ASC can be seen as next-generation cryonics, but also as an alternative form of cryonics—"cryonics for uploaders"—designed for future post-biological revival.
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Makuch also visits two cryonics facilities, the newly opened Oregon Cryonics, and Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, which has already preserved 146 patients.
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" Michael R. Page on cryonics: "Robert Ettinger was one of the early proponents of [cryonics], and Pohl became a spokesman of sorts for that process.
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While we still hear skeptical sounding statements about cryonics, the obvious lack of any sound technical argument against the feasibility of cryonics is becoming increasingly obvious.
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It's worth noting, however, that Alcor and other established cryonics providers like Cryonics Institute and Kriorus could be in the best position to start offering a vitrifixation option.
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And lurking beneath the surface, there is a different fear—that cryonics might just actually work and that signing up for cryonics might be the most insanely rational decision you will ever make.
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"Cryonics Institute has no association with this doctor," Kowalski said.
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Image: Cryonics InstituteA terminally ill 14-year-old girl had her dying wish come true when a British high court approved her request to be preserved at a cryonics facility in the United States.
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He decided to sign up to cryonics and had packed up his life in Ohio to live near the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, so he could be near the facility when his time comes.
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Shannon Vyff, the director of the Society for Venturism, a cryonics advocacy group, is also signed up for cryonic suspension, and she's had a long interest in Death With Dignity as it pertains to cryonics.
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And genuine concern exists about the feasibility and viability of cryonics.
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Alcor is the first and largest cryonics firm in the world.
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This would help with another important issue in current cryonics: cost.
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Vitrification without fixation is the cryonics procedure currently used by Alcor.
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"Otherwise it would be wiser to invest in cryonics," he said.
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" But cryonics, he told me, is "a chance, and it's uncertain.
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The documentary also briefly features cryonics, mind uploading, robotics, and oncology.
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Cryogenic facilities are out there like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute.
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Aschwin de Wolf, the editor of Cryonics Magazine and CEO for Advanced Neural Biosciences, says it's good that Hayworth and others are holding Alcor to a high standard, because it pushes the science of cryonics forward.
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These questions might seem self-evident, and nix any interest in cryonics.
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McIntyre's system is unique in that it combines chemical fixation with cryonics.
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He said she spent her final months researching cryonics on the internet.
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"Cryonics doesn't make anything easier about our thoughts of death," she says.
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For Sahatorn and Nareerat Naovaratpong, cryonics is just another branch of science.
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That's when he published his cryonics magnum opus, The Prospect of Immortality.
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It was already 24 hours after he died that I began considering cryonics for him, and, like humans, the cryonics process works best if it's begun within hours of death—especially to preserve the brain and its memories.
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He also noted that she spent her final months of life researching cryonics.
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Cryonics in its current form is more of a religion than a science.
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Dewars at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan where the teen is now cryopreserved.
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We would ask that he please not associate his transplant activities with cryonics.
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"Cryonics only seems disturbing because it challenges our complacency about death," he said.
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I asked More whether he thought the general vibe around cryonics will normalize.
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Aschwin de Wolf, the editor of Cryonics Magazine and CEO for Advanced Neural Biosciences, says the honeymoon period between advocates of vitrifixation and mainstream scientists appears to be even shorter lived than that of "traditional" cryonics advocates and mainstream scientists.
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Its only true competitors are the Cryonics Institute located near Detroit—a 7,000-square-foot facility that currently hosts 100 preserved individuals—and CryoRus near Moscow—the world's first cryonics firm based outside the United States, and home to 51 corpsicles.
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The problems faced by cryonics are at least an order of magnitude more complex.
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In fact, such a business model is pretty consistent in the nonprofit cryonics community.
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Reversible cryopreservation—that holy grail of cryonics—has so far remained out of reach.
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Death is, for the time being, unavoidable, but cryonics offers a possible work-around.
