June 22, 2010 • 21 mins
Is it possible to freeze a body and bring it back to life? Through cryonics, scientists preserve bodies at extremely low temperatures, hoping to revive them in the future, when advanced technology may prolong their lives. Tune in and learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey, guys, welcome to the podcast.
This is us and I don't know, like the science
editor how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. And uh,
(00:23):
in the podcast room here, the temporary room is pretty,
uh it's kind of toasty, but the rest of the
office it's uh, pretty freezing, pretty frigid. Yeah, it's the
time of the year where like it's getting warmer outside,
but the air conditioning is already on and it's a
little too ambitious, right, And there's somebody in the office
who's always hot, you know, so you've got to turn
it down for them. And then there's somebody who's always
(00:44):
all tiny and keeps space heaters on underneath your desk
and piles on the shawls. And then there's that one
guy that's bringing in frozen corpses of like dead rich
people so that they can be thought out like centuries
from now in the future when they created cures for
their various ailments, right right, the cryonics guy. Yeah, so
that's the topic of today's podcast, is in fact cryonics
death on ice. Yeah, and this is I mean, this
(01:07):
is a pretty snazzy topic. It's been in the news
pretty much a lot over the past decade especially, and uh,
and it's all over sci fi just you know, just
the idea of people people freezing themselves when they die
so they can live forever. It's kind of morbid neural answer.
The test or Ashpools, the clan, the main clan in there. Yeah,
(01:28):
they're all like frozen up in the orbit, right and
all as crazy as a rat and a coffee can indeed. Yeah,
so just to refresh your memory. Cryogenics is just the
area of science that deals with what happens at really
low tempts. It doesn't just deal with us humans. Cryonics
is the technique used to store human bodies are really
low temperatures with the hope of one day reviving them.
(01:49):
And it is being performed today that the freezing part
that is not necessarily the reviving part. But the technology
is really still in its infancy. And here's the really
interesting thing that's stuck with me when we were researching
this is that you don't have to freeze your whole body.
You can, in fact, just freeze your your head. Yeah,
or if you want to get more reductionists. You can
just freeze your brain. Yeah, I mean, and you know
(02:11):
this is uh if anybody's watched Futurama, you know there's
a whole deal with like celebrities and they're they're they're
just these all these heads and jars. So in the
future you can go to a museum and meet like
past presidents in there. You know, did they talk? They talk?
You know, even people who are clearly not uh preserved
and frozen. You know, it'll be like like people like
(02:32):
George Washington will be ahead and at jar and then
it'll be the Beastie Boys. So why are we so
interested in this? Well, because it's it's that one. It's
one of those topics that that it once it's one
of those topics that is yes, it's kind of gasly
engross and and uh and bizarre, but it's also chance
of immortality. It's it's a it's a shot at preserving
(02:57):
life or um postponing down. Yeah, yeah, preserving the human mind.
And yeah, I mean ultimately it's all about like cheating death.
It's it's kind of like the modern equivalent of the
of like the Pharaoh going into the pyramid, you know,
like based on the best information at the time that
he was getting from the priest that you know, if
(03:17):
you go into this pyramid with all your stuff, then
you're going to be set for the afterlife. And this
is kind of like a scientific take on it, you know,
where it's like, hey, some people would argue it's not
very scientific, but we'll get into that. But it's using
the it's employing the science. Is you know, whether whether
the science actually backs it up completely and you know,
(03:38):
we can get into that, but but they're they're making
a scientific argument for delivery into what is essentially the afterlife.
Some scientists are interested in it, like astronauts, for example,
this would be pretty handy if you could freeze a
couple of astronauts for a long distance journey to another world. Um,
(03:58):
if you were if you happen to be suffering from
some incurable disease, you could go into the freeze until
the cure arrives. Yeah. Like Mr Burns and the Simpsons,
do you remember that one where it was the one
where Lisa is like in it's like if Lisa gets
to see what her future is going to be like
and and this your Burns, the evil boss you know,
has been has been frozen until medical science can create
(04:20):
a cure for seventeen stab wounds to the back. Yeah.
One thing I was thinking about was I wonder if
this could be a facet of a witness protection program
in the future. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean that's because
in a way, you're in trouble, it'll just freeze you
until yeah, put the eyes on him, um, and then
he can wake up sometime in the future when it
doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. I read the American Cranics Society
(04:41):
offers the quote unquote ultimate privacy option, in which your
attorney handles all the details and the society doesn't even
know your name, so you can be frozen anonymously. Just
corpsicle three, or it wouldn't be three, would be more
like a hundred and something now because according to those guys,
they're really stacking them up. So the chiggy thing about chronics,
of course, is that you have to your heart has
(05:03):
to stop beating in order for this procedure to be
performed on you. It can't be performed on someone who's
still alive legally speaking, yeah, because that would technically be murder. Yeah, obviously, thanks,
that's a good point. So you have to be legally dead.
