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Prospect of Immortality
Archived From August 1, 2007
Every year, a few people decide to have their bodies frozen after death, in the hopes that the future will cure all that ails them. It's called cryonic preservation. You forgot it existed, right? So did I, but like all interesting things, cryonics is something that continues to exist, completely independently of your awareness of it.
As a literary trope, life-extension through procedures homologous to cryonics is as old as the hills; even Benjamin Franklin proposed the idea, and it's stuck around ever since, popping up in the works of Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur C. Clarke. In these contexts, cryonics aids space travel, shutting down biological operations during century-long interplanetary flights, or transports characters through time, plopping them into the strange new words that are the fait accompli of science fiction. Presumably, the kinds of alienation endured by newly-awoken time travelers in science fiction novels and movies have a lot to do with our almost ubiquitous cultural cold-shouldering (so to speak) of the practice.
Still, it isn't fiction. Modern cryonics, after a tinfoil-hat boom in the mid-1970s, is more of a reality than ever. As it stands, it's only practiced by a handful of non-profit groups and satellite organizations around the United States: namely the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan. Alcor and CI's beginnings were, of course, dubious; and their rivalry, understated and surreal. The first Alcor conference in the early 1970s only attracted 30 attendees, and it conducted early cryopreservations out of a mobile surgical unit in a large van. Over the years, both organizations have accrued legitimacy despite Cease and Desist orders and macabre PR stumbles, including a 1994 scandal in which a Riverside county coroner ruled that an Alcor client was murdered with barbiturates before her head was removed by the company's staff (yikes!). Alcor contends that the drug was administered after her legal death, and I believe 'em, because of the inevitably rampant misconceptions about this kind of thing, and because of this devastating quote from the much-misunderstood Alcor's website: "sincere idealism is not fraud. While reading the many articles by physicians and scientists on this website, we ask you to remember one thing: We mean it."
Important Mythbust #1: Cryonic preservation is not "freezing." Freezing a human body damages it irreversibly, as ice crystals form between cells, causing straight-up mechanical destruction. What Alcor and CI perform is a process called vitrification: the replacement of more than 60% of the water in human cells with protective chemicals, which can reach sub-zero temperatures without forming any ice crystals. The chemicals involved in the process, called "cryoprotectants," aren't perfect, either, and cause significant biochemical damage while retaining the structure of the tissue. It's sort of a win-lose, but cryonics organizations seem dead-set (again, no pun indented) on the viability of repairing this damage in the future.
Important Mythbust #2: Although the prospect of immortality plays a large part in the decision-making process, cryonic preservation is considered by devotees to be a forward-thinking medical practice more than anything else, a chance for the terminally ill to benefit from therapies still unknown to the current medical establishment. The majority of people who undergo preservation consider it to be a sort of extended coma from which they will one day emerge, ripe for the skilled hands of advanced doctors.
Gory Reality #1: Although they tread lightly on the issue, cryonics institutions often do preserve just heads. These are referred to in cryo subculture as "neuros," and Alcor's clientele is about 2/3 heads, one of which belongs to baseball great Ted Williams (although his got a little banged up in the process). After all, our brains are the only part of our bodies that are absolutely essential to personhood. Everything else is just noise and limbs. If nanotechnology progresses to a point where vitrified human bodies can be resuscitated without brain damage, then perhaps we will also see massive advances in cell regeneration. Alcor firmly enthuses the possibility that "future technologies developed for healing trauma victims will someday regrow an entire new body around the brain." Why the fuck not? It's the future! Is there anything more vast?
The place that cryonics holds on the crackpot-scale all hinges on your definition of death. You hear terms like "legal" or "clinical" death thrown around all the time on TV, but, as an increasingly unfuckwithable amount of research shows, those things aren't really dying. In a way, the declaration of legal death is just a certification that there's nothing more contemporary medicine can do for a dying patient. See, cardiac arrest is one thing, but the death of all the cells in your body is something completely different; I know it's hard to swallow, but honestly -- even if your heart has stopped, you are technically and biologically still alive for a couple more hours, or until all your cells die. This is medical truth. What's arguable is the cryonics angle: that if a team of surgeons gets your head chopped off and vitrified in time, you might one day return to consciousness.