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I only really witnessed people with a religious faith involved with cryonics in Russia.
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Despite the high price, a second chance at life definitely isn't certain with cryonics.
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Brockbank noted that the "cryonics movement" will probably "distort the importance" of their new research.
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See more photos from The Prospect of Immortality below: Catstat, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan.
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The Cryonics Institute preserves only whole bodies and rejects any unfounded predictions about what we do.
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They lie in the flat file like a body on a slab at a cryonics lab.
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Or should they be viewed as the "patients" cryonics vendors would have us believe they are?
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Are those who believe in cryonics forward-thinking scientists, or just deluded individuals terrified of death?
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"He believed in cryonics, but he didn't believe in mutilation," his brother Jim told the outlet.
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Instead, the province outlaws advertising cryonics services that encourage the "expectation" of being resuscitated one day.
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What's more, the case was not about a ruling on the science, ethics, or efficacy of cryonics.
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Chamberlain and other cryonics enthusiasts may eventually have to choose between vitrification with, or without, pre-fixation.
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For example, Singularity University's Jose Cordeiro is working on improving the virtually-unknown cryonics space in Spain.
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The process involves three key steps once someone has been declared legally dead, according to the Cryonics Institute.
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The Cryonics Institute in Clinton township, Michigan holds a similar number—150 humans, plus more than 100 pets.
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McIntyre agrees, and said the technique needs to be discussed more before it can be considered in cryonics.
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Revival of today's cryonics patients will require future repair by highly advanced future technology, such as molecular nanotechnology.
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Therefore Alcor does not expect body donations or transplants to ever be necessary for revival of cryonics patients.
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So I think to really see a big shift in the practice of cryonics will require technical breakthroughs.
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She froze her cat at the Cryonics Institute, and the process cost her about $5,700, she told me.
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The Cryonics Institute in Clinton township, Michigan holds a similar number—2000 humans, plus more than 100 pets.
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The Cryonics Institute alone has more than 800 members in the United States and more than 100 more worldwide.
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Photo: Brain Preservation FoundationIt's for this reason that the technique is being heralded as a new form of cryonics.
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Ettinger followed suit and founded the Cryonics Institute (CI) in 1976 in Clinton Township, Michigan along with three others.
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It comes after the advent of an almighty, all-knowing AI within our lifetime and cryonics, in that order.
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His will stipulates that his body should be handed over to a cryonics company and his brain should be scanned.
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And they want to solve the problem of death, whether by freezing their bodies through cryonics or uploading their consciousnesses.
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That means…Read more ReadAs I've argued before, the right to assisted death is important in the context of cryonics.
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Cryonics pioneer Linda Chamberlain could become a virtually immortal superwoman, but she must choose how: There's more than one way.
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With Zero K, DeLillo invites us to contemplate whether cryonics is another possible panacea for avoiding the terror of fatality.
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The practice is called cryonics, and researchers have been using the technique since the first patient was preserved in 1967.
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But even if the science of cryonics does end up checking out, there are still a lot of unanswered questions.
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Don't get your hopes up on cryonics (cryopreserving your whole body) or bringing Ted Williams back from his icy, decapitated stasis.
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CRISPR gene editing, chip implants, designer babies, cryonics, bionic augmentation, and artificial intelligence were changing the landscape of the human race.
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A big thing just happened in the world of cryonics, and it has nothing to do with Ted Williams' permafrozen remains.
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Instead of cryonics, he is working toward "mind uploading," the construction of a mind that can exist independent of the body.
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In a similar vein of cryonics is the idea of preserving your brain for a possible digital consciousness in the future.
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The 14-year-old London girl is one of 11 Britons to have been frozen under this procedure, Cryonics UK said.
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The girl's body was recently flown to the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute for storage, and an updated Times article appears here.
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The actual deep freezing will likely be done by a company outside of Canada such as Arizona-based cryonics leader Alcor.
