannot say for now if those frozen bodies will be revived or not, all we have to do is keep our fingers crossed for what the result would be.
Post Reference
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6093470/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/gv78my/the-creepy-insane-and-undeniably-romantic-world-of-cryonics
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/18/father-of-cryogenically-frozen-girl-she-died-without-me-being-ab/
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/cryogenic-freezing-meet-people-who-want-be-brought-back-life-future-1592312
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/sep/20/cryonics-death-insurance-policies
https://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/7140979-L
https://cryonics.org/
https://cryonics.org/member-statistics/
https://www.alcor.org/library/alcor-membership-statistics/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3328517/
https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/composite-lab
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15094092/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/04/27/cryogenically-frozen-brains-will-woken-transplanted-donor-bodies/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/15/109906/the-false-science-of-cryonics/
https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/docs/persistence-of-long-term-memory-in-vitrified-and-revived-c-elegans.pdf
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/water-you-water-and-human-body?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733321/
Image Reference
Image 1 || Goodfon || Section Fantasy
Image 2 || Fickr || Technology For Life (Cryonics)
Very funny how wealthy people love to experiment with things, I remember reading about some technologies that would prevent aging, and now this... Mhmmm, interesting times indeed.
haha... You would be so surprise at what people can do just to be alive forever. Well technology and innovation speed has increased in the last 100 years, so we might see breakthroughs in this field soon.
If one can afford it, it is something one can give a try but I doubt it would be possible with the current stage of science that we have to bring consciousness to a person, well that is why Cryonics is targeting the future and not currently.
From my findings, it looks like the scientific criticisms of cryonic companies from Cryogenic scientist shows that although it might have been a long time that they have been researching on it, the field still looks really new as they haven't studied it much. Although the rabbit kidney vitrification transplant worked, a lot of research still has to be done but I think it would be difficult seeing that people are paying premium for them to be cryonized, so they cannot pick up any of them to further their research. Possibly the animals that are cryonized can be used but we are different from them in makeup and genes.
I will not be surprise if these companies begin to collect bodies of donors for this purpose in the near future so they can be able to make progress because for instance, a person who did this for the sake of cancer cure now has a chance to be treated of cancer but the technological advancement and research to bring such person back to life isn't available.
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