Freezing People is (Not) Easy (27 page)

 

Connie Ettinger

I am now seventy-six years old and a lot closer to death than when I first read Professor Ettinger's book; my place is secured at Cryonics Institute in Michigan. I don't fear my voyage to the Undiscovered Country. I know the infrastructure now exists to keep me suspended, and I have full confidence that future generations will keep pushing toward those unknown frontiers. I know that
they
will sooner or later answer all of today's questions, including the possibility of reviving a frozen human being. My journey isn't over yet—it's only just begun.

I now have two older daughters, Lori and Susan, with my first wife, Elaine, and two younger daughters; Natalie is seventeen and Christine is twenty-two. They are starting their own journey. I wonder about all the scientific miracles that will come to pass during their lifetime, once I'm gone and lying in stasis in liquid nitrogen.
What part will their generation play in advancing human hibernation and suspended animation? How many millions of lives will be saved?

The conclusion really brings me back to the beginning—to years before and the original path I had chosen for CSC, which was finding a scientific advisory board that could lead to reliable suspended animation. It's astonishing how far I had drifted from that original course. My personal passion had always been to discover how to sustain astronauts in suspended animation for months or even years. For me the solution to our limited life span, and therefore our limited travel distance to the planets, rested with science and advanced thinkers such as Professor Ettinger, Albert Einstein, and other visionaries. If scientists are unable to find a way to travel near the speed of light, then we must make the travel time irrelevant. One day we could send humans to explore throughout the solar system and beyond.

Such worlds are just waiting for us to discover their amazing and strange features, possibly even life. Beyond our solar system await planets, stars, and whole swarms of galaxies. Mastery of such prospects as human hibernation and suspended animation will catapult humanity to a kind of superman traveling the universe at will. And who wouldn't love to be Superman?

This is today's reality: 118 patients are frozen at this facility in hopes of future reanimation.

Epilogue

 

My story is now told,
and I hand over the narrative of my personal experiences to the technology and astounding wonders of nature. The work of others shows all the potential and promise that has inspired me through the decades. For me, the Wright brothers' struggle to fly with man-made heavier-than-air craft has a special poignancy. Most of their contemporaries rejected the Wrights' experiments. The audacity of these mere bicycle mechanics, without even a high school diploma, thinking they could teach the world how to fly. Surely this must be a joke. It hadn't mattered that Leonardo da Vinci had left meticulous drawings on how such flying wings might one day be realized. On December 17, 1903, Orville made man's first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Today there are at least ten methods of flight, including the NASA rocket plane, the Falcon HTV-2, which travels at thirteen thousand miles per hour—that's California to New York in fifteen minutes.

We have made astonishing progress since man has moved from the cave into the cosmos. Discoveries and enlightenment are happening faster and faster; I dare not project how life on earth will be in the coming centuries.

Looking around at today's advancements in medical technology, I see proof of the principle that “death” isn't final and that human hibernation is a reality. I feel at ease knowing that my efforts were not in vain. I'm always wondering,
What will be the world's next great scientific discovery?

From the sidelines I've seen technology march on all around me—inexorably continuing with new medical miracles, both great and small. The examples I will offer here are just a trickle of what is quickly becoming an ocean of new intelligence. Mankind is on a roller-coaster ride into the heavens and the discovery of creation's purpose, which I believe will be complete enlightenment of the human mind and greatly extended, youthful life. Remember: Not so long ago, the world believed that if you sailed too far out onto the ocean, you would fall off!

Inspiration in the Natural World

I've learned through the years of astonishing adaptations and feats of survival. We look to them as analogies of the possibilities that can be harnessed for humanity. One powerful lesson I've learned is that
life,
this inexplicable life force, always finds a way to endure.

During a heat or dry spell, the African lungfish undergoes estivation (triggered by heat instead of cold), a dormant state similar to hibernation. It can stay dormant for years, waiting for its environment to return to normal. The lungfish can remain in this deep sleep for up to five years.

In 1977 six-foot-long tube worms were discovered among an ecological system of hundreds of diverse life-forms, thousands of feet deep near 800°F ocean vents close to the island of Guam. These tube worms grow about one-half inch per year; some have lived as long as two hundred fifty years, making them among the longest-living animals known to science. And they live with absolutely no sun!