And what is legally dead mean. It means your heart
stopped beating, not totally dead as in brain death. We
(05:23):
have an article on brain death which I read and
got side checked in when I was researching this. So
brains can survive, according to our article on brain death,
for up to six minutes after your heart stops speeding.
So it's really interesting between the time your heart stops
speeding and your brain cells start dying, there's this sort
of purgatory Yeah, well window of opportunity anyway, Yeah, right, exactly,
(05:45):
And this is where the Chronics people jump in, and
after the heart stops speeding, there's some cellular brain function
that they think may remain for those precious few minutes.
So Chronics preserves that sell functions so that theoretically the
person can be resuscitated in the future. Yeah. It's kind
of like, um, if you say, a struggling actor at
a pizzeria and you see like a family with a
bunch of breadsticks on the table and they like totally
(06:06):
get up and leave the breadsticks when they go. It's
like if you can swoop in and get those breadsticks
before they come and bust the table window of opportunity.
So let's get into the process of freezing a body.
So you're interested in joining a chronics facility, Well, you'd
have to pay an annual membership fee and this can
be in the area of four hundred dollars a year,
or you can just get it all over at once,
(06:27):
because what if your estate isn't taken care of. What
if your person who is the executor of your state,
you know, loaves off and decides to spend it on
something else, will you just pay up front? Essentially? Yeah,
we're talking long term planning here, Like you guess you
could have like if you're just rolling the dough, you
could have some sort of account set up where the
interest off of your massive amount of money, um, you know,
(06:50):
goes to pay for your yearly fee. It's kind of like, uh,
what we need have those condos and you have to
pay for like the lawn time share. Yeah no, no,
but with the like the association fee. Oh yeah right,
And some of the organizations has cut me up offered
discounts on fees for students. So if you're struggling students
but are still interested in chronics, you can start now
and just pay a discounted fee weight, but you have
(07:12):
when you have to be dead, like that's you're not
really struggling anymore at that point. Well, I think they
offer payment programs. I think that's the idea behind it,
unless in that you're you're you're not brain dead, so
like for six years. So however long you're frozen, you're
still having that dream about about how you didn't drop
that class in time right right right, you're showing up
naked for a test. That's the worst. Um. So the
(07:34):
first step is joining this facility and paying out some cash.
But then things start to get interesting. When your heart
stops speeding and you're pronounced legally dead. Then there's an
emergency response team from the facility and they spring into action.
So the problem here that I was thinking about is
what do you do if you die in accidental death
and you're kind of stuck, and what happens is the
chronics company refund your money. I would hope you would
(07:56):
have like a voucher, you know that It's like if
I'm not able to use it, then I've got like
a you know, a freezing voucher that I can pass
on to somebody else that I care about that's a
good idea. I mean, that's just my idea. I have
no idea what they do, right, So the team springs
into action, and the first thing they do is they
stabilize your body. They're supplying your brain with enough oxygen
and blood to preserve minimal function until you can be
(08:17):
transported to the suspension facility. So at this point they
put you on ice ice. Yeah, and we're just talking
normal ice here, just to cool you down. Um. And
then they also inject you with an antecout coagulant to
keep your blood from clotting during the trip. And then
a medical team just awaits the arrival of your body
at the cryonic facility. And that is when the actual
(08:38):
of freezing begins. When you get there, you can't really
just put people into a vat of liquid nitrogen because
the water inside their cells would freeze, and when water freezes,
it expands, and then your cells would be in bad shape.
They would shatter. Yeah. Anybody who's ever, you know, put
a glass of anything in the freezer has observed this.
(08:58):
Now imagine that with the whole body. That's not good,
not good at all. So the cronics you must first
remove the water from your cells and replace it with
this funky mixture called a cryo protective. It's a sort
of human anti freeze. Yeah, and the goal here is
to protect the organs of the tissue from forming those
ice crystals at those really low temperatures. Yeah. You don't
(09:18):
want your organs to get freezer burned. Yeah. So this
is called vitrification, deep cooling without the freezing and puts
the cells into a s state of suspended animation. Next,
your body is laid on a bed of dry ice
until it reaches the temperature necessary, which is roughly around
negative degrees celsius. And you you can only imagine it
(09:38):
looks really gnarly at this point because it's like a
like a haunted house. It's like all that dry ice
is smoking and your corpse is setting on top and there.
