Image Credit: Simone Syed - Alcor sign at facility in Scottsdale, AZ, USA
[Alcor Conference - Table of Contents]
In a graveyard, dirt and sorrow reside with rot hidden by little more than fading flowers, expensive coffins and shallow depths. Death hangs in the air. The graveyard is a solemn place, or at the very most morbidly curious. For comfort, visitors must find another location, like a church, or their death traditions passed down for generations with the certainty that the next life is not this life.
Alcor is no graveyard.
On a warm October 07, 2007 Sunday in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, Alcor opened its doors for an open house, capping a weekend of talks during the 7th Alcor Conference. Outside in the parking lot was a BBQ: shredded meat on rolls, vegetarian lasagna, a salad dripping with dressing, and peach cobbler. Speakers and audience members from the conference and Alcor staff and members, some with children, gathered around tables for pleasant discussion, networking, and family. This was not a solemn place. Instead, it was a very happy one, despite the clinically dead hanging out just inside the Alcor facility.
Alcor is a cryonics company. Here they take the remains of members who signed up for expensive services years before and cryopreserve them in the hope that someday technology will advance so far that the cryopreserved will be resurrected. Cryopreservation procedures flush most water out of the human body and replace it with cryoprotectants, before the member is stored in huge dewars of liquid nitrogen.
All this “cryo” is the technical prefix for something like freezing, but without the nasty side effects. To freeze is to introduce water ice crystals, dangerous daggers that wreak havoc on delicate biological material. A strawberry placed in a freezer might look beautiful when pulled out frozen, but let it thaw and what you are left with is a mushy remnant. Cryogenics (not to be confused with cryonics!) researchers have developed technology that allows the vitrification of biological material, without most of the side effects of freezing. Ice crystals are minimized by removing the water from which they grow, replaced with compounds that instead turn into a glass-like, smooth substance at low temperatures. Biological material becomes encased, vitrified, inside and out, and the chemical reactions that generally race forward come to a near standstill.
Making use of cryogenics technology to vitrify human remains is cryonics. While vitrification has been demonstrated to work, thawing, repairing, and returning the body to life has not. Alcor bluntly admits to this in their marketing and conferences, but they also hint that there is a very minuscule - but perhaps non-zero? - chance that someday technology will become just so advanced as to revive Alcor’s cryopreserved members. This is the tiny hope that makes this third option to dealing with human body remains, instead of burial or cremation, so appealing to some people. After all, these cryonics proponents claim, they certainly will be no worse off if it turns out recovery from cryopreservation is not possible.
Inside the Alcor facility is the gear for modern cryopreservation. Open house attendees signed up for tours of the facility, spread out over the afternoon to allow everyone to eat and mingle. In the first room is the future.
Research on Rats
With money from membership fees, donations, and insurance policies signed over to Alcor to pay for services upon a member’s death, the company makes enough to struggle with rising operations costs and services that can begin at the member’s bedside just prior to legal death. In recent years they have stabilized financially while recognizing that their best bet for new members, and therefore more money, rests with proving scientifically some of the claims of cryonics. Therefore Alcor is investing in a new animal model to use for research in cryopreservation and revival.
Alcor use to experiment on dogs. As expenses have increased and animal rights activists have sought more stringent guidelines regarding research animals, the dog model has become difficult to maintain. The use of rats instead may provide a host of benefits, along with some difficulties. There is little regulation of rat laboratory models, but, fully expecting activists to begin targeting the use of rodents in the near future, Alcor has decided to abide by the same regulation as dogs. This means unnecessary paperwork and procedures until they become, as expected, absolutely necessary.
This research future is in first room we visit on the tour. Central to the room is a cardiopulmonary bypass apparatus, many, many times smaller than similar equipment used for larger animals and humans. Some of it has been custom built, and Alcor research associate Chana de Wolf has been practicing with this new equipment in preparation for future work on real rats. There is a small cooling stage where a rat will be connected to the Circuit, a ring of devices like the pump and the oxygenator that act as a mechanical heart and lungs, respectively. Also attached are the chiller for control fluid temperatures. Blood can be washed out of the rat body with a fluid consisting of blood and various concentrations of cryopreservants and other compounds. Someday, research using this equipment and the rat model might lead to improved cryopreservants, more effective concentrations, improved equipment and techniques, and, perhaps, the first animal revived after lengthy cryopreservation. Alcor has not yet begun active research with the rat model while they continue to equip this laboratory with the necessary tools.