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The ability of some organisms to survive freezing is a sign from nature that what cryonics promises might one day be possible.
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Laurence Pilgeram, a scientist long involved in the cryonics community, was Alcor's 22015th patient, and is the subject of the aforementioned lawsuit.
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Michigan-based Cryonics Institute offers a similar payment structure, albeit at the more affordable cost of just $1473,000 for whole-body preservation.
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It's a breakthrough that could have serious implications for cryonics, and the futuristic prospect of bringing the frozen dead back to life.
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It's a preposterous claim given the current limitations of medical science, and a complete misreading of how the fledgling cryonics industry works.
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Hayworth says that chemical fixation, in conjunction with cryonics, is the future of brain preservation, and that Alcor has it all wrong.
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Such a scientific and cultural shift would be unquestionably unsettling, and it may account for much of the vitriol directed at cryonics.
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For the slugger Ted Williams, who died in 2002, Mr. Carhart visited the Alcor Life Extension Foundation cryonics lab in Scottsdale, Ariz.
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The elder Pilgeram was a long-time supporter of cryonics, even giving a speech on the subject at a conference in 1971.
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Though I don't doubt its prophets are well intentioned, contemporary cryonics is essentially a belief system providing comfort against the fear of death.
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Cryonics UK, a nonprofit organization, says cryopreservation cannot be guaranteed to work and that it's up to people who want to try it.
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Alcor, the world's leading cryonics institute, has only 2101,21 full members after four decades—and that includes the 2569 patients currently in cryostasis.
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Its members discussed AI, cryonics, nanotech and crypotoanarchy, among other things, and some reverted to transhumanism, creating an organization now known as Humanity+.
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"The Book of Resting Places" is Mira y Lopez's account of his travels, from a cemetery to a crematorium to a cryonics company.
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A Montana man is counter-suing a cryonics organization for $1 million and to get the frozen head of his scientist father back.
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Dennis KowalskiPresident, Cryonics InstituteThe scientifically correct answer is that we do not know, since no one knows the future and what will be possible.
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A dispute had erupted between the girl's divorced parents about whether the girl's remains should be cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute near Detroit, Michigan.
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Aside from her 17-year-old son, who has recently developed a more cynical take towards cryonics, the family is enthusiastic about the prospect.
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In a summary published earlier this year, Alcor said Hardy's case was an "important milestone for Alcor and for cryonics," and for good reason.
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Photo: GettyA man is suing a cryonics firm for allegedly not respecting his late father's wishes—or contract—to have his entire body cryogenically preserved.
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Classicists at Alcor and the Cryonics Institute steadfastly believe that brains (and bodies, for that matter) must be preserved with as little damage as possible.
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"Hayworth's position seems to be that a cryonics organization should only offer cryopreservation services if its electron micrographs are indistinguishable from controls," de Wolf says.
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Currently, only three storage facilities exist in the world: the Cryonics Institute in Michigan where JS is stored, Alcor in Arizona, and KrioRus in Russia.
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The promise of a deathless future at the heart of cryonics research presumes that immortality may be achieved by uploading our neural structures into machines.
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However, quite a few have told me that they don't see a conflict, and liken cryonics to any other life-saving technology, such as CPR.
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Fighting the emotion that threatened to paralyze him, he alerted the cryonics team waiting nearby and called the hospice nurses to come pronounce her dead.
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As a final note, there are companies out there who, for a price, will gladly preserve your brain, albeit via the more "conventional" form of cryonics.
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More says that people instinctively react against cryonics as a "psychological immune reaction" to death, having internalized mortality to the point where its presence is unquestioned.
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As it stands, no one who has opted for cryonics has ever been brought back to life, and it's not likely to happen any time soon.
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Most advocates "feel life is good and they hope to have more of it through cryonics," she said, pointing to a 2017 survey of cryonicist attitudes.
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He's often quoted in cryonics message boards and publications, and before his death made the media rounds, including TV appearances with David Frost and Johnny Carson.
