Cryonics Technology Market Trends, Research Report, Growth, Opportunities and Forecast 2023-2029 – openPR

The global cryonics technology market is anticipated to grow significantly at a CAGR of 10.1% during the forecast period. Egg preservation/freezing, also known as mature oocyte cryopreservation, is a method used to save women's ability to get pregnant in the future. These preserved eggs can be combined with sperm in a lab and implanted in a female's uterus for pregnancy. The factors such as increasing infertility, late pregnancy, and late marriage are propelling demand for egg preservation/ freezing, which in turn is further increasing the growth of the cryonics market across the globe. Infertility is a disease of the male or female reproductive system failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more.

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Carrying pregnancy at an advanced age has complications, thus this technology can aid in the situation it is an easily approachable and affordable process With the development and advancement in oocyte freezing techniques. According to WHO's latest data, around 48 million couples, and 186 million individuals have infertility globally, and a further 15% of married couples across the globe are affected by infertility. Environmental and lifestyle aspects such as smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, obesity, and exposure to environmental impurities have been associated with lower fertility rates.Increasing organ transplants is considered to be te another factor that is supporting the growth of the cryonics market across the globe. According to Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA), around 40,000+ transplants were performed in 2021 in the US, and another 106, 162 patients are on the waiting list, which is increasing the growth of the cryonics market.

Market Coverage

The market number available for - 2022-2028Base year- 2021Forecast period- 2022-2028Segment Covered-By Cryoprotective AgentsBy MethodBy ApplicationBy End-UserRegions Covered-North AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificRest of the WorldCompetitive Landscape- Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., GE HEALTHCARE, OREGON CRYONICS, Merck KGaA, and others.

Key questions addressed by the report

What is the market growth rate?Which segment/region dominates the market in the base year?Which segment/region will project the fastest growth in the market?How has COVID-19 impacted the market?oRecovery TimelineoDeviation from the pre-COVID forecastoMost affected region/segmentWho is the leader in the market?How players are addressing challenges to sustain growth?Where is the investment opportunity?

Global Cryonics Technology Market- Segmentation

By Cryoprotective Agents

Permeating cryoprotectantsNon-permeating cryoprotectants

By Method

Slow freezingVitrificationUltra-rapid

By Application

Animal husbandryFishery scienceMedical sciencePreservation of microbiology cultureConserving plant biodiversity

By end-user

Life science and healthcare facilitiesResearch laboratories

A full report of Cryonics Technology Market is available at: https://www.omrglobal.com/industry-reports/cryonics-technology-market

Cryonics Technology Market- Segment by Region

North America

United StatesCanada

Europe

GermanyUnited KingdomFranceSpainItalyRest of Europe

Asia-Pacific

ChinaJapanIndiaRest of Asia-Pacific

Rest of the World

Middle East & Africa Latin America

Company Profiles

BioCisionCryologics, Inc.Cryonics Asia, Ltd.Cryonics InstituteCryotherm GmbH & Co. KGGE HealthcareHumai Technologies GmbHKrioRus Oregon CryonicsPraxair Technology, Inc. Sigma-Aldrich

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1.We cover more than 15 major industries, further segmented into more than 90 sectors.2.More than 120 countries are for analysis.3.Over 100+ paid data sources mined for investigation.4.Our expert research analysts answer all your questions before and after purchasing your report.

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Ted Williams – Wikipedia

American baseball player (19182002)

Baseball player

Williams in 1949

As manager

Theodore Samuel Williams (August 30, 1918 July 5, 2002) was an American professional baseball player and manager. He played his entire 19-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career, primarily as a left fielder, for the Boston Red Sox from 1939 to 1960; his career was interrupted by military service during World War II and the Korean War. Nicknamed "Teddy Ballgame", "the Kid", "the Splendid Splinter", and "The Thumper", Williams is regarded as one of the greatest hitters in baseball history and to date is the last player to hit over .400 in a season.

