“This mainstream acceptance raises a key question: If vitrification can preserve embryos and organs like kidneys, why wouldn’t similar principles apply to brain preservation of cryonics?”
Most animals and organisms tolerate environmental changes. Few can tolerate extreme environments, especially freezing temperatures, without putting their lives in danger. Uniquely, the wood frog, woolly bear caterpillar, young painted turtles, tardigrades, alligators, and iguanas are part of a group of animals that can survive freezing temperatures by naturally producing their own biological cryoprotectants. This means that these animals have evolved with a metabolism that protects them from temperatures that would normally freeze their bodily fluids. In other words, they naturally prepare themselves by producing antifreeze compounds of glycerol, antifreeze proteins (AFPs), and sugars.
Humans do not have this ability. While I am not an expert scientist in this particular area, I do have specialized knowledge in the long-term memory of simple animals undergoing biostasis. Outside of my scientific research, my innovative projects on longevity include academic courses, lectures, and my own longevity practice as a hands-on innovator in the field. Being an innovator also means that I need to understand why a new science or technology is developed. This knowledge helps to find better loopholes and gaps, where advances in science and technology can potentially make the difference. With this in mind, I have learned that advances in the field of biostasis have followed the originations in nature and created very advanced cryoprotectants for cryonics to eliminate ice formation that would cause cellular damage. Recent innovations bring about a far greater degree of biological slowing and much more protection from the effects of cold temperatures.
To be clear, for the purposes of this discussion, there are three important terms worth noting: biostasis, cryopreservation, and cryonics. Biostasis is the general concept of preserving biological material. Cryopreservation is a specific method of biostasis using very cold temperatures, and cryonics is the controversial application of cryopreservation techniques to entire human bodies, with the goal of future revival.
The future of biostasis for humans is reversible human biostasis, currently in the form of cryopreservation. Cryopreservation is widely regarded as a controversial practice. Advocates of cryonics argue that advancements in future science and technology may offer the possibility of revival and restoration. As I will explain in more detail later, critics often dismiss cryonics as unscientific, labeling it a “pseudo-science” or incorrectly reducing it to merely “freezing corpses,” while some skeptics who doubt its feasibility do acknowledge that cryopreservation is not entirely unreasonable.
Reversible human biostasis entails cryonics practitioners using sophisticated means of protecting the human body against freezing damage. Rather than freezing, cryonics practitioners vitrify or cool the body to a glass-like state (rather than freezing tissues) by introducing high concentrations of cryoprotectant. This is the same technology successfully used for decades for human reproduction for preserving embryos. The process of vitrification of embryos in reversibly preserving human eggs and sperm for reproduction mirrors the process for corneas, skin, and recently mammalian organs and brain tissue—and, in the future, human cryopreservation.
It is undeniable that approximately 150,000 people around the world die every day. For each person, the uncertainty of mortality weighs heavily. This uncertainty can become all the more acute when we hear about how biomedical science is advancing and finding cures for diseases at exponential rates. Consider that the deadly virus of smallpox, which historically killed 300-500 million people, was eradicated worldwide in 1980. HIV/AIDS was once a death sentence and is manageable today through antiretroviral therapy. Heart disease preventive care has saved millions of lives, and diabetes can now be regulated with insulin therapy.
While it is difficult to quantify the exact number of diseases, dozens of previously fatal conditions are now curable, preventable, or manageable. This progress reflects a remarkable improvement in life expectancy and quality of life over the past half century. These facts remind us that there could be a cure for a life-threatening disease and to ask, “What if there will be a cure just around the corner?”
But cures for specific diseases will add only a few years to life expectancy. Biostasis of human cryopreservation offers a chance to take patients into the future in an unchanging condition. Then, these patients potentially can benefit from far more advanced medical technologies, including those that halt and reverse the aging process.
If we look at the issue of delaying the finality of death through biomedical intervention (if a cure is possible or biostasis if a cure is not possible), it becomes a logical next step to consider human cryopreservation. But why is there not more support within the scientific community for investing in and developing more cryonics research, as well as for marketing to increase the number of people signing up for cryonics? (This will also bring down the current price.)
To answer this question, we might first ask why many scientists downplay the possibility of cryonics actually working. The most obvious reason is that they could be putting their reputations and, therefore, funding in danger. As such, it is easier and more beneficial to their funding options to stick with the social acceptance of death rather than to suggest that death is a biological consequence of cellular senesce and that mitigating this process is a next step in the future of medicine.
Second, the lack of knowledge on the part of so-called experts in evaluating the ethics, accountability, and the actual hard science of cryonics is missing. Instead, as Max More, a leading expert on biostasis, who was the longest-standing CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, writes: “[a]n expert in current resuscitation research and practice may look at the state of a cryonic patient’s cells and, especially the brain, see that they don’t know of any way of reversing the damage, and conclude that preservation is not ‘sufficiently good’.”