I'm just saying, it probably looks pretty cool. Yeah, So
that completes the vitrification process. Also, what he's with the
name that is not a very attractive name. I don't know,
you feel okay with it? Well, it's kind of it
sounds like it's got to be that strongly like vigorous. No,
(10:00):
it's like a file. Anyway. The next step is inserting
the body into an individual container that's placed into this
huge tank filled with liquid nitrogen at a temperature around
negative one celsius. And check this out. They store you
head down, so if there's ever a leak in the tank,
your brain stays immersed in the freezing liquid. And if
(10:20):
there is a leak, they do check to see if
there are leaks periodically. Yeah, because you don't want to like,
you know, they crack the v open you know, um,
a couple of millennium in the future and they're like, oh, well,
only as feet survive. The other thing is you're going
to have some company in your container, as a lot
of people, well not a lot, but a few people
are typically stored in a container. I bet, I bet
(10:42):
if you paid down, you know, some more money, you
could probably get a solo tank totally if you're just
like super you know, weird about that kind of thing. So,
now that you're all handy and frozen and upside down
in the tank, how do you revive someone? Well, you don't.
And this is where the chronics problem starts to get
a little messy. Yeah, it's kind of a it's like
a gamble, really, it's it's saying, Hey, we're gonna go
(11:03):
ahead and chill this out, and eventually science is gonna
catch up with us and they're gonna be able to
do something with it. Yeah, in a weird way, it's
sort of a faith in science, which is nice. Yeah. Again,
it's like applying the it's applying science in the same
way that one might have applied a religion in in
ancient times. So a couple of points in chronics favor
(11:25):
if you're considering this. Living organisms can be and have
been brought back from a dead or near dead state.
You things like defibrillators and CPR are bringing back accident
and heart attack victims all the time. Yeah. And then
you have other organisms that can quote freeze themselves, like
the wood frog. The wood frog is awesome. So it
(11:46):
can deal with freezing of up to six seventy of
their body water. It can maintain a minimum body temperature
of negative six degrees celsius, and for four weeks it
can stay frozen. It's pretty good. I'm impressed. So what
helps the wood frog to survive the freeze? Well, one
of the responses promoting the tolerance and these frogs is, uh,
(12:07):
they're able to redistribute the water within their body. So
all that water that's normally found all over the tissues
is concentrated within the limp system and the column. Oh cool,
so they just, yeah, they repurpose it to areas that
aren't going to be damaged by that crystallization process, exactly, exactly.
And the other cool thing about the wood frog is
it has this inherent cryoprotectant in the form of glucose
(12:28):
from liver glacitchen and then it can quickly make and
send it to the rest of the body. So this
happens really fast. O. Cool. So is it so basically
that this is a creature that is evolved to deal
with with cold spells? And uh, and so it can
survive cold spells. Yeah, and it has a good company.
They are about a dozen different reptiles and amphibians that
can freeze themselves, according to Miami University Department of Zoology.
(12:52):
So maybe we should like just throw this out there.
Maybe we should be looking to the continuing evolution of
say Canadians or you know, Siberians. Yeah, anybody living in
extreme temperatures. You know, nature is eventually going to catch up.
Just quit turning on the heat. And ruin and things.
You know. So one thing reassuring about about all this
is that we can freeze certain human materials, say embryos
(13:16):
and semen most definitely, that was an interesting thing to
look into while we're researching this podcast. Yeah, human embryos
that are frozen in fertility clinics or defrost and implanted
and mother's theaters and they grow into you know, totally
normal human beings. It's a great example we can put
of us putting life on ice and then in a
(13:37):
way reviving it. Right, So if I were considering chronics,
I would think that would be something that would point
me in its favor. Well, we can do it with
seuman and embryos. Granted it's not a human body. And
the argument there is that the human body is enormously complicated.
So it's one thing to d ice semen or embryos,
(13:57):
but it's another thing entirely to d ice human being. Yeah,
but I guess it seems like a natural progression, um
a complicated, natural, complicated one. But like I take for instance,
UM being able to freeze organs for transplant, Like you
might think, all right, that's a very practical means. You know,
if we could, you know, somebody loses you know, dies,
(14:18):
we harvest their organs and then we can put them
on ice to make sure that they are ready when
somebody needs them, or that they can be transported to
the person who needs them. Uh, and that would be
you know, an actual need that would lead to better
freezing techniques. Right. Well, they are put on ice now,
but yeah, the shelf life of them is so fast.
(14:38):
I mean you have to move it instantly, get that
kim me on ice and bomb send it to the recipient.
It sounds like the U S courts haven't quite figured
out what to make of chronics just yet. Did you
see that new stories at you? Oh? Yeah, yeah, the
one from Iowa, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Iowa
Court of Appeals has ordered the family of a deceased
man to exhume his body so that his previous wishes
(15:00):
to have his head frozen by an arizona Um cryonics
company can be met. Yeah. That was strange. Independent This
seems kind of like, because how long has he been
in the ground, you know, it's just it's kind of
over at this point. What's the point of freezing it? Yeah.