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But according to The Times, one unnamed transhumanist said he and Epstein once chatted about cryonics, and Epstein said he'd want his head and penis frozen.
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Cryonics is the process in which human remains are kept in a frozen state until science has advanced to the point that they can be reanimated.
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To get his hands on cryogenically-preserved brains, Canavero said he'll recruit the help of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company located in Scottsdale, Arizona.
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Cryonics is the practice or technique of deep-freezing the bodies of those who have died of an incurable disease, in the hope of a future cure.
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Cryonics—the science of using sub-freezing temperatures to preserve people in the hope that resurrection may come in the future—is a pseudo Easter for atheists.
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Whether scientifically nutty or not, cryonics in Ettinger's time, and now, are—literally—banking on a world that is better than the one we live in today.
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According to the Cryonics Institute, an US organization that offers the service, the fundamental goal is "to give people a second chance at life" and extend human lifespans.
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But unlike conventional cryonics, where an entire body or head is preserved in a vat of liquid nitrogen, the ASC technique makes no effort to preserve biological function.
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Refracting the past through the present, Winterson links automation, A.I., cryonics, and sexbots to the human yearning to transcend the aging, mortal bodies that we are born into.
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Cryonics and minor novels aside, it's already clear that DeLillo, through his masterpieces, will endure; the open question is who else can follow his example in living forever.
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A local group of cryonics enthusiasts helped to prep the girl's body in advance of its transport to the US, while a hesitant hospital staff assisted as well.
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Alcor is the largest service provider for cryonics—the practice of freezing "patients" immediately after death, in the hope that future technology will bring them back to life.
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" Cryonics is based entirely on the hope that future scientific advances will be able to make use of these bodies and severed heads to achieve "life after revival.
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In Frozen Faith: Cryonics and the Quest to Cheat Death, Motherboard explores whether the patients and animals already preserved ever have a chance of coming back to life.
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There's no proof that it works, but advocates say cryonics offers a "non zero" chance of returning from the dead, even if the odds of it working are slim.
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But it's through cases such as this one, and the precedents that they set, that the practice of cryonics, or whatever seemingly futuristic practice is in contention, becomes normalized.
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Gizmodo also reached out to Dennis Kowalski, the president and CEO of the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute, to see how another leader in the field felt about Canavero's claims.
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The primary vehicle in the pursuit of immortality has been cryonics: freezing people in liquid nitrogen, in the hopes that they can one day be safely defrosted and revived.
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The first cryonics patient in Russia was a neuro-patient, so only her head was cryopreserved; her body was buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.
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Still, advocates of the practice argue that it's not any different than donating your body to any branch of science, and they point out that cryonics is rapidly progressing.
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Cryonics has for decades tendered the double dream of immortality and the chance to sit out the worst of times until medicine and civilization get their perpetual act together.
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This preservation—the first of its kind—signifies an important milestone for cryonics advocates, who argue that the right to death, paradoxically, is a potential pathway to an eternal life.
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Their experiment had come to an end, but the article went on to mention there was an organization in the United States that offered a more professional form of cryonics.
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It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
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"Advocates of cryonics are unable to cite any study in which a whole mammalian brain (let alone a whole mammalian body) has been resuscitated after storage in liquid nitrogen," he said.
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Sahatorn and Nareerat Naovaratpong—both of whom hold PhDs in science and engineering—argue that cryonics is a misunderstood branch of science "at the edge of human limitation," as Sahatorn says.
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In a phone call with Motherboard, Craib explained that the idea came from his own personal membership of cryonics provider Alcor, whose services will now be extended to Numerai employees too.
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At a cryonics center, all the fluids in a patient's body are removed, and replaced instead with a cryoprotectant, a kind of antifreeze meant to keep the body's cells from freezing.
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The largest cryonics organization in the world, it currently holds 146 patients—52 frozen whole bodies and 94 frozen brains—including baseball hall-of-famer Ted Williams and Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney.
