Cryonics - History

History

Benjamin Franklin, in a 1773 letter, expressed regret that he lived "in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science" that he could not be preserved and revived to fulfil his "very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence." In 1922 Alexander Yaroslavsky, member of Russian immortalists-biocosmists movement, wrote "Anabiosys Poem". However, the modern era of cryonics began in 1962 when Michigan college physics teacher Robert Ettinger proposed in a privately published book, The Prospect of Immortality, that freezing people may be a way to reach future medical technology. Even though freezing a person is apparently fatal, Ettinger argued that what appears to be fatal today may be reversible in the future. He applied the same argument to the process of dying itself, saying that the early stages of clinical death may be reversible in the future. Combining these two ideas, he suggested that freezing recently deceased people may be a way to save lives.

Slightly before Ettinger’s book was complete, Evan Cooper (writing as Nathan Duhring) privately published a book called Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now that independently suggested the same idea. Cooper founded the Life Extension Society (LES) in 1964 to promote freezing people. Ettinger came to be credited as the originator of cryonics, perhaps because his book was republished by Doubleday in 1964 on recommendation of Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl, and received more publicity. Ettinger also stayed with the movement longer. Nevertheless, cryonics historian R. Michael Perry has written “Evan Cooper deserves the principal credit for forming an organized cryonics movement.”

Cooper’s Life Extension Society became the seed tree for cryonics societies throughout the country where local cryonics advocates would get together as a result of contact through the LES mailing list. The actual word “cryonics” was invented by Karl Werner, then a student in the studio of William Katavolos at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, in 1965 in conjunction with the founding of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY) by Curtis Henderson and Saul Kent that same year. This was followed by the founding of the Cryonics Society of Michigan (CSM) and Cryonics Society of California (CSC) in 1966, and Bay Area Cryonics Society (BACS) in 1969 (renamed the American Cryonics Society, or ACS, in 1985). Neither CSNY nor CSC are currently in operation. CSM eventually became the Immortalist Society, a non-profit affiliate of the Cryonics Institute (CI), a cryonics service organization founded by Ettinger in 1976. Alcor now has more current cryonics patients than any other organization, 110 as of December 2011.

Although there was at least one earlier aborted case, it is generally accepted that the first person frozen with intent of future resuscitation was Dr. James Bedford, a 73-year-old psychology professor frozen under crude conditions by CSC on January 12, 1967. The case made the cover of a limited print run of Life Magazine before the presses were stopped to report the death of three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire instead. Bedford is still frozen today at Alcor.

Cryonics suffered a major setback in 1979 when it was discovered that nine bodies stored by the head of the CSC, Robert Nelson, in a cemetery in Chatsworth, California, had thawed due to depletion of funds by relatives, after being maintained for a year and a half at the personal expense of Nelson. Some of the bodies had apparently thawed years earlier without notification. Nelson was sued, and negative publicity slowed cryonics growth for years afterward. Of 17 documented cryonics cases between 1967 and 1973, only James Bedford remains cryopreserved today. Strict financial controls and requirements adopted in response to the Chatsworth scandal have resulted in the successful maintenance of almost all cryonics cases since that era.

The largest cryonics organization today, in terms of membership, was established as a nonprofit organization by Fred and Linda Chamberlain in 1972 as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia (ALCOR). In 1977, the name was changed to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. In 1982, the Institute for Advanced Biological Studies (IABS), founded by Mike Darwin and Steve Bridge in Indiana, merged with Alcor. During the 1980s, Darwin worked with UCLA cardiothoracic surgery researcher Jerry Leaf at Alcor to develop a medical model for cryonics procedures. They pioneered the first consistent use of a cryonics procedure now known as a “standby”, in which a team waits to begin life support procedures at the bedside of a cryonics patient as soon as possible after the heart stops.

The oldest incorporated cryonics society still in existence is the American Cryonics Society (ACS). This tax-exempt 501(c)(3) membership organization was incorporated in 1969 as the Bay Area Cryonics Society (BACS) by a group of cryonics advocates that included two prominent Bay Area physicians, Dr. M. Coleman Harris and Dr. Grace Talbot. The first suspensions under BACS auspices were performed in 1974 by Trans Time, Inc., a for-profit company started by BACS members. BACS researcher Dr. Paul Segall, working with Jerry Leaf of CryoVita, developed a medical model to induce hypothermia shortly after pronouncement of death. Dr. Segall later went on to pioneer blood substitutes for use in both cryonic suspension and in mainstream medicine.

