CHAPTER 18
ON THE OTHER HAND – you’re very rich and you don’t want to die. You want to live for ever. Life is good and you still have things you want to do. You want to keep having fun. But sadly immortality is still not possible. One prominent person in the Middle East claimed to have come back from the dead 2,000 years ago, but that looks like something of a one-off. So you settle for second best. You have your body or maybe your head frozen. And you leave instructions that you are to be thawed out when the time comes that the disease you died from has been eradicated. This is the world of cryonics – the science of freezing human bodies to thaw them out in the future and jumpstart them when the time is right.
Cryonics (from the Greek ‘kryos’, meaning ‘cold’) is defined as the low-temperature preservation (usually at a very cold -196°C) of people who cannot be kept alive using the medical interventions that we have today. The hope is that resuscitation and restoration back to normal might be possible at some point in the future. In a notable recent case, a 14-year-old girl dying of cancer in the UK asked to be cryonically frozen1. Her father refused and her mother agreed, so the matter was brought before the unfortunate High Court Judge Mr Justice Peter Jackson, who had to decide what to do. He ruled that the mother’s opinion should prevail, and the girl is now cryonically preserved in a facility in the US, dead, but floating in a tank of liquid nitrogen. Waiting (even though she’s dead) for a cure that might come, when she might be awakened like Sleeping Beauty and brought to full health. Only it won’t be Prince Charming waking her, but the Cryonics Institute in the US. I wonder whether the scientific equivalent of the seven dwarves will be there when she wakes up – meaning scientists in different specialisms. She herself pleaded with the judge, writing, ‘I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years. I don’t want to be buried underground.’ The case was the first of its kind, and yet again illustrates that you never know what might come up before a judge.
A MEDIEVAL DEPICTION OF A RICH MAN DYING.
Cryonics is not part of regular medical practice, and is looked upon with scepticism by the medical community. This is because cryopreservation is currently not reversible, and it’s not known whether it ever will be. However, it is a very active area of science, with several laboratories experimenting with the freezing of various animals and, more importantly, organs for transplantation. If it were possible to freeze, say, a kidney for use in a transplantation, this might increase the chances of the transplantation working. Often, transplanted organs are rejected because they have been kept too long outside the body. They effectively go off. Cooling fluids are sometimes used, but if the organ were to be frozen fresh from the donor, it might fare better when thawed than an organ kept above freezing for hours on end, where the cells become damaged.
CRYONICS: DR JAMES BEDFORD IS PREPARED FOR CRYOPRESERVATION.
Legally the procedure can only begin after someone is certified as dead. There is now a standard series of things that are done to cryopreserve a body. The first person ever to be cryopreserved was Dr James Bedford in 1967. Since then, there are estimates that around 250 people have been cryopreserved in the US2, with another 1,500 having it in their wills. Freezing needs to be carried out as soon as possible after death to limit the damaging effects that occur following death (described in the previous chapter)3. The first thing that happens is the body is cooled in an ice bath. Sometimes cardiopulmonary resuscitation is carried out (which can include the shocking of the heart to keep it beating) to limit brain damage.
The procedure at this stage almost resembles the kind of things happening in Frankenstein, the story of how electricity was used to bring the unintended monster back to life. Flashes of lightning, very very frightening, and an awful lot of shouting, with the head bolted onto the body. Not that any of these things happen in the high-tech world of cryonics, but you get the idea. That book, written by Mary Shelley, was inspired by the experiments of Luigi Galvani in Italy, who made muscles twitch after death by applying an electrical current.
That kind of thing blew people’s minds in the 19th century, making a dead man’s limb twitch as if by magic (since nobody knew what electricity was). Even today this might be considered slightly odd, though we now know that the electrical current causes nerves to discharge, which in turn makes the muscle contract. It can be done on a dead person up until the stiffening of muscles (rigor mortis) occurs (or, as is always said, ‘sets in’).
The next step is to drain the body of all its fluids, and to replace those fluids with an anti-freeze based on glycerol, which stops ice crystals forming when the deep freeze begins. This is important because ice crystals can damage the delicate structures in the body, such as the many tiny blood vessels that course through our bodies. The body is then packed in ice and transported to a cryonic facility, either in the US or Russia, depending on who you’re paying. The 14-year-old girl’s body was taken to a US facility. Once it arrives the body is put in a special arctic sleeping bag and then cooled to -110°C over several hours using nitrogen gas. This is a very low temperature.
