Earlier this year I had an article in Canberra Law Review on the legal status of cryonics, ie the practice of what one critic mordantly likened to purportedly turning frozen hamburger back into a live cow, complete with the moo. In July, under the heading 'The Cryonics Industry Would Like to Give You the Past Year, and Many More, Back', the New York Times featured a characteristically uncritical article on cryonics - in other words cold storage of cadavers as the basis for eventual 'reanimation'.
It states
The business of cryopreservation — storing bodies at deep freeze until well into the future — got a whole lot more complicated during the pandemic.
When an 87-year-old Californian man was wheeled into an operating room just outside Phoenix last year, the pandemic was at its height and medical protocols were being upended across the country.
A case like his would normally have required 14 or more bags of fluids to be pumped into him, but now that posed a problem. Had he been infected with the coronavirus, tiny aerosol droplets could have escaped and infected staff, so the operating team had adopted new procedures that reduced the effectiveness of the treatment but used fewer liquids.
It was an elaborate workaround, especially considering the patient had been declared legally dead more than a day earlier. He had arrived in the operating room of Alcor Life Extension Foundation — located in an industrial park near the airport in Scottsdale, Ariz. — packed in dry ice and ready to be “cryopreserved,” or stored at deep-freeze temperatures, in the hope that one day, perhaps decades or centuries from now, he could be brought back to life.
Alcor, which has been in business since 1972, adopted new rules in its operating room last year that restricted the application of its medical-grade antifreeze solution to only the patient’s brain, leaving everything below the neck unprotected.
In the case of the Californian man, things were even worse because he had died without completing the normal legal and financial arrangements with Alcor, so no standby team had been on hand for his death. By the time he arrived at Alcor’s facility, too much time had elapsed for the team to be able to successfully circulate the protective chemicals, even to the brain.
Ouch
That meant that when the patient was eventually sealed into a sleeping bag and stored in a large thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen that cooled it to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 Celsius), ice crystals formed between the cells of his body, poking countless holes in cell membranes.
Apparently that doesn't matter, with the article reporting that Max More, the 57-year-old former president of Alcor, said that the damage caused by the “straight freeze” could probably still be repaired by future scientists, especially if there was only limited damage to the brain, which is often removed and stored alone in what is known in the trade as a “neuro” preservation.
“The important stuff is up here as far as I am concerned,” he said, pointing to his sandy-blond crop of hair in a Zoom call. “That is where my personality lives and my memories are … all the rest is replaceable.”
Presumably his consciousness resides in his head rather than the follicles.
Onwards to another incident that rtaises questions about unconscionability and ethics, with the Times stating
The relatives of one client failed to inform Alcor that he had died and instead had him embalmed and buried in Europe. When Alcor found out a year later, it confirmed that his contract said he wanted to be cryopreserved no matter how much time had elapsed, so the company got a court order and had the body returned to Arizona.
After embalming and a year in the ground we might be more than usually sceptical about the prospects of a sure and certain resurrection.
Russian cryo service KrioRus - which appears to be operating out of premises less impressive than my garden shed - has meanwhile been in the news, with Slate reporting
Two weeks ago, police in the Moscow region received a call about an unusual robbery and were ordered to stop a truck belonging to the suspect. On a platform attached to the vehicle, they found containers with frozen bodies. They belonged to people who agreed—and paid money—to be frozen after death in the hope of being revived in the future, a practice called cryonics. .... The woman who allegedly tried to steal bodies was Valeria Udalova, a former CEO of the cryonics company KrioRus, founded in 2006. The man who accused her of theft was her ex-husband, Danila Medvedev, also a former CEO of KrioRus. Both Udalova and Medvedev now own separate cryonics businesses and are in the midst of a battle over 81 bodies of KrioRus clients.
It came to a head on Sept. 7, when Udalova reportedly broke into the cryostorage near Moscow, which is now under the control of Medvedev (though Udalova claims that she rents this facility). According to the Medvedev`s team, Udalova and her partners cut through a metal wall at the lab, dumped liquid nitrogen from containers with dead bodies, and loaded the containers, known in the industry as “dewars,” on the truck. When workers lifted the heavy vats, the dewars were bending like they were going to fall and break, as a leaked video shows; meanwhile, liquid nitrogen was pouring out and spilling on people. “Even paying much for your death in Russia can’t save you from being a part of the criminal conflict,” wrote one Facebook user who had watched the video. One of Medvedev’s partners, Dmitry Kvasnikov, claimed on Facebook on Wednesday that Udalova broke some equipment during the raid, so now it is hard to maintain dewars and refill them with liquid nitrogen. This put cryopatients “at some risk,” he said.
Hijinks about cadaver napping aside, the piece is of interest for reference to contracts
KrioRus signs contracts with patients for 100 years; the founders believe, for some reason, that the technology to raise the dead will be discovered by the end of the century. Not just to revive them, but to return them to full health. ... But if such technology hasn’t been invented by the time the agreement comes to an end, it will be automatically extended for 25 years as many times as needed, the company promises.
