Cryonics

[ciphergoth]

I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, kidneys are doing a much simpler job than brains, there are very many ways in which brains will be much harder.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Indeed, yes. For one thing, kidneys are fairly physical devices: hook up the right fluid in- and out- connections and they'll pretty much "just work" under the control of the right chemicals in the bloodstream. The brain, not so much.

(BTW the rabbit that lived with the thawed out frozen kidney? Did it still have the other one?)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

(BTW the rabbit that lived with the thawed out frozen kidney? Did it still have the other one?) What do you think?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

I'd expect that if it lived, it still had the other kidney.

However, tracking down the original research has been interesting: most citations bother linking to anything link to this conference programme (pdf), which - surprise, surprise - doesn't actually contain a reference to the transplant.

What I did find, though, is that similar work on rabbit liver tissue shows that it suffers fairly severe damage on freezing and thawing.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

So, given that you'd be surprised by it, if you were later convinced that the research was legit and that the rabbit lived with only one thawed kidney, you'd update on that Bayesian evidence?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

If you can point me at a publication in a peer-reviewed journal, of course I'd update.

But kidneys are a heck of a long way from liver tissue, and even further from brain/nervous tissue.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15094092

http://www.cryostasis.com/perspectivesandadvances.pdf

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Cheers for those. Fahy's name then leads me to this one: Organogenesis 5:3, 167-175; July/August/September, 2009; © 2009 Landes Bioscience, which is essentially progress since the earlier work. There are still problems with getting the cryoprotectant fluid all the way into the kidney, though, and with the toxicity of the cryoprotectant itself.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

What do you think led you to the wrong conclusion in your guesses about the rabbit kidney?