Williams was a nineteen-time All-Star,[1] a two-time recipient of the American League (AL) Most Valuable Player Award, a six-time AL batting champion, and a two-time Triple Crown winner. He finished his playing career with a .344 batting average, 521 home runs, and a .482 on-base percentage, the highest of all time. His career batting average is the highest of any MLB player whose career was played primarily in the live-ball era, and ranks tied for 7th all-time (with Billy Hamilton).

Born and raised in San Diego, Williams played baseball throughout his youth. After joining the Red Sox in 1939, he immediately emerged as one of the sport's best hitters. In 1941, Williams posted a .406 batting average; he is the last MLB player to bat over .400 in a season. He followed this up by winning his first Triple Crown in 1942. Williams was required to interrupt his baseball career in 1943 to serve three years in the United States Navy and Marine Corps during World War II. Upon returning to MLB in 1946, Williams won his first AL MVP Award and played in his only World Series. In 1947, he won his second Triple Crown. Williams was returned to active military duty for portions of the 1952 and 1953 seasons to serve as a Marine combat aviator in the Korean War. In 1957 and 1958 at the ages of 39 and 40, respectively, he was the AL batting champion for the fifth and sixth time.

Williams retired from playing in 1960. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966, in his first year of eligibility.[2] Williams managed the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers franchise from 1969 to 1972. An avid sport fisherman, he hosted a television program about fishing, and was inducted into the IGFA Fishing Hall of Fame.[3] Williams's involvement in the Jimmy Fund helped raise millions in dollars for cancer care and research. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush presented Williams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States government. He was selected for the Major League Baseball All-Time Team in 1997 and the Major League Baseball All-Century Team in 1999.

Williams was born in San Diego on August 30, 1918,[4] and named Theodore Samuel Williams after former president Theodore Roosevelt as well as his father, Samuel Stuart Williams.[5] He later amended his birth certificate, removing his middle name,[5] which he claimed originated from a maternal uncle (whose actual name was Daniel Venzor), who had been killed in World War I.[6] His father was a soldier, sheriff, and photographer from Ardsley, New York,[7] while his mother, May Venzor, a Spanish-Mexican-American from El Paso, Texas, was an evangelist and lifelong soldier in the Salvation Army.[5] Williams resented his mother's long hours working in the Salvation Army,[8] and Williams and his brother cringed when she took them to the Army's street-corner revivals.[9]

Williams's paternal ancestors were a mix of Welsh, English, and Irish. The maternal, Spanish-Mexican side of Williams's family was quite diverse, having Spanish (Basque), Russian, and American Indian roots.[10] Of his Mexican ancestry he said that "If I had my mother's name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, [considering] the prejudices people had in Southern California."[11]

Williams lived in San Diego's North Park neighborhood (4121 Utah Street).[12] At the age of eight, he was taught how to throw a baseball by his uncle, Saul Venzor. Saul was one of his mother's four brothers, as well as a former semi-professional baseball player who had pitched against Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe Gordon in an exhibition game.[13][14] As a child, Williams's heroes were Pepper Martin of the St. Louis Cardinals and Bill Terry of the New York Giants.[15] Williams graduated from Herbert Hoover High School in San Diego, where he played baseball as a pitcher and was the star of the team.[16] During this time, he also played American Legion Baseball, later being named the 1960 American Legion Baseball Graduate of the Year.[17]

Though he had offers from the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees while he was still in high school,[18] his mother thought he was too young to leave home, so he signed up with the local minor league club, the San Diego Padres.[19]

Throughout his career, Williams stated his goal was to have people point to him and remark, "There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived."[20]

