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What happens when you are frozen?
What happens when you are frozen? Cormac Seachoy, a graduate from Bristol, UK, was just 27 when his body succumbed to metastatic cancer of the colon. He was pronounced dead on 16 December last year. Not long after, he became Alcor’s 142nd cryopreserved member. Seachoy, who had decided he wanted to be frozen after death, had planned to relocate to Scottsville, Arizona, to be close to Alcor’s main facility, but his condition went downhill too fast. “Ideally, we are there at the bedside so that we can take over within 60 seconds of the patient being pronounced dead,” says Aaron Drake, head of Alcor’s medical response team. Instead, Drake made the journey to the UK but was still in the air when Seachoy passed away. An organisation called Cryonics UK stepped in, cooling the body and administering the first lot of drugs until Drake and his team arrived.“ As soon as death is pronounced, we want to mitigate as much from happening in the cells as possible,” says Drake. To do that, his team restores blood circulation using a pump to mechanically do chest compressions and intubates the patient to restore oxygen to the lungs. “We can do bloods at this point to show they are every bit as normal as a living patient, biologically speaking,” he says. Next, the team reduces the rate of metabolism to slow decay. “We immerse the patient in an ice bath and circulate chilled water that draws heat away from the body,” says Drake. “We then administer drugs that are designed to prevent clots from forming, break up existing clots and keep a good pH balance and blood pressure. And a general anaesthetic acts to reduce metabolic activity in the brain.” The next step is to replace all the blood in the body with medical-grade antifreeze. “We are trying to prevent any ice from forming when we take the body below freezing point,” says Drake. “We continue to cool the body and eventually everything turns into a glass-like solid.” Seachoy’s body was held in this state using dry ice, and flown to Alcor to be stored along with Alcor’s other members in liquid nitrogen at −196 °C. Here he will remain, possibly for hundreds or thousands of years, waiting for the day that technology can treat the cancer and bring him back to life. “We can’t promise that they’ll be able to be resuscitated some day,” says Drake. “That will depend on future technologies – but if we’ve been successful and started the process within seconds of clinical death, we’ve been able to mitigate all types of cellular damage.”
Valentine spent months drawing up proposals for the building, together with advice from engineers who had previously worked for NASA and security experts from around the world. “We had to address everything from pandemics and cyberattacks to snipers and global warming,” says Fred Waterman, a risk mitigation expert on the Timeship team. The designs were approved by Kent but immediately put on ice. He believed the technology that would make the building worthwhile was not yet advanced enough to warrant its construction. At body temperature, cells need a constant supply of oxygen. Without it they start to die and tissues decay. At low temperatures, cells need less oxygen because the chemical activity of metabolism slows down. At very low temperatures, metabolism stops altogether. The problem faced when trying to preserve human tissue by freezing it is that water in the tissue forms ice and causes damage. The trick is to replace the water with cryoprotectants, essentially antifreeze, which prevent ice from forming. This works well for small, uncomplicated structures like sperm and eggs. But when you try to scale it up to larger organs, damage still occurs. But in 2000, Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist at 21st Century Medicine in Fontana, California, made a breakthrough with a technique called vitrification. It involves adding cryoprotectants then rapidly cooling an organ to prevent any freezing; instead the tissue turns into a glasslike state. Fahy later showed that you could vitrify a whole rabbit kidney that functioned well after thawing and transplantation. This was the breakthrough Kent and Faloon had been waiting for.
Murray Ballard. from the book ‘ THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY’
Cold comfort farm
The operating theatre at Alcor, where new members are prepared for storage 28 | NewScientist | 2 July 2016
The pair gave Valentine a multimillion-dollar budget and told him to find land on which to build Timeship. Valentine spent five years scouring the US, believing it to be the country most likely to remain politically stable for the next 100 years. He homed in on four states that fitted his exacting criteria. And after evaluating more than 200 sites in Texas alone, Valentine ended up in Comfort. Here he discovered the Bildarth Estate, which came with acres of land, a 1670-square-metre mansion and even a few zebras. Since then, Valentine, together with a team of specialists, has fine-tuned the project. Timeship’s architectural plans make it look like something between a fortress and a spaceship. The central building is a low-lying square with a single entrance. This sits inside
Valentine spent months drawing up proposals for the building, together with advice from engineers who had previously worked for NASA and security experts from around the world. “We had to address everything from pandemics and cyberattacks to snipers and global warming,” says Fred Waterman, a risk mitigation expert on the Timeship team. The designs were approved by Kent but immediately put on ice. He believed the technology that would make the building worthwhile was not yet advanced enough to warrant its construction. At body temperature, cells need a constant supply of oxygen. Without it they start to die and tissues decay. At low temperatures, cells need less oxygen because the chemical activity of metabolism slows down. At very low temperatures, metabolism stops altogether. The problem faced when trying to preserve human tissue by freezing it is that water in the tissue forms ice and causes damage. The trick is to replace the water with cryoprotectants, essentially antifreeze, which prevent ice from forming. This works well for small, uncomplicated structures like sperm and eggs. But when you try to scale it up to larger organs, damage still occurs. But in 2000, Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist at 21st Century Medicine in Fontana, California, made a breakthrough with a technique called vitrification. It involves adding cryoprotectants then rapidly cooling an organ to prevent any freezing; instead the tissue turns into a glasslike state. Fahy later showed that you could vitrify a whole rabbit kidney that functioned well after thawing and transplantation. This was the breakthrough Kent and Faloon had been waiting for.
Murray Ballard. from the book ‘ THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY’
Cold comfort farm
The operating theatre at Alcor, where new members are prepared for storage 28 | NewScientist | 2 July 2016
The pair gave Valentine a multimillion-dollar budget and told him to find land on which to build Timeship. Valentine spent five years scouring the US, believing it to be the country most likely to remain politically stable for the next 100 years. He homed in on four states that fitted his exacting criteria. And after evaluating more than 200 sites in Texas alone, Valentine ended up in Comfort. Here he discovered the Bildarth Estate, which came with acres of land, a 1670-square-metre mansion and even a few zebras. Since then, Valentine, together with a team of specialists, has fine-tuned the project. Timeship’s architectural plans make it look like something between a fortress and a spaceship. The central building is a low-lying square with a single entrance. This sits inside