In physics, cryogenics is the study of the production and behaviour of materials at very low temperatures. 
Cryopreservation involves a two-step process. The first step is vitrification - in which over 60 percent of the water inside cells is replaced with protective chemicals, which prevents ice damage. The body is then preserved in liquid nitrogen at temperatures of minus 196 degrees Celsius which, proponents say, can stave off decay for centuries. 

In 1972 Max More saw a children’s science fiction television show called Time Slip that featured characters being frozen in ice. He didn’t think much about it until years later, when he started hanging out with friends who held meetings about futurism. “They were getting Cryonics magazine,” he says, “and they asked me about it to see how futuristic I was. It just made sense to me right away.”

More is now the President and Chief Executive officer of Alcor, one of the world’s largest cryonics companies. More himself has been a member since 1986, and has decided to opt for neuropreservation – just deep freezing the brain – over whole body preservation. “I figure the future is a pretty decent place to be, so I want to be there,” he says. “I want to keep living and enjoying and producing.”

Cryopreservation is a darling of the futurist community. The general premise is simple: medicine is continually getting better. Those who die today could be cured tomorrow. Cryonics is a way to bridge the gap between today’s medicine and tomorrow’s. “We see it as an extension of emergency medicine,” More says. “We’re just taking over when today’s medicine gives up on a patient. Think of it this way: 50 years ago if you were walking along the street and someone keeled over in front of you and stopped breathing you would have checked them out and said they were dead and disposed of them. Today we don’t do that, instead we do CPR and all kinds of things. People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not. Cryonics is the same thing, we just have to stop them from getting worse and let a more advanced technology in the future fix that problem.”

Of course, the premise of cryonics also makes it essentially untestable. Nobody has ever tried to bring a human back to life after preservation. While researchers working on ‘suspended animation’ are finding that they can cool a living being down to appear apparently dead before reviving them, freezing a body for decades is a different matter. More points to studies in which scientists have studied the preservation of cells and tissues and even worms, but scaling that up to a full human body isn’t a trivial proposition. But whether the science is there or not, people are being frozen in liquid nitrogen with the hope of seeing some distant tomorrow.

Alcor’s members come from all over the world. Ideally, More says, the company will have an idea of when their members are going to die. Alcor maintains a watch list of members in failing health, and when it seems as though the time has come they send what they call a “standby team” to do just that – stand by the person’s bed until they die. “It could be hours, days, we’ve gone as long as three weeks on standby,” More says.

Once the person in question is declared legally dead, the process of preserving them can begin, and it’s an intense one. First, the standby team transfers the patient from the hospital bed into an ice bed and covers them with an icy slurry. Then Alcor uses a “heart-lung resuscitator” to get the blood moving through the body again. They then administer 16 different medications meant to protect the cells from deteriorating after death. As they note on their website, “Because cryonics patients are legally deceased, Alcor can use methods that are not yet approved for conventional medical use.” Once the patient is iced up and medicated, they move them to a place for surgery.

In the operating theatre, the body is treated to avoid freezing damage, and the head removed if requested (Courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation)

The next step includes draining as much blood and bodily fluids as possible from the person, replacing them with a solution that won’t form ice crystals – essentially the same kind of antifreeze solution used in organ preservation during transplants. Then a surgeon opens up the chest to get access to the major blood vessels, attaching them to a system that essentially flushes out the remaining blood and swaps it with medical grade antifreeze. Since the patient will be in a deep freeze, much of the preparatory work involves trying to ensure that ice crystals don’t form inside the cells of the body.

Surgeons prepare a body for ‘perfusion’ of a solution that prevents ice formation in tissue (Courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation)

Once the patient’s veins are full of this antifreeze, Alcor can begin to cool them down by about one degree Celsius every hour, eventually bringing the body down to -196C after about two weeks. Eventually the body finds its final home for the foreseeable future: upside down in a freezer, often alongside three others.

This is the ideal scenario. But it doesn’t always go this way – if a patient hasn’t told Alcor they were sick, or if they die suddenly, the process can be delayed for hours or days. In one of their most recent cases, an Alcor member committed suicide, and Alcor staff had to negotiate with police and the coroner to get access to the body. The longer the wait between death and preservation, the more cells will decay, and the harder it will be to resurrect and cure the patient, More says. 

