CRYONICS – - FICTION or SCIENCE
CRYONICS – - FICTION or SCIENCE
Do you believe in life after death? In reincarnation? What if I tell you that there’s an immense interest in the development of a new futuristic technology that defies the human and spiritual laws regarding death. The field of Cryonics – tries to attain a deathless society by trying to develop technology that will enable us to revive a dead loved one.
We often see fiction movies featuring human beings and pre-historic animals preserved on ice. But these movies are not fiction at all, since preserving human beings or large animals on low temperature is called Cryonics in science. Cryopreservation of human beings is proposed that someday people who are considered medically dead or may not be necessarily dead, can be recovered and revived by using greatly advanced future technology.
Ideally, cryonic begins within minutes of cardiac arrest by cooling the body to near 77.15 Kelvin (boiling point of liquid nitrogen) so that long-term cryopreservation can be achieved. It is false belief that cells will lyse or burst due to the configuration of ice crystals within the cell, which is a common mistake, since this only takes place if the freezing rate goes beyond the osmotic loss of water to the extracellular space. On the other hand, ice may still form between cells, causing mechanical and chemical damage. This damage from freezing can still be serious.
Cryonic organizations use cryoprotectants to lessen this damage or to put a stop to ice formation for the entire duration of cryopreservation. In using cryoprotectant to remove and replace water inside cells with chemicals that prevent freezing, cryoprotectant solutions are injected intravenously through the blood vessels. To a great extent, this procedure can decrease the damage, although freezing of the whole human body still results to injuries that are not reversible with present technology.
Still fiction remains with this study as long as theories will not be proven correctly. The potential repair technologies unspecified by cryonics are still hypothetical and not widely known or renowned. Medical science is first and foremost concerned with what is demonstrably attainable, not what is theoretically possible.
During the process the brain is left without oxygen for a couple of minutes at warm temperatures, this is to help aid in the prevention of brain cell death, but there are instances that the brain is left with no viable supply of oxygen for hours that unfortunately results in ischemic injury to the brain and other vital tissues which make resuscitation a challenge with today’s medical knowledge. This is one of the challenges that doctors and scientists working on the advancement of cryonics face. They dispute the current medical definition of death as the process of the brain having some form of ischemia that they are hoping to be able to reverse in the future.
Revival
Cryonics is not done by magic, optimists and transhumans hoping for the realization of the technology heavily relies on the advancement of bioengineering, molecular nanotechnology and nanomedicine as prime movers for the field. They hope that one day, a development or discovery in this field will be the missing link puzzling scientists concerning revival.
The process of revival requires the piece by piece repairing of the damage primarily caused by the lack of oxygen to the brain, the toxicity caused by the cryoprotectant chemicals, thermal stress, the freezing of tissues that fail to vitrify and reversing the effects of death by extensive tissue regeneration.
Neuropreservation is the specialized process of preserving the brain, it’s the complete opposite of the theory of mind transfer wherein scientists contemplate the possibility of reading the entire memory embedded within a living or dead person and transferring it to a lab grown and modified body void of any memory. Cryonics is usually perceived as either the preservation of the whole body or a specialized process wherein the brain is the only one preserved.