A 23-year-old woman who recently died from brain cancer might get a second chance at life.

Before Kim Suozzi died this month, she wrote on her blog that her last wish was to be cryogenically preserved, The Huffington Post reports.

"Many of you know that I’m agnostic; I don’t have any clue what happens when you die, but have no reason to think that my consciousness will continue on after death," Suozzi wrote. "The only thing that I can think to make me feel a little more at ease with my death is to secure cryopreservation plans on the off-chance that they figure out how to revive people in the future."

Since the procedure could cost anywhere from $30,000 to $80,000, depending on which organization performed it, she sought out donations from Reddit users.

She ended up raising about $2,100 through Reddit, while the Society for Venturism helped raise $27,000 in about one week's time. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which quoted the procedure at $80,000, also set up a page for donations, but did not disclose the amount raised.

According to Alcor, Suozzi raised enough money for her procedure and was transported to its facilities the day she passed away. 

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The town of Nederland, Colo. had its annual Frozen Dead Guy Days festival this month, celebrating the corpse of a guy whose family froze him after his 1989 death with the hope he might be revived in the future.

We spoke to a planetary ecologist named Bo Shaffer— affectionately dubbed "Ice Man"— who tended to the frozen corpse of Bredo Morstoel for 18 years in the family’s absence.

Shaffer's connection with the frozen man began when Morstoel’s grandson Trygve Bauge was deported from the U.S. to his native Norway in the mid-90s, forcing him to search for a caretaker to ensure Morstoel remained frozen. Shaffer, who lives 45 miles outside Nederland, first made contact with Morstoel’s grandson based on a shared interest in cryonics, and Bauge offered Shaffer the job of preserving his deceased grandfather’s corpse.

For the next 18 years, Shaffer transported 1,600 to 1,800 pounds of dry ice a month to a hilltop shed housing the preserved corpse. There, he packed the dry ice into a homemade freezer box made from plywood and styrofoam, which encased the metal sarcophagus holding Morstoel’s corpse.

After installing the dry ice each month, Shaffer took photos of the freezer box and recorded its temperature, anywhere between minus 60 and minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Shaffer found the work tedious and recruited a small team of helpers, students from the University of Colorado Boulder who were intrigued with the novelty of the strange job.

“There's a certain Tom Sawyer aspect of it, like painting the fence,” Shaffer told Business Insider, in reference to his ability to attract enthusiastic helpers.

Shaffer performed that job dutifully, recalling only one serious mishap when the homemade freezer box broke open between his monthly trips, warming the corpse. Shaffer repaired and bolstered the box’s insulation before Morstoel could thaw out.

Shaffer says he eventually gave up the job and the keys to the shed in 2012 after a dispute with Trygve. Shaffer still attends the yearly Frozen Dead Guy Festival, where revelers commemorate the legacy of the now 109-year-old Morstoel with winter-themed contests and events, such as coffin races, polar plunges, and frozen salmon tosses.

He is amused that no one recognizes him, even though his 18 years as Morstoel’s caretaker has earned him the nickname “Ice Man” among festival-goers. "Everybody knows who the Ice Man was, especially out there at the festival and all over the place, but no one knows who I am,” he said.

"I like to stand around people and chat with them about it and they don’t know who I am,” he said. “I fill them with details they’ve never heard before, and sometimes at the very end I’ll tell them who I am.”

After posing for photos with fans of the Ice Man at the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival, Shaffer said they often ask what Morstoel looks like after so many years encased in ice. Shaffer tells them he has no idea, because he has never actually opened the sarcophagus.

While he's no longer involved in preserving Morstoel’s body, he still holds Nederland’s honorable distinction of caring for its precious frozen corpse for the better part of two decades.

“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” he said.

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As far as medical technology goes, there's never been a better time to be alive than the present.

Before antibiotics were discovered, diseases caused by bacteria (like tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, and various infections) were the leading causes of death in America.

What if all those people who died had somehow been able to benefit from our modern technology?

Today, some people are freezing their bodies or heads at death in hopes of future cures for what ails them. Their goal is to be revived and cured. While several companies will take your money to freeze your body or head, there isn't solid science showing that this will work.

We know it's even crazier to think that we could have successfully cryogenically frozen people in the past, when medical technology was far behind what we have today, but let's have a little fun, shall we?

Here are seven historic people (of thousands — likely millions) who died of things we could treat today, theoretically, if we had their thawed, freshly-dead and somehow rejuvenated bodies to work with:

Jane Austen

Jane Austen, that beloved author of "Pride and Prejudice" and five other novels, died in 1817 at the age of 41. She'd been ill for quite a while, according to letters she sent in the last year of her life. Sir Zachary Cope was the first to diagnose Austen with Addison's disease, in a 1964 article in the British Medical Journal. Interpreting the weakness, back pain, stomach upset, faintness, and skin discoloration Austen described in her letters (and symptoms she didn't mention), Cope thought Addison's disease was probably what killed her.

In people with Addison's disease, the adrenal glands don't produce enough of the hormones cortisol and aldosterone. These hormones help coordinate metabolism and blood pressure to keep the body running smoothly. When there's not enough of them in the body, people with Addison's suffer from weak and painful muscles, blood pressure low enough to faint, discolored skin, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. If the hormone levels get low enough, it can trigger a life-threatening "addisonian crisis" as blood pressure and blood sugar drop, which may have been what happened to Austen.

If she did indeed die in an addisonian crisis, today doctors would treat Austen with an IV of hydrocortisone, saline, and sugar to bring her back, then she'd have to keep taking the hormones her adrenal glands weren't producing. Perhaps she would be able to finish a seventh novel, "Sanditon," that she'd started but didn't finish before she died. We'll never know how that one ends.

Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh is perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning performance as Scarlett O'Hara opposite Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind."

Before she died of tuberculosis in 1967 at age 53, she'd had the disease for several years. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is to blame for tuberculosis' symptoms: fever, a flushed complexion, and a dry, persistent cough that brings up blood.

Though drug-resistant tuberculosis is a concern today, it's likely Leigh's historical case could be treated with antibiotics, if we were able to bring her back.

Before Leigh's time,tuberculosis also did in Emily Bronte, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and John Keats. It's not that the disease was especially popular among authors in the 19th century, it was just that common for everyone. Thanks to effective antibiotics and changes in living conditions, deaths from tuberculosis have gone down steadily since the beginning of the 20th century.

James Garfield

America's 20th president didn't even hold the office a full year before he was assassinated in 1881. But it wasn't really the assassin's bullet that killed him — it was the doctors who didn't wash their hands or instruments before they tried to remove the bullet from his back. Garfield's wound became infected, and he hung around 11 excruciating weeks before dying. It's more a change in medical practice to sterilize wounds and medical tools with antiseptics (which were around at the time) than an actual technological advance that could've saved Garfield. Still, he'd have a better shot today with modern antibiotics.

Though Garfield's case is one-of-a-kind, he's not too different from the thousands of Civil War soldiers who died from wound infections. Antibiotics, antiseptics, and sterile operating and examining procedures would have saved a lot of lives.

Prince Leopold

Hemophilia ran in the genes of Europe's royal families in the 19th and 20th centuries, likely because Queen Victoria of England was a carrier, had many children, and in those days royals had a tradition of marrying other royals. Her own son, Prince Leopold, had the disease, meaning his blood lacked the proteins to make it clot after a cut. He died in 1884, age 30, after a fall that caused him to bleed heavily.

We don't have a cure for hemophilia today, but we know how to treat it. Prince Leopold could get regular treatment that would help his blood clot, and he could get an emergency dose of clotting factors if he started bleeding profusely. He would have a much better chance of making it past 30.

Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky

Though there's controversy surrounding the death of the composer who brought us "Swan Lake" and "The Nutcracker,"cholera is most likely what killed Tchaikovsky. He probably got cholera from drinking water or eating food with Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria responsible for the disease, in it. Tchaikovsky reportedly took ill the evening of October 20, 1893, and was diagnosed with cholera the next day. His symptoms might have included diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps before dying of kidney failure as a complication of all the body fluids lost.

