Cryogenics - good or bad?

Question

I watched a programme about it this evening and just wondered how people feel about cryogenics.

Should we freeze people after death until we can reanimate them cured of their original illness?

Or do you feel it is unnatural and shouldnt be done?

Do you think we can reanimate their original 'soul' their essence of who they were?

Just wondered what everyone else thinks of it.

Thanks,
lozz

Answer 1

It's definitely an interesting technology. Theoretically it could work but it would be incredibly complicated. I freeze mammalian cell lines for tissue culture all the time in liquid nitrogen. You just thaw them and they bounce right back and start dividing again (notably, a bunch do die in the process).

That being said, the body is such a complicated machine that bringing things back up to speed after being frozen would be incredibly daunting technologically, if not impossible. The previous poster is right that freezing bodies without any preservatives causes massive cellular damage. This is because water, unlike most compounds, actually expands when it's frozen (put a bottle full of water in the freezer and see). When the water in your cells and blood vessels expand, they smash open. If you thawed those bodies and "woke them up", they would probably suffer incredibly extensive internal hemorrhaging followed by widespread tissue necrosis.

One can overcome this tissue damage by pumping the circulatory system full of protecting, such as dimethyl sulfoxide or glycerol (which is how I freeze my cells). This diminishes cellular damage but after that stuff has soaked through every tissue in the body including the brain, how do you think it's going to function when "awoken". How can you get it out fast or completely enough (perhaps by keeping them partially suspended during prolonged dialysis)?

Much more interesting is the current work in suspended animation. Recently, people have made great strides. One group showed that exposing rats to very low levels of sulfur dioxide (poisonous gas at higher doses) it causes the metabolism to slow to a crawl, the body temperature fall almost to room temperature, and for the rat to be in suspended animation. They seem to suffer no ill effect when awoken. Another group at Massachusetts General Hospital is working on suspended animation to help patients with massive trauma (they are testing it in pigs now). They can remove all the blood (ALL OF IT!), replace it with very cold liquid with free radical scavengers (antioxidants basically) and go to lunch, play chess, forget about the friggin pig. Then they can transfuse chilled (but warmer) blood back in, warm the pig back up with a heating blanket and most of them are just fine.

Answer 2

Oh looks like we have a lot of experts on here.
Which one of you can prove that it wont work.
I love experts, like the guy who said it was impossible to do heart transplants.
Cryonics is already used for embryos and sperm
How can you know what will be possible in the future
We are already messing with life are you saying nobody should be resuscitated, nobody should have life saving operations, which were also impossible if you go back in time.
I am signed up for cryonics myself and am also part of the standby team.
If we listened to experts we would still be living in caves.
The classification of death is changing, it has already, from stopped breathing, heart stopped, now it has to be brain stem death, who is to say at some point the brain cant be re started.
Why is it un natural ? are you saying it is un natural to live or want to live.
How can you be sure there is a soul.
Ice damage is now becoming less of a problem as techniques improve.
Given the choice of being eaten by maggots or sent up a chimney I will stick with my cryonics. If it doesn't work I have lost nothing and wont know anything about it. If it does work it will be mind blowing.
We cant prove it will work and nobody yet has proved it wont.

Answer 3

Cryogenics needs to be done while they're alive, if they're dead its a bit too late to cure them.

Your sense of who you are is encoded in memory engrams in your brain, which probably wouldn't survive cryogenics by freezing with ice. There is no method at the moment that a person would survive going through.

Answer 4

i dont believe in god or the soul, if saomeone wants to try cryogenics and can afford it let them try it i mean they're dead youve got to do something with your body - personally im leaving my dead body to the hospital saved my life a few years back let the students cut me up. i carr a donor card as well so any bits can be reused to let someone else live a little longer or little better they can

Answer 5

one chance at life.

80 years if you are lucky.

no one should come back cryo or otherwise.

the world is over populated, we are too good at curing disease and defects and its not the way it should be (i nearly said as god intended then- dude im no holy man)

natural selection dictates how long you live for.
live life my friend.

and get a hat

Answer 6

It will never work . the reason is ice crystal with in actually cuts the cells and damage of this sort is like freezer burn and is non reversible.

Answer 7

COOL question ..... Let me think about it....


No I like the heat so its Cremation

Answer 8

I think its wrong.

How would the brain cope with it for starters?
I don't think we should be messing with life.