Cryonics. Fiction and reality

Cryonics.Fiction and reality

 Francisco Cesar Pinheiro Rodrigues

Translator: Marianna Fernandes Perna 

As an author, I feel injusticed. Which probably doesn’t cause any estrangement or surprise for well-informed people. I imagine that no writer – either good or bad – considers himself entirely fulfilled. If he considers himself “the best”, he’s absolutely mistaken, for perfection is unattainable and incongruous with any kind of art. He certainly falls for some subtle nonsense  - even if he’s a Nobel, mixing winning money by writing books with being an actual great writer. These do exist – in a small account – and I, granted with a minimum sense of reality, do not include my own self in this selected list. If I did so, for some reason, I would not tell anybody because immodesty is offensive and along it, the just mentioned dumbness would be showing their claws. 

As for the authors – men and women – that have gone rich writing books of mediocre quality – fully consciously – there’s no reason for criticizing. Quite the contrary. They are quite clever. They’re winners. They knew exactly what they wanted – to win a lot of money – and they did what was necessary to obtain this goal. They’re pragmatic men and women, good managers of themselves, stunts of psychologists and marketers with a large sense of what pleases and what doesn’t, not only the reading public, but also the editors – these attributed mediators between the talent and the public.  

Without an editor there’s  no deal. Printing, advertising and distributing books is an esoteric science, expensive and risky. Someone has once said that the writer and the editor must do as a chicken: it’s not enough to simply lay the egg, one must cluck it. But it’s only for the hen that this has no costs. Editors need an elevated flair, better than airport drug detectors dogs - a flair rather mercantile than literary – to avoid that their printed products don’t end up stranding and provoking monumental gastritis. Basically, editors are booksellers and not officials at the Ministry of Culture, in charge of increasing the country’s education. Only on exceptional cases do they release respectable – yet financially stinky - literary pieces. On top of it all, the Estate isn’t rich enough to assure editors that all their stranded books will be reimbursed by the national treasure. There are many other priorities for the day rather than raising the spirits of writers that see their work being rejected. 

In 2005 I published, on my own account, a novel – “Cryonics” (Editions “Inteligentes”), about cryonics applied to human beings. We all know how serious the Cryonics chapter is to the book of Science, dedicated to study the effects of extremely low temperatures on living and non-living beings. The iceness interests the researches of speed of electricity in various materials, as well as the spatial research, the research on ovule and spermatozoon banks and many others. 

As for human beings, Cryonics ended up interesting the more “visionary” minds which found promising to inaugurate a separate branch of Cryonics to study specifically the freezing of human beings. Such “visionaries” – maybe it would be wiser to say “enthusiasts”  - imagined that if a man, not too old, had an incurable disease and an imminent death, there would not be anything wrong on freezing his body right after his natural death, as if he was a spermatozoon or an ovule - instead of letting it be buried or cremated. Kept on a close to zero degree – in which the agitated atoms become almost entirely static- there would be no decomposition, right? 

“But the individual would already be dead! How to resuscitate a frozen dead body? Being dead, his soul is no longer present! Where would we gain it back to reintroduce it on the deceased?” the spiritualists, wrathful, would say. 

Based on this hope, not morally reprehensible, the “utopic enthusiasts” began to imagine all the possible techniques to freeze a person right after dying, avoiding the addlement, especially of the neurons. They imagined – using only their logic, misleading several times, because inobservant of factual details – that if a living being remains frosted in a way that its cells do not rot, paralyzed by the coldness, then it is possible that some decades later, when science and technique are both very advanced, this living being can be defrosted and manipulated for regaining life. The damage caused by a prolonged sleep would be fixed by the future science. Something somewhat similar to watching a movie on DVD, pushing “pause” and then coming back to continue watching the same movie. If nothing has rotted when extremely frozen, why would it be impossible to “resuscitate” it a few decades later? Everything will depend on the future techniques, which will be way more advanced than the current ones. 

This expectance for a human being that is aware of his closeness to the grave, or to the cremation, has a considerable secondary psychological effect: it is much more comforting to know that you’re going to lose consciousness in a surgery table and maybe – at least, maybe – wake up in a more scientifically developed future, than to know with absolute certainty that you’re going to die no matter what, and be buried or burned in a crematory, until there isn’t much of you left that can’t fit into a small casket “If the cryonics don’t work, well, nevermind. I’ll be dead already and won’t even know about it. It is like falling asleep for a risky operation.” Something much more flavorful than the certainty of the upcoming death, with its frightening “nothing”, or Hell. In fact, it’s a similar circumstance to the bets of lottery. “Probably I won’t win anything this week, but I can win next week. And my investment on the freezing technique will not be too grand. The only harm, in case cryonics don’t work, will be of my inheritors with the cost of the whole procedure. If it works, then the disadvantage will be greater – but not to me! - because the heirs will have to give me back part of my fortune which was distributed to them!”

Let us see now the technical side of this idea and then the discouraging conclusion to which I was led. 

There is no doubt, as I’ve said, that the extreme low temperature of cryonics – negative 196º Celsius – avoids the decomposition of the tissue in, let’s say, 99%. However, this iceness does not only produce positive consequences. There is a negative side to it: with the freezing, the water inside the cells of our body turns into ice crystals and swell; and, since they’re crystals, they are provided with edges and these end up piercing the cellular membrane and the precious liquid inside the cells without which is impossible the “new life” pours from the cells. Once the defrosting takes place, there would be billions of cells completely unusable. This is the major technical obstacle to the efficacy of cryonics. 