Today, cholera is treated primarily by drinking or getting an IV (if it's an emergency) of a solution of salts, sugars, and water to replace the lost bodily fluids and electrolytes. Antibiotics would have also helped Tchaikovsky, if they had existed. But if he was actually killed by poisoning, as some conspiracy theories suggest, all bets are off.

René Descartes

You probably know at least one thing Descartes said: "I think, therefore I am." The famous philosopher died in 1650 of pneumonia, apparently contracted as his health declined from living in Sweden's harsh climate and getting up at 5 a.m. to tutor the queen in philosophy.

We can't know whether it was bacteria, a virus, or a fungus that infected Descartes's lungs to make them fill up with fluid so he couldn't breathe, but if was bacteria, antibiotics could have helped him. While pneumonia is still a concern today, especially for people over 65, we have a lot more resources to treat it than the likes of Charlemagne, Robert E. Lee, Victor Hugo, and Benjamin Franklin had when they died of it long ago.

Wilbur Wright

One of first men to fly died from a very common cause for his time: typhoid fever. Infection with the bacteria Salmonella Typhi not only causes the fever the disease is named for, but also weakness, stomach pains, headache, and a rash. Wilbur Wright was 45 when he died in 1912, but today doctors could treat him with antibiotics and he'd probably recover.

While we're dreaming big, let's also consider the 27,058 Union soldiers who died of typhoid fever during the Civil War, about 36% of all the Union soldiers diagnosed with the disease. Two thirds of the soldiers who died in the Civil War died from disease, not battle wounds. We'd be able to treat them much more effectively today.

All that's not to say no one dies of any of these diseases anymore, unfortunately.

The WHO reported 1.8 million deaths from tuberculosis in 2008, making it one of the leading causes of death in the world. People with HIV are more vulnerable to infection by tuberculosis, and antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria responsible for the disease are increasingly problematic.

Really, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a terrifying prospect across the board. But at this moment in time, we should definitely appreciate how far we've come in the past century, and look forward to making a longer list in another 100 years.

SEE ALSO: Our superbug problem is about to get much worse

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For the first time this year, cremation has surpassed traditional burial as the most popular after-death option.

According to data from the National Funeral Directors Association, 48.5% of people are choosing cremation while only 45.6% opt for burials.

But as those two figures show, cremation and burials still leave out nearly 6% of the dying population. So where do those people go?

Here are some of the innovative ways people are choosing to spend eternity.

Resomation.

Instead of using open flames to incinerate the body, resomation relies on heated water and potassium hydroxide. The combination liquefies the body, leaving just the person's bones behind.

In the US, resomation is still catching on. Fewer than 10 states have funeral homes where resomation is an option.

It's more popular in the UK, where in 2008 the Cremation Society amended their 134-year-old charter to classify resomation as a superior option to burial.

Mummification.

Contemporary mummification looks pretty similar to how the ancient Egyptians did it.

Corky Ra, founder of the mummification service Summum, told CBS News in 2005 that roughly 1,400 people had signed up for their eventual whole-body wrapping. The service costs $63,000, Ra said.

The idea is that by preserving the body for hundreds if not thousands of years, people can retain their DNA in case technology one day lets them rejoin the living.

Ra could become one of the lucky ones: After his death in 2008, Ra was mummified.

Body donations.

Provided you don't have any communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS or syphilis and don't weigh too much, donating your body to science is a legitimate option after death.

If after registering you still qualify by the time you're dead, coroners at body donation companies like Science Care and BioGift Anatomical will disperse the body to various medical research programs in their area.

One university might get your brain and spine, another might get your kidneys, liver, and spleen. A third might get your skin.

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In a massive story in the New York Times this Sunday, journalist Amy Harmon documented the journey of a dying 23-year-old woman who decided to freeze her brain.

The woman, Kim Suozzi, had terminal brain cancer, and wanted to preserve her brain with the hope that it could one day be revived.

Suozzi isn't alone, either. More than 100 people have undergone cryonics (freezing their body for reviving later) or neuropreservation (freezing of just the head and brain) since the first case in the 1960s, according to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which performs both procedures.

Alcor requires patients to sign over to them their life insurance policies of $80,000 for neuropreservation and $200,000 for cryonics, according to their website.

Medical professionals and researchers have gotten quite good at freezing and reviving human parts — everything from organs for transplantation to embryos and eggs for reproduction. But the human brain is a whole other story.

The truth is, no one has ever been revived after death and freezing. Experts, including Winfried Denk, a brain mapping expert at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who Harmon quoted in her story, think the ability to revive someone who has undergone cryopreservation is at least 40 years away. By then, hopefully, we'd also have developed cures to whatever killed the patient in the first place.

The problem is, when the body dies, cells immediately start releasing toxic substances and decomposing. It's extremely difficult to prevent this natural process from happening, but a few organizations, including Alcor, which Suozzi used, are giving cryonics a try with the hope that one day they will be able to bring their frozen patients back to life.

Here's how Alcor does it:

1. Within minutes of the patient's heart stopping and being medically pronounced dead, the cryonics team places him/her in an ice water bath to start the cooling and preservation process.
2. Life support is administered to artificially keep the heart beating, the blood pumping, and to increase blood oxygen levels to those experienced in airplanes. This keeps the brain healthy during the cryopreservation process.
3. An external heart-lung machine takes over for the patient's organs, and the patient is cooled to a temperature a few degrees above the freezing point of water, where oxygen is no longer necessary.
4. Blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant antifreeze solution over the course of a few hours. The cryoprotectant chemicals used are similar to those used for transporting organs for transplant. This antifreeze is crucial for keeping ice crystals from forming, since ice expands and can form spiky crystals that damage brain cells.
5. The patient is slowly cooled (in a few more hours) via nitrogen gas circulation to -193 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, their cells vitrify, and turn into a solid. They technically don't "freeze" since the process is ice-free, and molecules instead move slower and slower until all chemistry stops.
6. Over the next two weeks, the patient is cooled to about -320 degrees Fahrenheit, and the cryopreserved brain and/or body is stored under liquid nitrogen for long term care.

But how would freezing a brain work to bring a human back to life? We really don't know yet.

Billions of cells make up the human brain, and the most important thing in preserving it is keeping their connections intact. If those connections are frozen intact, the hope is that future scientists would be able to read them from a frozen brain and recreate that person from those connections — either implanted into a synthetic, or "lab-grown," brain and body, or potentially into a computer.

What's hard is that researchers aren't even sure they fully understand how these connections work to create memories and personality. The Human Connectome Project aims to learn more about this network, but significant progress will take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars.

While people are having their heads and bodies preserved now, it will take a long time before they can be revived. What that will look like, however, is a whole other story.

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Anyone who has experienced the devastating loss of a loved one can understand the impulse to latch on to anything that might bring that person back.

It's that very impulse that drives some people to pay to have the brains of loved ones frozen in the hopes that someday, technology of the future will allow them to bring back that person's mind with their memories, personality, experiences, and love intact, neuroscientist Michael Hendrickswrites over at MIT Technology Review.

This process is known as cryonics or cryopreservation.

The world of cryopreservation was recently thrust into the spotlight after a much-discussed New York Times story by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Amy Harmon, who documented the heartbreaking death of a 23-year-old woman as she succumbed to cancer — and the subsequent preservation of her brain.

But the problem with the cryonics industry, Hendricks writes, is that"any suggestion that you can come back to life is simply snake oil."

(Alcor, the cryonics company that froze the woman's brain, told Tech Insider that Hendricks' argument "rests on several mistaken assumptions." We've included the company's full emailed statement at the end of this article.)

As Tech Insider's Rebecca Harrington writes, proponents of cryopreservation believe that if the brain's "connections are frozen intact, the hope is that future scientists would be able to read them from a frozen brain and recreate that person from those connections — either implanted into a synthetic ... brain and body, or potentially into a computer." If implanted in a computer, that recreation is known as mind uploading — and Hendricks criticizes the idea that an uploaded mind would even be the same person.