This story goes on to say that He died in
February two thousand nine at age eight one, and prior
to his demise, he'd entered into this contract with the
(15:21):
Crownics company called alk Core Life Extension Foundation. But his
his his brother, and his sister didn't want to do it,
and so they had him buried and the appeals Kurt said, no, no,
you gotta dig that guy up and you gotta stick
him in the Chronics facility. Yeah, that's I mean, it
sounds like those breadsticks have been bust you know. I
mean there's I don't unless I'm missing something. Um in
(15:43):
the grounds really cold there. Um, that one's kind of
done for. Yeah, kind of odd. So this is pretty cool. Um.
I was pulling up some some different statistics and I
think you were looking at this these two. Um. The
Cryonics Institute has a bunch of comparative proceidures and policies
on their website, so you can look at like some
of the different different places you could have your body frozen.
(16:07):
You can stop around steal. So there's like there's Altcore
Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, American Chronic Society in California,
Chronic Institute in Michigan, Creo Roussan and um. And then
there's Suspended Animation Inc. In Florida that has a nice
ring to it. Yeah. I wonder if they do anime
(16:28):
there too. It's it does it sounds kind of um,
I don't know's it sounds like something out of a novel. Um. Oh.
And then there's trans Time Inc. Also in California. So
California is a hotbed of getting your body frozen pretty much. Um.
But they have all this other stuff on there too,
(16:49):
about like all right, which ones offer you know, just
the head um or you know, full body freezing? Um?
You know what what kind of prices are involved in?
There was one that was pretty that I was kind
of i because it had had some like it wasn't
that much per year like I think they had like
the yearly cost down to yeah, like trans Time and
(17:12):
uh Chronics Institute they headed down to like like one
is like ninety six dollars for yearly fee and the
other ones are and twenty And of course it still
takes an enormous amount of money to to get frozen
to begin with, but it's like hundred twenty a year.
I probably you know, spend that much on I don't
know beer or something you know, indeed not beer, but
(17:33):
I don't know. Fine coffee, yeah, something caffeine to keep
you awake during your podcasts. Yeah, definitely on caffeine. Yeah.
So for the price of like one year's worth of coffee,
I could to have my body frozen until they figured
out how to restore me and like put me in
like a new android body in the future. Or you
could have the exact opposite done and you could be
burned up proverb that's right, for a lot cheaper, yeah,
(17:58):
or composted. This gonna be the next big craze, they say,
human composting. Yeah. Yeah, there's actually a whole deal about it. Um.
And actually Mary roaches a stiff book kind of like
body farm, um kind of. I mean, it's basically operates
along the principle that you know, it's kind of like,
you know, to I feel like today's generation, a lot
of us are like like I feel it's like I'm
(18:20):
I would be like telling my parents and I'd be like, like,
I think, you know, being buried in the ground would
be a waste because I'm taking up like valuable you know,
real estate. It's costing money, and then what am I
doing down there. I'm just you know, being kept in
like this artificial state, you know, and still decaying when
you could just burn me, right and that will be
a lot clear and simpler. Um. But then there's this
new movement saying, well, no, actually you're you know, you're
(18:43):
creating emissions when you burn a body and you all
this fire, et cetera. And also it keeps it. It
requires a lot of energy to keep the incinerator at
that temperature. And then if you have you know, you
have any feelings, etcetera, you know, you might have some
you know, something in there that it burns up and
adds the pollution. Um. So they're people to say, hey,
what would be more natural than just simply becoming a
(19:04):
part of the earth again. You know, you're burying and
they have these these green burials you know where yeah, yeah,
they they talked about it in there where not much
as done to the corpse and you just you know,
you're retaken by the ecosystem. And it's actually a lot
like I believe they do that into bet you've probably
seen the pictures where they take the body and they
leave it up on the rocks for the for the scavengers.
(19:26):
So Yeah, it's you know, that's all about like continuing
the natural cycle, the complete opposite of freezing yourself so
that robots can rebuild your body in the future. But
go forward. If that's your thing, don't let me talk
you out of it. Yeah. So I think that wraps
it up for death and death on it in particular.
If you're curious about jeff or chronics, we have many
(19:46):
articles on both, so head on over to the homepage
and type in cryonics or brain death or how dying works.
Molly Edmunds were a really good article on how dying
works that I liked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very interesting. All
the processes are going on in it. Hey, and we
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(20:08):
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(20:29):
started talking about like how he would like seriously want to, like, um,
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(20:51):
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the house stuff works dot com home page. Tw
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey, guys, welcome to the podcast.
