WILL CRYONICALLY FROZEN BODIES EVER BE BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE?
CRYONICISTS HOPE THAT MODERN TECHNOLOGY WILL ONE DAY BRING THEM BACK FROM THE DEAD. BUT HOW REALISTIC IS A SECOND LIFE AFTER A DEEP FREEZE?
One of the things that makes us human is our awareness of our own mortality. Yet for nearly as long as we’ve known that we’ll one day die, we’ve wondered about the possibility of waking back up. Stories about resurrection and immortality are found in countless religions and myths, and in recent years, many of these stories have hinged on the idea of cryonic preservation: freezing a body and then reanimating it in the future. If it worked for Han Solo, Captain America, and Fry from Futurama, why can’t it work for us?
“[For] most cryonicists, there’s two things you’ll find: We are sci-fi lovers, obviously. We’re also optimists,” says Dennis Kowalski, the president of the Cryonics Institute, a non-profit based in Michigan and one of a handful of companies worldwide offering its line of services.
That optimism is important, because cryonic preservation and reanimation is “100 percent not possible today,” according to Kowalski. But, he says, “we certainly have more to learn and to discover in the future.” Kowalski, a former paramedic, cites modern life-saving interventions like cardiac defibrillation and CPR as examples of how science can drastically advance.
Based on that premise — that someday, science will find solutions to biological damage that’s irreparable by today’s standards — the aim of cryonics is to keep bodies in a stable, preserved state until the necessary medical technology arrives. Even to its staunchest adherents, cryonics isn’t a guarantee; Kowalski describes it as “an ambulance ride to a future hospital that may or may not exist.”
When someone who’s made arrangements to have their remains cryonically preserved is declared dead, a medical team cools the body with ice water and keeps the body’s tissues oxygenated using CPR and oxygen masks. The icecold body is put in a hermetically sealed container and flown to the cryonics facility.
There, the team puts the body on a machine similar to a heart-lung bypass, circulating the blood and maintaining oxygenation. They pump in a vitrification solution that works like antifreeze to keep the body’s tissues from turning to ice crystals, in hopes of minimizing structural damage. Then, they slowly cool the body to minus 320 degrees F in a liquid nitrogen vapor chamber. Once it’s cold enough, the body is transferred to a Thermos-like tank of liquid nitrogen, where it’ll stay for the foreseeable future.
The bodies will wait in these tanks until medical technology (hopefully) is able to revive them. Kowalski says there are three challenges for this future tech to overcome: It’ll need to repair the damage done by freezing, cure whatever ailment originally killed the subject, and reverse the aging process so that the subject has a young, healthy body to enjoy in their second go-round. No one knows what that technology might look like; Kowalski’s best guess is tissue engineering and molecular nanotechnology that will be able to repair and replace damaged tissues.
Kowalski and his fellow proponents of cryonics recognize that it’s a tall order. But if you ask most cryobiologists — scientists who study the effects of freezing temperatures on living tissues for procedures like organ transplantation — about cryonics, they’ll just shake their heads.
“There is absolutely no current way,
“[For] most cryonicists, there’s two things you’ll find: We are sci-fi lovers, obviously. We’re also optimists.”
no proven scientific way, to actually freeze a whole human down to that temperature without obliterating the tissue,” says Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. When scientists attempt to freeze a sample of living human tissue, like a slice of liver, “the tissue is completely obliterated, the cell membrane is completely destroyed.”
Cryonicists like Kowalski are well aware of criticisms like these. He argues that while these problems are insurmountable to us today, they may well be solvable in the future. It’s a point that’s definitionally impossible to rule out — almost like definitively proving that there’s no such thing as unicorns.
“You have nothing to lose, everything to gain. Other than some life insurance money,” says Kowalski, who is signed up for cryonic preservation along with his wife and sons. “Even if it doesn’t work, we’re still advancing science, figuring out what doesn’t work. And if it does work, we just stumbled across a cure for death, at least temporarily.”