X-Message-Number: 28168
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2006 11:20:15 -0600
From: "Anthony ." <>
Subject: Frozen Brains Awaiting Resurrection Day in Storage

Frozen Brains Awaiting Resurrection Day in Storage
By Dan Shea

http://www.times.spb.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=18041

Staff Writer

ALABUSHEVO, Moscow Region   Lidia Fedorenko loved life. There were her
friends, family and, of course, all the former math students she had
taught over the decades.

So when the 79-year-old St. Petersburg native suffered a stroke in
September, dying a week later, her grandson, Daniil Fedorenko, knew
what to do: freeze her brain.

"She wanted to extend her life by another 200 to 300 years," Fedorenko said.

Today, Lidia Ivanovna's brain sits in a metal container in a former
schoolhouse in the village of Alabushevo. Her last wish was
resurrection. Kriorus, a recently founded cryonics outfit, guards over
her cerebral matter and that of a wealthy Moscow businessman's
60-year-old father, who died of throat cancer in 2002. Kriorus
declined to name the deceased man.

"We founded the company because human life is the most important thing
there is," Kriorus' managing director, Alexei Potapov, explained. "To
lose a life without putting up a fight is a crime."

Potapov and his co-founders say they are Transhumanists, who believe
technology can be used to transform human life and postpone death
indefinitely. They founded Kriorus, the world's first cryonics company
outside the United States, in 2005 so that they and their family
members would have a place to stay until medicine found a way to bring
them back to life.

Now, for $9,000, anyone can spend eternity, or some portion of it, in
cryonic stasis.

Cryonics has been hotly debated since the 1964 publication of American
physicist Robert Ettinger's book "The Prospect of Immortality." But as
far as Potapov and others at Kriorus are concerned, the debate is
over: By mid-century, they predict, the technology should exist to
give dead people a second life.

"In America, dogs have been frozen for eight hours and revived," said
Potapov, 29, a former computer programmer. "By exploiting
nanotechnology, we'll be able to manipulate cells and revive them."

In the United States, 150 bodies are frozen in cryonic slumber, 74 of
them at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, which
Ettinger founded in 1976 and still runs.

When some of the bodies were frozen 30 years ago, there was
speculation that they would be revived at about this time. But there
is no sign that anyone is going to be resurrected anytime soon.

Ettinger, now 88, noted there had been recent advances in freezing
techniques and other cryonics-related areas but said he did not
foresee great medical advances on the horizon. He conceded that
Americans   and, presumably, Russians   are skeptical. "There will be
a major shift in public sentiment at some point, but I've given up on
predicting when that will happen," he said.

Among cryonics' foes are professional scientists.

"It's complete nonsense," said Adelia Koltsova of the Russian Academy
of Sciences' Institute for Higher Nerve Activity and Neurology. "There
are methods of treating organs by freezing them, but this is totally
different. We have no idea what will happen in 100 years."

The science of cryobiology   the study of what happens to cells when
subjected to extremely low temperatures   had a long and proud history
in the Soviet Union, which after its fall bequeathed the country's
premier research facility, Kharkov's Institute for Problems of
Cryobiology and Cryomedicine, to Ukraine.

Yury Pichugin, the chief research scientist at Ettinger's Cryonics
Institute, worked at the Kharkov institute for 20 years before moving
to the United States in 1999. He said he first became interested in
cryonics in 1975 when, as a student in Tomsk, his professors showed
him a film on cryonics.

"They showed everything negatively: 'These American fools are trying
to freeze people, which is impossible,' but I didn't think it was
impossible," Pichugin recounted.

Pichugin was criticized when he shared his cryonics ideas with his
Komsomol peers. He voiced surprise that the communists, who professed
love for the people, didn't want them to live forever. The party  
responsible for the gulag, collectivization and the Ukrainian famine  
apparently preferred to use people as postmortem political symbols:
hard-working proletarians, cosmonauts or collective-farm managers.

Not defeated, Pichugin began work in 1978 at the Kharkov institute,
where he researched cryoprotectors, chemicals that help freeze tissue
with minimal cell damage.

While he was unable to delve deeply into cryonics at the institute,
Pichugin said cryobiology, with its advanced freezing techniques,
contributed significantly to cryonics.

Still, Grigory Babiychuk, the institute's current deputy director,
called the ties between cryobiology and cryonics strained. "Between
us, there's a lot of money to be made in cryonics," he said.

Ettinger attributed lingering doubts about cryonics to "cultural
inertia." Humankind, he said, has accepted the inevitability of death,
with the major monotheistic religions pinning their hopes for
everlasting life on the soul, not the body.