This is us and I don't know, like the science
editor how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. And uh,
(00:23):
in the podcast room here, the temporary room is pretty,
uh it's kind of toasty, but the rest of the
office it's uh, pretty freezing, pretty frigid. Yeah, it's the
time of the year where like it's getting warmer outside,
but the air conditioning is already on and it's a
little too ambitious, right, And there's somebody in the office
who's always hot, you know, so you've got to turn
it down for them. And then there's somebody who's always
(00:44):
all tiny and keeps space heaters on underneath your desk
and piles on the shawls. And then there's that one
guy that's bringing in frozen corpses of like dead rich
people so that they can be thought out like centuries
from now in the future when they created cures for
their various ailments, right right, the cryonics guy. Yeah, so
that's the topic of today's podcast, is in fact cryonics
death on ice. Yeah, and this is I mean, this
(01:07):
is a pretty snazzy topic. It's been in the news
pretty much a lot over the past decade especially, and uh,
and it's all over sci fi just you know, just
the idea of people people freezing themselves when they die
so they can live forever. It's kind of morbid neural answer.
The test or Ashpools, the clan, the main clan in there. Yeah,
(01:28):
they're all like frozen up in the orbit, right and
all as crazy as a rat and a coffee can indeed. Yeah,
so just to refresh your memory. Cryogenics is just the
area of science that deals with what happens at really
low tempts. It doesn't just deal with us humans. Cryonics
is the technique used to store human bodies are really
low temperatures with the hope of one day reviving them.
(01:49):
And it is being performed today that the freezing part
that is not necessarily the reviving part. But the technology
is really still in its infancy. And here's the really
interesting thing that's stuck with me when we were researching
this is that you don't have to freeze your whole body.
You can, in fact, just freeze your your head. Yeah,
or if you want to get more reductionists. You can
just freeze your brain. Yeah, I mean, and you know
(02:11):
this is uh if anybody's watched Futurama, you know there's
a whole deal with like celebrities and they're they're they're
just these all these heads and jars. So in the
future you can go to a museum and meet like
past presidents in there. You know, did they talk? They talk?
You know, even people who are clearly not uh preserved
and frozen. You know, it'll be like like people like
(02:32):
George Washington will be ahead and at jar and then
it'll be the Beastie Boys. So why are we so
interested in this? Well, because it's it's that one. It's
one of those topics that that it once it's one
of those topics that is yes, it's kind of gasly
engross and and uh and bizarre, but it's also chance
of immortality. It's it's a it's a shot at preserving
(02:57):
life or um postponing down. Yeah, yeah, preserving the human mind.
And yeah, I mean ultimately it's all about like cheating death.
It's it's kind of like the modern equivalent of the
of like the Pharaoh going into the pyramid, you know,
like based on the best information at the time that
he was getting from the priest that you know, if
(03:17):
you go into this pyramid with all your stuff, then
you're going to be set for the afterlife. And this
is kind of like a scientific take on it, you know,
where it's like, hey, some people would argue it's not
very scientific, but we'll get into that. But it's using
the it's employing the science. Is you know, whether whether
the science actually backs it up completely and you know,
(03:38):
we can get into that, but but they're they're making
a scientific argument for delivery into what is essentially the afterlife.
Some scientists are interested in it, like astronauts, for example,
this would be pretty handy if you could freeze a
couple of astronauts for a long distance journey to another world. Um,
(03:58):
if you were if you happen to be suffering from
some incurable disease, you could go into the freeze until
the cure arrives. Yeah. Like Mr Burns and the Simpsons,
do you remember that one where it was the one
where Lisa is like in it's like if Lisa gets
to see what her future is going to be like
and and this your Burns, the evil boss you know,
has been has been frozen until medical science can create
(04:20):
a cure for seventeen stab wounds to the back. Yeah.
One thing I was thinking about was I wonder if
this could be a facet of a witness protection program
in the future. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean that's because
in a way, you're in trouble, it'll just freeze you
until yeah, put the eyes on him, um, and then
he can wake up sometime in the future when it
doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. I read the American Cranics Society
(04:41):
offers the quote unquote ultimate privacy option, in which your
attorney handles all the details and the society doesn't even
know your name, so you can be frozen anonymously. Just
corpsicle three, or it wouldn't be three, would be more
like a hundred and something now because according to those guys,
they're really stacking them up. So the chiggy thing about chronics,
of course, is that you have to your heart has
(05:03):
to stop beating in order for this procedure to be
performed on you. It can't be performed on someone who's
still alive legally speaking, yeah, because that would technically be murder. Yeah, obviously, thanks,
that's a good point. So you have to be legally dead.
And what is legally dead mean. It means your heart
stopped beating, not totally dead as in brain death. We
(05:23):
have an article on brain death which I read and
got side checked in when I was researching this. So
brains can survive, according to our article on brain death,
for up to six minutes after your heart stops speeding.
