Cold comfort for those who want to live for ever
For $32,000, KrioRus will freeze your body until a time when humanity has beaten old age and disease
IN A snowy village of run-down cottages outside Moscow, a pair of vacuum-sealed fibreglass and resin tanks in a shed are taking 30 human bodies and 25 heads and brains on a journey into an eternal future.
It was two degrees below freezing on a recent afternoon on the outskirts of Sergiev Posad, but inside the two “cryostats” of liquid nitrogen it was much colder, -320F (-196C) to be exact.
There, a crew of intrepid “cryopatients”, who before their deaths were citizens of Russia, the United States, Japan, Australia, and across Europe, will be frozen until we figure out how they can be “revived and satisfactorily cured”.
That’s according to KrioRus, the only company outside the US engaged in cryonics, the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals for future resurrection.
The ultimate goal is eternal life. “From the biophysical point of view, time has stopped for them,” said Igor Artyukhov, KrioRus’s chief scientist, as he patted one of the tanks. “No chemical processes are going on. They could last for 2,000 years.”
Like most cryonicists, Mr Artyukhov, a retired medical data engineer, doesn’t think it will take that long for science to beat ageing and illness, maybe only a few decades.
For those who die too soon, there’s vitrification. Cryonicists receive a cadaver on ice, cut open the arteries and replace the blood with a cryoprotector solution, which doesn’t form ice crystals as the body is cooled and hung by its feet in the cryostat. “Cryonics is a plan B for those who want to live forever and reach times when we can do whatever we want,” he said.
On Thursday, KrioRus launched a cryptocurrency offering to raise money for a new cryonics centre. The company wants to open it in a former military bunker in a cave in Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal, meaning it could potentially avoid the last-minute rush to put a body on ice and transport it to where vitrification will be done.
Two British men and one woman are among more than 200 to have signed contracts to be preserved by KrioRus.
Few share their optimism. Most doctors and scientists are sceptical that frozen bodies can be revived.
KrioRus head Valeriya Udalova said profits are reinvested in the company and prices are lower than the US, only $36,000 (£27,000) for a body and $12,000 (£9,000) for a head. He cites technological advancements as cause for hope: in March researchers at the University of Minnesota said silicacoated iron nanoparticles had allowed them to thaw frozen pig heart valves without damage. Freezing and thawing entire human organs, however, which could hugely expand the availability of transplants, is still a long way off.