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But it could also apply to cryonics —the practice of preserving a person in cold storage in the hopes that they'll eventually be brought back to life once the requisite technologies exist.
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Eric Drexler, the "father of nanotechnology," proposed a form of vitrifixation for cryonics use in his 1986 cult book " Engines of Creation," envisioning future nanorobots able to systematically repair all molecular damage.
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The challenge comes from today's standards of cryonics freezing, which according to officials at the foundation, causes massive dehydration in the brain, squashing the neural connections and rendering it useless for imaging.
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Cryonics advocates like to point out that there's nothing inherently infeasible about the prospect, but at the same time, providers have to be prepared to wait centuries before they achieve their goals.
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We most commonly think of "cryonics" as the preservation of a body after someone is dead, in hopes that we'll someday be able to resurrect them or otherwise cure whatever killed them.
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That seems to be the thinking, at least, of the ultra-wealthy Americans spending thousands on "young blood" transfusions, preserving their bodies through cryonics, and colonizing space in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.
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The not-for-profit cryonics organization Alcor was founded in 1972, froze its first human in 1976, and its facilities currently house 2003 people and 33 pets, according to the company's website.
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The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences's Pseudoscience Commission, Evgeny Alexandrov, described cryonics as "an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis", in comments to the Izvestia newspaper.
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The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences's Pseudoscience Commission, Evgeny Alexandrov, described cryonics as "an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis", in comments to the Izvestia newspaper.
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As a believer in cryonics and a multi-million dollar investor in a variety of life-extension projects, Thiel is on a mission to cure what he sees as the problem of mortality.
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The PayPal founder, after all, has never practiced law, once wrote that women's suffrage was antithetical to a "capitalist democracy," and promotes fringe ideas like cryonics and paying young geniuses to skip college.
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However, in the end, I decided to go with cryonics because of one particular teaching from the Lord Buddha: 'Believe when there is a reason to believe, otherwise that belief will lack wisdom.
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He finds himself walking the halls of the sunken structure—which is in fact a cryonics facility—where his father's sickly younger wife is waiting to have her body frozen when she dies.
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Cryonics—that is, the deep chilling of corpses with the hope that at some point in the future, they can be resurrected—is the focus of my story in VICE's Future of Technology issue.
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All told, an estimated 300 or more people are cryogenically frozen in the US today, including Ettinger, the movement's unlikely father, who died in 2011 and is cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan.
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"Over recent months, JS has used the internet to investigate cryonics: the freezing of a dead body in the hope that resuscitation and a cure may be possible in the distant future," he said.
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As long as we have good reason to believe that the original state of the brain can be inferred from the altered state, offering cryonics services is not only reasonable but an ethical mandate.
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"If you want to have a chance of living much, much longer, then whether cryonics gives a five percent chance or a ten percent chance, it's still very good value for money," Craib said.
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Kurt Pilgeram alleges that the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of the largest cryonics organizations in the world, improperly removed his father's head, cremated his body, and sent the ashes to his family members.
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In a related Telegraph article about the Cryonics Institute, its president and chief executive says memory may be lost if the process is one day reversed successfully and bodies are brought back to life.
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I visited a cryonics facility outside Phoenix, in which the severed heads of the faithful were stored in liquid nitrogen, in the hope that future scientific innovations would permit their eventual return to life.
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Since cryonics are not a branch of science we've been able to master yet, at some point, the world this game takes place in had technology slightly (or vastly) better than what we're familiar with.
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If it can be proven that cryonics prevents irreversible damage to the brain so it can be revived, then a strong case can be made that the individual is still a person deserving of rights.
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Interestingly, Robert Ettinger, the "father of cryonics," told me he used to make grand statements about life in the future, hoping it would inspire people to sign up, but he realized it was a mistake.
