The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved | Hacker News Reader

The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

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63 pointsyinghang51 comments

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials).

But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain image onto an organic robot, thus making it possible to have many copies of the same person.

I also find the concept similar to the teleport. You may be the person who goes in, but are you the same person who comes out the other end? Indistinguishable from you, only you are not the observer of your own reality.

[Edit: A couple of really obvious grammatical errors]

>someone has to go first

Probably there'll be animal experimentation first. Then when Fido's still able to fetch they'll give humans a bash.

That's assuming humans would be performing the resuscitation, which I doubt. If general intelligence has been solved, it will probably be an AI doing the work.

Well there's a scary thought. Sending your loved ones into the future full of machine whose motives may not exactly be the same as ours.

Not saying machines will be running the show, just that they'd likely be handling the logistics of the resuscitation itself.

If general intelligence goes sideways and takes over, the probability it'd care about resuscitating preserved humans is extremely low.

That said, waking up into some sort of Roko's Basilisk-esque eternal torment would kind of suck.

Only if the observer were some metaphysical being, rather than simply the inside view of a particular computation. If you reproduce the computation faithfully, you have reproduced the observer.

Lets hope that part of science is discovered before the restoration part.

Where my thoughts end up more in the personal beliefs rather than scientifically backed is down to what the observer is defined as. Could this be the same as a soul?

One thought that I have is whether the physical state is bound with a non-physical state, like you (non-physical) controlling a remote controlled car (physical). By freezing the subject you could detach this binding, and by thawing you could reattach another observer, maybe based on proximity, with the memories and physical mind of the original.

Hollywood has pretty much covered all these concepts in one shape or another.

[1] The Prestige - Teleportation

[2] 21 Grams - Existence of a soul

[3] The Matrix - AI controlled future

Is there any name for this puzzle? I've been thinking about this for a while now.

Cloning the particles (and their states) that make you up would most likely produce a separate mind, as I think would teleporting where v1 is destroyed and v2 consisting of different particles, although in the same configuration. But what about separating said configuration, transporting them somewhere else and putting them back together? Cryogenics is in my opinion the only possible way to give a chance in preserving an original mind well beyond natural human lifespan without actually extending it.

Not only can't others tell a clone apart from the original: the hypothetic clone, as I understand it, couldn't do that either. Now what if this process, due to cellular regeneration in the brain, happens constantly? Your mind is not the same it was a minute ago: that mind is dead and gone. Would it even matter?

The thing is, unless you have certain metaphysical beliefs, the very concept of "identity" is a flawed one and doesn't really represent the reality of us being actually a complex aggregate structure of cells. The concept of "self" is in my opinion just a rough approximation or a framework that we use to quickly assess reality, much like time, as we commonly think of it, does not fully represent the complexities of relativistic time, however it is useful to manage our daily life[1]: the sentence "I'll be with you in 5 minutes" could open a whole lot of possibilities if we consider time in a relativistic scenario, whereas it is fairly unambiguous in our daily life. Similarly, the concept of "self" would be very ambiguous with regards to e.g. annelid worms (who can be split in 2 and survive as two separate individuals[2]) whereas it sums up fairly well the way we think of ourselves as individuals.

[1] See http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2166333... [2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(reproduction)

It was called "Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?" in a poll of philosophers:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/what_do_philoso....

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2009/12/15/who-are-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

A long (but relevant) web comic.

Serious question: what's to salvage from the brain of a terminal brain cancer child? This strikes me as a very silly way to preserve a human being. If they really wanted to give their child a "chance" to live a full life, they should have cryogenized her sooner, no? (It might be illegal, though.)

The serious answer is that resuscitation of cryopreserved humans is not currently possible and has never been done. We have no idea whether anything from the brain or the body is salvageable, nor whether starting sooner or later makes any difference.

Perhaps one way to think about it is that cryopreservation is a modern alternative to a grave burial, and the thing most salvaged is the hope and memories in the family and friends of the deceased.

I agree. Resuscitation seems unlikely, given that the freezing process itself damages the tissues, as well as the degradation that has already happened post-mortem.

They don't freeze, they vitrify. That's a very big difference.

http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html#myth2

We can debate the degree to which cryoprotectant perfuses the brain outside a laboratory test of tissue, but vitrification appears to preserve the fine structure of tissue very well:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/

There is evidence of synaptic preservation in preserved and restored nematodes:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/rej.2014.1636

Well, they resuscitated a nematode. That's... actually worth updating my view of how well they can preserve things. I should go ask people for help interpreting that paper.

