Who is in cryonic suspension

Because of those difficulties, cryonics experts feared that the body had suffered serious damage. But the examination in quelled those concerns. In recent years, cryonics promoters have borrowed from medical advances in such fields as cryobiology and nanobiology. To prevent ice crystals from damaging cell walls in the frozen state, cryopreservationists replace the body's blood supply with mixtures of antifreeze compounds and organ preservatives — a technique developed to preserve frozen eggs for fertility treatments.

Another emerging approach accounts for the separation of Ted Williams' head and body. Based on studies of roundworms, promoters of cryonics argue that freezing can preserve the contents of individuals' brains even if their bodies can't be revived. That opens the possibility of downloading cryopreserved personalities into a robotic future body. Hendricks disagrees. Scientists such as Barry Fuller, a professor of surgical science and low temperature medicine at England's University College, London, emphasize that even preserving body parts in such a way that they remain viable on thawing remains a distant dream.

Nevertheless, Perry expresses optimism about a timeline for the revival of frozen humans. Reprinted with permission from Inside Science , an editorially independent news product of the American Institute of Physics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing, promoting and serving the physical sciences.

IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Share this —. Other cryogenically revived people would be a good starting point for replacing lost connections.

Like refugees arriving in a new country, communities of formerly vitrified persons would likely bond around their shared experience and temporal origins. Where members of those communities would live or how they would support themselves are other unanswered questions. The hope is that future returns can help revived persons get back on their feet, so to speak.

To be bodiless but aware is a ghost-like state completely foreign to what any human has ever experienced before Credit: iStock.

It is possible, however, that money will no longer exist by the time cryonics pays off, and that people will not have to work for a living. A society that has achieved the medical breakthroughs necessary to cure disease and end aging, Kowalski and others believe, may also be one bereft of poverty and material want.

In such a scenario, clothing, food and homes, fabricated with 3D printers or some other advanced means, would be abundant and freely available. Still, even if cryogenically revived persons come back to a more equitable and advanced future, the mental flip-flops required to adjust to that new world would be substantial.

Dislocated in time, alienated from society and coming to grips with the certainty that everyone and everything they had ever known is irretrievably lost, they would likely suffer symptoms of intense trauma. Communities of formerly vitrified persons would likely bond around their shared experience and temporal origins Credit: Getty Images. Kowalski agrees, pointing out that people who move from developing countries to more industrialised ones often do well in their new environment.

Likewise, those whose bodies are altered by an accident or in combat are able to carry on. There is also the question of how those from the distant past would go about creating relationships with those from the present.

What would it be like to be genuinely out of your own time? No-one has ever experienced it Credit: iStock. Those from that time would be almost alien creatures.

These scenarios are still based in the realm of the imaginable, but there is an additional, wildcard option for how all of this could turn out. As Kauffman points out, the brain functions in conjunction with sensory organs and other bodily sensations, and even those cut off from their bodies, such as quadriplegic persons, still have self-images. He seemed to be pretty confident that he would be back someday; in a interview, when asked for a piece of wisdom to pass on to cryonicists, he said, "I'm sure that any profound piece of wisdom I might have would seem really rather stupid in years.

So I think it would be better for me to say nothing, so I don't feel ashamed of myself in years. Yeah, that was his real name. He was born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, but changed his name to reflect his goal of living to be would have been his th birthday.

He also predicted that would be "a magical time. In we will be ageless and everyone will have an excellent chance to live forever. He died in at the age of 69 when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He was cryogenically frozen because he believed that people would soon develop synthetic organs and body parts that would make the notion of death a thing of the past.

Dora Kent is a sad tale maybe. Her son, Saul, was a board member of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation most of these cryogenically-frozen people were frozen by Alcor and are stored in their facilities. In at the age of 84, she came down with a fatal case of pneumonia and was unable to recover. When it looked like death was upon her, she was brought to the Alcor facilities so they could freeze her when she died.

And they did, with no doctor present.