According to Alcor's statement, "cryonics does not require or imply mind uploading," and many of the people who choose to have their brains and bodies preserved hope that in the future, it will be possible to repair this frozen body on a molecular level.

Hendricks, however, says that from what we know, this is wrong. Even if the connections of the brain were perfectly preserved, mapped, and known, those connections alone are not sufficient to recreate consciousness or to simulate life.

A living brain is more complex than that, and it's the actions within the brain that make us individuals — not just its structure. "We know that the same set of synaptic connections can function very differently depending on what mix of [neurotransmitter] signals is present at a given time," Hendricks writes.

The signals sent back and forth throughout the mind, comprised of chemicals and proteins and electrical impulses, along with genes activated at different times, are the things that physically comprise our memory, according to Hendricks.

Just freezing a brain and statically preserving its connections doesn't maintain these features, he says, even if it's "theoretically possible." Consciousness in the brain is dynamic, not a fixed thing that can be frozen in time.

The idea that the brain is more complex than just its connections is one that's shared among neuroscientists and psychiatrists. Yet Alcor argues that its procedures account for this. "The aim at Alcor is to cryopreserve ​*all*​ the fine details of the brain and even secure viability of the brain as well as we can," the company said in its statement.

Still, much about the living brain and what makes it work remains mysterious. Earlier this year, Dr. Thomas Insel, at the time the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, explained to Tech Insider that we're trying to map the human brain now, but that's just a beginning.

We won't actually know what's happening in the mind until we have "a way of looking at activity in real time, essentially at the speed of thought, so you're able to capture what's activated when and how that's connected in a way that's sufficient for behavior," he said.

The technology for this does not exist yet, and we don't know how we'll get there, though we're trying. As Harmon explained in her story, a human brain is so complex that we estimate that mapping one mind would take up half of all the digital storage capacity on Earth — and that's just the structure, not even the living action happening inside that structure.

In light of that, it seems unlikely that all of the complexity that makes up a person's consciousness can been saved by freezing brain tissue alone. Yet that's exactly what people have paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do, in hopes of returning someday.

We reached out to two of the leading cryonics organizations in the United States, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the Cryonics Institute, for a comment on Hendricks's criticism.

Alcor emailed us this response:

The article in the MIT Technology Review rests on several mistaken assumptions. First of all, cryonics does not require or imply mind uploading. While some of our individual members are interested in this topic, the default resuscitation scenario for cryonics patients involves molecular repair of the patient's biological brain (and body).

While we are encouraged by the rise of connectomics, the aim at Alcor is to cryopreserve ​*all*​ the fine details of the brain and even secure viability of the brain as well as we can. In fact, in our stabilization procedures we we aim to keep the brain viable by contemporary medical criteria and collect data to evaluate the efficacy of our procedures.

Alcor is a charitable, non-profit, organization and we do not make a profit when we place our patients in biostasis.

We strongly disagree that absent proof of human suspended animation or flawless ultrastructural preservation it is not ethical to practice cryonics. Our organization challenges the mainstream definitions of death, and we believe that perfected cryopreservation is a sufficient but not necessary condition for cryonics to succeed. As long as we have good reasons to believe that the original state of the brain can be inferred from the damaged state, making cryonics arrangements can be a rational choice to make. To our knowledge, there are no rigorous, scientific, studies that demonstrate that today's cryonics procedures produce irreversible destruction of identity-critical information.

Information about the ultrastructural effects of the vitrification solutions we use to inhibit ice formation can be found here: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html

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Over 100,000 people die each day globally. Why don't more of us consider cryonics — the practice of freezing the clinically dead in the hopes of bringing them back to life at a later date — as a way to avoid death?

As part of my 2016 US Presidential campaign representing the transhumanist party,  I had a chance to stop in at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world's best-known cryonics facility, to find out.

You've probably seen cryonics before. Hollywood loves to use it in movies. Mike Myers (as Austin Powers), Woody Allen, and Mel Gibson are just some examples of people who have been "frozen" on the big screen. 

Cryonics — and the field of life extension — has also been in the news a lot lately. A recent New York Times article featuring an Alcor patient generated discussion across the Internet.

Most cryonicists would not call frozen patients dead. They say patients are temporarily beyond the help of modern medicine, and that cryonics is the final attempt to provide emergency healthcare. Cryonics, they argue, is actually saving a patient by buying them time for science to catch up to the point where they can be revived.  

"Death is not a moment, but a process, where an individual goes from a state of health, through many steps which end up becoming irreversible by modern means. It is not an absolute event. It is almost entirely dependent on the skills and means of the rescuer, and as we know, those skills and means improve over time," says Christine Gaspar, a RN and President of Cryonics Society of Canada and CEO Biostasis Canada.

I visited Alcor while traveling cross-country aboard my Immortality Bus (a campaign bus that resembles a coffin).  Dr. Max More, a philosopher and the CEO of Alcor, gave me and my Transhumanist Party volunteers a private tour at the nonprofit's Scottsdale, Arizona facility.

Check it out in this video from Roen Horn: 

One thing that struck me about Alcor was its size. It's not a small shop housing a few dead people in big steel tubes. It's a giant medical facility, complete with offices, surgical bays, laboratories, conference rooms, and of course, a large, highly secured hall for the cryonic tanks, known as dewars.

More oversees many of the cryonics procedures, and has a medical and scientific advisory board to look after operations. His team includes medical doctors, paramedics, and surgeons. 138 patients have been placed in cryonic suspension at Alcor so far.

Among these patients are baseball legend Ted Williams, transhumanism advocate FM-2030, and James H. Bedford, PhD., the first patient to be cryopreserved back in 1967.

"FM-2030 is a good friend of mine,” More tells me.

That comment made me wonder about the immense challenges and commitment of being responsible — literally —for the existence of one's good friends. It seems overwhelming, but More, a fit 51-year-old, is up to the challenge. He is a steward for the transhumanist community — overseeing the bodies of friends and their families as they grow too old for science to help them. He acts as their guardian, advocate, and spokesman.

The process of cryonics begins with signing up for the service and gaining membership at Alcor or one of the other few cryonics facilities in existence. Ideally, a patient dies near a cryonics facility, so that they can be immediately cooled and prepared.

This is the ideal condition for diffusing cryoprotectants in the brain: Cooling the patient down to liquid nitrogen temperatures in the most controlled method possible, so that brain neurons containing memories and (hopefully) identity can be protected and preserved.

Many cryonicists wear “dog tags” or other identifying jewelry that show they require cryopreservation immediately after pronouncement of death — and medical professionals are supposed to respond to that. Dr. More told me one person even had instructions tattooed on himself so that they could be easily seen. Patients that aren't transported to a cryonics facility within a few hours of death are thought to not be preserved in ideal conditions.

Patients are placed in a bath of ice for transport and infused with chemicals to help preserve their cells and tissue structures in a process called vitrification. This, hopefully, eliminates the formation of ice crystals that can puncture cell walls and destroy the cells themselves. Later, either the head or whole body (depending on the preference of the patient) is transferred into a giant dewar filled with liquid nitrogen. Preserving just your head at Alcor is about half the price of the body, coming in around $80,000 plus minimal annual fees.

The science at Alcor and in cryonics is constantly improving, according to More. He tells me the new techniques they've been using the in the last 10 years are better at staving off the ice crystals that scientists suggest might lead to damage of the brain.

Some experts believe that patients could be revived in as little as 50 years, though there is no definitive way to prove this.

When I first began my Immortality Bus tour, I considered transforming the bus into a cryonics dewar to raise attention to life extension issues. But so few people knew about cryonics that the bus's effect on the public would be muted. So I chose to make my bus look like a coffin, and most people get it right away.

Because I'm in excellent health, and cryonics is expensive, I haven't signed up yet. However, More told me that life insurance can help provide financial means to get the cryonics procedure done. Now I'm set on signing up for cryonics before my presidential campaign ends, in hopes of bringing attention to this small but potentially life-changing industry. 

When I asked More why more people don't sign up for cryonics, he shrugged and said, "I don't really know. You would think everyone that likes living would be interested in this. But so far few people have signed up.”

