Hooked on Cryonics

If you like this cold, wet and dreary Boston weather, have I got a deal for you. Picture an unlimited stay peacefully bobbing in the animation-suspending -200 C liquid nitrogen tanks of the Cryonics Institute for less than your parents spend on one year of Harvard tuition. That's right, the price of immortality has fallen to the paltry one-time fee of $28,000. Given this one-time capital commitment, and the wonders of compounded interest, members of the Cryonics Institute will painstakingly tend to your body until the as-yet-undetermined time when technological and medical advancements allow your consciousness to be restored. But how long, you ask? Basically until when we have figured out the human organism down to its enzymatic nuts and nucleic-acid bolts, and have developed microscopic wrench-wielding robots that can overhaul your ravaged body, rendering you operational once more. The price of this trip to the future can be financed through life insurance at a monthly cost of less than you would pay for basic cable (and since Harvard has no basic cable, this might serve as a viable alternative).

But what do you get for your pittance? The cool-down procedure reads like the recipe for creating a modern-day mummy. At the news that the end is near, folks from the Cryonics Institute (CI) rush to the scene and await the inevitable, as undergoing the freezing process while still alive is illegal. When you are pronounced "dead," the cool-down immediately begins with application of ice to your head and body. At this point the powerful anticoagulent heparin is injected to prevent massive blood clots from making you even deader. Then your clammy corpse is transported to the CI facility in Clinton Township, MI, where your blood is replaced with increasing concentrations of, um, antifreeze. After washing out blood and "perfusing" with "cryoprotectant" the "dead" body is lowered to liquid nitrogen temperature over the course of two weeks to avoid macroscopic and microscopic cracks that occur if patients are cooled too quickly (I would hate to see those early, more crumbly patients). From here it's straight into your cold dark home, a holding tank with up to 15 other like-minded immortalists for the next indeterminate amount of time.

Other cryonics companies have offered euphemistically titled "neuro-suspensions" as a low cost alternative to full-body preservations. Neuro-suspensions, of course, involve the freezing of the patient's head only, and discarding their worn-out body in the hopes that future generations will provide them with such materialistic triflings gratis. Either way you choose, the real problem you face is the freezing procedure itself. Even with the heavy perfusion of anti-freeze into your system, your body is still mostly water, and each polar water molecule is just waiting to partner up with its nearest neighbor in a nice hydrogen bond as the temperature plummets. And as water crystals begin to form they slice and dice their way through your cells, Benihana-ing until they homogenize your now frozen cellular structure. Bummer.

But wait. Off in that distant time human ingenuity will save us from this molecular blender. Well, sort of. You must wait for the development of nanotechnology, basically the engineering of FriendlyTinyRobots capable of being programmed and self-duplicating. With a horde of FriendlyTinyRobots willing to scour our body's molecular nooks and crannies, repairing the damage that the crystalline Katana blades have done, thawing is no problem, and if we can solve the thawing problem (i.e. the reassembly of every cell in the body) the original cause of your death ought to be laughably easy to remedy.

Yes, it all sounds a bit out there on Edge City, but I must admit that strangely enough, the idea of immortality appeals to me. The most compelling argument for deep-freeze is also one of the simplest: Either you are part of the experimental group, or you are part of the control, and the control group is dead. Thus, with an infinite gain associated with a successful experiment, I must believe that the 20 dollars a month utility loss that I will suffer is just buying me a ticket in the highest-stakes lottery on the planet: a chance to see the heat-death of the universe.

In an evolutionary eye-blink (if we keep our noses to the grindstone for the next few hundred years or so) we will likely understand the biochemical soup that is our body and be able to manipulate it at will, extending life indefinitely. With humans on the cusp of technology-induced functional immortality, I feel ripped off. I am part of the last few of the millions of generations that will not taste the almost infinite fruits of our long evolutionary assent. It is time to cheat fate.

Sure, the Cryonics Institute might go out of business, or my brain might be sufficiently scrambled so that no number of tireless FriendlyTinyRobots might put Humpty together again, or any number of technical difficulties might prevent me from being successfully thawed, but so what? I am no deader that I would be otherwise.

So who's with me? Who wants to either be chillin' in the 25th century, or buried as limp ground beef? Who'll cast their dice? I don't know the odds, but the payoff is more than you or I can imagine.

B.J. Greenleaf '01 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.