Cryonics  

A recent London Futurists Hangout on Air featured a discussion between an international panel of people with practical experience of the world of cryonics: Max More, Anders Sandberg, Natasha Vita-More, and Garret Smyth.

What lies in the future for cryonics - the practice of low-temperature suspended animation of people who have died of an incurable disease, in the hope of a future cure?

This London Futurists Hangout on Air features a discussion between an international panel of people with practical experience of the world of cryonics: Max More, Anders Sandberg, Natasha Vita-More, and Garret Smyth.

The discussion with David Wood covers:

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• Recent developments in the world of cryonics, and anticipated future improvements;
• Why has the take-up of cryonics been comparatively low so far, and what steps might change that state of affairs?
• Objections to cryonics - and responses to the objections;
• Cryonics in context - new attitudes towards death and technology.

The Mores and Sandberg are involved with Alcor, the long-running cryonics foundation in Arizona.  According to Alcor, today brain tissue preserved with a modern vitrification solution shows virtually no freezing damage. Whole neurons are visible with intact membranes and well defined structure. This brain preservation which Alcor claims it can now achieve in human patients. Many who complain about damage caused by cryonics procedures are unaware that such preservation is now possible.


SOURCE  David Wood

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 Ideas  

During a talk a last year's Alcor Conference, Future of Humanity Institute researcher and futurist Anders Sandberg presented a high level talk on the problems of futurist thinking and what some of the implications might be for the pursuit of cryonics.

Researcher, science debater, futurist, transhumanist, and author Anders Sandberg presented and interesting talk on the possibilities of cryonics and other futurist topics at last year's Alcor conference.  He defines his presentation as a 'theoretic and meta talk," on the future.

Uncertainty, for Sandberg, is especially prevalent when we extend outside of our animal needs.  The solutions therefore are to approach such problems with rationality.  However as he points out, decision theory is hard and rationality is hard, so approximation is always necessary.  These problems affect multiple areas including economics and artificial intelligence.

Moreover for humans, our cognitive biases affect our decision-making.  During his talk, Sandberg discusses how these factors affect the pursuit of cryonics.

Sandberg also points out that certain tools of futurism, like trend lines, can affect accuracy.  He warns that technological tracking, like Moore's Law, or the graphs used by Ray Kurzweil to predict the Singularity, do not really take into account uncertainty and, as a consequence, the models may not reflect what is actually going to happen.  For Sandberg, the Singularity also represents a potential area of uncertainty.

Looking at cryonics Sandberg comments, "Cryonics is actually fun, because we have so much uncertainty in it."  There is uncertainty about the future situation(s), uncertainty about storage, uncertainty about the future of medical advances, uncertainty about the reanimation situation and uncertainty about identity recovery (especially considering how little we know about what defines identity now).  Statistically, for Sandberg, "not getting suspended poses the greatest risk of all."

Sandberg model of cryonics - Image Source: Anders Sandberg

Also for Sandberg, "The Singularity is a wildcard you may or may not believe in.  It amounts to a serious chunk of the positive futures, but is likely to also contribute significant existential risk."

Sandberg holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

Sandberg's research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as on assessing the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. His recent contributions include work on cognitive enhancement (methods, impacts, and policy analysis); a technical roadmap on whole brain emulation; on neuroethics; and on global catastrophic risks, particularly on the question of how to take into account the subjective uncertainty in risk estimates of low-likelihood, high-consequence risk.

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He has worked on this within the EU project ENHANCE, where he also was responsible for public outreach and online presence. Besides scientific publications in neuroscience, ethics, and future studies, he has also participated in the public debate about human enhancement internationally. Anders also holds an AXA Research Fellowship.

Sandberg has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modelling of human memory. He has also been the scientific produce for the major neuroscience exhibition “Se Hjärnan!” (“Behold the Brain!”), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation that toured Sweden 2005–2007. He is co-founder and writer for the think tank Eudoxa.


SOURCE  Alcor

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 Connectomics  

Currently there are two methods on the table for preserving a brain so that it may be reanimated, or uploaded in the future. Alcor has been cryopreserving people for 40 years, while the techniques for bringing back frozen flesh, and more importantly neural pathways, are slowly developed. Now connectomics research has introduced chemical brain preservation as a method, albeit destructive, that may someday allow a brain to be brought back to 'life'.