As an aspiring politician, I advocate for government policy that specifically protects citizens' lifespans. Today, cryonics is the only hands-on treatment I know of that has a shot a preserving the lives and minds of the people we love. If people could become more comfortable with the idea of cryonics as emergency medicine rather than simply “freezing the dead,” then I think it might become a much larger industry.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, 2016 US Presidential Candidate of the Transhumanist Party, and author of The Transhumanist Wager.

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Science has been tackling new ways to stop death, which includes diving into the world of cryonics. 

Cryonics is an experimental effort to save lives by freezing a person's body who is so chronically ill that today's medicine could not help. Some scientists believe that cryopreservation could be successful in the future, while others are very doubtful, according to BBC.

Photographer Murray Ballard has spent years photographing cryonics institutions around the UK and the United States. "What I like about cryonics is that it gives us a vehicle to consider questions about the future," Ballard tells Business Insider. "You stand a much better chance of coming back to life if you’re cryopreserved than if you’re buried or cremated." Ballard compiled his photos into a book titled "The Prospect of Immortality." Below, see photos inside the cryonics institutions.

SEE ALSO: I visited a facility where dead people are frozen so they can be revived later

For his series, Ballard visited cryonics institutions in the UK, France, Norway, Arizona, Colorado, and Russia. He visited Alcor Life Extension Foundation, pictured below, in Scottsdale, Arizona the most.

Planning to participate in cryonics must take place before death. As of April 2016, the Alcor institute has 146 patients.

Source: alcor.org

The freezing and preserving process starts immediately after a patient's "legal death" is announced. A person can decide whether to freeze their entire body or just their brain. "Legal death" is when a person is beyond help and dies naturally and can no longer be revitalized by current technology.

Source: alcor.org

In a massive story in the New York Times this Sunday, journalist Amy Harmon documented the journey of a dying 23-year-old woman who decided to freeze her brain.

The woman, Kim Suozzi, had terminal brain cancer, and wanted to preserve her brain with the hope that it could one day be revived.

Suozzi isn't alone, either. More than 100 people have undergone cryonics (freezing their body for reviving later) or neuropreservation (freezing of just the head and brain) since the first case in the 1960s, according to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which performs both procedures.

Alcor requires patients to sign over to them their life insurance policies of $80,000 for neuropreservation and $200,000 for cryonics, according to their website.

Medical professionals and researchers have gotten quite good at freezing and reviving human parts — everything from organs for transplantation to embryos and eggs for reproduction. But the human brain is a whole other story.

The truth is, no one has ever been revived after death and freezing. Experts, including Winfried Denk, a brain mapping expert at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who Harmon quoted in her story, think the ability to revive someone who has undergone cryopreservation is at least 40 years away. By then, hopefully, we'd also have developed cures to whatever killed the patient in the first place.

The problem is, when the body dies, cells immediately start releasing toxic substances and decomposing. It's extremely difficult to prevent this natural process from happening, but a few organizations, including Alcor, which Suozzi used, are giving cryonics a try with the hope that one day they will be able to bring their frozen patients back to life.

Here's how Alcor does it:

1. Within minutes of the patient's heart stopping and being medically pronounced dead, the cryonics team places him/her in an ice water bath to start the cooling and preservation process.
2. Life support is administered to artificially keep the heart beating, the blood pumping, and to increase blood oxygen levels to those experienced in airplanes. This keeps the brain healthy during the cryopreservation process.
3. An external heart-lung machine takes over for the patient's organs, and the patient is cooled to a temperature a few degrees above the freezing point of water, where oxygen is no longer necessary.
4. Blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant antifreeze solution over the course of a few hours. The cryoprotectant chemicals used are similar to those used for transporting organs for transplant. This antifreeze is crucial for keeping ice crystals from forming, since ice expands and can form spiky crystals that damage brain cells.
5. The patient is slowly cooled (in a few more hours) via nitrogen gas circulation to -193 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, their cells vitrify, and turn into a solid. They technically don't "freeze" since the process is ice-free, and molecules instead move slower and slower until all chemistry stops.
6. Over the next two weeks, the patient is cooled to about -320 degrees Fahrenheit, and the cryopreserved brain and/or body is stored under liquid nitrogen for long term care.

But how would freezing a brain work to bring a human back to life? We really don't know yet.

Billions of cells make up the human brain, and the most important thing in preserving it is keeping their connections intact. If those connections are frozen intact, the hope is that future scientists would be able to read them from a frozen brain and recreate that person from those connections — either implanted into a synthetic, or "lab-grown," brain and body, or potentially into a computer.

What's hard is that researchers aren't even sure they fully understand how these connections work to create memories and personality. The Human Connectome Project aims to learn more about this network, but significant progress will take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars.

While people are having their heads and bodies preserved now, it will take a long time before they can be revived. What that will look like, however, is a whole other story.

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A 14-year-old girl in Britain has just been granted the right to have her body cryonically frozen in the hope that she will be brought back to life one day. The teen, from London, was dying from cancer when she took her case to the high court.

"I don’t want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up," she said. "I want to have this chance. This is my wish."

Cryonics is the practice of preserving a human body in extremely cold temperatures after they die, with the hope of being able to revive them sometime in the future when science has advanced enough.

People who undergo the procedure must be declared legally dead, as it's illegal to cryonically preserve someone who's still alive. However, legally dead is not the same as completely dead. Legal death occurs when the heart has stopped beating, but you're technically still alive until all brain function ceases.

Cryonics works in this narrow but crucial window, to preserve that tiny amount of cell function that's still happening. If you sign up at one facility, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, the protocol consists of four elements: deployment and standby, stabilization, cryoprotectant perfusion and cryogenic cool-down.

1. Deployment and standby

You have to be signed up with a cryonics facility before your death, so that the team can be prepared. Decomposition starts happening pretty much immediately, so the window of time for the team to start the preservation process is narrow. 

They will still try though. On the Alcor website it states: "it is a general principle of cryonics that cryopreservation should proceed after legal death even under poor biological conditions when standard protocol procedures cannot be performed."

A team is notified of your death and rushes to your side once you've passed, and they stabilize your body by supplying your brain with oxygen and blood to preserve minimal function.

2. Stabilization

After this, you are injected with heparis — an anticoagulant that prevents blood clots — and packed in ice. Your lungs might be ventilated too.

If it will take a long time to be transported to the operating room, your blood may be replaced with an organ preservation solution.

3. Cryoprotectant perfusion

The freezing begins when you reach the cryonics facility. Your body cannot simply be frozen in liquid nitrogen because it would damage your cells. You are around 70% water, so if it all froze, your cells would shatter.

Instead, the cryonics team starts a process called vitrification. They remove all the water from your cells and replace it with a chemical mixture of organ preservation and antifreeze chemicals called a cryoprotectant.

In theory, this protects organs and tissues from forming ice crystals and instead are put into a state of suspended animation. It's the same technique that has dramatically improved the way eggs and embryos are frozen and thawed in fertility treatments. 

Vitrification has successfully been used to freeze small pieces of tissue, and scientists even managed to preserve and recover the brain of a rabbit. However, we're probably still a long way off from being able to freeze and thaw larger structures, as vitrifying organs such as human kidneys for transplantation has not been done successfully. 

4. Cryogenic cool-down

Once vitrified, your body is cooled on a bed of dry ice until it reaches -130 degrees Celsius. Then you're placed head down in a large metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen at around -196 degrees Celsius. 

It costs over £100,000 to get your whole body cryonically preserved, but for a smaller fee, you can choose just to freeze your brain. This relies on the idea that one day in the future, scientists will be able to grow a clone of your body and you will somehow be revived. 

That's still not the end of it though.

Nobody has ever been revived from being frozen, because this technology doesn't exist. It also hasn't been around enough for everyone who has been preserved to be cured from whatever illness was killing them in the first place. 

That being said, medicine has come a long way in that people are often, technically, brought back from the dead. Defibrillators can shock your heart into a regular rhythm again, and in some surgeries, people are cooled down to very low temperatures so doctors can operate on aneurysms. 

