Irish Independent: Who Wants To Live Forever?
PUBLICATION: IRISH INDEPENDENT
DATE: 14TH MAY (HEALTH SECTION)
AUTHOR: JONATHAN MCCREA
On 22nd March 2012, Fred Chamberlain died for the first time. Unlike most people, he was not buried or cremated, nor was his body donated to a university for the education of anatomy students. Instead, as the 111th patient of Alcor Life Extension (an organisation he himself founded), he is awaiting resurrection, biding his time upside-down in a vat of liquid nitrogen. The second coming of Fred Chamberlain is projected to happen some time in the next century.
The idea of cryonics is simple: Using modern techniques, a fresh corpse is put on ice in the hope that one day technological advancements can cure not just the cause of the death but death itself. As unconventional as it sounds, the number of ordinary people who are choosing not to die continues to grow. Among the doctors, lawyers, teachers and baseball players that form this community, there is now a small Irish contingent paying their annual dues, hoping for their own eventual revival.
While there are funeral directors in Ireland willing to facilitate anyone opting for “cryopreservation”, the procedure itself is not exactly straight forward. You can’t just slide a body into the freezer like a leg of lamb and hope for the best. “It requires a lot of planning and co-operation and expertise”, explains Max More, CEO of Alcor, and it all begins once a doctor has pronounced legal death.
In the ideal scenario, the standby team have been notified in advance of your demise, for example in the case of a terminal illness and would be ready to begin their work immediately. 15 different chemicals are quickly pumped into the body to protect against the various traumas that occur when your heart stops beating. The body is then transferred to a portable ice bath and the cooling begins. As soon as is practical, entry and exit incisions are made in your leg at the femoral vein and artery. Then, the blood in your body is “washed out” and replaced with an antifreeze solution called a “cryoprotectant” to prevent damage to the blood vessels from ice crystals.
The body is then shipped to the cryonics facility packed in dry ice, where it will finally be cooled to -196˚C, the temperature at which physical decay is effectively stopped in its tracks. “You can store up to 4 full-bodies in a dewar” says More, matter-of-factly. A dewar is a vacuum-sealed flask, similar to those used to transport biological samples, except much larger. “The bodies are traditionally stored upside-down in the extremely unlikely event of a container fault”. If the liquid nitrogen starts to leak out, you want to have the head at the bottom of the tank so it’s the last thing to go. There’s not much use to a perfectly preserved pair of legs if your brain has gone soggy.
In fact, many members don’t bother with the legs at all. Neurocryopreservation, is a surprisingly common choice among Alcor members, and it would seem, a bit of a bargain. While a full-body service costs $200,000 (typically paid out from life insurance), a head-only package starts at a mere $80,000. Of course, price isn’t the only deciding factor, explains More. “I personally have sufficient funding for a whole body, but I’ve chosen to have just my brain preserved” says More. “By the time I’m clinically dead, I’m probably going to be pretty old, and it’s not really the part of me that’s essential. That’s my brain, my personality, my values my goals. I think that by the time they will have figured out how to resuscitate me, the relatively easy part of that will be the body, whether through cloning or regeneration. Some of the members feel differently, of course, they’re very attached to their bodies, psychologically” he says flatly.
At first glance, it would appear that there is some solid science underpinning the concept of cryonics. There are thousands of people alive today who have essentially been frozen – in some case for many years – before being carefully implanted for in-vitro fertilisation. There are documented cases of children who have fallen into icy water surviving cardiac arrest of over an hour without permanent damage. Rabbit kidneys and dog intestines have been removed, frozen and returned to the body to function perfectly. And in 2007, researchers were stunned to record limited activity in a cat’s brain that had been in deep-freeze storage for a full 7 years.
However, a cat is not a person and the idea of returning with “limited brain activity” doesn’t sound very appealing either. Despite these experiments, some scientists, like biochemist Ken Storey from Carleton University in Ottawa, say that cryonics is closer to religion than science. “It’s like any of the major faiths: something magical is going to happen in the future, and we don’t know how it’s going to happen, but if you don’t do what we say, you’re doomed forever”. Storey says that no matter how quickly you treat a patient, you can never preserve enough of the brain for it to be of any use. “A person’s skin? Sure, it’s thin with a big surface area, so we can freeze that no problems. But a complex 3d structure like the brain with many different cell types and tissues? I just don’t see a way you could do that. When we look at any complex organ that’s been through this procedure, there’s damage at every single level: cellular, molecular and tissue. All you’re left with is mush”.
So for all cryonics patients who hope to be defrosted intact, an extraordinary leap of faith in mankind is required. “We know this won’t be easy. It’s a very speculative medical procedure, we emphasise that to everyone who signs up” says More, who is undeterred by the opinions of people like Storey. “Really, how different is it to trialling a new cancer therapy? It seems a reasonable projection that advances in medical science will continue. It’s not as if we are waiting on a shrinking ray or an anti-gravity gun, everything we want to do is well within the realms of known science, we’re just not quite there yet.”
Specifically, it is in the rapidly advancing fields of regenerative medicine and nanotechnology that we may find the path back from death, More believes. Indeed, for the eternally optimistic there are some exciting developments in these areas. Slowly, we are unlocking the secret of how to grow our own tissues, biological structures and even organs in the lab. Devices on an unimaginably small scale are being designed to repair damage to individual cells. But these technologies are in their infancy, and the future and limits of this science is still unknown. Time, of course, is one thing people like Max More and Fred Chamberlain have in abundance.
If you do decide to time-travel, what happens if you don’t like what the future holds? What if the year 2312 is more like Blade Runner than Star Trek? More, for one isn’t worried. “Well, my wife is a member and so at the very least we’ll have each other, and people are very adaptable. There are aboriginals who now live in New York City and it’s not likely to be much more radical change than that. I see it as a big adventure. Think about it: in the long run of history, civilisation and quality of life has generally improved, violence has decreased. I can only imagine any place that brings us back will probably be better than the world of today. And really, what is the alternative? Any way you look at it, it looks pretty grim to me”.