Prospect of Immortality

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.