Anti-Aging: Can We Turn Back The Clock?

You can feel the heat of the sun beat down on you, unrelenting and unapologetic. The rays become more and more oppressive as each step gets heavier and each sweat droplet intensifies. Still, you carry on begrudgingly. After hours of roaming aimlessly in hopes of escaping the unforgiving sun, you see something off in the distance--but you’ve been fooled before. Mirages have been unkind in the past. But you think to yourself, what if just this time it’s real? Teetering on the edge of insanity, you make your way towards the distant shape/form. 

To your relief and surprise, instead of chasing nothingness, you appear to be getting closer to the inviting structure by the second. In disbelief you reach the front doors of the building: With feeble arms you pry them open. Upon first glance there is nobody in sight. Between the strangely polished white interior and the off-putting air of secrecy, it is obvious that something isn’t quite right. Perplexed, you make your way down the narrow staircase tucked behind a bookshelf. With each step, the air gets colder, more barren, far from fresh. Your eyes burn as you inhale the chemical fumes of the awfully sterile environment leading you to steel coffins that tower over you--as if they've been waiting for your arrival. 

Maybe I’m seeing things. Maybe I’m hallucinating, you think. Your head starts spinning.  Surely the scorching heat is better than this certified torture chamber. Quickly you turn around--the staircase is nowhere in sight. Instead you've met with a lifeless face, staring back at you with its blank face and absent eyes. 

Your panic turns to immediate relaxation as the fumes envelope your brain and take over. Your eyes start to shut and you start to fade into the blur, embraced by the frigid white cloud of chemicals that surround you now, floating off into the abyss of nothingness as the door of the steel chamber slams shut before your face....

Anti-aging is a subject that has been capitalized on within the genre of science fiction for centuries. It has a contemporary, futuristic, "Frankenstein meets Dracula" style that never fails to tantalize our mortal interests. For years, we've written off this topic of fascination as fantasy, but is this as far from reality as we thought?

The idea of immortality has been present in real life amongst humans since the time it was recognized that life is impermanent. For example, early 20th century Russia was the age of biocosmic-immortalists, a group of writers and anarchists who believe that humans have two basic rights: the right to exist, and the right of free movement for eternity. The ultimate goal was to freeze the planet in a state of suspended animation while they remade the planet, eliminating disease, raising the dead, and even controlling the weather (Pinkham, 2020). This eventually sparked the idea of cryonics, the freezing and storage of a human corpse, severed head, or brain, in the hopes that resurrection may be possible in the future. This vision has come a long way since and made its way around the world. Indeed, in Russia, KrioRus, a cryogenic company, has become one of the biggest  in the world of its kind, along with American counterparts like Alcor in Arizona (Alcor, 2014).

The use of cryonics in the US has surged over the last couple of decades, capturing the attention of some renowned people along the way. US baseball star Ted Williams, is stored at -196C at Alcor in Arizona, with PayPal founder Peter Thiel and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil having agreed to be cryonically preserved, too. Most notably, however, is James Bedford, who was the first person to have his body cryopreserved at Alcor in 1967. 

But how does cryonics work? 

Immediately after legal death, the body is stabilized to supply your brain with sufficient blood and oxygen to retain minimal function. The body is packed in ice and injected with heparin, an anticoagulant that protects your blood from clotting. Water in the cells is then replaced with a glycerol-based human antifreeze called cryoprotectant, and the body is cooled on dry ice until it reaches -130C. Shortly after, the body is transferred to a container within a larger metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196℃, placed head down, so if the tank leaks the brain is still submerged in the contents (Thau, 2020).

If you “froze” a human, the 60% of water that composes the adult body would eventually reach its freezing point and crystallize into a solid. As you can imagine, this isn’t an ideal situation: water expands and the ice takes up 9% more volume than liquid, so this would damage tissue and pierce the cell membranes around it. To avoid this catastrophe, cryonic technicians carry out a surgery in which they replace all of your blood from the arteries with the cryoprotectant solution(antifreeze). This also decreases the freezing point of whatever liquid is left, resulting in no actual freezing within the body. In fact, it cools the body down over 3-4 hours, until it hits the “glass transition temperature”, -124ºC, where the body’s liquid remains amorphous but highly viscous so that the molecules cannot move. Now, you’re essentially vitrified--a glass body, put on biological pause (Alcor, 2014).

Despite the fascinating process, however, cryonics raises many ethical questions that need to be answered before progressing on this path. For example, is the stored body considered to be a person or not? Some scientists believe that people have particular characteristics and traits, like the ability to think or communicate. Depending on one’s perception, it can appear as though a corpse may or may not fall under the category of a person, and their rights will differ depending on how they are classified. With this, how should a revived person be treated by their family? Would the latter be financially responsible for them? What role would they play in society? 

Another issue is that of resource allocation. Given how scarce resources in our medical system are, it is just to ask how many and what kinds of resources should be given to a dead body. Is it ethically justified to allocate medical, social, and other resources to a person declared dead? Similarly, if the person is brought back to life and society, then should they be allocated just as many medical/healthcare resources as individuals who have contributed to society in recent years? 

Distributive justice and the fairness that is associated with it are a major aspect of cryonics that we must examine further in a way that accounts for both the currently living members of society as well as the living dead (Moen, 2015). These are all pertinent questions to address when considering cryogenics.

But the most important question: is this all feasible or is cryonics just a sci-fi lover’s dystopian dream? As of right now, while adequate blood supply and a malleability to mechanical manipulation facilitate the preservation of the brain, technical challenges are present and thwart the progression of cryonics. Specifically, whole body cryopreservation does not retain regulatory function as well as memory, nor is it capable of reversing the damage that led to the biological death. For example, those with neuro-degenerative disorders may not wish to be preserved and potentially revived with the same cognitive state. This brings in the added complication of wanting to be cryopreserved before death, leading into ethical and legal questions. You could say that the current state of cryonics is “frozen,”, in that it sounds good in theory and also as far as the idea of “body preservation” goes, but the retention of memory, neurological state, as well as the ethical debate that is associated with it are heavy baggage that weigh down the feasibility of living forever.  

The inevitable impermanence of life is a universal event that brings humans together. Some accept death as a part of life, while others try to concoct the elixir of life through anti-aging technology. Although we've come a long way in the process of preserving the human body, there is still no definitive evidence that cryonics can preserve long-term memory or personal identity. There is still a long way to go, but who knows, maybe you’ll be around to see it....

References

Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Complete List Of Alcor Cryopreservations. http://www.alcor.org/cases.html 

Moen, M. O. (2015, February 25). The case for cryonics. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/44014182

Pinkham, S. (2020, March 30). The strange and often radical pursuit of immortality in Russia. The Nation. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/anya-bernstein-future-immortality-russia-cryogenics-review/

Thau, T. (2020, February 09). Cryonics for all? Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bioe.12710?casa_token=r8CzMlxa4LEAAAAA%3AF5gecCnVjY_5oIsAt0R4xX48OqHz8urMpPh67gca68fwaelp1L8GycTu0uOTUV_TGWe4q1ZhUJxw7Eg