There's also the ethical issues to consider about whether a clone grown from your cells would really be "you" or not. With the brain being such a complex organ, it's also impossible to know how much damage has been done by the process until you wake them up again.

The biggest problem with revival would be thawing a person the right way at the right speed. If it isn't done exactly right, your cells could turn to ice and be destroyed. 

The first person to be cryonically preserved was 73-year-old Dr James Bedford, who was frozen in 1967. He died of kidney cancer and was frozen a few hours after his death. In the cryonics community, January 12th is celebrated as "Bedford Day."

According to Alcor, Bedford's body is still in a good condition. It's quite possible that his metastasized cancer would be treatable now if he were revived, it's just the warming him back up again that needs to be figured out. 

SEE ALSO: An Italian surgeon will perform the world's first head transplant after a 'proof-of-concept' experiment on a dog

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The San Fransisco-based hedge fund Numerai is currently advertising for a full stack engineer.

You would be paid pretty well — $130,000 to $160,000 (or about £100,000 to £124,000) — to develop the numer.ai stock market app, and work with the team of mathematicians and machine learning experts.

There's also the employee perk of having the opportunity to be "cryonically preserved" after your death.

Yes, the company is offering its employees the chance to be shipped off to Alcor when they die, so their bodies can be drained of fluids and preserved in the hope they can one day be revived if medicine advances enough.

According to the ad, this is because "Numerai cares about its employees beyond their legal deaths."

The practice involves dropping the body temperature to -196 degrees Celsius and replacing all bodily fluids with a mixture of organ preservation and antifreeze chemicals called a cryoprotectant. That's so your blood doesn't freeze and puncture your cells. The process usually costs about £100,000, but it's cheaper if you just want to get your brain frozen.

In an interview with Motherboard, Numerai founder Richard Craib said he was inspired by his own membership to Alcor.

"If you want to have a chance of living much, much longer, then whether cryonics gives a five percent chance or a ten percent chance, it's still very good value for money,"he said. "When I realized you could do it through a life insurance policy, then you're only paying a few hundred dollars a month for the chance of eternal life."

There are various technological skills the ideal candidate should have, including coding languages and a "keen interest in cryptocurrencies." They should also be proactive, optimistic, passionate, contrarian, honest, and should "seek truth above what is easy or makes you look good."

If this sounds like the ideal job for you, you can apply here.

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A 23-year-old woman who recently died from brain cancer might get a second chance at life.

Before Kim Suozzi died this month, she wrote on her blog that her last wish was to be cryogenically preserved, The Huffington Post reports.

"Many of you know that I’m agnostic; I don’t have any clue what happens when you die, but have no reason to think that my consciousness will continue on after death," Suozzi wrote. "The only thing that I can think to make me feel a little more at ease with my death is to secure cryopreservation plans on the off-chance that they figure out how to revive people in the future."

Since the procedure could cost anywhere from $30,000 to $80,000, depending on which organization performed it, she sought out donations from Reddit users.

She ended up raising about $2,100 through Reddit, while the Society for Venturism helped raise $27,000 in about one week's time. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which quoted the procedure at $80,000, also set up a page for donations, but did not disclose the amount raised.

According to Alcor, Suozzi raised enough money for her procedure and was transported to its facilities the day she passed away. 

SEE ALSO: Tech Guy Tells His Wife He Wants To Live Forever

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The town of Nederland, Colo. had its annual Frozen Dead Guy Days festival this month, celebrating the corpse of a guy whose family froze him after his 1989 death with the hope he might be revived in the future.

We spoke to a planetary ecologist named Bo Shaffer— affectionately dubbed "Ice Man"— who tended to the frozen corpse of Bredo Morstoel for 18 years in the family’s absence.

Shaffer's connection with the frozen man began when Morstoel’s grandson Trygve Bauge was deported from the U.S. to his native Norway in the mid-90s, forcing him to search for a caretaker to ensure Morstoel remained frozen. Shaffer, who lives 45 miles outside Nederland, first made contact with Morstoel’s grandson based on a shared interest in cryonics, and Bauge offered Shaffer the job of preserving his deceased grandfather’s corpse.

For the next 18 years, Shaffer transported 1,600 to 1,800 pounds of dry ice a month to a hilltop shed housing the preserved corpse. There, he packed the dry ice into a homemade freezer box made from plywood and styrofoam, which encased the metal sarcophagus holding Morstoel’s corpse.

After installing the dry ice each month, Shaffer took photos of the freezer box and recorded its temperature, anywhere between minus 60 and minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Shaffer found the work tedious and recruited a small team of helpers, students from the University of Colorado Boulder who were intrigued with the novelty of the strange job.

“There's a certain Tom Sawyer aspect of it, like painting the fence,” Shaffer told Business Insider, in reference to his ability to attract enthusiastic helpers.

Shaffer performed that job dutifully, recalling only one serious mishap when the homemade freezer box broke open between his monthly trips, warming the corpse. Shaffer repaired and bolstered the box’s insulation before Morstoel could thaw out.

Shaffer says he eventually gave up the job and the keys to the shed in 2012 after a dispute with Trygve. Shaffer still attends the yearly Frozen Dead Guy Festival, where revelers commemorate the legacy of the now 109-year-old Morstoel with winter-themed contests and events, such as coffin races, polar plunges, and frozen salmon tosses.

He is amused that no one recognizes him, even though his 18 years as Morstoel’s caretaker has earned him the nickname “Ice Man” among festival-goers. "Everybody knows who the Ice Man was, especially out there at the festival and all over the place, but no one knows who I am,” he said.

"I like to stand around people and chat with them about it and they don’t know who I am,” he said. “I fill them with details they’ve never heard before, and sometimes at the very end I’ll tell them who I am.”

After posing for photos with fans of the Ice Man at the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival, Shaffer said they often ask what Morstoel looks like after so many years encased in ice. Shaffer tells them he has no idea, because he has never actually opened the sarcophagus.

While he's no longer involved in preserving Morstoel’s body, he still holds Nederland’s honorable distinction of caring for its precious frozen corpse for the better part of two decades.

“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” he said.

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As far as medical technology goes, there's never been a better time to be alive than the present.

Before antibiotics were discovered, diseases caused by bacteria (like tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, and various infections) were the leading causes of death in America.

What if all those people who died had somehow been able to benefit from our modern technology?

Today, some people are freezing their bodies or heads at death in hopes of future cures for what ails them. Their goal is to be revived and cured. While several companies will take your money to freeze your body or head, there isn't solid science showing that this will work.

We know it's even crazier to think that we could have successfully cryogenically frozen people in the past, when medical technology was far behind what we have today, but let's have a little fun, shall we?

Here are seven historic people (of thousands — likely millions) who died of things we could treat today, theoretically, if we had their thawed, freshly-dead and somehow rejuvenated bodies to work with:

Jane Austen

Jane Austen, that beloved author of "Pride and Prejudice" and five other novels, died in 1817 at the age of 41. She'd been ill for quite a while, according to letters she sent in the last year of her life. Sir Zachary Cope was the first to diagnose Austen with Addison's disease, in a 1964 article in the British Medical Journal. Interpreting the weakness, back pain, stomach upset, faintness, and skin discoloration Austen described in her letters (and symptoms she didn't mention), Cope thought Addison's disease was probably what killed her.

In people with Addison's disease, the adrenal glands don't produce enough of the hormones cortisol and aldosterone. These hormones help coordinate metabolism and blood pressure to keep the body running smoothly. When there's not enough of them in the body, people with Addison's suffer from weak and painful muscles, blood pressure low enough to faint, discolored skin, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. If the hormone levels get low enough, it can trigger a life-threatening "addisonian crisis" as blood pressure and blood sugar drop, which may have been what happened to Austen.

If she did indeed die in an addisonian crisis, today doctors would treat Austen with an IV of hydrocortisone, saline, and sugar to bring her back, then she'd have to keep taking the hormones her adrenal glands weren't producing. Perhaps she would be able to finish a seventh novel, "Sanditon," that she'd started but didn't finish before she died. We'll never know how that one ends.

Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh is perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning performance as Scarlett O'Hara opposite Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind."

