X-Message-Number: 26693 Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 19:22:53 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug Skrecky <> Subject: low cost alternatives to cryonics This is a reply to D. den Otter regarding low cost options. I've have not checked recently, but a company called Summum was offering a rather pricy full body mummifcation option. I was not impressed by Summum, and the route to a low cost answer would certainly not lie with them. The medical literature is full of articles about paraffin embedding, and similar plastic monomer based techniques being used on small tissue samples. Until recently there have been problems with infiltration of large specimens, but apparently this has been overcome with plastination. I expect embedding of large blocks of fixed tissue in glycerol would also be successful, with less membrane destruction. Results have been good with small samples. Freeze drying has been done on brains, but the result has been poor ultrastructure to due freezing artifacts. Unfortunately there appears to have been virtually no work done on improving freeze drying. Human cells have been demonstrated to survive gradual dessication, but no work has been done on extending this to large samples. Unfortunately essentially no work has been done on investigating low cost alternatives to cryonics. I'm afraid a significant amount of experimentation would be required to work up a reasonable alternative. My own best guess at this would be a variant of vitrification using solutes which are volatile such as methanol, in conjunction with solutes with relatively high glass transition temperatures such as various low molecular weight monosaccharide sugars. The later offer good protection against drying induced damage, but are relatively impermeable. Methanol offers good protection against freezing induced damage, and at low dosages actually reduce cryoprotectant toxicity, possibly by reducing osmotic damage. Since it is volatile, methanol would not affect the properties of dessicated tissue. High doses of methanol have been used to fix small tissue samples. Proper infiltration with sugars would be a problem, and this would need to be addressed first. Costs could be kept down by treating only the brain, and just cremating the body. The dehydrated result should be "stable" at temperatures considerably higher than liquid nitrogen temperatures. However I expect cellular viability would, with any low cost technique would be much lower than with current whole body cryonic procedures. It might even be zero, as with chemical fixation. Question: Why is cephalic (head) only cryonics so expensive? Answer: The entire body is still treated, so there is no reduction in preparation costs. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26693