Groups of four are kept in refrigerators cooled by liquid nitrogen (middle and left), after treatment in the operating room (right) (Courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation)

If this all sounds like a lot of risk for a slim reward, it might be. More is the first to admit that cryonics comes with no guarantees. “We don’t know for sure, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong,” he says. It’s possible that Alcor and companies like it are simply storing a lot of dead bodies in liquid nitrogen. But he also claims that cryonics is unlike a lot of other futuristic technology. “There’s no fundamental physical limit to be able to repair tissues,” he says, “it’s not like time travel.” The science of tissue regeneration is steadily advancing. But nobody really knows when they’ll be able to wake these patients up, or if they’ll be able to at all. When forced to take a guess at how long we’ll have to wait for medicine to catch up to save Alcor’s members More put the number between 50 and 100 years. “But it’s really impossible to say. We probably don’t even know what repair technology would be used.”

As of today, 984 people are signed up with Alcor to be preserved when they die. People who sign up for Alcor’s services pay a yearly membership fee of about $770. When it comes time to actually preserve a person the cost ranges from $80,000 to preserve just the brain up to $200,000 to preserve the whole body. Some of that money, More says, goes into a patient care trust fund that keeps the facilities running and the bodies inside preserved for the long haul. And More is quick to point out that many patients get a life insurance policy that factors in the cost of their eventual freezing. “It’s not only something for the rich,” he says, “anybody who can afford an insurance policy can afford this.”

Professor Sergio Canavero wants to be the first surgeon ever to perform a head transplant. He claims that this could happen within the next year and that there are many volunteers willing to participate. He claims that despite the risk, there are many interested participants and the surgery will most likely take place in the UK, Germany or France.

Valery Spiridonov is a 31-year-old man with Werdnig-Hoffman’s (muscle-wasting disease) who is willing to have his head transplanted onto a different body.

All in all, the transplant would require a team of 150 medical professionals and 36 hours to complete. The first step would require freezing the head and body to stop brain cells from dying. The trickiest part of the surgery will involve cutting the spinal cord. Canavero claims a special knife made of diamonds will be used because of its strength and precision. The head will then be removed and the spinal cord glued to the donor. The testing of the procedure will be done on brain-dead donors to see how they recover neuro-physiologically.

While many medical experts around the world claim his theories are science fiction and a head transplant is not feasible, Canavero claims that the surgery will have a success rate of 90%. If it is possible to perform a head transplant, than there are many questions that I have. Firstly, how would someone cope with living in a completely new body? More importantly, would they be the same person or would they change? Many questions are also raised about who the donor and recipient would be and what the requirements are to participate. I think while an interesting idea, many ethical questions are raised by the idea of a head transplant.

It is not well-defined at what point on the temperature scale refrigeration ends and cryogenics begins, but scientists^[1] assume a gas to be cryogenic if it can be liquefied at or below −150 °C (123.15 K; −238.00 °F). The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has chosen to consider the field of cryogenics as that involving temperatures below −180 °C (93.15 K; −292.00 °F). This is a logical dividing line, since the normal boiling points of the so-called permanent gases (such as helium, hydrogen, neon, nitrogen, oxygen, and normal air) lie below −180 °C while the Freon refrigerants, hydrocarbons, and other common refrigerants have boiling points above −180 °C. 

Prolonging life Sometimes after injury or a long illness, the main organs of the body no longer work properly without support. Your health care provider may tell you that these organs will not repair themselves.

Medical care to prolong life can keep you alive when these organs stop working well. The treatments extend your life, but DO NOT cure your illness. These are called life-sustaining treatments.

Treatments to extend life can include the use of machines 

 

For years now, the luminaries of Silicon Valley have been putting their minds, money, and machines behind an all-out effort to solve for death. Full of futurists who don’t have enough time in the day to achieve their lofty goals, the Valley has long looked for ways to make those days never-ending. After all, there is just so much left to do (and so much money left to be made).