Before she died of tuberculosis in 1967 at age 53, she'd had the disease for several years. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is to blame for tuberculosis' symptoms: fever, a flushed complexion, and a dry, persistent cough that brings up blood.

Though drug-resistant tuberculosis is a concern today, it's likely Leigh's historical case could be treated with antibiotics, if we were able to bring her back.

Before Leigh's time,tuberculosis also did in Emily Bronte, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and John Keats. It's not that the disease was especially popular among authors in the 19th century, it was just that common for everyone. Thanks to effective antibiotics and changes in living conditions, deaths from tuberculosis have gone down steadily since the beginning of the 20th century.

James Garfield

America's 20th president didn't even hold the office a full year before he was assassinated in 1881. But it wasn't really the assassin's bullet that killed him — it was the doctors who didn't wash their hands or instruments before they tried to remove the bullet from his back. Garfield's wound became infected, and he hung around 11 excruciating weeks before dying. It's more a change in medical practice to sterilize wounds and medical tools with antiseptics (which were around at the time) than an actual technological advance that could've saved Garfield. Still, he'd have a better shot today with modern antibiotics.

Though Garfield's case is one-of-a-kind, he's not too different from the thousands of Civil War soldiers who died from wound infections. Antibiotics, antiseptics, and sterile operating and examining procedures would have saved a lot of lives.

Prince Leopold

Hemophilia ran in the genes of Europe's royal families in the 19th and 20th centuries, likely because Queen Victoria of England was a carrier, had many children, and in those days royals had a tradition of marrying other royals. Her own son, Prince Leopold, had the disease, meaning his blood lacked the proteins to make it clot after a cut. He died in 1884, age 30, after a fall that caused him to bleed heavily.

We don't have a cure for hemophilia today, but we know how to treat it. Prince Leopold could get regular treatment that would help his blood clot, and he could get an emergency dose of clotting factors if he started bleeding profusely. He would have a much better chance of making it past 30.

Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky

Though there's controversy surrounding the death of the composer who brought us "Swan Lake" and "The Nutcracker," cholera is most likely what killed Tchaikovsky. He probably got cholera from drinking water or eating food with Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria responsible for the disease, in it. Tchaikovsky reportedly took ill the evening of October 20, 1893, and was diagnosed with cholera the next day. His symptoms might have included diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps before dying of kidney failure as a complication of all the body fluids lost.

Today, cholera is treated primarily by drinking or getting an IV (if it's an emergency) of a solution of salts, sugars, and water to replace the lost bodily fluids and electrolytes. Antibiotics would have also helped Tchaikovsky, if they had existed. But if he was actually killed by poisoning, as some conspiracy theories suggest, all bets are off.

René Descartes

You probably know at least one thing Descartes said: "I think, therefore I am." The famous philosopher died in 1650 of pneumonia, apparently contracted as his health declined from living in Sweden's harsh climate and getting up at 5 a.m. to tutor the queen in philosophy.

We can't know whether it was bacteria, a virus, or a fungus that infected Descartes's lungs to make them fill up with fluid so he couldn't breathe, but if was bacteria, antibiotics could have helped him. While pneumonia is still a concern today, especially for people over 65, we have a lot more resources to treat it than the likes of Charlemagne, Robert E. Lee, Victor Hugo, and Benjamin Franklin had when they died of it long ago.

Wilbur Wright

One of first men to fly died from a very common cause for his time: typhoid fever. Infection with the bacteria Salmonella Typhi not only causes the fever the disease is named for, but also weakness, stomach pains, headache, and a rash. Wilbur Wright was 45 when he died in 1912, but today doctors could treat him with antibiotics and he'd probably recover.

While we're dreaming big, let's also consider the 27,058 Union soldiers who died of typhoid fever during the Civil War, about 36% of all the Union soldiers diagnosed with the disease. Two thirds of the soldiers who died in the Civil War died from disease, not battle wounds. We'd be able to treat them much more effectively today.

All that's not to say no one dies of any of these diseases anymore, unfortunately.

The WHO reported 1.8 million deaths from tuberculosis in 2008, making it one of the leading causes of death in the world. People with HIV are more vulnerable to infection by tuberculosis, and antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria responsible for the disease are increasingly problematic.

Really, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a terrifying prospect across the board. But at this moment in time, we should definitely appreciate how far we've come in the past century, and look forward to making a longer list in another 100 years.

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For the first time this year, cremation has surpassed traditional burial as the most popular after-death option.

According to data from the National Funeral Directors Association, 48.5% of people are choosing cremation while only 45.6% opt for burials.

But as those two figures show, cremation and burials still leave out nearly 6% of the dying population. So where do those people go?

Here are some of the innovative ways people are choosing to spend eternity.

Resomation.

Instead of using open flames to incinerate the body, resomation relies on heated water and potassium hydroxide. The combination liquefies the body, leaving just the person's bones behind.

In the US, resomation is still catching on. Fewer than 10 states have funeral homes where resomation is an option.

It's more popular in the UK, where in 2008 the Cremation Society amended their 134-year-old charter to classify resomation as a superior option to burial.

Mummification.

Contemporary mummification looks pretty similar to how the ancient Egyptians did it.

Corky Ra, founder of the mummification service Summum, told CBS News in 2005 that roughly 1,400 people had signed up for their eventual whole-body wrapping. The service costs $63,000, Ra said.

The idea is that by preserving the body for hundreds if not thousands of years, people can retain their DNA in case technology one day lets them rejoin the living.

Ra could become one of the lucky ones: After his death in 2008, Ra was mummified.

Body donations.

Provided you don't have any communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS or syphilis and don't weigh too much, donating your body to science is a legitimate option after death.

If after registering you still qualify by the time you're dead, coroners at body donation companies like Science Care and BioGift Anatomical will disperse the body to various medical research programs in their area.

One university might get your brain and spine, another might get your kidneys, liver, and spleen. A third might get your skin.

In a massive story in the New York Times this Sunday, journalist Amy Harmon documented the journey of a dying 23-year-old woman who decided to freeze her brain.

The woman, Kim Suozzi, had terminal brain cancer, and wanted to preserve her brain with the hope that it could one day be revived.

Suozzi isn't alone, either. More than 100 people have undergone cryonics (freezing their body for reviving later) or neuropreservation (freezing of just the head and brain) since the first case in the 1960s, according to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which performs both procedures.

Alcor requires patients to sign over to them their life insurance policies of $80,000 for neuropreservation and $200,000 for cryonics, according to their website.

Medical professionals and researchers have gotten quite good at freezing and reviving human parts — everything from organs for transplantation to embryos and eggs for reproduction. But the human brain is a whole other story.

The truth is, no one has ever been revived after death and freezing. Experts, including Winfried Denk, a brain mapping expert at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who Harmon quoted in her story, think the ability to revive someone who has undergone cryopreservation is at least 40 years away. By then, hopefully, we'd also have developed cures to whatever killed the patient in the first place.

The problem is, when the body dies, cells immediately start releasing toxic substances and decomposing. It's extremely difficult to prevent this natural process from happening, but a few organizations, including Alcor, which Suozzi used, are giving cryonics a try with the hope that one day they will be able to bring their frozen patients back to life.

Here's how Alcor does it:

1. Within minutes of the patient's heart stopping and being medically pronounced dead, the cryonics team places him/her in an ice water bath to start the cooling and preservation process.
2. Life support is administered to artificially keep the heart beating, the blood pumping, and to increase blood oxygen levels to those experienced in airplanes. This keeps the brain healthy during the cryopreservation process.
3. An external heart-lung machine takes over for the patient's organs, and the patient is cooled to a temperature a few degrees above the freezing point of water, where oxygen is no longer necessary.
4. Blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant antifreeze solution over the course of a few hours. The cryoprotectant chemicals used are similar to those used for transporting organs for transplant. This antifreeze is crucial for keeping ice crystals from forming, since ice expands and can form spiky crystals that damage brain cells.
5. The patient is slowly cooled (in a few more hours) via nitrogen gas circulation to -193 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, their cells vitrify, and turn into a solid. They technically don't "freeze" since the process is ice-free, and molecules instead move slower and slower until all chemistry stops.
6. Over the next two weeks, the patient is cooled to about -320 degrees Fahrenheit, and the cryopreserved brain and/or body is stored under liquid nitrogen for long term care.