The water bear might be the toughest creature on the planet. This tiny animal, w
hich looks like a microscopic caterpillar, can survive temperatures from a bitter -400°F to a hellish 300°F, tolerate a thousand times more radiation than other animals, and survive a decade without water. It is a breathtaking example of what is possible within the realm of living creatures.

Can any complete organism withstand immersion in liquid nitrogen? The nematode
Haemonchus contortus,
a parasite that infects goats, has survived several months of submersion in liquid nitrogen without preparation, damage, or negative results. Other life-forms can tolerate frozen suspension but require some treatment, such as a biological antifreeze.

The common mayfly lives for just one day and never eats. The giant California redwood lives several thousand years. At least one animal has actually achieved immortality. The captivating immortal jellyfish (
Turritopsis nutricula
) has somehow discovered the fountain of youth. This creature is able to cycle from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp and then back again and again.

Natural Instances of Human Hibernation

Cryonics is not the only means of slowing down the biological clock in an effort to extend human life. In 1969 Armando Socarras Ramirez was a seventeen-year-old stowaway in a lower cargo compartment of a DC-8 plane bound for Madrid from Cuba. During the eight-hour flight, he was exposed to -30°F temperatures at thirty thousand feet. His kidneys had failed and he barely had a heartbeat, and yet twenty-four hours later, he made a complete recovery. He was the world's first documented case of accidental human hibernation.

In 1999, near Narvik, Norway, Anna Bagenholm fell into an icy river while skiing. She spent over an hour underwater before she was recovered from her icy tomb. There seemed little hope for her recovery, but Anna was brought to the intensive care unit at Tromsø University Hospital, hooked up to a heart-lung machine, and treated by attending physician Mads Gilbert.

Anna didn't have a heartbeat or any detectable pulse; her EKG showed a flat line. By all standard definitions, she was dead. Despite her bleak prospects, the doctors kept working. Four hours after her plunge into the icy water, Anna's heart quivered and shortly thereafter began to beat normally. Anna's recovery took several months, and she has some lasting nerve damage, although no brain damage. Today she is living a normal, healthy life, working as a radiologist at the hospital that saved her life. One lasting message of her ordeal was echoed by an anesthesiologist at that hospital: “Never give up, never give up, never give up.”

In October 2006, while attending a work-related barbecue on Mount Rokkō in western Japan, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi went for a brief walk during a blinding snowstorm. He accidentally slid down the side of a steep, snow-covered embankment. Mitsutaka lay undiscovered in a coma for twenty-four days. His remarkable survival was attributed to accidental human hibernation. He is alive and well today.

Cooling Therapy

The potential for human hibernation shows great promise to hospital trauma centers around the world. Both small and large animals that are not natural hibernators have been induced to hibernate under controlled conditions. The hope is that critical patients may be cooled, which reduces the demands of the body and gives them
time
to get to a hospital. This time delay could allow bold lifesaving treatment of accident victims and many other urgent-care trauma cases, with results approaching the miraculous.

The book
Cheating Death
was published in 2009 by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN News. He presented the surprising results of cold therapy (hypothermia) for heart attack, accident, shooting, and shock victims.
The New England Journal of Medicine
reported that a large number of heart attack patients who received cooling therapy survived, while a significant percentage of victims who did not receive this treatment perished.

In 2006 at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, the survival rate of cardiac victims treated with hypothermia therapy increased by 50 percent. Obviously, a patient going home to his family is a far better outcome than coma or death.

The container and system used in hospitals for hypothermia therapy cooling cost about twenty-five thousand dollars, not a large amount of money compared with the majority of medical equipment and considering its potential to save so many lives.

At the time only a few hundred hospitals in the United States have installed these cooling units, a low number compared with the six thousand hospitals that have not added hypothermia to their heart attack treatment repertoire. Since Dr. Gupta published
Cheating Death,
more hospitals across the country have climbed aboard the hypothermia therapy train. One understandable reason for the delay is the possibility of lawsuits if the patient dies after receiving this new therapy. I know from personal experience that the fear of being sued severely restricts a doctor's confidence in trying new methods. Despite that liability, we must still forge our way ahead to such promising new procedures. It is a constant balancing act between approving a damaging treatment too soon, which directly causes someone's death, and stalling on a promising treatment, which results in needless deaths.

For years therapeutic hypothermia has been an accepted treatment for cardiac victims in Europe and to a lesser extent in Australia. Despite the large number of cardiac survivors in countries that employ hypothermia therapy, its acceptance in the United States has been delayed by conservative medical authorities.

