(Thinkstock)
Max More will have his brain frozen after he
dies, and he’s not alone. Rose Eveleth asks
him why he signed up – and how the strange
procedure of cryopreserving bodies actually
works.
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.
Death plan
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.
View image of 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.
View image of 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.
View image of 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.”
A video tour of Alcor, recorded by Nikola
Danaylov of singularityweblog.com
Most members, More says, are somewhat
squeamish about the actual process of
cryopreservation – but they see it as a means
to an end. “We don’t want to be cryopreserved
– we hate the idea in fact. The idea of sitting in
a tank of liquid nitrogen not able to control our
own destinies is not appealing. But it’s a lot
more appealing than the alternative, to be
digested by worms or incinerated – that doesn’t
appeal to us at all.”