So it's really interesting between the time your heart stops
speeding and your brain cells start dying, there's this sort
of purgatory Yeah, well window of opportunity anyway, Yeah, right, exactly,
(05:45):
And this is where the Chronics people jump in, and
after the heart stops speeding, there's some cellular brain function
that they think may remain for those precious few minutes.
So Chronics preserves that sell functions so that theoretically the
person can be resuscitated in the future. Yeah. It's kind
of like, um, if you say, a struggling actor at
a pizzeria and you see like a family with a
bunch of breadsticks on the table and they like totally
(06:06):
get up and leave the breadsticks when they go. It's
like if you can swoop in and get those breadsticks
before they come and bust the table window of opportunity.
So let's get into the process of freezing a body.
So you're interested in joining a chronics facility, Well, you'd
have to pay an annual membership fee and this can
be in the area of four hundred dollars a year,
or you can just get it all over at once,
(06:27):
because what if your estate isn't taken care of. What
if your person who is the executor of your state,
you know, loaves off and decides to spend it on
something else, will you just pay up front? Essentially? Yeah,
we're talking long term planning here, Like you guess you
could have like if you're just rolling the dough, you
could have some sort of account set up where the
interest off of your massive amount of money, um, you know,
(06:50):
goes to pay for your yearly fee. It's kind of like, uh,
what we need have those condos and you have to
pay for like the lawn time share. Yeah no, no,
but with the like the association fee. Oh yeah right,
And some of the organizations has cut me up offered
discounts on fees for students. So if you're struggling students
but are still interested in chronics, you can start now
and just pay a discounted fee weight, but you have
(07:12):
when you have to be dead, like that's you're not
really struggling anymore at that point. Well, I think they
offer payment programs. I think that's the idea behind it,
unless in that you're you're you're not brain dead, so
like for six years. So however long you're frozen, you're
still having that dream about about how you didn't drop
that class in time right right right, you're showing up
naked for a test. That's the worst. Um. So the
(07:34):
first step is joining this facility and paying out some cash.
But then things start to get interesting. When your heart
stops speeding and you're pronounced legally dead. Then there's an
emergency response team from the facility and they spring into action.
So the problem here that I was thinking about is
what do you do if you die in accidental death
and you're kind of stuck, and what happens is the
chronics company refund your money. I would hope you would
(07:56):
have like a voucher, you know that It's like if
I'm not able to use it, then I've got like
a you know, a freezing voucher that I can pass
on to somebody else that I care about that's a
good idea. I mean, that's just my idea. I have
no idea what they do, right, So the team springs
into action, and the first thing they do is they
stabilize your body. They're supplying your brain with enough oxygen
and blood to preserve minimal function until you can be
(08:17):
transported to the suspension facility. So at this point they
put you on ice ice. Yeah, and we're just talking
normal ice here, just to cool you down. Um. And
then they also inject you with an antecout coagulant to
keep your blood from clotting during the trip. And then
a medical team just awaits the arrival of your body
at the cryonic facility. And that is when the actual
(08:38):
of freezing begins. When you get there, you can't really
just put people into a vat of liquid nitrogen because
the water inside their cells would freeze, and when water freezes,
it expands, and then your cells would be in bad shape.
They would shatter. Yeah. Anybody who's ever, you know, put
a glass of anything in the freezer has observed this.
(08:58):
Now imagine that with the whole body. That's not good,
not good at all. So the cronics you must first
remove the water from your cells and replace it with
this funky mixture called a cryo protective. It's a sort
of human anti freeze. Yeah, and the goal here is
to protect the organs of the tissue from forming those
ice crystals at those really low temperatures. Yeah. You don't
(09:18):
want your organs to get freezer burned. Yeah. So this
is called vitrification, deep cooling without the freezing and puts
the cells into a s state of suspended animation. Next,
your body is laid on a bed of dry ice
until it reaches the temperature necessary, which is roughly around
negative degrees celsius. And you you can only imagine it
(09:38):
looks really gnarly at this point because it's like a
like a haunted house. It's like all that dry ice
is smoking and your corpse is setting on top and there.
I'm just saying, it probably looks pretty cool. Yeah, So
that completes the vitrification process. Also, what he's with the
name that is not a very attractive name. I don't know,
you feel okay with it? Well, it's kind of it
sounds like it's got to be that strongly like vigorous. No,
(10:00):
it's like a file. Anyway. The next step is inserting
the body into an individual container that's placed into this
huge tank filled with liquid nitrogen at a temperature around
negative one celsius. And check this out. They store you
head down, so if there's ever a leak in the tank,
your brain stays immersed in the freezing liquid. And if
(10:20):
there is a leak, they do check to see if
there are leaks periodically. Yeah, because you don't want to like,
you know, they crack the v open you know, um,
a couple of millennium in the future and they're like, oh, well,
only as feet survive. The other thing is you're going
to have some company in your container, as a lot
of people, well not a lot, but a few people
are typically stored in a container. I bet, I bet
(10:42):
if you paid down, you know, some more money, you
could probably get a solo tank totally if you're just
like super you know, weird about that kind of thing. So,
now that you're all handy and frozen and upside down
in the tank, how do you revive someone? Well, you don't.
