Cryonics, the freezing of human bodies in the hopes of thawing and resurrecting them in the future, was once almost entirely hypothetical; something you only heard about in connection with unsubstantiated rumors about Walt Disney. Technology is accelerating rapidly, however, and there are now a handful of cryonics facilities around the world, including several in the United States.
YouTuber Tom Scott visited one such facility based in Switzerland, called Tomorrow Bio, in his latest video. It opens with founder and CEO Emil Kendziorra admitting that they don’t have many patients yet — “more than zero, but you can count it on a very few hands.” He also clarifies that while the center refers to them as patients, they are, legally and medically speaking, corpses, and patients cannot be frozen until they have been declared dead, because otherwise it’s murder. Which, you know, checks out.
If someone who has elected to be frozen is close to death, Tomorrow Bio dispatches one of their own ambulances in order to start the process as soon as possible. As Kendziorra explains, there needs to be minimal delay between the patient’s heart-stopping and the initiation of the cryonic procedure. Once the patient dies, technicians start three procedures at once: they begin cooling down the body “as quick as possible”; they start chest compressions in order to provide some amount of metabolic support; and they replace all blood in the body with medical-grade antifreeze.
Along those lines, Kendizorra explains that they don’t technically freeze anyone, they vitrify them — he describes this as a “glass-like amorphous state that allows tissue to be stored without any further damage in a state where potentially future technology might be able to resuscitate.” Scott then shows viewers a room filled with stainless-steel containers that house patients, submerged in liquid nitrogen, for the indefinite future.
On the financial side of things, cryonics is still very much only possible for eccentric rich weirdos. Patients pay a $28 membership fee while alive, and then around $220,000 at the time of their death.
In fairness, Kendziorra is pretty realistic about the likelihood of this succeeding — he describes cryopreservation as a research procedure, not a medical one, and plainly states, “No one in the world can say if and when cryopreservation might work.”
In case all of this didn’t already sound like something out of Futurama, it gets better: The company offers brain-only cryopreservation, meaning we’re one step closer to a future populated by preserved heads in jars. Huzzah!
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