And the applause that greets the end of Fahy’s lecture suggests that the audience agrees that those nine days are a victory. Today a kidney, tomorrow a cryonaut.
STRUCTURE, FUNCTION, AND THE FINE ART OF TAXIDERMY
As the applause for Fahy’s rabbit trick begins to subside, I elbow my way to the front of the room to ask about the wisdom of using antifreeze in people. The line in front of Fahy is surprisingly short. There is just one middle-aged man ahead of me and I catch the tail end of his question: “Aren’t you biased toward chemopreservation rather than cryopreservation just because current techniques of connectome mapping require fixation?”
Translated into English, this man’s question hints at what’s been nagging me. Basically, my fellow attendee is suggesting that the common metric for evaluating whether cryopreservation is successful—the preservation of structures as viewed under a microscope—doesn’t take into account what kind of damage cryopreservation does to function. With the help of compounds like ethylene glycol, you can preserve tissue and make it look nice at 1000x magnification. But given how toxic these compounds are, there seems to be a high probability that what you’ll be left with is just a shell.
I’m thinking that this emphasis on structure, rather than function, makes cryonics a little like taxidermy. The result looks nice. And an expertly stuffed lion is probably indistinguishable—at a safe distance, at least—from a living one. But that stuffed lion is never going to roar again.
Fahy’s answer to the man’s question is vague. Really, who knows? But he reminds us that cryoprotectants and vitrification have been used in other settings to preserve body parts. He mentions that lone rabbit survivor too. I’m thinking there’s a lot riding on nine days in the life of a small, probably very confused, lagomorph.
Finally, Fahy turns to me and I ask him a question that I think I already know the answer to. Kidneys, I suggest, are really pretty simple. They’re just tubes with membranes that act as filters. They’re simple enough that we’ve been using artificial kidneys (dialysis machines) for decades. But what about the brain? What are the chances that all of those tangled neural structures could survive the vagaries of cryoprotection and freezing?
What would cryoperfusion do to a whole brain’s function?
He ponders that question for what is, for me, an excruciatingly long time. “The answer,” he says finally, “is that we don’t have a clue.”
COULD CRYOPRESERVATION WORK? MAYBE? EVENTUALLY?
Fahy’s reluctant summary is emblematic of this entire field. No one knows what works, or what might work. Worse, no one knows whether the things they’re doing to people right now are working. That point is about to become very, very clear.
During the break, I’m sipping coffee and trying to eavesdrop inconspicuously on the conversations around me. But my attention is pulled inexorably to the screen at the front of the auditorium that displays a never-ending parade of CT scan images. Shown in vivid shades of blue, green, orange, and yellow are brains in finely detailed sections, animated to show various levels in all their pixelated wonder.
Complemented by the soundtrack soft elevator music in the background, they’re like something a person might hallucinate on acid. Especially if that person were, say, Oliver Sacks. They’re mesmerizing, even beautiful.
A question begins to form in my own dull, gray brain. Where do these colorful brains come from?
Fortunately there’s someone standing quietly up against a nearby wall who might be able to help me, I think. Ben Best is the director of research oversight at Alcor, which has contributed these images. Best looks like someone whom an interloper like me can ask even the silliest questions. Wild wisps of gray hair fling themselves outward in a halo that surrounds an otherwise bald head, and his thick glasses, oversize ears, and a chunky tweed sport coat make him look like a gentle English professor.
I introduce myself and ask my question. These brains—where do they come from?
“They’re the brains of cryonauts,” he says simply.
I look around the room, envisioning the bunch of five or six attendees nearby getting together over wine and cheese for a CT party. Like a Tupperware party for transhumanists. I ask him how many of the people here have been scanned, and he shakes his head.
“No, patients in cryostasis.” He’s grinning proudly now, and points at the current slide excitedly. We’re looking at the cross-section of a head, cut about the level of the eyebrows. The entire section is a bright, happy orange. “Look,” he explains, “that’s all cryopreservative.”
So does that count as a successful preservation? Did it work? It turns out that how you answer this question depends on what you mean by “successful.” I’m about to hear Best’s definition.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Of course, we’d like to get rid of all of the ice.” He points to a corner that looks like it’s at the top of the right temporal lobe. “Except here, that’s a little bit of ice. But not much,” he says hopefully. “Probably less than one percent.”
But . . . how does he know that the preservation was “successful”? I press.
“Well, there’s no ice. As I said.” He’s starting to look a little annoyed, if it’s possible for everyone’s favorite English professor to look annoyed.
So that’s his definition of a successful preservation? They look for ice crystals? I’m thinking that’s a very, very low bar. It’s a little like saying a surgery was a success because you managed to cut someone open. It’s necessary, of course, but surely not sufficient.
I’m skeptical because I’d like to see a more meaningful definition of success. Ice-free preservation is a good first step, but it’s just a first step. I’d like to see that frozen organs can be thawed and shown to function normally. But with the exception of one rabbit kidney, it seems like my definition of success is a long way away.