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And then the argument is that the worse possible outcome of being cryopreserved is to remain dead, so cryonics gives you a chance of future revival that will not happen if you are buried or cremated.
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"Because ASC uses perfusion fixation as its first step it avoids the main complications of cryonics which has always been a delicate race to increase CPA [CryoProtectant Agent] concentration while simultaneously lowering temperature," Hayworth emailed me.
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Alcor initially sued Kurt Pilgeram in 2017 after he allegedly attempted to stop his father's life insurance from paying the not-for-profit cryonics organization, which, in cases like this, depend on such payouts for funding.
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Aside from the still-unrealized goal of reanimation, the problem with cryonics, as Sam Shaw found when he profiled low-temperature preservation pioneer Bob Nelson for "This American Life," is how to keep the refrigerators on.
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"...massively challenging and far beyond what is currently possible..."Ralph MerkleDirector of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world's leading cryonics organizationThe short version is: many of the patients at Alcor will likely be revived sometime this century.
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The unusual statement was made in a tweet on Tuesday from founder Richard Craib, with a link to a job posting for a software engineer in which "whole-body preservation cryonics" is listed as a benefit offered.
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The major problem in cryonics is that people are skeptical of whether it will work, and rightly so I would say given that cryopreservation does not work for large human organs or even for small mammalian models.
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On today's episode of Daily VICE, we meet Matthew Deutsch, a young advocate of cryonics, the process of deep freezing a body with the hope of preserving it to be brought back to life at a later time.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story said standard cryonics freezing renders the brain useless according to the Brain Preservation Foundation; in fact, what they said was that the procedure renders it useless only for electron microscopy imaging.
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Correspondent Ben Makuch meets with the individuals who believe more than anyone else that they'll live forever via cryonics, and tries to untangle whether they've merely found a comforting new religion, or if they've actually got it right.
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"It is not really clear what critics are wanting to see right now, and what kind of information they think is still being erased by either chemical fixation or vitrification [the technique used in cryonics]," de Wolf told Gizmodo.
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Cryonics, the practice of freezing oneself in the hopes that you can later be brought back to life and cured of whatever condition (including old age) motivated your decision, is basically illegal in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
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"Despite the claims made by cryonics companies, they've failed to demonstrate that the extraordinary mass of tissue that constitutes the human brain can be protected by the antifreeze that they try to pump through the body after death," he said.
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"Any attempt to deviate from this norm—this idea that cryonics is somehow 'unnatural' or a kind of perversion—leads some to believe that any person who would support such a thing must have something wrong with them," More says.
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The next step for cryonics research is to demonstrate these techniques work on larger animal brains, and so the Foundation has an unclaimed prize out for the first team who can preserve a pig brain, or one with similar size.
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A few days later, I was leafing through the Guardian and came across an article; it told the story of a French family who had attempted their own cryonics experiment with a modified industrial freezer in the cellar of their chateau.
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Contrary to the practice, current in the cryonics industry, of starting work only after a patient's certified legal death to avoid regulatory and legal complications, Hayworth is persuaded that ASC should be performed on a living brain before death to ensure optimal results.
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As of now, the entry that seems to be closest to winning the prize isn't exactly cryonics, but rather a new brain-banking technique where brains are removed before death and are treated with both a cryoprotective agent and a chemical fixative.
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Sure, there's a very real possibility that neither cryonics or ASC will work to preserve your memories and personality, but as cryonicists like to say, having your body preserved in a vat of liquid nitrogen is the second worst thing that can happen to you.
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Elaine Walker, 47, is a single mother and part-time college instructor at Scottsdale Community College who signed up to have her head frozen at Alcor nine years ago, after discovering cryonics in an online newsgroup back in the pre-Google days of the 1990s.
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According to Cryonics UK, a nonprofit organization that embalmed and transferred the girl's body to a storage facility in Michigan, once a patient is declared dead, a response team swiftly injects a cocktail of chemicals to try to reduce blood clotting and brain damage.