Robert Kastenbaum, an Arizona State University psychologist, said that
surveys conducted in the United States revealed that many associate
cryonics with live burial or being in a coma.

Back in the schoolhouse, Vladimir Alexeyevich, Kriorus' elderly
security guard, unlocked a rusted gate to reveal a yard littered with
old bicycles and children's toys. A German shepherd at his side was
barking.

The brains reside inside the schoolhouse, at the end of a cramped
corridor. There are no signs indicating where the brains are kept;
across the entrance from the room containing the 1-meter-tall vat
where the cerebral matter is stored is an unhinged door with faded
letters reading Accounting Office.

Vladimir Alexeyevich, who lives with his family in a series of rooms
adjacent to where the brains are, checks in on them at weekends and
other odd hours to make sure everything is okay. The security guard
declined to give his last name.

In the event of an electricity outage   a serious concern since last
May's brownout, in which thousands of tons of sausage in Moscow-area
meat processing plants spoiled   Kriorus is ready: The brains require
three to four liters of liquid nitrogen daily, Potapov said. Given its
storage capacity, Kriorus could go for 10 days without a problem.
After that, the brains could be moved to dry ice, which doesn't need
electricity.

Before his grandmother's death, Daniil Fedorenko had spoken to Lidia
Ivanovna about her possible resurrection. After her grandson told her
about the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, she willed her brain to him.

At the time of her death, Kriorus was still a dream.

Given the unexpectedness of her death, Lidia Ivanovna's body could not
be sent to the lab in the United States. Instead, it dispatched its
representative in Russia, future Kriorus founder Danila Medvedev, then
25, to help Fedorenko.

Lidia Ivanovna died on a Friday evening. The next day, Fedorenko and
Medvedev found the capital's shops closed and were unable to buy the
chemicals to carry out a perfusion, or oxygenation of the blood, which
precedes a full-body freeze.

His grandmother's remains in the morgue, Fedorenko, with Medvedev,
asked an employee to remove her brain and put it in a container of dry
ice as a stop-gap measure. For seven months, Lidia Ivanovna's brain
lay in her grandson's apartment. Daniil Fedorenko cared for his
grandmother's brain, which was kept in her former bedroom, packing it
in dry ice every four to five days.

Kriorus' other brain was also frozen and as a last resort kept on dry
ice in a private apartment for three years before the Alabushevo
schoolhouse facility opened.

"Of course, these situations are not optimal," Medvedev admitted. "The
chances of resurrecting these patients is much lower." In Fedorenko's
case, the formation of ice crystals set in when her brain was put on
dry ice.

Daniil Fedorenko is hopeful. "When she is resurrected, she'll be able
to choose her own new body," he said, adding that he hoped microscopic
robots would have been invented by then to transmit detailed
information from her neurons to a computer. It is hoped that
eventually that information would lay the groundwork for a new brain,
body   and life.

"We can put our brains in better, stronger bodies," Potapov said.
These new bodies could feature harvested organs and robotic body
parts. "Transhumanism tells us it's probable human beings will be
smarter in the future. I want to be able to access that."

Both Potapov and Daniil Fedorenko stressed that an individual's soul
would remain intact because their memories and thoughts would be
preserved.

But the equation of memory with the soul, or "essence," raises sundry
questions   especially in Russia, where spirituality and the soul have
for hundreds of years been given special status.

The Russian sense of soul has been largely shaped by the Russian
Orthodox Church, said Yury Afanasyev, a historian and rector of the
Russian State Humanities University.

After Tsar Alexander I's troops beat Napoleon back to Paris, giving
Russians a first glimpse of the West, many in Russia began to conceive
of the country as spiritually superior to mercantilistic, Catholic
France, Afanasyev said. Russians' tendency to think of themselves as
highly spiritual persists to this day, he said.

Given the Church's growing prominence, its hostility to cryonics could
have a debilitating impact on public perceptions. Father Vladimir
Vigilyansky, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, explained the
"technological resurrection of man ... contradicts God's word about
man."

Pichugin, of the Cryonics Institute, rejected the Church's exegesis.
Just as Christianity offers human beings everlasting life, so, too,
does cryonics, he said. "I don't know if the soul is preserved when a
person is frozen, but there's a point where the difference between the
physical and the spiritual is unclear," he said.

Pichugin added that cryonics' future is in Russia. "From Dostoevsky to
Tolstoy, writers and philosophers have argued that it is Russia's
place to save mankind," he said. Then, somewhat enigmatically, he
added: "Russians have a more communal mindset than Americans and
understand the idea of community better. Their mentality is more
inclined to cryonics."

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