To be human is to be aware that this will come to an end. We’re going to close our eyes eventually, and our time on this Earth will expire. Drives a lot of us crazy and makes some of us buy things like sports cars and injectable botulinum.
That’s just not good enough for some people. With unproven promises of a cure to whatever robs you from this life, some people have paid out simply astonishing amounts of money to throw the problem of death on the rocks.
Today’s Moment of Science… whatever happened to Ted Williams’ head?
The body predictably goes through a handful of processes after death. Absent the interventions we’ve grown accustomed to in order to keep a funeral aesthetically (and odorifically) pleasant, things get grim quickly. We’re meat, and we rot.
Drastic simplification, but cryonics is a lot like throwing Uncle Walt in the freezer hoping to extend his “best by” date. Just in case we find a recipe that makes him less dead later.
Often mixed up, cryonics and cryogenics are related but not the same. Cryogenics is the whole field of working with extremely low temperatures, generally defined as anything below -150C. Cryopreservation is the act of preserving tissues or organisms at very low temperatures. And cryonics is the notion that we can use this technology to eventually bring organisms back to life.
The science behind cryogenics and cryopreservation is pretty fascinating and has useful applications. Tissue samples of all kinds from tumors to stem cells are successfully preserved with this method. If you’ve donated sperm, any baby that you belatedly spunked out was ice housed for a bit there. Egg cells and even whole embryos are cryogenically frozen.
About whole humans though.
In the 1960s, Robert Ettinger was getting a little freaked out about the prospect of his own death because that’s a thing we do. A professor of math and physics at Wayne State University, he literally plucked the idea from reading science fiction as a child. Likely the result of his own mid-life crisis, he put forth the idea in the 1964 book, The Prospect of Immortality.
The book turned him into somewhat of an overnight sensation, all for a science that Ettinger had done virtually zero practical research on.
What, did you think he was freezing rabbits in the math department?
To be fair, for all the overblown promises, he presented something that seemed plausible. Hell, it still doesn’t seem entirely impossible. Freeze the body in a way that eliminates sources of cell damage and it can remain in perfect stasis until such a time when a treatment can be found for the cause of death. Sure.
We’re getting better at freezing dead animals, but we’re still pretty fucking bad at it. Using a mixture of chemicals that act kinda like antifreeze in a process called vitrification, scientists have maintained a rabbit’s brain in excellent condition after being frozen and thawed.
However, this guarantees nothing about big questions like reanimation or functionality. Also, some tissues are better than others at being thawed out, and there are many organs that still haven’t been successfully lifted from a frozen slumber. And last I checked, not many organs are optional.
For now, cryonics is best put on the shelf as a pipe dream. Perhaps one day we will be able to freeze and reanimate people as easily as we can find a pulse. But the dream of bringing someone back from an illness one day after we find a cure? You don’t just have to find a treatment for the illness, you have to cure the end stage of an illness that killed someone after they’ve been frozen using whatever old- and possibly damaging- technology was used to freeze them decades ago.
I’m not ruling it out, but I’ll spend my money in this lifetime. Do you even know how much Diet Coke I can get for the cost of the cheapest cryogenic freezing package? The answer is “a fuckload.”
Ettinger complained once that it was hard to convince people “into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!” Which makes me think he’d be a natural on twitter. Also, I suspect he didn’t realize what he was actually trying to convince people of. Nobody needs to be convinced that any of these are true. What’s difficult is convincing people without a shred of evidence that a scheme concocted from a sci-fi novel is going to Philip J. Fry them back to life.
Firmly a believer in what he’d launched, Ettinger was cryogenically preserved after death, telling his son he wanted to take up skiing when he was defrosted.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, telling you that what’s cooler than being cool is not giving your money to a bullshit artist.
Heck, all you need is that WWII Super-Soldier Serum they gave to Steve Rogers. No Captain America? That’s crazy talk!