It seems that in life-or-death situations, people's desire for heroic treatment is quite varied. Many people want no extraordinary procedures used to save their life. Others, like my mother, asked the doctors to use every treatment known to medical science to fight off her death; she intended to battle the Grim Reaper to the very end.

Nevertheless, a simple seven-degree drop in body temperature will often have an enormous positive effect on whether a cardiac arrest patient will live or die.

Think about it.
Seven degrees.

I am not talking about expensive equipment here; I'm talking about ice.

Technological Advancements

Today many types of biological material are routinely frozen and stored for years and then warmed to resume functionality. These include human sperm, eggs, small embryos, and skin and blood; insects; fish; frogs; numerous seeds; and much more.

In the mid-1960s at Kobe University, Japan, Dr. Isamu Suda perfused a cat's brain with glycerol and froze it for six months. When rewarmed, the cat brain recorded an EEG not greatly different from normal.

In 2006 Kaitlyne McNamara received a new bladder, one grown from her own cells in a laboratory. This was the
world's first human organ grown in a laboratory.

In 2008, for the first time in history, a heart belonging to a rat
was grown in the laboratory by Dr. Doris Taylor, whose philosophy is “Give nature the tools, and get out of the way.” The rat's beating heart was showcased by Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University on the
Oprah Winfrey Show
along with myriad other medical wonders to come. Can the human heart be far behind?

Stem-cell research is emerging as the most exciting and promising treatment and potential cure for all diseases known today. Many leading scientists believe that stem-cell research will extend the human life span by curing disease and greatly slowing the aging process.

In 2005 Dr. Gregory Fahy announced that his company, Twenty-First Century Medicine, had cooled a rabbit kidney down to -200°F and then warmed and implanted it back into the rabbit as the sole kidney. That rabbit's subsequent survival portends the eventual survival of us all. This is an enormous breakthrough!

Many of the world's great discoveries stem from government research and support. The military is trying to buy time for soldiers who have been critically wounded on the battlefield by artificially inducing human hibernation. With this procedure, a mortally wounded soldier with thirty minutes of life remaining could acquire several hours of time to be transferred to a hospital and prevent the ultimate sacrifice.

NASA has sent several rovers to Mars that have been searching for water and signs of life for years. Scientists now hypothesize that oceans of water once covered Mars, and scientists are on the brink of confirming that life has and does indeed exist elsewhere. This will be one of the most profound realizations humanity has ever faced.

A sensational wonder is the incredible science of nanotechnology—the world of the insanely small. This branch of medicine is so remarkable that even I, probably one of the world's most optimistic people, have trouble foreseeing the trajectory of this young science. I am glad the governments of our world are pouring billions of dollars into this research. Just one example of what may soon be possible is a tiny robot, the size of a single cell, that will be placed into an artery and travel to the damaged site in a stroke victim. Once there, it will repair all damage, including any heart damage.

Future Potential of Cryonics

Is liquid nitrogen time travel truly possible? Will we ever be able to slow a human biological clock to within a fraction of absolute zero, hold someone there for a couple hundred years, and then return that suspended body back into a rejuvenated, thriving human being? These questions are at the soul of the cryonics quagmire.

Imagine that the human race will someday have a choice about when we are ready to give up the ghost. Yes, it will take time to perfect the cryonic suspension procedures required to resuscitate a suspended patient, but that should not keep us from climbing aboard a cryonics time machine. Almost every suspension patient has left instructions not to be resuscitated until it is medically possible to return the body to a healthful, youthful, and, some even stipulate, handsome state.

We realize we have a long wait until these dreams can be realized. But when suspended in a state-of-the-art liquid nitrogen cryonics capsule at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan or the Alcor Foundation in Arizona, the passing time will be irrelevant to the patients waiting for these miracles to materialize.

Hospitals' routinely staving off death by applying cryonic suspension is likely still decades away, but the outlook is improving. Several companies, including Florida-based Suspended Animation, Inc., are advancing toward ideal conditions for cryonic suspensions.

For almost fifty years, Saul Kent, cofounder of CSNY and now CEO of Suspended Animation, has remained a driving force in bringing the science of extended life to the public and to the world. The cryobiology conference sponsored by his company has brought many leading scientists and medical experts into cryonics. His facility offers the most advanced cryonics standby preparations, and while they are not cheap, they provide the best chance of revival. I consider him on par with Robert Ettinger as one of the most influential leaders of life extension.