Cryonics

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Surgeons prepare a human body for cryostasis

Cryonics (from ancient Greek κρύος kryos , German 'ice, frost' ) is the cryopreservation (also cryostasis ) of organisms or individual organs (mostly the brain ) in order to "revive" them in the future , if possible .

Action

The cryopreservation of larger organs and organisms has so far caused damage that cannot be repaired with the means available today. The respective antifreeze agent would have to be precisely tailored to the individual cell types . Since this is not practicable, the focus is mostly on the best possible preservation of the brain with the aim of being able to replace imperfectly preserved tissue in the future, for example by means of tissue engineering . It is still unclear whether this damage will be reversible in the future.

For conservation, modern cryonics has been using vitrification since the beginning of the 21st century in order to avoid the formation of ice crystals. Otherwise, ice crystals lead to a large number of microscopic injuries which, based on current knowledge, can be classified as irreversible.

For storage, the organism or the organ is usually cooled at −196 ° C in liquid nitrogen . Here, the glass transition temperatures of the vitrification solutions used (for example approx. −120 ° C for M22) are well below, which leads to breaks in the tissues. Since these are only a few macroscopic fractures, the technology providers consider them to be reversible in principle.

Another challenge is thawing. While the thawing of a larger organism can take several hours, there is a conflict of objectives: On the one hand, critical temperatures must not be exceeded, which, for example, leads to the denaturation of the proteins contained in the tissue, on the other hand, care must be taken that the tissue does not die during thawing due to an insufficient supply of oxygen. For larger organs and organisms, this problem has not yet been resolved.

Provider and legal situation

In the US, cryonics is offered by nonprofits such as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the Cryonics Institute . There people can go into cryostasis after their death. The first human cryopreservation was carried out on January 12, 1967 on James Bedford , whose body is now being held at Alcor. The commercial provider KrioRus has existed in Russia since 2006. A detailed legal examination by Jochen Taupitz comes to the conclusion that cryonic storage is also legal in Germany for an indefinite period of time. CryoSuisse states that this also applies to Switzerland.

Contact persons for the topic of cryonics in German-speaking countries are Cryonics Germany , CryoSuisse , CRYOVAL , the Ulm project by Klaus Sames and the German Society for Applied Biostasis . The latter also awards the Robert Ettinger Medal for outstanding achievements in cryonics.

implementation

Since January 17, 2013, the 23-year-old Kim Suozzi is the 114th patient of the “Alcor Life Extension Foundation” in Scottsdale, Arizona, who received “cryonically”. The Missouri psychology student had raised money in the months since she learned of her cancer and was cared for by a non-profit organization in the United States. A total of 254 people have been stored in liquid nitrogen so far (as of February 2013). In addition, there are 20 people at a cryonics provider in Russia, although in some cases only the heads with the brains are kept. Supporters refer to tissue engineering , with which artificial tissue can already be colonized with human stem cells. Suozzi wrote on her blog: "I think it's better to bet on this progress than to rot."

From today's point of view, the decisive step is the choice of the suitable agent to replace the body's own fluid: vitrification. The decisive approach is freezing without ice crystal formation. The sixth refrigerant variant has been in use since the method was introduced. They are mixtures based on dimethyl sulfoxide , formamide and ethylene glycol . However, the toxicity of the substances remains a problem. In a series of tests, the US researcher Gregory M. Fahy succeeded in freezing the vitrified kidneys of rabbits for a few minutes, thawing them and re-implanting them, with one of the animals living on for a period of 48 days, after which the experiment was ended. Vitrified brain tissue also showed a response to electrical stimuli .

Since substances are formed in the body just a few minutes after cardiac arrest, which would ultimately lead to massive reperfusion damage that has been irreversible , a quick initial cooling is urgently required. The American Kim Suozzi moved to a hospice near Alcor headquarters. As a result, the preparation could begin promptly when the heartbeat stopped. The body is placed in ice and treated with a heart-lung massage to keep the blood circulation moving and to supply the brain. Infusions are supposed to prevent the formation of free radicals, nitrogen oxides and body toxins, while narcotics are used to reduce the oxygen uptake of the brain. After this on-site treatment, they are transported to the devices in the operating room. Here the blood is completely drained and the blood vessels are rinsed with a cold solution and gradually filled with the (toxic) vitrification solution at a temperature of −125 ° C. After several hours the body has also reached this temperature and the liquid is "glazed". In the course of two weeks, it is then cooled to −196 ° C with liquid nitrogen. In the cryostat, nitrogen only needs to be topped up at monthly intervals.

A full body treatment costs between 50,000 euros (at Krio-Rus) and 150,000 euros at Alcor, and at Cryonics Institute 27,000 euros. If only the head is frozen, costs of 7,000 to 60,000 euros are incurred. These sums are required for the readiness of the first aid of a trained team and the research and development expenses. Membership in preparation for cryonic care requires an annual fee of 100 to 450 euros.