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The province of British Columbia, the defendant in the case, seeks to have the court refuse to make a ruling on the case since the LSBC doesn't currently provide or advertise any cryonics services and their argument is "academic and hypothetical," the province contends.
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She offers her mushroom suit as an alternative to what she calls the "death denial" practices of the funeral industry — which is still embalming bodies then putting them in coffins entombed in concrete liners — and the cryonics field, which aims to preserve dead people for later revival.
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He thinks that Alcor and CI have "given up on the idea of society and the medical community accepting cryonics," but he's holding out for changes that will allow people to preserve their brains before they die, as part of a continuum of care offered by healthcare providers everywhere.
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"Two hundred thousand dollars for the whole body, $80,000 for the head—that's where your memories are; we should be able to rebuild the rest," explained R. Michael Perry, who is a live-in employee at the Alcor cryonics facility in Scottsdale, where he helps watch over more than 160 preserved bodies.
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But the good news …Read more ReadBut unlike conventional cryonics, which attempts to preserve the biological components of a person's body or brain, this new school of cryobiology envisions "synthetic revival"—a process in which the complete database of a single individual's neurological information can be used to create a new digital version.
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It's not science fiction — to some it might not even be science — yet thousands of people around the world have put their trust, lives and fortunes into the promise of cryonics, the practice of preserving a body with antifreeze shortly after death in hopes future medicine might be able to bring the deceased back.
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In "Zero K," two central characters seek to conquer death not by outrunning it but by submitting to it: They plan to be "chemically induced to expire" and frozen at a supersecret cryonics compound so that one day they might be resurrected — through a yet-to-be-perfected science involving cellular regeneration and nanotechnology.
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In fact, after legal death has been declared the government views Alcor's 147 "patients" as nothing more than bodies and organs donated to science under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which means even though Alcor signs a contract with its members saying it will deliver its cryonics services, it is under loose obligations to do so.
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We're loath to confront the undignified lengths we will go to in our fight against aging and mortality, whether it's in the "feminine" pursuit of looking younger or the wealthy man's pursuit of life extension, which comes complete with its own ghastly para-scientific fads: intermittent fasting, blood transfusions from teenagers, human-growth-hormone injections, cryonics.
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"With Norman Hardy we have moved one step closer to making cryonics a viable reality, since choosing the time of one's death allows cryonicists to perform an optimal preservation instead of trying to preserve a brain that has been dead for hours," James Hughes, a bioethicist and the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, told Gizmodo.
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Also, we tour a cryonics center in Arizona where folks are betting on a chance at a second life, talk to some hackers who are making online dating simultaneously more and less complicated, visit recycling centers for old TVs that have become toxic-waste sites, look at why a fraction of the gaming work force is striking, and speak to the guy responsible for breaking Ticketmaster.
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If there is a way to "solve death," as Friend puts it, whether through cryonics or gene therapies, a kind of vampirism in which Silicon Valley billionaires "end up being sustained by young blood" or more wholesome methods such as good nutrition and medicine, some combination of the above or perhaps an actual sorcerer's stone, the next generation of well-funded alchemists is determined to find it.
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The aimless protagonist, one Jeffrey Lockhart, is whisked into the wastes of ex-Soviet Central Asia to meet with his estranged father, Ross, a finance billionaire who has channeled much of his fortune into the development of the Convergence, a vast underground cryonics project: For the right (unfathomably high) price, men and women will have their bodies frozen so that they might be revived in a future where technology permits them to live eternally.
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As to whether or not irrevocable damage occurs in the brain during the seconds and minutes following death, or as the brain is brought down to temperatures reaching -196 degrees Celsius (-320 degrees Fahrenheit) is another question entirely; a notorious issue facing cryonics is the degree to which "ice crystal formation, osmotic shock, and membrane damage during freezing and thawing will cause cell death," as noted in a 2017 Integrative Medicine Research study.
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