“Of course there are other things we track,” Best says. “Like time to dry-ice temperature, and time to cryostasis in liquid nitrogen. We also watch for evidence of temperature swings prior to cryopreservation. But,” he says, “this is hard evidence. We can look at these scans, and see how we’re doing.” And, it appears, he’s confident that they’re doing pretty well.
THE TRAVELS OF A WANDERING CRYONAUT
And maybe Best and company are doing pretty well. Now. But things haven’t always been so rosy.
A case in point, which is either a sign of progress or a cautionary tale, is that of James Hiram Bedford. Bedford, it seems, moved around a lot. Not during his life, which ended January 12, 1967, due to renal cancer in a California nursing home. No, it was after he died that he began to roam.
Bedford was frozen initially by a man named Robert Nelson, who was then president of the Cryonics Society of California, under circumstances that appear to have been bizarre, even by cryonics standards. For instance, no one did anything for the first hour or two after Bedford “deanimated.” Then they packed him in ice and started CPR. Then they injected him with DMSO. (I suppose it couldn’t hurt.) Then they wrapped him up and put him in a box and covered him with slabs of dry ice, later plunking him into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
Bedford was moved within days to a company called Cryo-Care (now defunct), and then in April 1970 to another company called Galiso (still around but, its Web site suggests, staying as far away from freezing humans as possible). He was there for about six years until Galiso had to get rid of him, apparently because insurers had liability concerns. It’s unclear what those concerns could possibly be, given that Bedford was really quite dead.
So poor Bedford was packed up and moved again. This time he was taken on July 31, 1976, to a company called Trans Time, Inc. (still in existence as of 2012). After less than a year, though, Bedford’s family, perhaps tired of all of this moving, loaded him in a U-Haul trailer on June 1, 1977, and took over his upkeep in DIY mode. That’s right. They took him home.
He s
eems to have spent some of the next five years at a storage facility and some at home with his family. It’s not clear where they put him, or how they managed to afford the biweekly deliveries of liquid nitrogen necessary for his upkeep, but one hopes that after all that wandering Bedford at least had a room of his own. Eventually, though, in 1982, his family gave him to Alcor’s facilities, then run by a company called Cryovita (now defunct). From there he was moved in 1991 to Alcor’s facilities in Scottsdale, where one can only imagine he’d have heaved a sigh of relief if only he could still breathe.
But he had one more indignity to endure because his last (and, one would fervently hope, his final) transfer required some unpacking. This, someone thought, was a great time to take a peek at poor Mr. Bedford. So, how well did he do?
Well, the good news is that once they cut away the container and removed him from the sleeping bag that he was stored in (the traditional Cryonics Society of California method), they found chunks of ice in cube form. This suggests that if any thawing had taken place along the way, it hadn’t been severe enough, or prolonged enough, to disrupt the ice structure. It also meant that Bedford was surrounded by enough ice for quite a few martinis.
The bad news, though, is a bit more involved: “The skin on the upper thorax and neck,” the report says, “appears discolored and erythematous [inflamed] from the mandible to approximately two cm. above the areolas.” (This, by the way, is the point at which the squeamish will want to stop reading.)
The report continues in the same dispassionate tone: “The nares are flattened out against the face, apparently as a result of being compressed by a slab of dry ice during initial freezing. Close examination of the skin on the chest over the pectoral area disclosed sinuous features that appeared to be fractures.”
That’s right. Apparently the freezing process leads to cracks. You know, like an ice cube.
Finally, buried in the latter half of the report is this note: “There is frozen blood issuing from the mouth and nose.”
OK, you’d think this information would make prospective cryonauts pause and think very, very hard about what they’re getting themselves into. Flattened face? Cracked skin? Blood? This makes Bedford sound like more like the loser of a bar brawl than someone who is boldly voyaging forth into the future.
At the very least, this doesn’t sound like a description of someone who is going to be jumping for joy when he wakes up. Nor, in all likelihood, is he going to be jumping for any reason when he wakes up. In fact—and I’m admittedly going out on a limb here—he doesn’t seem likely to wake up at all.
SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE
Granted, Bedford’s is a worst-case scenario. Remember, he was frozen by a friend under circumstances that sound more like a frat party hazing gone terribly wrong than any sort of medical procedure. Then he was moved around like an unwanted piece of furniture for the next twenty-five years. Actually, given all of that, Bedford’s level of preservation is remarkable. Still, Best and his team have their work cut out for them if they are going to convince skeptics that they can preserve bodies in a state that will result in anything other than a reanimation scene reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead.
Will that ever be possible? After a day of lectures and conversations I’m still on the fence. It seems like a stretch to imagine that anyone could be frozen and revived in the way that Alcor promises. And yet, there are frogs out there who manage to do something similar. And as John the ordinary guy pointed out to me this morning, we can do all sorts of things today that no one dreamed possible ten years ago. So why not?
In hopes of a dose of scientific realism from someone I can trust to tell it like it is, I go looking for Ken Hayworth, one of the morning’s speakers. Up close he’s tall and impossibly thin. He looks like the geek who was ostracized in high school who has grown up to become a professor at Harvard.
I ask him, as one scientist to another, does he really believe this cryonics stuff?
