Comment by MartinMcGirk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MartinMcGirk | Hacker News Reader

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>It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die.

The thing that always disappoints me whenever I read about cryogenic freezing is that people seem to have to already be dead before anyone is allowed to freeze them.

From the article:

>Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility... As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals... Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit.

I always thought that the great selling point of cryo was that if you have some incurable-by-today's-science condition and you are shortly about to die, then you could be frozen instead, and then unfrozen and promptly cured many years later once someone has figured out a reliable treatment.

Isn't waiting until you are already clinically dead before having yourself frozen missing the point?

Sadly no, because it would legally be considered killing them. As it is, when you're dying, you get what's called a standby where you have a team waiting by your bedside with a doctor, then they get to work as soon as death is pronounced. Generally, perfusion (replacement of blood with cryoprotectants) can be started in situ within 15 minutes or so, while cardiopulmonary support is provided via a machine from in many cases seconds after legal death. It isn't perfect, but it's the best that can be done in the current legal climate.

It might happen in the future in a decent state/country with good assisted suicide laws (if there was a Swiss cryonics organisation, they would probably be able to offer it). Perhaps in the US it will eventually become possible in Oregon/Washington (edit: also Montana, Vermont, and New Mexico), which allow assisted suicide. Alcor are based in Arizona, so they could have patients get themselves preserved in New Mexico, then be driven to Alcor.

You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order. Which is the general plan.

It's still a shame we have to wait though, because being vitrified while still legally alive would majorly reduce the chances of brain damage due to lack of oxygen (ischemia).

> You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order.

That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?

There are cases where people who were apparently dead for minutes to hours, were then successfully revived. All the cases involved very low temperatures that presumably prevented brain damage.

http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-mi...

Quote: "'There have been a number of well-documented case histories of adults and children who drowned in very cold water, even trapped under ice for hours, and were successfully revived many hours later,' Alistair Jan Gunn, a professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. 'Of course, this is used routinely in modern cardiac bypass.'"

Legal death is arbitrary as it's just a decision by a trained person. People have been revived after 10 minutes or so after 'drowning' in cold water. Even in cases of heart failure, pronouncement of death is when the doctor/nurse feels further efforts to revive would be futile. In the long past, someone who would today be revived in that case might have been pronounced dead earlier; the issue is that resuscitation efforts are stopped immediately after pronouncement of legal death - if they were not, it would be a more common occurrence.

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