100 years from now is a long time for medical advancements. Would you imagine having an MRI or CT scan 100 years ago? Or that they'd induce hypothermia in an emergency room to stave off damage from cardiac arrest [1]?

[1] http://www.popsci.com/node/205352

Personally, I'm with you on this. Cryonically suspending a person that died from brain damage or debilitating disease has even more fleeting chance for success. Unless there's a chance that at the moment of death the conscience is still there (due to great redundancy in the brain), it might be futile, after all. This is one issue that I believe all cryonics companies and advocates prefer to wholly overlook.

I imagine it should be terrifically hard to let go of your child and 'kill' them preemptively, for them to have a hope of later life. Even if the parents did even consider that option.

As far as I see it, cryopreserving a person that is not legally dead ('cryothanasia'?) might be possible, but no cryonics company has procedures in place to arrange for it and I am not aware of anyone that has been preserved this way. At least, it is necessary to move to a country where voluntary euthanasia is legal and the associated autopsy is not mandatory, and you are on your own with this. [1] This is another issue that cryonics companies and advocates prefer to overlook.

Cryonics is still very niche as it is. People are still very reluctant to arrange for cryopreservation beforehand, as it is. Cryonics companies have their hands full with just continuing to operate and convincing people to use their services. For there to exist people that are fully rational about their own or their loved ones' death, and think about it more deeply than the cryonics companies and advocates, is a whole next step entirely: I am unaware of such people yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_euthanasia

> Unless there's a chance that at the moment of death the conscience is still there (due to great redundancy in the brain), it might be futile, after all. This is one issue that I believe all cryonics companies and advocates prefer to wholly overlook.

You seem to be arguing that death is a binary state, but I don't think this is particularly well established. There are all sorts of arguments over what constitutes definite proof of death [1]. It seems more likely to me that the process of dying is a transition, and that the exact point along that transition where someone is irreversibly gone depends on our current level of medical technology – which is exactly what cryonics is betting on.

As an analogy, when RAM loses power, the data on it doesn't vanish instantly, but rather degrades over some period of time [2]. Depending on how the information is stored, what you're willing to do without, and what you can piece together, you can declare the data in RAM "gone" at different points throughout that process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_definition_of_death

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/h...

I didn't mean to disagree argue that; just didn't have enough time to think this question over before typing.

Yes, death is not a binary state physically, but it is legally. This is what cryonics counts for.

Also, conscience is not binary; there is plenty of evidence that it is uneven and noncontinuous. People lose conscience and then regain it and live on all the time. Many people live in reduced states of consciousness most or all of the time. Our mind tries to maintain illusion of continuity of consciousness for our convenience. Sometimes people survive ridiculous amount of brain damage (men living with a hole in their head). All this is evidence that whatever forms our conscience is very redundant and just might survive the damage of what today is considered death and future restoration. Especially with the help of whatever medical technology will be available in the future (nanotech, hi-res brain scanning, etc.); especially if it would be needed anyway to counter the damage sustained during cryopreservation.

> People lose conscience and then regain it and live on all the time.

Do you mean "consciousness" here? I assumed you actually meant conscience at first but this sentence doesn't seem to make sense with that word but then you use consciousness later which means it isn't just a spelling error. I'm not asking to be pedantic, but because I'm now getting confused about what you're trying to say in parts of your otherwise interesting comment.

It is clear that you have done a good amount of research, which is great! If you look further, you will find that in fact there are plenty of people who are interested in precisely this aspect of brain preservation/cryonics. See, for example, [1], [2], [3], [4].

[1] http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2012/05/20/...

[2] http://www.brainpreservation.org/preservation-rights/

[3] http://www.oregoncryo.com/aboutCryonics.html

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/should-cryonics-...

Attempts to cryopreserve people who are still (just about) living will take more months of human life than will ever be restored by foreseeable future revival attempts.

> foreseeable future revival attempts.

I don't fully disagree with you, but this is sort of begging the question, since cryonics seems to rely heavily on the chance of unforeseeable advantages.

On top of that, you seem to be committing the common fallacy of equating every minute of life as the same, whether you're suffering terminally in a hospital bed or watching the sunset with friends (this is also why people choose to be taken off the respirator or have DNRs). Using something like QALYs makes infinitely more sense (though switching to QALYs may not quite invalidate your point).

