The human cryopreservation project faces skepticism from medical and legal authorities

  • tentphone@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    There’s also a guy cryogenically frozen in a tuff shed in Nederland, CO. They have an annual festival called Frozen Dead Guy Days.

    A Norwegian woman and her son brought the woman’s father’s dead body there from Norway and planned to start a cryonics (cryogenics refers to freezing things in general, cryonics refers specifically to freezing dead bodies in hopes of future revival) facility. The son got deported, the woman got evicted for living in the partly-finished facility which wasn’t up to building code and didn’t have plumbing or electricity, and the town passed a law specifically preventing storage of dead bodies on public property. For some reason there was a lot of public support for her and they ended up making an exception for the one body that was already there.

    Also cryonics doesn’t work. The idea is that if in the future people find a way to bring physically intact dead bodies back to life they can be revived, but because water expands when it freezes it destroys the bodies at a cellular level. There are reports of bodies literally cracking apart even at the most “state of the art” cryonics facilities.

    There were some experiments on rodents with limited success in the 50s but it just doesn’t scale up to larger organisms.

  • musicalcactus@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    The youngest of the patients at Alcor is two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong, a Thai girl with brain cancer, who was cryopreserved in 2015, reports Reuters.

    “Both her parents were doctors, and she had multiple brain surgeries,” More tells the publication. “Nothing worked, unfortunately. So, they contacted us.”

    This is a bit chilling. How do you begin to move on with your lifeif you’re holding out hope that your loved one will be revived one day? What happens to this girl’s body once her parents die? What happens if they beat the odds and master cryo and the girl gets revived in 100 years? That sounds incredibly traumatic.