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.

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