A new hope was born some years ago, though: arctic frogs congeal during winter, remaining dead, apparently. However, with the coming of Spring, they “wake up”, ready to continue their “complex” biological cycle: eat and copulate – because these ugly cretinous can’t think of anything else. To embrace such task of resuscitating, the organism of a frog from the Arctic - the Rana pipiens (“leopard-frog”) - produces a type of sugar that stops the water from the cells from turning into ice and with that the swell which provokes the cellular injury does not occur. Therefore, the cells remain frosted, glazed, but without the flare. And without it, all the cells will conserve the indispensable water inside them. 

This is what the cryonics adepts wanted to hear. The other obstacles would be manageable, as for example, the exaggerated legal prohibitions, which require that the patient is “totally” dead in order to begin the preparative for the freezing, with the replacement of all the blood for glycerol. This legal requirement means keeping a technical team in prompt, and this waiting can last for days. At the very moment that the heart stops beatings, a marathon against time starts because every second is precious. If the brain is deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes – the exact number is a subject of discussion – the neuron starts to fester, which would preclude the cryonics to take place. And that is because who wishes to be frosted to wake up in a few decades also wishes to be as lucid as he was before passing away. 

With the excellent news that a few frosted frogs can return to life, it would be enough for the cryonics fans to strive to synthesize a substance that once introduced into the patient right after his death would prevent the water inside the cells to turn into ice. Without ice, I must say again, no dilatation and no rupture of cells. 

At this point of the enunciation, I must admit that my biggest hope, when studying the subject and writing the romance, was not so much in propitiating a person with incurable cancer, for example, a few more years of life after his “resuscitation”. That would  be too much work and money to have just a few years of life again. My “secret ambition”, “unconfessable” – not exactly aimed at my ownself – was the perspective of a much wider and omnibus thing, a nearly physical eternity. How is that? I will explain. 

If the patient, after decades of “cryo-preservation” was to wake up clearheaded and happened to be an exceptional scientist – an Einstein, or equivalent – with a huge luggage of knowledge and original thinking, it would be useful to humanity that he lived – lucid, lucid! – two hundred, three hundred or more years, with iterant additions of new neurons – truly drawers that store up information – which would add new knowledge to the already existing ones. 

Where would we obtain these new neurons? Through embryonic stem cells, capable of transforming into any kind of cell - including the neural ones. Even the most brilliant and clever heads grow old and weak. “Mean and stingy” Nature has this limitation. It insists that no one may go beyond 130 years. If this happens to take place, we will be seeing a living mummy, blind, mute, deaf and bewildered. 

Indeed, even the best brains do grow old, unfortunately. However, with periodical additions of new neurons – even with the occasional necessity of surgical interventions on the skull – with such neurons “eager to work”, the human mind would take a tremendous shift ahead. Back to the great physician, an Einstein three times more capacitated in terms of neuron quantity certainly would have a lot to teach us.

At this point of my meditation, I received a bucket of cold water directly at my speculative enthusiasm. I remembered that – as most people know – no cell is immortal. Neuron is a cell. And what’s more: new neurons, obtained through embryonic stem cells, would be “baby cells”, totally ignorant. They would need to learn to speak, to read, to go to elementary school, to secondary, undergraduation and post-graduation before being able to help and add something new to the old scientist. Old neurons, although wise, would be growing weak and dying at the same time that the “dumb kids” would be sprouting in his brain, erst privileged. This recurrent “barbarian invasion” - as has said a certain philosopher, when referring to every new generation - would keep taking place at the cerebral cortex. 

Since I ignore any possibility of making the neurons immortals, sadly, I don’t see now, in cryonics, a major use to it than for the patient to continue the life that he had before being frost, living, after “waking up” again, the years that he would have normally lived if he hadn’t been grasped by the mortal malady. That would probably be a few years more, given the means of future medicine. Nothing more. Only a slight “stretch” after a long “respite”; and not centuries of accrual. 

I insist: even if a person can indeed “resuscitate”, without damage – which is already a tremendous technical feat – “the risen” would still grow old every day. If he would recurrently receive the implant of embryonic stem cells capable of transforming into neurons, these would be, as I’ve said, “empty boxes” that would require a fill starting from zero. As the years would go by, the grand scientist would not be himself anymore, because his old and wise neurons would be dead. Einstein would no longer know that he was born in Ulm and that he is German, unless some taught him that. Gloomy, isn’t it? 

If there is a God that deliberately created such a special creature, “at His image” – the beast man – it appears that it was not in His intentions to put in the Earth a greedy, proud and not reliable being, that one day would try to live forever and maybe swipe His power. Not relying entirely on his special creature, He implanted in its brain neurons of limited duration and stamped these invisible words: “Perishable article. Expiration date: 120 years. Advisable  to consume well before the expiration time.” 

This is, for now, the discouraging future of cryonics. But my novel is good, or at least illustrative. It’s a pity that it hasn’t been propagated. To hell with modesty. 

(16-9-2012)