Over the course of the next two weeks, the body is then progressively cooled down to -196°C. Very, very cold indeed. Then the spooky thing happens. The body is suspended in a big vat of liquid nitrogen, bobbing away like a cork. It is then transferred to the ‘patient care bay’, where it will be kept until either the money runs out or the relevant technology is found to bring the body back to life in full health, emerging like Lazarus from the tomb. A cheaper option is neurocryopreservation, which involves preserving the head only. There has been a strong rumour that Walt Disney’s head is frozen in a cryonics facility in the US, although this has been hotly denied.
You might be wondering at this stage how much all this costs. The cost of cryonically preserving the 14-year-old girl was £37,000, although this only covered the cryonic process of freezing. The costs include having medical personnel on standby for the moment of death, the cryonic process (which is called vitrification, because the body effectively becomes glass-like and could actually shatter), and the setting up of a trust fund to pay for the upkeep (which means the cost of the facility and the electricity bills to keep everything cool, with the occasional top-up of liquid nitrogen). In the US, the costs can vary from a cheaper option of $28,000 to the deluxe option of $200,000.
One company stores multiple bodies in the same dewar (as the big jar that the bodies are kept in is called). All of those corks bobbing together. At least it’s sociable. This is a cheaper option, costing as little as $12,000. There was a major setback in the 1970s, however, when a company in California ran out of money and began stuffing too many bodies into containers. Two of the containers broke and nine bodies decomposed. Not a great result.
One company charges €75,000 for head-only cryopreservation. About one-third of this goes to the medical team who are on standby, and who then remove the head and preserve it. One-third goes into a fund for future revival and the rest goes into the trust to generate the income to top up the liquid nitrogen. There are a total of three cryonics facilities in the US and one in Russia. The British court which arbitrated on the 14-year-old girl calculated a total cost of £43,000, although it must be said that this is probably literally the tip of the iceberg.
So the question is, how likely is it that cryonics will work? Well, experiments have been done on animals as large as dogs and monkeys. There are claims that these animals have been resuscitated after being frozen to just below zero, with their blood being replaced with anti-freeze and then given rapid transfusions. This might be something like what happens when someone has had a heart attack and appears to be dead. They can be resuscitated by cardiopulmonary resuscitation. One company claims to have frozen a rabbit kidney to -135°C and brought it back for a successful transplantation4. This provides hope that the technology might work for preserving organs for transplantation. A company in California recently reported that it has frozen a rabbit’s brain and recovered it back to a ‘near perfect’ state, meaning they could restore electrical activity. What the rabbit’s thoughts might have been after this process we’ll never know, but this procedure brings a whole new meaning to the term ‘brain freeze’. The same company are now testing pigs’ brains.
The science of cryopreservation (which is actually what was being carried out on the rabbit kidney and brain) is more reputable than cryonics. Many labs will freeze cells to thaw out for experiments later. And sperm and eggs can be frozen and thawed for use in in vitro fertilisation. It was thought that water inside cells would freeze and burst the cells open during thawing but this is not what happens. Instead the water outside the cells freezes, and the cells themselves actually become dehydrated and squashed. Cryoprotectants like glycerol prevent this happening.
IT HAS BEEN POSSIBLE TO RESUSCITATE A TARDIGRADE AFTER 30 YEARS AT MINUS 20 DEGREES CENTIGRADE.
The difficulties of thawing a whole animal have been known for decades, however. Crystals form in tissues and damage them or stop communication between cells needed for organs to work properly. Cryoprotectants stop ice crystals forming and allow for cooling and solidification of the tissues. This is the process of vitrification5. The problem is that large tissues can crack during cooling, so that when they are subsequently thawed out, major damage has occurred. A piece of brain or liver might fall off. One issue is that death of the tissue will definitely occur during vitrification, meaning life might never be restored.
Another problem applies specifically to the brain, where different parts appear to need freezing at different rates, otherwise damage occurs to a part being treated the same as another part. This is never done, either during whole body or head cryopreservation, giving rise to much scepticism in the cryopreservation community. They might well bring back your liver from the frozen wasteland of a liquid nitrogen dewar, but they won’t bring back the brain.
Then there is the question of how revival might work. This will require a lot of repair and restoration. A lot of face cream and Botox. A lack of oxygen is seen as a major cause of damage, so this would somehow have to be reversed. The cryoprotectant itself might be toxic, the organs might fracture and of course the cause of death would have to be reversed. People have a blind faith that all these problems will be solved in the future, or at least they are sold on the idea.
One company has an interesting selling point, which says that the cryonics procedures are getting better, and so as we get closer to the time when revival is possible, the most recent bodies preserved will be the ones most likely to be revived. Scientists will learn from these people, and then work backwards to the ones preserved the longest time ago, which will be more difficult to work on, increasing the chances of success with the expertise that will have been learnt. Would you trust that kind of sales patter? What would it take to make you believe?