Robert Ettinger, the father of modern cryonics and author of the surprisingly readable Prospect of Immortality, explains it thusly: "a man does not go like the one-horse shay, but dies little by little usually, in imperceptible gradations, and the question of reversibility at any stage depends on the state of medical art."
I'm not going to waste our time together here in the blogosphere trying to convince you that cryonics is a plausible, or, worse, reasonable practice. What scientific evidence there is pretty much speaks for itself, and the rest just depends on the amount of trust you're willing to place on the future. Disclaimer: I'm almost entirely convinced we'll all be telepathic techno-immortals by the time I'm 60. And I love crackpots with a profound tenacity.
The philosophical questions raised by this relatively simple idea are almost overwhelming. If cryonics can be used to secure treatment for persons suffering from currently untreatable maladies, is the medical establishment barbaric not to practice it? Can our identities be preserved after our frozen brains are thawed out? What right do we have to impose our degenerate bodies on our descendants? Who will want us? Who will debrief us, help us adapt to an undoubtedly isolating future? Will our cowardice cause disastrous overpopulation? Robert Ettinger argues that the weight of a human life transcends these sorts of questions, and that thawed patients "will not find themselves idiot strangers in a lonely and baffling world, but will be made fully educable and integrated," by virtue of the human responsibility to others.
I hope you're right, dude.
<< | Posted on August 1, 2007 at 12:00 PM | >>
Comments (7):
If cryonics can be used to secure treatment for persons suffering from currently untreatable maladies, is the medical establishment barbaric not to practice it?
'No' but only because we've yet to thaw and revive anyone. Currently we only know there is a whole lot of cold meat sitting around waiting for someone to come up with a way to thaw and treat them.
Once we know we can revive people it should be - will be - a standard therapy.
It's not barbaric it's just not ready for prime time.
What right do we have to impose our degenerate bodies on our descendants?
If they don't want us they don't have to revive us. We can't _be_ revived unless the world is wealthy enough to afford the process.
There might be debt to pay for being revived.
On the other hand consider what we'd do with a guy who was with Washington's army at Valley Forge; he could make a living on the lecture circuit.
Then consider what we'd do with 30,000 people from the same era. The smarter and more engaging ones could make a living, the unlucky or dumb ones would be just a bunch of guys needing a lot of support and retraining.
Posted by Brian @ August 1, 2007 1:33 PM
I think around 2012 when the Mayan calendar predicts a catalytic transformation that we'll be more telepathic than the present -- like the Greek gods.
"Rationality limits a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos." John Nash (Beautiful Mind)
Is that an answer? lol
Posted by Jen Elliott @ August 1, 2007 2:21 PM
Great article, I love spending too much time thinking about subjects like this.
Does Cartoon Network still air Futurama reruns? I never liked it much when it was on the air, but man its a funny show. All those heads in jars.
Idiocracy had its moments but ultimately sucked.
I guess Robocop kind of falls into this category of science fiction as well.
Man, technology is sweet. I'm all for it.
Posted by Dave @ August 4, 2007 12:09 AM
Right on the nose as usual, Brian. It's a bit of a Catch-22, though, isn't it? We won't standardize the freezing of patients until we know the process is reversible, but we'll never find out a way of reversing the process unless we keep developing new ways to freeze people.
It's definitely a First In, Last Out (F.I.L.O.) situation: early pioneering preservations, frozen in the 60's in a bath of liquid nitrogen without cyroprotectants, will probably never see the light of the future, while patients with treated with the most recent precautions might be easier (if at all) to revive.
Posted by Claire Evans @ August 4, 2007 5:53 AM
don't forget demolition man, the snipes vs. stallone epic that warns us that if we get frozen now, we may wake up to find the world has become a pussy whipped brady bunch version of itself run by robed sissies.
also features characters named in reference to brave new world, true story.
also the first movie to joke about arnie being president, way ahead of its time.
Posted by evan @ August 12, 2007 11:23 PM
I'm actually replying to the mini-post: yes. 145 reasons and counting. MIT seems like a distant land of exciting things. I'm excited about the possibility of moving to Boston for work. Though CMU is a close second what with deep blue and all.
Posted by Geoff @ August 21, 2007 6:13 PM
Claire, have you ever seen Woody Allen's Sleeper? I hope to god-science that when I awake from cryostasis I am fit enough to pass the orb around.
Posted by JaclynJean @ August 1, 2007 4:00 AM