Larry Ellison, the eccentric co-founder of software conglomerate Oracle, donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to life-extension therapies every year. “I don’t understand how someone can be here, then not be here,” he says. We’re not sure if Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and unofficial technology advisor to US president Donald Trump, really transfused blood from younger men into his own in a search for eternal youth, but he’s definitely made an enemy of getting older. “I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing,” he told the Washington Post, reflecting on the millions of dollars he has donated to anti-aging research. 

For years now, the luminaries of Silicon Valley have been putting their minds, money, and machines behind an all-out effort to solve for death. Full of futurists who don’t have enough time in the day to achieve their lofty goals, the Valley has long looked for ways to make those days never-ending. After all, there is just so much left to do (and so much money left to be made).

Larry Ellison, the eccentric co-founder of software conglomerate Oracle, donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to life-extension therapies every year. “I don’t understand how someone can be here, then not be here,” he says. We’re not sure if Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and unofficial technology advisor to US president Donald Trump, really transfused blood from younger men into his own in a search for eternal youth, but he’s definitely made an enemy of getting older. “I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing,” he told the Washington Post, reflecting on the millions of dollars he has donated to anti-aging research.

In 2013, Bill Maris, the founding CEO of Google Ventures, Alphabet’s venture-capital arm, convinced CEO Larry Page and president Sergey Brin to launch Calico, Google’s billion-dollar, super-secret effort to cure aging. When asked why, Maris told the New Yorker that seeing his father die of a brain tumor changed him: “My thoughts can turn to dark things when I’m alone.” He, like so many, feared the end that awaits us all.

Other denizens of the valley pursue cryogenics or cryonics, which is the process of freezing oneself in a vat of liquid nitrogen soon after death. They do this in the hope that it will suspend them in time, preserving them for a future when science can bring them back to life. There are about 350 people already frozen worldwide with another 2,000 signed up—but yet to die.

The titans of the Valley are known for making the impossible possible. So what happens if they succeed? Instead of asking whether or not they can eschew death, they should be asking whether or not they should.

We’ve already gained significant ground on the Grim Reaper. An American born in 1950 could expect to live anywhere between 20 to 25 years longer than one born 50 years earlier, and every five year interval since then has gifted another one to two years of life to US citizens. 

In physics, cryogenics is the study of the production and behaviour of materials at very low temperatures.

It is not well-defined at what point on the temperature scale refrigeration ends and cryogenics begins, but scientists^[1] assume a gas to be cryogenic if it can be liquefied at or below −150 °C (123.15 K; −238.00 °F). The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has chosen to consider the field of cryogenics as that involving temperatures below −180 °C (93.15 K; −292.00 °F). This is a logical dividing line, since the normal boiling points of the so-called permanent gases (such as helium, hydrogen, neon, nitrogen, oxygen, and normal air) lie below −180 °C while the Freon refrigerants, hydrocarbons, and other common refrigerants have boiling points above −180 °C

Discovery of superconducting materials with critical temperatures significantly above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen has provided new interest in reliable, low cost methods of producing high temperature cryogenic refrigeration. The term "high temperature cryogenic" describes temperatures ranging from above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, −195.79 °C (77.36 K; −320.42 °F), up to −50 °C (223.15 K; −58.00 °F), the generally defined upper limit of study referred to as cryogenics.

A person who studies elements that have been subjected to extremely cold temperatures is called a cryogenicist.

Cryogenicists use the Kelvin or Rankine temperature scale, both of which measure from absolute zero, rather than more usual scales such as Celsius or Fahrenheit, with their zeroes at arbitrary temperatures. 

In physics, cryogenics is the study of the production and behavior of materials at very low temperatures. It is not well-defined at what point on the temperature scale refrigeration ends and cryogenics begins, but scientists assume a gas to be cryogenic if it can be liquefied at or below −150 C (123.15 K; −238.00 F). The U.S. National Institute Of Standard and Technology has chosen to consider the field of cryogenics as that involving temperatures below −180 C (93.15 K; −292.00 F). This is a logical dividing line, since the normal boiling points of the so-called permanent gases (such as helium, hydrogen, neon, nitrogen, oxygen, and normal air) lie below −180 °C while the Freon refrigerants, hydrogen, and other common refrigerants have boiling points above −180 °C.