Cryonics received new support in the 1980s when MIT engineer Eric Drexler started publishing papers and books foreseeing the new field of molecular nanotechnology. His 1986 book, Engines of Creation, included an entire chapter on cryonics applications. Cryonics advocates saw the nascent field of nanotechnology as vindication of their long held view that molecular repair of injured tissue was theoretically possible. In the late 1980s Alcor member Dick Clair (who was dying of AIDS) sued for, and ultimately won for everyone, the right to be cryonically preserved in the State of California. Alcor’s membership expanded tenfold within a decade, with a 30% annual growth rate between 1988 and 1992.

On July 24, 1988, a Ph.D. in computer science named Kevin Brown started an electronic mailing list called CryoNet that became a powerful tool of communication for the cryonics community. Numerous other mailing lists and web forums for discussing cryonics and the affairs of particular organizations have since appeared, but CryoNet remained a central point of contact for cryonicists until it was shut down on March 17, 2011.

Alcor was disrupted by political turmoil in 1993 when a group of activists left to start the CryoCare Foundation, and associated for-profit companies CryoSpan, Inc. (headed by Paul Wakfer) and BioPreservation, Inc. (headed by Mike Darwin). Darwin and collaborators made many technical advances during this time period, including a landmark study documenting high quality brain preservation by freezing with high concentrations of glycerol. CryoCare ceased operations in 1999 when they were unable to renew their service contract with BioPreservation. CryoCare’s two patients stored at CryoSpan were transferred to Alcor. Several ACS patients stored at CryoSpan were transferred to CI.

There have been numerous, often transient, for-profit companies involved in cryonics. For-profit companies were often paired or affiliated with non-profit groups they served. Some of these companies, with non-profits they served in parentheses, were Cryonic Interment, Inc. (CSC), Cryo-Span Corporation (CSNY), Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation (CSC and CSNY), Manrise Corporation (Alcor), CryoVita, Inc. (Alcor), BioTransport, Inc. (Alcor), Trans Time, Inc. (BACS), Soma, Inc. (IABS), CryoSpan, Inc. (CryoCare and ACS), BioPreservation, Inc. (CryoCare and ACS), Kryos, Inc. (ACS), Suspended Animation, Inc. (CI, ACS, and Alcor). Trans Time and Suspended Animation are the only for-profit cryonics organizations that still exist.

The cryonics field seems to have largely consolidated around three non-profit groups, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Cryonics Institute (CI), and the American Cryonics Society (ACS), all deriving significant income from bequests and donations. A newly formed non-profit group called the Cryonics Society was formally incorporated in 2006 but is devoted solely to promotion and public education of the cryonics concept.

As research in the 1990s revealed in greater detail the damaging effects of freezing, there was a trend to use higher concentrations of glycerol cryoprotectant to prevent freezing injury. In 2001 Alcor began using vitrification, a technology borrowed from mainstream organ preservation research, in an attempt to completely prevent ice formation during cooling. Initially the technology could only be applied to the head when separated from the body. In 2005 Alcor began treating the whole body with their vitrification solution in a procedure called "neurovitrification with whole body cryoprotection". In the same year, the Cryonics Institute began treating the head of their whole body patients with their own vitrification solution.

The Cryonics Institute maintains 103 human patients as of 1 May 2011 (along with about 76 pets) at its Clinton Township, Michigan facility. About a fifth of the cryopreserved humans and a smaller portion of the pets came to the CI facility through contract with the American Cryonics Society (which has no storage facilities of its own). On 1 May 2011 Alcor currently was maintaining 104 cryonics patients in Scottsdale, Arizona. There are support groups in Europe, Canada / Quebec (Magali & Stephan Beauregard), the United Kingdom, and Australia. There is also a smaller cryonics company in Russia called KrioRus, which maintains 16 human patients and 7 pets, and the new not-for-profit company Stasis Systems Australia plans to build the first facility in the southern hemisphere. There are also plans being developed by renowned architect Stephen Valentine for a multi-acre futuristic high security facility called Timeship to be built in an undisclosed location in the United States, as well as for an underground facility in Switzerland. Trans Time, a small company, currently maintains 3 cryonics patients.

DARPA currently funds several research projects aimed on sending the human body into a state of suspended animation, essentially “shutting down” the heart and brain until proper care can be administered that can be regarded as a step to cryopreservation of humans.