The lack of vision or even advanced understanding of where medicine is headed underlines a clear deficit. Medical fields we expect to be knowledgeable about cryonics and the broader field of cryobiology (as well as that of resuscitation medicine) often display significant comprehension gaps. This extends to intensive care medicine, anesthesiology, trauma surgery and, emergency medicine, along with the relevant fields of biochemistry, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
As an example of inadequate knowledge or visionary wherewithal about the future of medicine, one expert in cryonics tissue preservation, Jens Karlsson at Georgia Institute of Technology, told the Chicago Tribune in 2021: “They are effectively destroying the body and preserving the pieces, hoping someone in the future can put the pieces back together.”
Claims that cryonics destroys cells are demonstrably false. Many tissues and now organs can be successfully cryopreserved, as mentioned above. In fact, as stated earlier, the field of fertility treatment has been cryopreserving embryos since the 1970s with success, as evidenced by the 8,000,000,000 or more people walking about planet Earth who were once an embryo is a petri dish that was cryopreserved.
This statistic got me thinking: If embryos can tolerate the extreme environment of freezing temperatures of vitrification without putting their lives in danger, what happens to their neurons? Do the brains of the wood frog, wooly bear caterpillar, or young painted turtles tolerate the cold and when warmed up function the same as they did before? I wanted to know if I could test the neuronal function of a simple animal in biostasis: simple animal cryopreservation.
My research approached the question of neuronal function in the long-term memory of a simple animal before and after cryopreservation. Using a methodology of training and testing, I was able to observe repeated patterns that indicated the simple animal had remembered in which areas of a petri dish the food had been placed through olfactory imprinting. The results showed that the mechanisms that regulate odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in young C. elegans were not modified by either the process of vitrification or slow freezing. This provided the first evidence of preservation of memory after cryopreservation.
According to More, a growing body of evidence supports the idea. As he recently told me, “the evidence for biostasis continues to accumulate, including reversible preservation of more tissue types and whole organs and studies of vitrified neural tissue that demonstrates excellent preservation of structure.”
Eventually, as biostasis achieves wider acceptance, hospitals are likely to include it as part of their standard medical practice. Rather than disposing of critically ill people when their hearts stop beating, doctors will give their patients a chance of living again in the future.
Once hospitals acknowledge that biostasis is an extension of emergency medicine, it seems likely that such hospitals will initiate the stabilization procedures before turning over the patient to a dedicated biostasis organization. Medicine is highly conservative and highly regulated, so this is unlikely to happen soon. We need more and clearer evidence that vitrification and other methods can preserve brain tissue sufficiently well. That evidence has only recently begun to accumulate. For hospitals to perform initial stabilization in-house—rather than, as now, allowing in an external team—laws will also need to change. Currently, organ donors and some other patients in certain jurisdictions can be declared legally dead while biologically alive. Hospitals will need to accept that someone who is clinically dead is not truly dead but will soon become so if they are not put into biostasis.
No one knows the future, but we do know today that most people want to live as long as possible, and in good health. People’s desire and advocacy for good health might be the ultimate driving force pushing the longevity industry further, past current therapies and cures and into the edge of tomorrow. The future of the longevity industry cannot ignore cryonics. In fact, in my view, the longevity industry could eventually be a major player in financing new scientific and technological advances to revive those currently in suspension.
Today, the scientific community widely accepts the cryobiology of vitrification research for organ preservation and transplantation. This mainstream acceptance raises a key question: If vitrification can preserve embryos and organs like kidneys, why wouldn’t similar principles apply to brain preservation of cryonics? The disparity between mainstream scientists’ enthusiasm for organ vitrification and their criticism of cryonics deserves greater scrutiny. This is because they have yet to provide compelling scientific reasoning for why preserved brains would be fundamentally less recoverable than other organs. This is a first step. And while animals have evolved with different metabolisms that protect them from harsh temperatures and even bacteria store pieces of viral DNA as a form of adaptive immunity against future viral infections and later alter their own genes (resulting in what we now call CRISPR), why not consider how advances in technology, along with artificial intelligence, might offer new insights and new innovations that could benefit biomedical advances in service of human cryopreservation?.
Natasha Vita-More, Ph.D. co-pioneered the philosophical world movement of transhumanism, created the first artificial intelligence-driven nanorobot biocompatible body prototype, and established a scientific discovery in long-term memory in the field of cryobiology. She has been featured in numerous media outlets, and her works have been honored at Telluride Film Festival, London Museum, Vigeland Museum, and Brooks Memorial Museum. She can be found on X @NatashaVitaMore
