Really! Most of us are familiar with the idea of cryogenically
freezing recently dead people, right? Companies freeze the corpse
shortly after death to very low temperatures, in the hopes of
preserving the person until such time as scientists can reverse
whatever it was that killed them. At the minimum we know that
Ted Williams
is chilling out somewhere in California at 77 Kelvin, waiting for
science to come up with a way to give him a new body (Walt Disney, by
the way,
was cremated). But thanks to last night’s episode of
The Eleventh Hour, I’ve now learned that some people choose to only have their heads frozen and not the rest of them. It sounds like that
scene from Young Frankenstein, right?
A little research reveals that it’s basic economics: Head-only
freezing can cost as little as $80,000, far better than the $150,000
whole-body freezing costs, based on the pricing at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation,
a real life cold-storage non-profit. The theory behind cryonics is
simple: The brain is the storage unit of everything that defines us:
personality, memories, habits, etc. If the brain can be frozen without
damage, then the person contained by the brain can live indefinitely
until science is ready for them.
Alcor and its brethren companies have actually solved most of the problems
on the freezing end. Ideally technicians get the body immediately after
medical death is declared, typically, they say, after the heart has
stopped beating, but before true brain death. Consider this the “Mostly
Dead” phase. They rush the body to an ice bath, and then they keep
blood flowing with a heart-lung resuscitator. They inject the body with various medications, plus ethylene glycol (the key ingredient
in anti-freeze) to raise the freezing temperature of water and prevent
ice crystals from forming between cells (As Dr. Hood discusses in the
episode). Then they lop off the head, send the body for cremation or
organ donation, and dunk the head into liquid nitrogen, which, at 77 K,
keeps everything nice and frozen until…well, until it’s ready for
warming. Alcor thinks they’re so good at this now that the company
pretty much claims the preserved tissue will last forever.
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