Why The Scifi Dream Of Cryonics Never Died
The environment has changed for Drake, who has been director of medical services for the Alcor Life Extension Foundation for the past seven years. Although Alcor has been a leader in cryonics, it was still a small non-profit organization. Since 1976, he has been freezing the bodies and brains of his members with the idea of one day bringing them back to life.
Foundation and cryonics in general remained out of the mainstream for a long time. Generally shunned by the scientific community, cryonics is best known for its appearance in science fiction films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey . But his supporters hold on to the dream that at some point in the future, medical advances will allow him to recover and live for more years on Earth. Over the decades, exciting little developments in related technologies, as well as famous frozen objects like Ted Williams, have kept hope alive. Today, around 200 deceased patients are frozen in Alcor's cryogenic chambers at -196°C, including several celebrities who have paid tens of thousands of dollars for "potential rebirth" and eventual "reintegration".
But Yinfeng's latest involvement marks a new era in cryonics. With enormous financial resources, government support and scientific staff, it is one of the few new laboratories dedicated to expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and attempting to retest the long-debated theory of human resuscitation. A year after Drake took over as director of research at the Shandong Yinfeng Life Sciences Research Institute, a subsidiary of the Yinfeng Biological Group that oversees the cryonics program, the institute conducted its first cryopreservation. His tanks now host a dozen clients who pay upwards of $200,000 for full-body care.
However, this field is still based on faith rather than actual evidence that it works. "This disappointment shows a tremendous ignorance of biology," says Clive Cohen, a neuroscientist and professor at King's College London.
Even if one day you manage to completely thaw a frozen human body, you will still have a warm corpse in your hands .
The cryonics process often works like this: after a person dies, the response team cools the body to a low temperature and provides cardiopulmonary support to maintain blood flow to the brain and organs. The body is then taken to the cryonics department, where a solution to preserve the organs is pumped through the veins before the body is submerged in liquid nitrogen. This process must begin within an hour of death: the longer you wait, the more damage is done to the body's cells. Then, as soon as the frozen corpse is placed in a cryogenic chamber, the pile of dead begins.
Since its inception in the late 1960s, this field has drawn criticism from the scientific community, especially from its more respected relative, cryobiology, which studies the effects of low and low temperatures on living organisms and materials. The Cryobiology Society banned its members from practicing cryonics in the 1980s, and the society's former president criticized the field as being closer to "fraud than faith or science."
However, in recent years it has attracted the attention of the libertarian crowd of techno-optimists, mostly tech tycoons who dream of their own immortality. And some startups are leveling the playing field. For example, Tomorrow Biostasis in Berlin became the first cryonics company in Western Europe in 2019, and in early 2022 Southern Cryonics opened a facility in Australia.
"More researchers are open to long-term futuristic issues than there were 20 years ago," says Emil Kendiora, founder of Tomorrow Biostasis.