Williams played back-up behind Vince DiMaggio and Ivey Shiver on the (then) Pacific Coast League's San Diego Padres. While in the Pacific Coast League in 1936, Williams met future teammates and friends Dom DiMaggio and Bobby Doerr, who were on the Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals.[21] When Shiver announced he was quitting to become a high school football coach in Savannah, Georgia, the job, by default, was open for Williams.[22] Williams posted a .271 batting average on 107 at bats in 42 games for the Padres in 1936.[22] Unknown to Williams, he had caught the eye of the Boston Red Sox's general manager, Eddie Collins, while Collins was scouting Bobby Doerr and the shortstop George Myatt in August 1936.[22][23] Collins later explained, "It wasn't hard to find Ted Williams. He stood out like a brown cow in a field of white cows."[22] In the 1937 season, after graduating from Hoover High in the winter, Williams finally broke into the line-up on June 22, when he hit an inside-the-park home run to help the Padres win 32. The Padres ended up winning the PCL title, while Williams ended up hitting .291 with 23 home runs.[22] Meanwhile, Collins kept in touch with Padres general manager Bill Lane, calling him two times throughout the season. In December 1937, during the winter meetings, the deal was made between Lane and Collins, sending Williams to the Boston Red Sox and giving Lane $35,000 and two major leaguers, Dom D'Allessandro and Al Niemiec, and two other minor leaguers.[24][25]

In 1938, the 19-year-old Williams was 10 days late to spring training camp in Sarasota, Florida, because of a flood in California that blocked the railroads. Williams had to borrow $200 from a bank to make the trip from San Diego to Sarasota.[26] Also during spring training Williams was nicknamed "the Kid" by Red Sox equipment manager Johnny Orlando, who after Williams arrived to Sarasota for the first time, said, "'The Kid' has arrived". Orlando still called Williams "the Kid" 20 years later,[26] and the nickname stuck with Williams the rest of his life.[27] Williams remained in major league spring training for about a week.[26] Williams was then sent to the Double-A-league Minneapolis Millers.[28] While in the Millers training camp for the springtime, Williams met Rogers Hornsby, who had hit over .400 three times, including a .424 average in 1924.[29] Hornsby, who was a coach for the Millers that spring,[29] gave Williams useful advice, including how to "get a good pitch to hit".[28] Talking with the game's greats would become a pattern for Williams, who also talked with Hugh Duffy, who hit .438 in 1894, Bill Terry who hit .401 in 1930, and Ty Cobb with whom he would argue that a batter should hit up on the ball, opposed to Cobb's view that a batter should hit down on the ball.[30]

While in Minnesota, Williams quickly became the team's star.[31] He collected his first hit in the Millers' first game of the season, as well as his first and second home runs during his third game. Both were inside-the-park home runs, with the second traveling an estimated 500 feet (150m) on the fly to a 512-foot (156m) center field fence.[31] Williams later had a 22 game hitting streak that lasted from Memorial Day through mid-June.[31] While the Millers ended up sixth place in an eight-team race,[31] Williams ended up hitting .366 with 46 home runs and 142 RBIs. He received the American Association's Triple Crown and finished second in the voting for Most Valuable Player.[32]

Williams came to spring training three days late in 1939, thanks to Williams driving from California to Florida, as well as respiratory problems, the latter of which would plague Williams for the rest of his career.[33] In the winter, the Red Sox traded right fielder Ben Chapman to the Cleveland Indians to make room for Williams on the roster, even though Chapman had hit .340 in the previous season.[34][35] This led Boston Globe sports journalist Gerry Moore to quip, "Not since Joe DiMaggio broke in with the Yankees by "five for five" in St. Petersburg in 1936 has any baseball rookie received the nationwide publicity that has been accorded this spring to Theodore Francis [sic] Williams".[33] Williams inherited Chapman's number 9 on his uniform as opposed to Williams's number 5 in the previous spring training. He made his major league debut against the New York Yankees on April 20,[36] going 1-for-4 against Yankee pitcher Red Ruffing. This was the only game which featured both Williams and Lou Gehrig playing against one another.[37] In his first series at Fenway Park, Williams hit a double, a home run, and a triple, the first two against Cotton Pippen, who gave Williams his first strikeout as a professional while Williams had been in San Diego.[38] By July, Williams was hitting just .280, but leading the league in RBIs.[38] Johnny Orlando, now Williams's friend, then gave Williams a quick pep talk, telling Williams that he should hit .335 with 35 home runs and he would drive in 150 runs. Williams said he would buy Orlando a Cadillac if this all came true.[39] Williams ended up hitting .327 with 31 home runs and 145 RBIs,[36] leading the league in the latter category, the first rookie to lead the league in RBIs[40] and finishing fourth in MVP voting.[41] He also led the AL in walks, with 107, a rookie record. Even though there was not a Rookie of the Year award yet in 1939, Babe Ruth declared Williams to be the Rookie of the Year, which Williams later said was "good enough for me".[42]