But how would freezing a brain work to bring a human back to life? We really don't know yet.

Billions of cells make up the human brain, and the most important thing in preserving it is keeping their connections intact. If those connections are frozen intact, the hope is that future scientists would be able to read them from a frozen brain and recreate that person from those connections — either implanted into a synthetic, or "lab-grown," brain and body, or potentially into a computer.

What's hard is that researchers aren't even sure they fully understand how these connections work to create memories and personality. The Human Connectome Project aims to learn more about this network, but significant progress will take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars.

While people are having their heads and bodies preserved now, it will take a long time before they can be revived. What that will look like, however, is a whole other story.

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Anyone who has experienced the devastating loss of a loved one can understand the impulse to latch on to anything that might bring that person back.

It's that very impulse that drives some people to pay to have the brains of loved ones frozen in the hopes that someday, technology of the future will allow them to bring back that person's mind with their memories, personality, experiences, and love intact, neuroscientist Michael Hendrickswrites over at MIT Technology Review.

This process is known as cryonics or cryopreservation.

The world of cryopreservation was recently thrust into the spotlight after a much-discussed New York Times story by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Amy Harmon, who documented the heartbreaking death of a 23-year-old woman as she succumbed to cancer — and the subsequent preservation of her brain.

But the problem with the cryonics industry, Hendricks writes, is that"any suggestion that you can come back to life is simply snake oil."

(Alcor, the cryonics company that froze the woman's brain, told Tech Insider that Hendricks' argument "rests on several mistaken assumptions." We've included the company's full emailed statement at the end of this article.)

As Tech Insider's Rebecca Harrington writes, proponents of cryopreservation believe that if the brain's "connections are frozen intact, the hope is that future scientists would be able to read them from a frozen brain and recreate that person from those connections — either implanted into a synthetic ... brain and body, or potentially into a computer." If implanted in a computer, that recreation is known as mind uploading — and Hendricks criticizes the idea that an uploaded mind would even be the same person.

According to Alcor's statement, "cryonics does not require or imply mind uploading," and many of the people who choose to have their brains and bodies preserved hope that in the future, it will be possible to repair this frozen body on a molecular level.

Hendricks, however, says that from what we know, this is wrong. Even if the connections of the brain were perfectly preserved, mapped, and known, those connections alone are not sufficient to recreate consciousness or to simulate life.

A living brain is more complex than that, and it's the actions within the brain that make us individuals — not just its structure. "We know that the same set of synaptic connections can function very differently depending on what mix of [neurotransmitter] signals is present at a given time," Hendricks writes.

The signals sent back and forth throughout the mind, comprised of chemicals and proteins and electrical impulses, along with genes activated at different times, are the things that physically comprise our memory, according to Hendricks.

Just freezing a brain and statically preserving its connections doesn't maintain these features, he says, even if it's "theoretically possible." Consciousness in the brain is dynamic, not a fixed thing that can be frozen in time.

The idea that the brain is more complex than just its connections is one that's shared among neuroscientists and psychiatrists. Yet Alcor argues that its procedures account for this. "The aim at Alcor is to cryopreserve ​*all*​ the fine details of the brain and even secure viability of the brain as well as we can," the company said in its statement.

Still, much about the living brain and what makes it work remains mysterious. Earlier this year, Dr. Thomas Insel, at the time the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, explained to Tech Insider that we're trying to map the human brain now, but that's just a beginning.

We won't actually know what's happening in the mind until we have "a way of looking at activity in real time, essentially at the speed of thought, so you're able to capture what's activated when and how that's connected in a way that's sufficient for behavior," he said.

The technology for this does not exist yet, and we don't know how we'll get there, though we're trying. As Harmon explained in her story, a human brain is so complex that we estimate that mapping one mind would take up half of all the digital storage capacity on Earth — and that's just the structure, not even the living action happening inside that structure.

In light of that, it seems unlikely that all of the complexity that makes up a person's consciousness can been saved by freezing brain tissue alone. Yet that's exactly what people have paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do, in hopes of returning someday.

We reached out to two of the leading cryonics organizations in the United States, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the Cryonics Institute, for a comment on Hendricks's criticism.

Alcor emailed us this response:

The article in the MIT Technology Review rests on several mistaken assumptions. First of all, cryonics does not require or imply mind uploading. While some of our individual members are interested in this topic, the default resuscitation scenario for cryonics patients involves molecular repair of the patient's biological brain (and body).

While we are encouraged by the rise of connectomics, the aim at Alcor is to cryopreserve ​*all*​ the fine details of the brain and even secure viability of the brain as well as we can. In fact, in our stabilization procedures we we aim to keep the brain viable by contemporary medical criteria and collect data to evaluate the efficacy of our procedures.

Alcor is a charitable, non-profit, organization and we do not make a profit when we place our patients in biostasis.

We strongly disagree that absent proof of human suspended animation or flawless ultrastructural preservation it is not ethical to practice cryonics. Our organization challenges the mainstream definitions of death, and we believe that perfected cryopreservation is a sufficient but not necessary condition for cryonics to succeed. As long as we have good reasons to believe that the original state of the brain can be inferred from the damaged state, making cryonics arrangements can be a rational choice to make. To our knowledge, there are no rigorous, scientific, studies that demonstrate that today's cryonics procedures produce irreversible destruction of identity-critical information.

Information about the ultrastructural effects of the vitrification solutions we use to inhibit ice formation can be found here: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html

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Over 100,000 people die each day globally. Why don't more of us consider cryonics — the practice of freezing the clinically dead in the hopes of bringing them back to life at a later date — as a way to avoid death?

As part of my 2016 US Presidential campaign representing the transhumanist party,  I had a chance to stop in at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world's best-known cryonics facility, to find out.

You've probably seen cryonics before. Hollywood loves to use it in movies. Mike Myers (as Austin Powers), Woody Allen, and Mel Gibson are just some examples of people who have been "frozen" on the big screen. 

Cryonics — and the field of life extension — has also been in the news a lot lately. A recent New York Times article featuring an Alcor patient generated discussion across the Internet.

Most cryonicists would not call frozen patients dead. They say patients are temporarily beyond the help of modern medicine, and that cryonics is the final attempt to provide emergency healthcare. Cryonics, they argue, is actually saving a patient by buying them time for science to catch up to the point where they can be revived.  

"Death is not a moment, but a process, where an individual goes from a state of health, through many steps which end up becoming irreversible by modern means. It is not an absolute event. It is almost entirely dependent on the skills and means of the rescuer, and as we know, those skills and means improve over time," says Christine Gaspar, a RN and President of Cryonics Society of Canada and CEO Biostasis Canada.

I visited Alcor while traveling cross-country aboard my Immortality Bus (a campaign bus that resembles a coffin).  Dr. Max More, a philosopher and the CEO of Alcor, gave me and my Transhumanist Party volunteers a private tour at the nonprofit's Scottsdale, Arizona facility.

Check it out in this video from Roen Horn: 

One thing that struck me about Alcor was its size. It's not a small shop housing a few dead people in big steel tubes. It's a giant medical facility, complete with offices, surgical bays, laboratories, conference rooms, and of course, a large, highly secured hall for the cryonic tanks, known as dewars.

More oversees many of the cryonics procedures, and has a medical and scientific advisory board to look after operations. His team includes medical doctors, paramedics, and surgeons. 138 patients have been placed in cryonic suspension at Alcor so far.

Among these patients are baseball legend Ted Williams, transhumanism advocate FM-2030, and James H. Bedford, PhD., the first patient to be cryopreserved back in 1967.

"FM-2030 is a good friend of mine,” More tells me.

That comment made me wonder about the immense challenges and commitment of being responsible — literally —for the existence of one's good friends. It seems overwhelming, but More, a fit 51-year-old, is up to the challenge. He is a steward for the transhumanist community — overseeing the bodies of friends and their families as they grow too old for science to help them. He acts as their guardian, advocate, and spokesman.

