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The Cold, Hard Facts on Cryonics

Posted on: Tuesday, 23 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

Such is the breathtaking pace of modern scientific advancement that in the three short years since the technicians at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation famously severed baseball star Ted Williams' head from his torso and deep-froze the parts for anticipated resurrection at some future date, there have been a number of improvements to the preservation process.

Antifreeze much better than anything in your car is now pumped into a client's corpse. State-of-the-art cooling techniques are used to chill the body parts down to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit before they are stored inside tall stainless steel tanks that look like they might have come from a microbrewery. The battered bicycle helmet that used to be strapped onto the deceased's head during the cooling phase is soon to be replaced with something more clinical-looking.

But the experts here, who have been struggling to perfect their techniques since 1972, still haven't quite conquered the ultimate bane of cryonics practitioners everywhere: the unfortunate phenomena known in the trade as "acoustic fracturing events."

In layman's terms, those would be the audible cracking noises made by the brain and other internal organs as they shatter from the effects of the extreme cold.

"It's exactly that kind of noise when you drop an ice cube into a glass of Coke," explained Tanya Jones, Alcor's director of technical operations. "In the best-case scenario we've ever had, it was only five fracture events. We are working on the engineering to see how to eliminate this problem."

And what will happen to all those fractured organs if the bodies can someday be thawed out and revivified?

"It should just be a matter of stitching them back together," Jones said. "You might be able to glue them together, but we don't have repair technologies on that scale yet."

Achieving immortality, it turns out, is not going to be easy. But that's no discouragement to the true believers in cryonics, the study of freezing freshly deceased bodies so that they might one day be revived and treated for whatever caused them to perish.

There are now at least five cryonics facilities in the United States, of which Alcor claims to be the largest. The oldest one, the American Cryonics Society ("Freezing people for more than three decades") was founded in 1969 in Cupertino, Calif. The newest company, Suspended Animation, recently received zoning permission to open a facility in Boynton Beach, Fla., which puts it at the heart of a burgeoning retiree market that presumably has the most urgent need of such services.

Mainstream biologists may scoff at cryonics, rating the successful reanimation of a frozen human being about as likely as re-creating a cow from a pound of frozen ground beef. And even the most devout cryonicists acknowledge that no technologies currently exist to realize their resurrection dreams.

But the critics, they point out, will be long dead a few centuries from now. And the flash-frozen expect to have the last laugh.

"It's all iffy, but if I don't try it, for sure I won't be reanimated," said Dr. David Hall, a retired psychiatrist in Pasadena, Calif., who has arranged to join the 68 other frozen clients currently padlocked inside Alcor's vats when he dies. "It's a crapshoot. But you know, it might work."

Cryonics is very much a "now and later" science, requiring of its adherents a lot of cash now--Alcor charges $150,000 to preserve a whole body, $80,000 for just the head--and a lot of faith later that what seems like science fiction will someday become fact.

"As far as the unproven aspect of the technology, cryonics is no different than the folks who are trying to find a cure for cancer," said Joseph Waynick, Alcor's CEO and president. "There's no cure for lung cancer, for example. Yet we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year searching for one. It's no more speculative than that, or any other advanced medical procedure that's experimental right now."

Alcor says it has 765 members who have paid their fees, many by purchasing life insurance policies for the purpose. New customers are generated through referrals and events such as Cryofeast 2005, a potluck picnic scheduled for later this month in Sunnyvale, Calif. ("Fridge available," the invitation notes.)

Members who die become "patients" in the Alcor vocabulary, and what happens next is not for the squeamish.

Ideally, a volunteer Alcor paramedic team will be able to rush to the hospital or hospice and begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation to keep blood flowing to the brain and internal organs while a preservation solution is pumped into the veins.

Those who can't be reached immediately and are shipped off to funeral homes face inevitable ischemia as their organs rapidly decompose from lack of oxygen. Alcor will still freeze them, but their future prospects are not considered as bright. And if the funeral home has already embalmed a patient with formaldehyde, or the patient has been autopsied or committed suicide with a gunshot to the head, they are really in trouble.

The patient is next packed in ice and transported to Alcor's Scottsdale facility, which is in a nondescript office park next to an interior design company. There, in a makeshift operating room, the blood is drained from the patient's body and replaced with a special glycerol antifreeze.

If the patient has opted for preservation of just the head--the assumption being that future scientists will be able to grow a new body for it or else extract the personality and memories from the brain--it is detached from the body and placed in a special plexiglass box. In either case, holes are drilled into the skull to observe the brain and make sure the antifreeze is infusing evenly, and then the holes are plugged with wax.

Finally, the patient is frozen in nitrogen gas and lowered with a crane into one of the large storage vats, which can each hold up to 10 whole clients alongside several heads.

There's also a vat for pets of members, and it now contains about two dozen cats and dogs.

"Oddly enough, the pets can have better preservation right now than humans," said Alcor's Jones, "because a veterinarian can come in and euthanize them, so at the time of death we can be all prepared, no surprises."

There's no telling whether any given Alcor patient will end up bumping elbows with Williams, Alcor's most famous client, whose head and torso are stored separately here. Alcor officials do not like to talk much about the baseball legend, whose interment in 2002 after a protracted family squabble over his last wishes landed the company in the headlines.

The only other near-celebrity who has been publicly identified as an Alcor member is Charlie Matthau, son of Walter Matthau. The late actor resisted his son's entreaties to join. Alcor also boasts bona fide scientists and physicians such as Hall among its members, which company officials believe further boosts the legitimacy of their efforts.

But ask credentialed cryobiologists--scientists who specialize in the behavior of organisms at low temperatures--what they think of cryonics and they universally cringe. They fear that their little-understood field, which seeks better ways to temporarily preserve organs for transplant or buy time for critically injured soldiers on a battlefield by slowing their metabolism so they can be transported to a field hospital, has been hopelessly confused with cryonics.

"What they are pursuing is not science, and they are banned from membership in our bylaws," said John Bischof, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and an official of the Society for Cryobiology. "There's absolutely not one shred of evidence that they will ever be able to reanimate these people. The science doesn't exist."

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