S ebastian Seung may seem like an unlikely person to visit and talk at the Alcor Conference.  The computational neuroscientist, and author of Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, did just that though last year. Specifically, Seung addressed some of the points and criticisms of the last two chapters of the book, which explore more of the transhumanist areas of connectomics research, including how cryonics may not save a person's brain (see video above).

Advances in neuroscience today strongly suggest that appropriately preserved brains will contain our memories, identity, and consciousness, and therefore preservation technology, when it arrives, will make such brains available for future reading of memories, or full revival if desired.

According to Seung, if the connectome is to be preserved, with the gossamer thin strands of neural connnections, that measure end-to-end into the millions of miles, cryopreservation will not work. Seung in his talk does not ever say these words exactly, but does ask the audience to consider what he is saying, by going through the steps that he, and other connectomics researchers like Ken Hayworth use.

Image Source: Brain Preservation Foundation

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Seung and Hayworth use the technology of chemical brain preservation to explore connectomes. Unlike the freezing method of cyronics used at Alcor, chemical brain preservation essentially kills the cells it preserves. Shortly before or moments after death, a scientists will start the process of emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion (EGP) for protein fixation (a kind of advanced embalming process).  

"The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body," says Hayworth.

At Alcor, many of the members want eventually to return to life in their own bodies, and so the methods of freezing the body (or just the head) at death makes sense.  They do not necessarily want to return as a 'brain in a box' upload, that seems to be the de facto outcome of the chemical brain preservation route.

In another talk at the same conference, Twenty-First Century Medicine cryobiologist Gregory Fahy took aim at the chemical brain preservation researchers (see image below).  Showing his work on advancing cryonics, Fahy says:

All of a sudden something scary happens.  People like Ken Hayworth come along and Sebastian Seung and John Smart wondering if maybe cryopreservation is all wrong - it's not the right way to go at all.  It would be much better too have your brain perfused with gluteraldehyde, then embedded in plastic and then cut into tiny little pieces and bombarded with electron beams.  I don't know but, I have some reservations about my brain being destroyed as a way of preserving it.

Fahy is counting on future nanomedicine to reanimate cryopreserved people.  He prefers what he calls the 'classical' cryopreservation approach.

Image Source: Anders Sandberg

To help decide whether cryonics or chemical brain preservation (or both, or neither) is a feasible method for an eventual uploading/immortality technology, Seung is a judge for the Brain Preservation Foundation's prize.  The Brain Preservation Foundation was started by Hayworth as an organization to advance the use and techniques of chemical brain preservation and long term storage.  The Prize seeks the development of an inexpensive and reliable hospital surgical procedure which verifiably preserves the structural connectivity of 99.9% of the synapses in a human brain if administered rapidly after biological death.

There are currently two competitors for the Brain Preservation Foundation prize.

Seung undoubtedly retains a lingering fascination with the possibility of an intersection between connectomics and transhumanism. At a TED talk he gave, he commented that connectomics might eventually put to the test whether a technology like cryonics will eventually be feasible.  



SOURCE  Alcor Cryonics

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 Anti-Aging  

Recently Alcor Cryonics shared a talk given by Aubrey de Grey at last year's Alcor 40th Anniversary Conference featuring work done by the SENS Foundation to fight aging.

At last year's 40th Anniversary Conference at Alcor Cryonics Aubrey de Grey discussed work done by the SENS Foundation to fight aging.  He also talked about other research that may have a significant effect on aging.

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Fittingly de Grey's work ties in with the cryonics preservation undertaken by Alcor, as it may, one day, provide some of the rejevenation technologies that may revive the patients frozen in Scottsdale.

Dr. de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based charity dedicated to combating the aging process.

He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world's highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He has developed a comprehensive plan for repair of aging damage, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one.

According to de Grey, there are seven types of damage that need to be addressed by regenerative medicine in order to solve the aging problem:

Dr, de Grey says that regenerative medicine will bring about the remedies to all seven forms of damage in the future. His definition of regenerative medicine is any intervention that seeks to restore the structure of a tissue or organ to its state before it suffered damage.

So far de Grey is positive about the work at the SENS Foundation, "We have very good reason to believe that we are on a good track and that we have demonstrated our robustness."



SOURCE  Alcor Cryonics

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