“Well, I’m an Alcor member,” he admits.
That surprises me.
“But I’m a skeptical Alcor member,” he continues. “I get no solace from that Alcor membership. If I went into a surgical procedure with a five percent chance, I wouldn’t go into that procedure comfortably.”
And yet, Hayworth tells me, he wants that solace. Moreover, he thinks cryopreservation is theoretically possible. He imagines a world where cryopreservation is standardized and high quality, done in hospitals with the science and transparency of other medical procedures.
I’m still thinking about that hopeful view of the future as the first day comes to a close. I’m walking across the dark parking lot when I hear trudging footsteps behind me, then muttering. I turn around to see a man in his seventies, slightly hunched over and wrapped in an oversize sport coat despite the warm night. He catches sight of me and gives a quick bob of his bald head in acknowledgment, but he doesn’t slow his pace. I have to hurry to keep up.
I ask him what he thought of the day.
“Crap. It’s all crap, isn’t it?”
I’m sensing that this is a rhetorical question.
“Every year I come here expecting to hear something new, but I never do.”
I protest mildly that I thought I’d heard some good news. Response times are getting better, and the preservation statistics—
“Heard that last year,” he interrupts me. “And the year before that. Pisses me off. You young guys, you don’t care. You’ve got time. But us? We’re getting old. We could kick off any minute.”
I don’t know what to say to that, but he stops and, without a word, climbs into an oversized pickup truck with a large white LIFE EXTENSION VITAMINS sign jerry-rigged onto the back. The big diesel starts up and the grumpy skeptic roars off into the night.
SCIENCE IN SEARCH OF A SAVIOR
The next morning I’m back, but now I’m pondering a different angle. Yesterday I was focused on the science of cryonics, and I was asking whether it could work. I’m no closer to an answer, yet I’m starting to suspect that this question is just too narrow.
In the end, what will make cryonics work—or not—isn’t only the science behind it. That’s clearly important, but there’s more. What also matters, and what will determine whether you’re going to wake up in a thousand years, is not just the technology itself but how (and if) it’s used.
And that depends on what people think of it. The patient is a believer, presumably. But what about the family members gathered around? And doctors and hospital staff and EMTs? And funeral directors and coroners?
If any one of these important actors begins to put up roadblocks, then it doesn’t matter what wizards like Hayworth and Fahy have cooked up in a lab. And it doesn’t matter what sorts of portable technology Baldwin and her team have assembled. None of that science will get within a mile of the patient.
What cryonics needs, I’m starting to think, is a PR savior. And judging by the screams and cheers as the latest speaker takes the stage, it looks like they might have found one. I know this because I can already hear people yelling his name with a religious fervor normally reserved for Third World dictators and NBA forwards.
Max More, as of 2014, is the CEO of Alcor, and has become its de facto public face. And since Alcor is the biggest, most successful player in the cryonics game, More is also the de facto spokesperson for the entire field. Born Mark O’Connor in Bristol, England, More comes to the savior role armed with rock-star good looks and a smooth British accent. With close-cropped blond hair, a thin goatee, and a predilection for silky sport shirts unbuttoned to mid-chest, he looks less like a scientist than a superstar yoga instructor or a celebrity chef.
In short, More is cryonics’ best hope for reaching the mainstream. And the cryonauts here seem to recognize that.
In fact, PR seems to be More’s primary focus these days. His driving effort is to try to build up the legitimacy of cryonics as
a science, as an industry, and as a movement. Throughout the conference, and in conversations during intermissions, he carries with him a seasoned politician’s ability to stay constantly, persistently, and unnervingly on-message.
That message started with some of his opening remarks, in which he warned us all that Alcor membership is just one step on the long road to immortality. “Once you’re a member, it’s not good-bye, death,” he warns. “Absolutely not. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
He goes on to paint a gruesome picture of all the things that can still go wrong. Your family may ignore your wishes. EMTs might not continue CPR once you’re dead. Hospitals might not permit recovery teams into the ICU. Coroners could insist on an autopsy. Each of these examples incites another wave of what is becoming a crescendo of grumbling in the audience.
“But,” he adds, “there are lots of things you can do to improve your chances.” He treats us to a dramatic pause that puts the audience on the edge of their seats.
First, he suggests, the cryonics world needs to develop communities. Cryonauts need to watch out for one another. Protect one another. Make sure that our wishes are honored.
Second, advocate for yourself. Make a video for friends and family members that states your wishes clearly. Wear an Alcor bracelet with instructions (he shows off his own). Talk about cryonics; preach it. Put ads in the local paper. Include cryopreservation plans in your obituary.
The audience is spellbound, but he pulls them up short. “It’s not easy, though,” he admits. “Being outspoken like that is difficult. It makes us look weird to neighbors . . . it’s strange . . . it’s ‘against God’s will.’ But the more you talk about it, the more normal it will seem.”
In the end, he admits, it’s a numbers game. Cryonics needs supporters to be successful. If you’re the only person in your family who believes, you’re a nut. But if you’re surrounded by believers, you have a fighting chance. “Get more people to join,” he urges us. “If you get more members, that gives you a better chance.”
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