When the only certainty is killing people, I'd question whether the incalculably remote possibility of "unforeseeable advantages" undoing that killing counts for anything at all.

The last thing advocates of euthanasia and DNR for the heavily-suffering should want to see is their ethical arguments muddied by cryogenics salespeople hanging round hospitals persuading people that they'd be better off dying shortly after diagnosis...

> When the only certainty is killing people, I'd question whether the incalculably remote possibility of "unforeseeable advantages" undoing that killing counts for anything at all.

I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you but I don't think misrepresenting the arguments made by proponents is the same thing as rebutting them, like you did in this second comment.

> The last thing advocates of euthanasia and DNR for the heavily-suffering should want to see is their ethical arguments muddied by cryogenics salespeople hanging round hospitals persuading people that they'd be better off dying shortly after diagnosis...

Uh, that's great and everything but it's not even remotely relevant to the point of whether QALYs are a more appropriate measure than raw years of life for measuring the effectiveness of cryogenics. Sorry if that sounded a little caustic, but I find enormously tiresome the cynical tactic of appealing to "that argument is dangerous, what if someone down the road abuses it?" when one is unwilling or unable to address a point. Particularly because you could come up with some scenario in which pretty much every assertion could be used for ill.

As you seemed to acknowledge yourself, QALYs don't really affect my original argument because unless you're ascribing negative utility to the remainder of the patient's lifespan, hastening a patient's death in the hope that it might have some effect on an incalculably small probability of future resuscitation still has a negative impact on QALYs. A fantasy of massively expanded future lifespan in perfect health multiplied by a probability best estimated at zero is still zero, to the best knowledge of all medics involved in the process.

If patients are making decisions to shorten their lifespan it should be on the basis of suffering less pain rather than subscribing to pseudoscientific twaddle about unforeseeable sufficiently advanced technological magic. The OP seemed to think the latter should have been prioritised if legal.

Its rather tiresome when people accuse me of being "unwilling or unable to address a point" after they've already parenthetically acknowledged it doesn't really change anything.

Wouldn't it make more sense to clone her whenever the cure becomes available? since she was so young...

You don't need to wait for the cure if you're just going to clone. But it won't be the same person. A two year old is old enough to know and recognize and do all kinds of things.

If we have the technology to both:

(1) Resuscitate cryo-preserved (vitrified) brain tissue.

(2) Re-create a body and somehow transfer this brain or mind into it (or upload consciousness)?

... then it is likely that we would have such a deep understanding of consciousness and mind that we could repair or scan-around the damage. I think we're talking about "singularity" levels of both technology and philosophical comprehension here. It's all total sci-fi for the time being.

> what's to salvage from the brain of a terminal brain cancer child?

Her personality and memories, of course. Most of the brain is back-office, keeping the body alive and doing low level processing. The parts containing "her" could easily be untouched by cancer. Keeping just her brain frozen is a bit of a stretch, but all the hurdles are strictly technological in nature. Make a clone (or a partial clone, if you have ethical concerns), cut and paste the good parts into the clone and you've healed her completely.

It may seem a lot right now, to fuse brain parts together or to do head transplants, but they aren't really that far-fetched. Barely 100 years ago we were still arguing whether heavier-than-air flight is possible, and weren't even dreaming concepts like radiation or turing computability. Compared to that making nerves grow back together is just elbow grease.

Has any living person ever had their heart intentionally stopped, been cryonically frozen, defrosted, and revived?

Because if not, then we don't know if it works on people who aren't yet dead. And if we can't do that, what hope do we have for reviving the actually dead?

(I'm aware in rare cases people have been massively cooled down and had their heart stopped for operations, but that's not quite the same.)

No.

Which question was that a 'no' to? (there were two questions in the post you're replying to)

Presumably the first.

There's also some cases of people who's hearts had stopped after being caught outside in sub-zero temperatures being successfully revived with no adverse effects.

This isn't cryonics by any stretch, but doctors are seriously looking to put gunshot victims into suspended animation by drastically cooling them down so they can be worked on [0]:

When a shooting or stabbing victim goes into cardiac arrest due to massive bleeding, even the most heroic attempts at resuscitation fail 90 percent of the time. But a study to begin this month under the direction of Sam Tisherman and Patrick Kochanek at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Presbyterian Hospital will see if there's a better way: cooling the body after the heart has stopped beating, to the point where all other functioning virtually ceases as well.