Improving Cryopreservation
While this research effort ramps up, Alcor’s primary task remains the cryopreservation of members. The next room on the tour is the testing site for new equipment that will automate previously manual and time-consuming procedures. A contractor to Alcor showed us the latest patient pod, an enclosed table in which the member is placed upon arrival at the facility. Liquid nitrogen vapor is pumped into the pod to continue the cooling down process that begins with technicians out in the field prior to transport to Alcor. The body’s water is removed and replaced by chemicals that can be toxic if introduced at too high a temperature. A fine balance between temperature, pressure and percent concentration of cryoprotectants will be maintained automatically by new monitoring software and equipment, replacing what use to be manual “eye-balling.” Should something go wrong, the software will begin appropriate countermeasures.
The new table helps consolidate steps that could previously lead to non-nominal temperature increases, threatening the effectiveness of the cryopreservation. After all, for cryonics to work, further damage to the member’s body must be minimized. Presumably this care will lead to an easier revival in the future. The new table can manage a temperature drop to -100 degrees Celsius, cutting out a previous step that required the body be removed from the pod and moved to other equipment in another room.
Improving Stabilization and Transport
As mentioned previously, there are procedures that precede the arrival of a member’s body at Alcor. Several volunteer field technicians located around the country await that fateful call: a member has just been pronounced legally dead, or legal death is imminent. The technicians travel to the patient’s location to begin the necessary paperwork, interaction with family and medical personnel, and initial cryopreservation procedures. All of this is done as quickly as possible to prevent brain and body damage as decomposition begins.
Currently these technicians must carry with them seven large kits full of tools, equipment, and chemicals. The number of kits can lead to difficulties and delays when traveling, and requires significant effort to tote around. Tanya Jones, COO of Alcor, and her team have revisited the contents of these kits to streamline them to just three. Content like freezer bags for ice, walkie talkies, batteries, medical tools, gloves, and infusion medications have been considered in detail to help minimize what needs to be included in these kits.
When deployed in the field, these kits will include a new portable ice bath that is lighter and easier to setup than the current model, while improving insulation during transport with the use of aerogel. The design is expected to accommodate new equipment that can be directly attached to the ice bath frame to maintain circulation in the body during transport, an important consideration when introducing cryopreservants into the body.
Finally, a new portable perfusion system has been developed that significantly reduces the previous system’s steep learning curve. Improved with automated monitoring equipment and debubbling circuit technology, the new system now requires only two connections: one to a cold water source, followed by one to the patient. This greatly simplifies the steps technicians need to take. The system washes out the patient’s blood and begins the initial infusion of cryoprotectants. One significant size and weight reduction has been with the computer controller, a device that had not been updated since the middle of last decade.
The next room we visited was the operating room, where the current patient table and equipment reside. The heart bypass machine circulates cooled cryoprotectants while Alcor staff continue the patient’s cryopreservation. This equipment will be replaced when design and testing of the new technology is completed. Testing is expected to begin later this year.
The Cryopreserved
The last stop in the tour was the patient care bay, the location of 76 people who have been cryopreserved since the first person, Dr. James H. Bedforf was cryopreserved in 1967 in an dewar he designed himself. Family and volunteers maintained the dewar for the next twenty years until he was moved to Alcor.
Five full-body cryopreserved members can fit head down in a modern dewar. Some members choose a less expensive plan that preserves only their head and brain, and several of these neuropreservations fit in the center of the five member storage bays in one dewar.
A bulk tank contains a 4 month supply of liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen can maintain its temperature at -196 degrees Celsius without power, so these dewars require no power source or backup, just the occasional automatic topping off from the bulk tank.
We did not enter the patient care bay directly but looked in through a large window. It is here that one immediately notices the differences that make Alcor no graveyard. People speak at normal volume levels and with excited passion about the technology, full of their own hopes for cryopreservation and eventual revival. A conference attendee from Australia finished his paperwork to become the latest member of Alcor while attendees from Quebec, Canada watched in excitement. Some of the people in the tour were already signed up and excited by the apparent effort by Alcor to continue improving their technologies while preparing to mount new research efforts. Others were new or prospective members seeing for the first time the technical side of cryonics. Perhaps a bit annoyed by certain personalities and questions, the Alcor staff who led the tour nonetheless remained professional. The staff was knowledgeable and, like everyone else, noticeably passionate about what they do.
Alcor calls itself a “Life Extension Foundation.” Whether or not cryonics works, to some people Alcor offers something coffins and cremation urns cannot. While those repositories for human remains are traditional and final, the dewars of Alcor are shiny and metal, standing tall and cold in the hopefully labeled patient care bay as symbols of technology and optimism for the future. Here death is reduced to a temporary legal and cultural existence if only science and technology continue their rapid progress forward to repair and recovery. For cryonics proponents, where there is such hope, optimism and steady progress, there is no graveyard.