To improve the chances of revival, scientists are studying what we can learn from nature about cryopreservation. It turns out there is a lot of research happening. Many creatures are able to survive prolonged periods of time below zero. Many of these make their own cryopreserving chemicals, including special proteins, compounds called polyols (a type of alcohol) and even lots of glucose can help. Plants are especially good at surviving very low temperatures. Tardigrades are tiny micro-animals that are resilient to extreme conditions, including temperatures as low as -272°C, which is close to absolute zero.
They’ve even survived being in outer space. Three species of bacteria, with the catchy names Carnobacterium pleistocenium, Chryseobacterium greenlandensis and Herminiimonas glaciei, have been revived after surviving thousands of years locked in ice. The red flat bark beetle has been shown to survive after being frozen to below -150°C. The fungus gnat Exechia nugatoria can be frozen to -50°C using the clever trick of only having ice crystals form in its body, and not its head. The scientists who devote themselves to the study of the fungus gnat deserve a special shout-out.
But there are two stars of the world of freezing animals and their restoration back to life6. The wood frog Rana sylvatica will freeze in the winter, with 45 per cent of its body turning to ice. Ice crystals form beneath its skin and become dispersed in its muscles. Amazingly, it stops breathing, its heartbeat ceases and blood flow halts. It makes special proteins and lots of glucose to preserve its tissues during this process. These prevent its vital organs from freezing. It can survive for up to 11 days at -4°C, which is no mean feat. The other star of the world of frozen creatures is the arctic ground squirrel, which is especially interesting as it’s a mammal and so is warm-blooded unlike the wood frog7. This animal can survive temperatures as low as -2.9°C for three weeks at a time, although its head is kept at zero or slightly above. Scientists studying these animals hope to learn biochemical tricks that may be useful for organ preservation or, who knows, for cryonics itself.
Although cryonics seems to be a long way off from being fully realised, this hasn’t stopped people saying they plan to have it done to them. Timothy Leary, the countercultural icon of the 1960s, publicly declared that he would be cryonically preserved, but disappointingly he changed his mind just before his death. We’d love to see him bobbing up and down. Perhaps he thought it would be too cool. Larry King and Britney Spears have both expressed an interest in it, although time will tell whether they follow through. For the moment, therefore, cryonics is a limited option for defying death.
Are there other options? Well, yes. It might be possible to keep replacing your organs once they pack in8. The science of stem cells has advanced greatly in the past ten years, as we saw in Chapter 15. This promises to be the answer to many medical issues, including repairing damaged spinal cords with freshly grown neurons. It effectively involves taking some cells from your body and then reprogramming them back into being like the fertilised egg. There are companies exploring this technology, or technologies like it. They claim that they can take some of your cells, store them, and then when you’re older, grow you a new liver or a kidney. These will be good as new, and can be used to replace the old ones in your body. Your immune system won’t reject them because they are you, and so won’t be seen as foreign. We therefore might see a scenario where you will order up spare parts, just like you would for your car.
THE ARCTIC GROUND SQUIRREL CAN SURVIVE FOR WEEKS AT SUB-ZERO TEMPERATURES ALTHOUGH IT KEEPS ITS HEAD AT SLIGHTLY ABOVE FREEZING TO AVOID BRAIN FREEZE.
The brain, though, might be tricky, as brain transplants have yet to be mastered, and may never be. But other scientists are speculating that it might one day be possible to upload the information in your brain into a supercomputer and that might then take charge, running all those fresh organs that are grown in the lab. Or perhaps operate an avatar. This seems like science fiction, right? A world where when we age, we simply replace old organs with new ones and hook our bodies up to a supercomputer. Immortality at last! But will it be fun? Will it be alive? Will the new you be a different person? At this stage we don’t know, but it’s intriguing to speculate and perhaps write a script for a Hollywood movie. Ultimately, though, we have to confront the reality that we can’t cheat death. Or if we do, the resulting person will not be you, it will someone with a different personality or disposition and organs that haven’t lived the life you’ve lived.
PERHAPS THE FUTURE WILL INVOLVE UPLOADING THE INFORMATION IN OUR BRAINS INTO A SUPERCOMPUTER WHICH WILL RUN A BODY MADE OF ARTIFICIAL ORGANS.
Spending years floating in liquid nitrogen or being made of organs grown in a lab are not ideal prospects for many of us. Perhaps it’s best to grow old gracefully and die at a venerable age, having passed on your wisdom to the next generation, as we saw in Chapter 16. We need to make room for them anyway, and give them a chance during their lifespan on Earth. Anything else is narcissistic and greedy. Who would want to live for ever anyway? Apart from that guy born 2,000 years ago …