By putting patients literally into a state of suspended animation—or "emergency preservation," as Tisherman calls it—the surgeons intend to preserve brain functioning long enough to close wounds that would otherwise be fatal.

[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140402-suspe...

There absolutely no hope right now. The idea (for better or worse) is that there will be some scientific breakthrough in the future (e.g., nano-scale medical robots) that will make it possible to repair the damage done by the current, very crude, freezing technology. You're taking a gamble on future technology. My impression is that the typical person signing up for cryonics thinks that there's a small chance of success, but almost no downside if it fails (you're already dead).

As far as I know nobody went through the cryogenic preservation process before they were declared dead due to legal reasons. It is a shame really. I hope at one point, somewhere in a country with less regulations, that will be done as well. Similar to the first heart transplantation.

Well... the whole idea behind cryonics is that the people preserved with current technology can be revived/reconstructed with future technology. Asking for a full preservation & resuscitation today is demanding evidence that wouldn't exist even in the case that cryonics works.

That said, there is evidence available today. 21st Century Medicine is a company that does research on cryoprotectants. Their chief science officer is Greg Fahy, who co-invented the first method for cryopreserving embryos[1].

21st Century Medicine's primary goal is to research new ways of cryopreserving tissues. This is already useful for research and some tissue banking (embryos, corneas, etc). If improvements continue, it could allow for organ banking. But the brain is an organ, and cryopreservation technologies work quite well on it. For example, 21st Century Medicine can take a slice of a rat's hippocampus, cryopreserve it, and thaw it. Afterwards, it's still viable tissue.[2] This is very important, as the hippocampus is not only crucial for memory consolidation, but it's the part of the brain most vulnerable to ischemic damage (especially the CA1 region).

21st Century Medicine has also experimented with whole organs. They've taken a kidney from a rabbit, cryopreserved it, thawed it, and transplanted it back into the rabbit. Then, after removing the remaining kidney, the vitrified-and-thawed kidney kept the rabbit alive indefinitely. Alcor uses the same cryoprotectants as this experiment.

If cryonics works, this is exactly the sort of evidence you'd expect to see today. Granted, it probably won't work, but the expected value is positive.

1. Ice-free cryopreservation of mouse embryos at −196 °C by vitrification (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v313/n6003/abs/313573a0...)

2. Cryopreservation of rat hippocampal slices by vitrification (http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf)

3. Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification (http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/12FahyORG5-3%5B1%5D.pdf)

Its impossible to imagine how hard it would be to lose a child, but I can imagine why that state of mind makes even the remotest glimmer of hope for reincarnation seem like a good idea.

I thought This American Life's episode on cryonics was riveting, educational and fascinating.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/m...

i agree, this is tasteless and should be forbidden in my opinion, the only one who should be able to decide if they want to be frozen and revived should be the person themselves.

It's impractical with kids any more than you can ask them if they want to be born.

Some might call them zygotes.

I was thinking that myself. Sperm, eggs, embryos - are these not vitrified routinely?

Probably they mean youngest legal human, or youngest post-birth vitrification.

How much does this cost?

In this case, probably $80,000.

This is Alcor, the most established and expensive option. Their list prices are $80,000 for neuro (brain only), $200,000 for whole body preservation [1] There are various funding options. [2]

Cryonics Institute, the other US-based organization, charges $28,000 for full body [3] (they don't offer neuro)

Russian KrioRus charges $12,000 for neuro and $36,000 for full body. [4]

NB: if the cost seems high, keep in mind that most of the money is supposed to be held in trust for the cryonics patient so that income from principal can pay for long-term storage. [5] History proved that it's the only way to reliably and sustainably finance cyopreservation, potentially indefinitely.

I am not affiliated with any cryonics organization, just researching my options.

[1] Alcor FAQ: Cost http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#cost

[2] Alcor: Funding http://www.alcor.org/BecomeMember/sdfunding.htm

[3] Cryonics Institute FAQs: http://www.cryonics.org/about-us/faqs

[4] KrioRus: Human cryopreservation http://kriorus.ru/en/Human-cryopreservation

[5] Cryonics FAQ by by Ben Best http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html#_IIIG_

I hope this doesn't count as feeding the trolls, but I found it slightly amusing that some of the replies to your post claiming it costs them $x were marked as [dead] by HN. =)

I can't imagine having to deal with this situation, loss of a child. However, this all seems a bit silly.

Spoiler: two years old.

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