And this is where the chronics problem starts to get
a little messy. Yeah, it's kind of a it's like
a gamble, really, it's it's saying, Hey, we're gonna go
(11:03):
ahead and chill this out, and eventually science is gonna
catch up with us and they're gonna be able to
do something with it. Yeah, in a weird way, it's
sort of a faith in science, which is nice. Yeah. Again,
it's like applying the it's applying science in the same
way that one might have applied a religion in in
ancient times. So a couple of points in chronics favor
(11:25):
if you're considering this. Living organisms can be and have
been brought back from a dead or near dead state.
You things like defibrillators and CPR are bringing back accident
and heart attack victims all the time. Yeah. And then
you have other organisms that can quote freeze themselves, like
the wood frog. The wood frog is awesome. So it
(11:46):
can deal with freezing of up to six seventy of
their body water. It can maintain a minimum body temperature
of negative six degrees celsius, and for four weeks it
can stay frozen. It's pretty good. I'm impressed. So what
helps the wood frog to survive the freeze? Well, one
of the responses promoting the tolerance and these frogs is, uh,
(12:07):
they're able to redistribute the water within their body. So
all that water that's normally found all over the tissues
is concentrated within the limp system and the column. Oh cool,
so they just, yeah, they repurpose it to areas that
aren't going to be damaged by that crystallization process, exactly, exactly.
And the other cool thing about the wood frog is
it has this inherent cryoprotectant in the form of glucose
(12:28):
from liver glacitchen and then it can quickly make and
send it to the rest of the body. So this
happens really fast. O. Cool. So is it so basically
that this is a creature that is evolved to deal
with with cold spells? And uh, and so it can
survive cold spells. Yeah, and it has a good company.
They are about a dozen different reptiles and amphibians that
can freeze themselves, according to Miami University Department of Zoology.
(12:52):
So maybe we should like just throw this out there.
Maybe we should be looking to the continuing evolution of
say Canadians or you know, Siberians. Yeah, anybody living in
extreme temperatures. You know, nature is eventually going to catch up.
Just quit turning on the heat. And ruin and things.
You know. So one thing reassuring about about all this
is that we can freeze certain human materials, say embryos
(13:16):
and semen most definitely, that was an interesting thing to
look into while we're researching this podcast. Yeah, human embryos
that are frozen in fertility clinics or defrost and implanted
and mother's theaters and they grow into you know, totally
normal human beings. It's a great example we can put
of us putting life on ice and then in a
(13:37):
way reviving it. Right, So if I were considering chronics,
I would think that would be something that would point
me in its favor. Well, we can do it with
seuman and embryos. Granted it's not a human body. And
the argument there is that the human body is enormously complicated.
So it's one thing to d ice semen or embryos,
(13:57):
but it's another thing entirely to d ice human being. Yeah,
but I guess it seems like a natural progression, um
a complicated, natural, complicated one. But like I take for instance,
UM being able to freeze organs for transplant, Like you
might think, all right, that's a very practical means. You know,
if we could, you know, somebody loses you know, dies,
(14:18):
we harvest their organs and then we can put them
on ice to make sure that they are ready when
somebody needs them, or that they can be transported to
the person who needs them. Uh, and that would be
you know, an actual need that would lead to better
freezing techniques. Right. Well, they are put on ice now,
but yeah, the shelf life of them is so fast.
(14:38):
I mean you have to move it instantly, get that
kim me on ice and bomb send it to the recipient.
It sounds like the U S courts haven't quite figured
out what to make of chronics just yet. Did you
see that new stories at you? Oh? Yeah, yeah, the
one from Iowa, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Iowa
Court of Appeals has ordered the family of a deceased
man to exhume his body so that his previous wishes
(15:00):
to have his head frozen by an arizona Um cryonics
company can be met. Yeah. That was strange. Independent This
seems kind of like, because how long has he been
in the ground, you know, it's just it's kind of
over at this point. What's the point of freezing it? Yeah.
This story goes on to say that He died in
February two thousand nine at age eight one, and prior
to his demise, he'd entered into this contract with the
(15:21):
Crownics company called alk Core Life Extension Foundation. But his
his his brother, and his sister didn't want to do it,
and so they had him buried and the appeals Kurt said, no, no,
you gotta dig that guy up and you gotta stick
him in the Chronics facility. Yeah, that's I mean, it
sounds like those breadsticks have been bust you know. I
mean there's I don't unless I'm missing something. Um in
(15:43):
the grounds really cold there. Um, that one's kind of
done for. Yeah, kind of odd. So this is pretty cool. Um.