Williams's pay doubled in 1940, going from $5,000 to $10,000.[43] A new bullpen was added in right field of Fenway Park, reducing the distance from home plate from 400 feet to 380 feet and earning the nickname "Williamsburg" for being "obviously designed for Williams".[44] Williams was then switched from right field to left field, as there would be less sun in his eyes, and it would give Dom DiMaggio a chance to play center. Finally, Williams was flip-flopped in the order with the great slugger Jimmie Foxx, with the idea that Williams would get more pitches to hit.[44] Pitchers, though, proved willing to pitch around the eagle-eyed Williams in favor of facing the 32-year-old Foxx, the reigning AL home run champion, followed by the still highly productive 33-year-old Joe Cronin, the player-manager.[45] Williams also made his first of 16 All-Star Game appearances[46] in 1940, going 0-for-2.[47] Although Williams hit .344, his power and runs batted in were down from the previous season, with 23 home runs and 113 RBIs.[36] Williams also caused a controversy in mid-August when he called his salary "peanuts", along with saying he hated the city of Boston and reporters, leading reporters to lash back at him, saying that he should be traded.[48] Williams said that the "only real fun" he had in 1940 was being able to pitch once on August 24, when he pitched the last two innings in a 121 loss to the Detroit Tigers, allowing one earned run on three hits, while striking out one batter, Rudy York.[49][50]

In the second week of spring training in 1941, Williams broke a bone in his right ankle, limiting him to pinch hitting for the first two weeks of the season.[51] Bobby Doerr later claimed that the injury would be the foundation of Williams's season, as it forced him to put less pressure on his right foot for the rest of the season.[52] Against the Chicago White Sox on May 7, in extra innings, Williams told the Red Sox pitcher, Charlie Wagner, to hold the White Sox, since he was going to hit a home run. In the 11th inning, Williams's prediction came true, as he hit a big blast to help the Red Sox win. The home run is still considered to be the longest home run ever hit in the old Comiskey Park, some saying that it went 600 feet (180m).[53] Williams's average slowly climbed in the first half of May, and on May 15, he started a 22-game hitting streak. From May 17 to June 1, Williams batted .536, with his season average going above .400 on May 25 and then continuing up to .430.[54] By the All-Star break, Williams was hitting .406 with 62 RBIs and 16 home runs.[55]

In the 1941 All-Star Game, Williams batted fourth behind Joe DiMaggio, who was in the midst of his record-breaking hitting streak, having hit safely in 48 consecutive games.[56] In the fourth inning Williams doubled to drive in a run.[57] With the National League (NL) leading 52 in the eighth inning, Williams struck out in the middle of an American League (AL) rally.[56] In the ninth inning the AL still trailed 53; Ken Keltner and Joe Gordon singled, and Cecil Travis walked to load the bases.[57] DiMaggio grounded to the infield and Billy Herman, attempting to complete a double play, threw wide of first base, allowing Keltner to score.[57] With the score 54 and runners on first and third, Williams homered with his eyes closed to secure a 75 AL win.[57][58] Williams later said that that game-winning home run "remains to this day the most thrilling hit of my life".[59]