Fictional reception

Science fiction uses cryostasis in various forms, for example as an explanation for manned space travel at sub-light speeds or to transfer figures from current events into the future.

Often freezing and reawakening is used in literary works as a time leap method. For example, Edward Bellamy, in his novel A Review from 2000 to 1887 , let the main actor rise from the freezing and compare his time with a development a hundred years further.

In the 1956 novel by Robert A. Heinlein , The Door to Summer , cryonics also plays a role; not only to enable the time jump from 1970 to 2000, but also to bring the ages of two main characters in love into line. In the world of the novel, however, living individuals allow themselves to be frozen voluntarily.

In the movie Forever Young , shortly before the outbreak of World War II, a test pilot is frozen by his friend, an inventor, after his girlfriend was injured in a traffic accident and fell into a coma. Contrary to plan, however, he did not wake up from artificial sleep until the 1990s and now has to search for his past in a completely strange world.

In the film Demolition Man , both a gangster and a policeman are thawed in a cryogenic prison after several decades of cold sleep and in this future they continue their fight against each other.

The subject of cryonics is also touched on in the Spanish film Abre los ojos and its US remake Vanilla Sky . The subject is also dealt with in Wes Craven's film Chiller - Cold as Ice from 1985. In the US film Avatar - Departure to Pandora , people are put into cold sleep in order to bridge the time of the journey to the fictional moon Pandora in the Alpha Centauri system. In the film Idiocracy , two people are frozen ( freeze-dried ) and resuscitated after several centuries. In 2014, the topic of cryostasis was taken up in the science fiction film Interstellar to explain the bridging of time during long space travel. Perhaps the most famous movie scenes in which humans are reversibly cryopreserved are those of the Star Wars series. Here this is done using the fictitious material carbonite. In the movie The Return of the First Avenger , an old friend of the captain's from WWII appears. He was frozen in the Soviet Union to be woken only for important events, that's why he's called the Winter Soldier .

The animated series Futurama begins with the main character frozen for a thousand years and thawed again in 3000. This possibility of preservation with frozen heads is also shown in the US series Fringe , and this topic is also taken up in an episode of the series Castle (4x03).

Vitrification also plays a major role in some of the works of the Polish writer Stanisław Lem , especially in the novel Fiasko .

In the video game Fallout 4 , the inhabitants of the fictional city of Sanctuary Hills , including the protagonist and his family, are housed in a supposed nuclear shelter shortly after the fall of the atomic bomb. There, under the pretext of decontamination , they are enclosed in so-called cryocapsules and put into a cold sleep as test objects for the company Vault-Tec . If the cold sleep system fails, the protagonist can free himself from the capsule after more than 200 years, although he has not aged a bit physically.

The “resurrection” of the Star Trek character Khan Noonien Singh and his followers, who belong to a group of genetically optimized people, happens in a similarly unplanned way . After sleeping for several hundred years, they are woken up in 2267 by the crew of the spaceship Enterprise.

The electropunk band Mono for everyone! attacks the cryonics and posthumanist approaches in 2001 published, satirical to interpretive song vision of immortality on.

See also

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Fahy, Wowk, Wu, Phan, Rasch, Chang, Zendejas: Cryopreservation of organs by vitrification: perspectives and recent advances In: Cryobiology 48 , April 2004, page 175
  2. ↑ Fuhr, Taupitz, Zwick, Salkic: Interrupted Life? Scientific and legal consideration of the cryopreservation of humans . St. Ingbert 2013, Fraunhofer Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8396-0593-6 ( online )
  3. ↑ Frequently asked questions - CryoSuisse. Accessed December 7, 2018 (German).
  4. ↑ Cryonics Germany website . Retrieved August 18, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Web site CryoSuisse. Retrieved August 18, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Web site CRYOVAL. Retrieved August 18, 2017 .
  7. ^ Website of the Ulm project. Retrieved August 18, 2017 .
  8. ^ Website of the German Society for Applied Biostasis. Retrieved August 18, 2017 .
  9. ↑ First award of the Robert Ettinger Medal at the event "Applied Cryobiology - Scientific Symposium on Cryonics" in 2010. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 23, 2016 ; Retrieved October 23, 2012 .
  10. ↑ Second award of the Robert Ettinger Medal at the event "Applied Cryobiology - Scientific Symposium on Cryonics" in 2014. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 22, 2016 ; Retrieved February 3, 2015 .
  11. ↑ a b c VDI-Nachrichten: Grateful death on the waiting bench . Issue 6, February 8, 2013
  12. ↑ Gregory M. Fahy, Brian Wowk, Roberto Pagotan, Alice Chang, John Phan, Bruce Thomson and Laura Phan: Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification . In: Organogenesis . tape 5 , no. 3 , July 1, 2009, p. 167-175 , doi : 10.4161 / org.5.3.9974 (English).