I was pulling up some some different statistics and I
think you were looking at this these two. Um. The
Cryonics Institute has a bunch of comparative proceidures and policies
on their website, so you can look at like some
of the different different places you could have your body frozen.
(16:07):
You can stop around steal. So there's like there's Altcore
Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, American Chronic Society in California,
Chronic Institute in Michigan, Creo Roussan and um. And then
there's Suspended Animation Inc. In Florida that has a nice
ring to it. Yeah. I wonder if they do anime
(16:28):
there too. It's it does it sounds kind of um,
I don't know's it sounds like something out of a novel. Um. Oh.
And then there's trans Time Inc. Also in California. So
California is a hotbed of getting your body frozen pretty much. Um.
But they have all this other stuff on there too,
(16:49):
about like all right, which ones offer you know, just
the head um or you know, full body freezing? Um?
You know what what kind of prices are involved in?
There was one that was pretty that I was kind
of i because it had had some like it wasn't
that much per year like I think they had like
the yearly cost down to yeah, like trans Time and
(17:12):
uh Chronics Institute they headed down to like like one
is like ninety six dollars for yearly fee and the
other ones are and twenty And of course it still
takes an enormous amount of money to to get frozen
to begin with, but it's like hundred twenty a year.
I probably you know, spend that much on I don't
know beer or something you know, indeed not beer, but
(17:33):
I don't know. Fine coffee, yeah, something caffeine to keep
you awake during your podcasts. Yeah, definitely on caffeine. Yeah.
So for the price of like one year's worth of coffee,
I could to have my body frozen until they figured
out how to restore me and like put me in
like a new android body in the future. Or you
could have the exact opposite done and you could be
burned up proverb that's right, for a lot cheaper, yeah,
(17:58):
or composted. This gonna be the next big craze, they say,
human composting. Yeah. Yeah, there's actually a whole deal about it. Um.
And actually Mary roaches a stiff book kind of like
body farm, um kind of. I mean, it's basically operates
along the principle that you know, it's kind of like,
you know, to I feel like today's generation, a lot
of us are like like I feel it's like I'm
(18:20):
I would be like telling my parents and I'd be like, like,
I think, you know, being buried in the ground would
be a waste because I'm taking up like valuable you know,
real estate. It's costing money, and then what am I
doing down there. I'm just you know, being kept in
like this artificial state, you know, and still decaying when
you could just burn me, right and that will be
a lot clear and simpler. Um. But then there's this
new movement saying, well, no, actually you're you know, you're
(18:43):
creating emissions when you burn a body and you all
this fire, et cetera. And also it keeps it. It
requires a lot of energy to keep the incinerator at
that temperature. And then if you have you know, you
have any feelings, etcetera, you know, you might have some
you know, something in there that it burns up and
adds the pollution. Um. So they're people to say, hey,
what would be more natural than just simply becoming a
(19:04):
part of the earth again. You know, you're burying and
they have these these green burials you know where yeah, yeah,
they they talked about it in there where not much
as done to the corpse and you just you know,
you're retaken by the ecosystem. And it's actually a lot
like I believe they do that into bet you've probably
seen the pictures where they take the body and they
leave it up on the rocks for the for the scavengers.
(19:26):
So Yeah, it's you know, that's all about like continuing
the natural cycle, the complete opposite of freezing yourself so
that robots can rebuild your body in the future. But
go forward. If that's your thing, don't let me talk
you out of it. Yeah. So I think that wraps
it up for death and death on it in particular.
If you're curious about jeff or chronics, we have many
(19:46):
articles on both, so head on over to the homepage
and type in cryonics or brain death or how dying works.
Molly Edmunds were a really good article on how dying
works that I liked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very interesting. All
the processes are going on in it. Hey, and we
also have Facebook and Twitter accounts, now be sure to
do There's stuff from the Science Lab on Facebook and
(20:08):
Lab stuff over on Twitter. Yeah, and you should be
able to put put Lab stuff into either, and that'll
bring you right to us. We'll keep you updated on
what we're talking about, what we're podcasting about, what we're
writing about, and uh, just what we find particularly amusing.
Like today, I ran across this awesome link from like
two thousand five about this Japanese mixed martial artist who
(20:29):
started talking about like how he would like seriously want to, like, um,
have a fight with an alien and how he might
carry it out. Excellent. Yeah, it's amazing. So if you
want to write to us and let us skip some
of their innings, send us an email. It's science stuff
at how stuff dot com for more on this and
(20:51):
thousands of other topics because at how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
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