Depressed Metabolism

On May 16, 2010 the only non-US cryonics provider KrioRus announced the cryopreservation of its 12th patient. The patient was pronounced legally dead on May 5 in Kiev and cryoprotectant perfusion was completed on May 7 after initial cooldown and ground transport to Moscow. A more extensive report is available here. It is encouraging to [...]

This past weekend (Friday, January 8, 2010 to Sunday, January 10, 2010) I attended a meeting for cryonicists in their teens & twenties near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The event was funded by Bill Faloon and the Life Extension Foundation. Cairn Idun, creator & coordinator of the Asset Preservation Group, created & coordinated this event as [...]

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with individuals in the life extension and cryonics movement. Rudi Hoffman is an Alcor and CI member and the most prominent seller of cryonics life insurance policies.  His website with information about how to fund cryonics can be found here. Did you find out about cryonics [...]

Alcor’s recent news item about its 2009 Annual Board Meeting and Strategic Meeting contains a number of encouraging statements. On the front of institutional reform, however, there is not much news to report. The passage about the need to balance recruiting new Board members and preserving institutional memory reads as a rather uninspired defense of [...]

Once a year I try to attend at least one biogerontology conference. Although I attend biogerontology conferences out of personal interest, and at my own expense, they are the most fruitful grounds for promoting cryonics I have found, and this is especially true of SENS conferences. I have missed none of the four SENS conferences [...]

Danila Medvedev has translated Ben Best’s  article “Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice” into Russian. The translation is available on the KrioRus website. The original Engish article was published in Rejuvenation Research and is available as a PDF file at the Cryonics Institute website. ABSTRACT Very low temperatures create conditions that can preserve tissue for centuries, [...]

The June 2009 issue of Rejuvenation Research features an article by Cryonics Insitute President Ben Best about the involvement of nuclear DNA damage in the aging process: Abstract This paper presents evidence that damage to nuclear DNA (nDNA) is a direct cause of aging in addition to the effects of nDNA damage on cancer, apoptosis, [...]

Real estate is all about location, location, location. Location matters in cryonics as well. The objective of standby and stabilization in cryonics is to limit injury to the brain after pronouncement of legal death. Unfortunately, many cryonics patients have not been stabilized promptly after pronouncement of legal death because the cryonics organization did a poor [...]

Following the news that mice have been cloned from 16 year old frozen tissue comes an announcement that scientists have made advances in resurrecting  the extinct Pyrenean Ibex. This does not only offer hope that someday other extinct species may be resurrected and returned to nature, it further reinforces the power of low temperatures to [...]

My experiences with death began in 1974, when I was age 10. On Labor Day Sunday, while watching the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, my father told me to turn the TV off. When I asked why, he said my grandfather, age 74, died. I would learn years later that he had emphysema and heart trouble. [...]

Contrary to popular opinion, in cryonics the blood of the patient is replaced with a cryoprotective agent to reduce freezing, or more recently, to eliminate ice formation altogether through vitrification. This procedure requires surgical access to the circulatory system of the patient to wash out the blood and replace it with a cryoprotective agent. But [...]

This is the first in a series of interviews with individuals in the life extension and cryonics movement. We start off with an interview with Ben Best, president of the Cryonics Institute. What is your philosophy toward life? I think that “sense of life” or emotional involvement  in life is the most crucial determinant of [...]

Today’s post on 21st Century Medicine’s vitrification agent M22 completes the series on vitrification agents in cryonics. To date, three different vitrification agents have been used for cryopreservation of humans: B2C (at Alcor from 2001-2005), VM-1 (at the Cryonics Institute since 2005) and M22  (at Alcor since 2005). Perhaps the most encouraging development in cryonics [...]

A major public misperception is that cryonics involves the freezing of dead people. The objective of cryonics is not to preserve dead people with the hope of future revival but to place critically ill patients in a state of biostasis until a time when more advanced medical technologies might be available to treat and cure [...]