Here's the catch: No cryonics organization knows how to bring life back to its preserved patients. Alcor cools the body to minus 320.8 degrees Fahrenheit and stores it in a tank filled with liquid nitrogen. Once the patient arrives at Alcor’s Arizona facility, the team releases cryoprotectants, or chemicals that prevent the formation of ice crystals that may damage organs, into the patient’s bloodstream. Acting quickly, a cryonics team that has usually been on standby, awaiting the patient’s death for up to a week, moves them to an ice bath and replaces their blood with an organ-preserving solution. At this time, their organs are still viable. Clive Coen, a neuroscientist at King’s College London in England, tells MIT Technology Review’s Laurie Clarke that cryonics is “a hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology.”īut for those that participate, the cryopreservation process begins as soon as a person is declared legally dead, according to Alcor’s website. Several medical and legal professionals have long been skeptical of human cryopreservation-or hostile to it, Peter Wilson reported for the New York Times last year. “We’re going to stabilize them, stop them getting worse and hold them for as long as it takes for technology to catch up and allow them to come back to life and continue living.” “We’re saying instead of just disposing of the patient, give them to us,” More tells Reuters. Max More, former CEO of Alcor who now serves as an ambassador and president emeritus of the foundation, tells Reuters that modern medicine and technology are insufficient to keep people alive as they’re nearing death. Some of the patients had terminal cases of diseases that lack a present-day cure, such as cancer or ALS. Packed together, cylindrical tanks filled with liquid nitrogen hold the heads and bodies of human “patients”-as the foundation calls them-plus about 100 preserved pets, reports Liliana Salgado for Reuters. By preserving bodies at below-freezing temperatures, Alcor’s goal is “restoring good health with medical technology in the future,” according to the non-profit organization’s website. To date, 199 people have had their heads and bodies cryopreserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation facility in hopes of being revived later. Amid the hot desert landscape of Scottsdale, Arizona, some people would rather be frozen-literally.
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