The process of cryonics begins with signing up for the service and gaining membership at Alcor or one of the other few cryonics facilities in existence. Ideally, a patient dies near a cryonics facility, so that they can be immediately cooled and prepared.

This is the ideal condition for diffusing cryoprotectants in the brain: Cooling the patient down to liquid nitrogen temperatures in the most controlled method possible, so that brain neurons containing memories and (hopefully) identity can be protected and preserved.

Many cryonicists wear “dog tags” or other identifying jewelry that show they require cryopreservation immediately after pronouncement of death — and medical professionals are supposed to respond to that. Dr. More told me one person even had instructions tattooed on himself so that they could be easily seen. Patients that aren't transported to a cryonics facility within a few hours of death are thought to not be preserved in ideal conditions.

Patients are placed in a bath of ice for transport and infused with chemicals to help preserve their cells and tissue structures in a process called vitrification. This, hopefully, eliminates the formation of ice crystals that can puncture cell walls and destroy the cells themselves. Later, either the head or whole body (depending on the preference of the patient) is transferred into a giant dewar filled with liquid nitrogen. Preserving just your head at Alcor is about half the price of the body, coming in around $80,000 plus minimal annual fees.

The science at Alcor and in cryonics is constantly improving, according to More. He tells me the new techniques they've been using the in the last 10 years are better at staving off the ice crystals that scientists suggest might lead to damage of the brain.

Some experts believe that patients could be revived in as little as 50 years, though there is no definitive way to prove this.

When I first began my Immortality Bus tour, I considered transforming the bus into a cryonics dewar to raise attention to life extension issues. But so few people knew about cryonics that the bus's effect on the public would be muted. So I chose to make my bus look like a coffin, and most people get it right away.

Because I'm in excellent health, and cryonics is expensive, I haven't signed up yet. However, More told me that life insurance can help provide financial means to get the cryonics procedure done. Now I'm set on signing up for cryonics before my presidential campaign ends, in hopes of bringing attention to this small but potentially life-changing industry. 

When I asked More why more people don't sign up for cryonics, he shrugged and said, "I don't really know. You would think everyone that likes living would be interested in this. But so far few people have signed up.”

As an aspiring politician, I advocate for government policy that specifically protects citizens' lifespans. Today, cryonics is the only hands-on treatment I know of that has a shot a preserving the lives and minds of the people we love. If people could become more comfortable with the idea of cryonics as emergency medicine rather than simply “freezing the dead,” then I think it might become a much larger industry.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, 2016 US Presidential Candidate of the Transhumanist Party, and author of The Transhumanist Wager.

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Science has been tackling new ways to stop death, which includes diving into the world of cryonics. 

Cryonics is an experimental effort to save lives by freezing a person's body who is so chronically ill that today's medicine could not help. Some scientists believe that cryopreservation could be successful in the future, while others are very doubtful, according to BBC.

Photographer Murray Ballard has spent years photographing cryonics institutions around the UK and the United States. "What I like about cryonics is that it gives us a vehicle to consider questions about the future," Ballard tells Business Insider. "You stand a much better chance of coming back to life if you’re cryopreserved than if you’re buried or cremated." Ballard compiled his photos into a book titled "The Prospect of Immortality." Below, see photos inside the cryonics institutions.

SEE ALSO: I visited a facility where dead people are frozen so they can be revived later

For his series, Ballard visited cryonics institutions in the UK, France, Norway, Arizona, Colorado, and Russia. He visited Alcor Life Extension Foundation, pictured below, in Scottsdale, Arizona the most.

Planning to participate in cryonics must take place before death. As of April 2016, the Alcor institute has 146 patients.

Source: alcor.org

The freezing and preserving process starts immediately after a patient's "legal death" is announced. A person can decide whether to freeze their entire body or just their brain. "Legal death" is when a person is beyond help and dies naturally and can no longer be revitalized by current technology.

Source: alcor.org

A 14-year-old girl in Britain has just been granted the right to have her body cryonically frozen in the hope that she will be brought back to life one day. The teen, from London, was dying from cancer when she took her case to the high court.

"I don’t want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up," she said. "I want to have this chance. This is my wish."

Cryonics is the practice of preserving a human body in extremely cold temperatures after they die, with the hope of being able to revive them sometime in the future when science has advanced enough.

People who undergo the procedure must be declared legally dead, as it's illegal to cryonically preserve someone who's still alive. However, legally dead is not the same as completely dead. Legal death occurs when the heart has stopped beating, but you're technically still alive until all brain function ceases.

Cryonics works in this narrow but crucial window, to preserve that tiny amount of cell function that's still happening. If you sign up at one facility, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, the protocol consists of four elements: deployment and standby, stabilization, cryoprotectant perfusion and cryogenic cool-down.

1. Deployment and standby

You have to be signed up with a cryonics facility before your death, so that the team can be prepared. Decomposition starts happening pretty much immediately, so the window of time for the team to start the preservation process is narrow. 

They will still try though. On the Alcor website it states: "it is a general principle of cryonics that cryopreservation should proceed after legal death even under poor biological conditions when standard protocol procedures cannot be performed."

A team is notified of your death and rushes to your side once you've passed, and they stabilize your body by supplying your brain with oxygen and blood to preserve minimal function.

2. Stabilization

After this, you are injected with heparis — an anticoagulant that prevents blood clots — and packed in ice. Your lungs might be ventilated too.

If it will take a long time to be transported to the operating room, your blood may be replaced with an organ preservation solution.

3. Cryoprotectant perfusion

The freezing begins when you reach the cryonics facility. Your body cannot simply be frozen in liquid nitrogen because it would damage your cells. You are around 70% water, so if it all froze, your cells would shatter.

Instead, the cryonics team starts a process called vitrification. They remove all the water from your cells and replace it with a chemical mixture of organ preservation and antifreeze chemicals called a cryoprotectant.

In theory, this protects organs and tissues from forming ice crystals and instead are put into a state of suspended animation. It's the same technique that has dramatically improved the way eggs and embryos are frozen and thawed in fertility treatments. 

Vitrification has successfully been used to freeze small pieces of tissue, and scientists even managed to preserve and recover the brain of a rabbit. However, we're probably still a long way off from being able to freeze and thaw larger structures, as vitrifying organs such as human kidneys for transplantation has not been done successfully. 

4. Cryogenic cool-down

Once vitrified, your body is cooled on a bed of dry ice until it reaches -130 degrees Celsius. Then you're placed head down in a large metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen at around -196 degrees Celsius. 

It costs over £100,000 to get your whole body cryonically preserved, but for a smaller fee, you can choose just to freeze your brain. This relies on the idea that one day in the future, scientists will be able to grow a clone of your body and you will somehow be revived. 

That's still not the end of it though.

Nobody has ever been revived from being frozen, because this technology doesn't exist. It also hasn't been around enough for everyone who has been preserved to be cured from whatever illness was killing them in the first place. 

That being said, medicine has come a long way in that people are often, technically, brought back from the dead. Defibrillators can shock your heart into a regular rhythm again, and in some surgeries, people are cooled down to very low temperatures so doctors can operate on aneurysms. 

There's also the ethical issues to consider about whether a clone grown from your cells would really be "you" or not. With the brain being such a complex organ, it's also impossible to know how much damage has been done by the process until you wake them up again.

The biggest problem with revival would be thawing a person the right way at the right speed. If it isn't done exactly right, your cells could turn to ice and be destroyed. 

The first person to be cryonically preserved was 73-year-old Dr James Bedford, who was frozen in 1967. He died of kidney cancer and was frozen a few hours after his death. In the cryonics community, January 12th is celebrated as "Bedford Day."

According to Alcor, Bedford's body is still in a good condition. It's quite possible that his metastasized cancer would be treatable now if he were revived, it's just the warming him back up again that needs to be figured out. 

SEE ALSO: An Italian surgeon will perform the world's first head transplant after a 'proof-of-concept' experiment on a dog

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