In late August, Williams was hitting .402.[59] Williams said that "just about everybody was rooting for me" to hit .400 in the season, including Yankee fans, who gave pitcher Lefty Gomez a "hell of a boo" after walking Williams with the bases loaded after Williams had gotten three straight hits one game in September.[60] In mid-September, Williams was hitting .413, but dropped a point a game from then on.[59] Before the final two games on September 28, a doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics, he was batting .39955, which would have been officially rounded up to .400.[59] Red Sox manager Joe Cronin offered him the chance to sit out the final day, but he declined. "If I'm going to be a .400 hitter", he said at the time, "I want more than my toenails on the line."[61] Williams went 6-for-8 on the day, finishing the season at .406.[62] (Sacrifice flies were counted as at-bats in 1941; under today's rules, Williams would have hit between .411 and .419, based on contemporaneous game accounts.[61]) Philadelphia fans ran out on the field to surround Williams after the game, forcing him to protect his hat from being stolen; he was helped into the clubhouse by his teammates.[63] Along with his .406 average, Williams also hit 37 home runs and batted in 120 runs, missing the triple crown by five RBI.[36][61]

Williams's 1941 season is often considered to be the best offensive season of all time, though the MVP award would go to DiMaggio. The .406 batting averagehis first of six batting championshipsis still the highest single-season average in Red Sox history and the highest batting average in the major leagues since 1924, and the last time any major league player has hit over .400 for a season after averaging at least 3.1 plate appearances per game. ("If I had known hitting .400 was going to be such a big deal", he quipped in 1991, "I would have done it again."[61]) Williams's on-base percentage of .553 and slugging percentage of .735 that season are both also the highest single-season averages in Red Sox history. The .553 OBP stood as a major league record until it was broken by Barry Bonds in 2002 and his .735 slugging percentage was the highest mark in the major leagues between 1932 and 1994. His OPS of 1.287 that year, a Red Sox record, was the highest in the major leagues between 1923 and 2001. Despite playing in only 143 games that year, Williams led the league with 135 runs scored and 37 home runs, and he finished third with 335 total bases, the most home runs, runs scored, and total bases by a Red Sox player since Jimmie Foxx's in 1938.[64] Williams placed second in MVP voting; DiMaggio won, 291 votes to 254,[65] on the strength of his record-breaking 56-game hitting streak and league-leading 125 RBI.[62]

In January 1942, just over 2 years after World War II began,[66][67] Williams was drafted into the military, being put into Class 1-A. A friend of Williams suggested that Williams see the advisor of the governor's Selective Service Appeal Agent, since Williams was the sole support of his mother, arguing that Williams should not have been placed in Class 1-A, and said Williams should be reclassified to Class 3-A.[66] Williams was reclassified to 3-A ten days later.[68] Afterwards, the public reaction was extremely negative,[69] even though the baseball book Season of '42 states only four All-Stars and one first-line pitcher entered military service during the 1942 season. (Many more MLB players would enter service during the 1943 season.)[70]

Quaker Oats stopped sponsoring Williams, and Williams, who previously had eaten Quaker products "all the time", never "[ate] one since" the company stopped sponsoring him.[68]

Despite the trouble with the draft board, Williams had a new salary of $30,000 in 1942.[68] In the season, Williams won the Triple Crown,[62] with a .356 batting average, 36 home runs, and 137 RBIs.[36] On May 21, Williams also hit his 100th career home run.[71] He was the third Red Sox player to hit 100 home runs with the team, following his teammates Jimmie Foxx and Joe Cronin.[citation needed] Despite winning the Triple Crown, Williams came in second in the MVP voting, losing to Joe Gordon of the Yankees. Williams felt that he should have gotten a "little more consideration" because of winning the Triple Crown, and he thought that "the reason I didn't get more consideration was because of the trouble I had with the draft [boards]".[62]

Williams joined the Navy Reserve on May 22, 1942, went on active duty in 1943, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps as a Naval Aviator on May 2, 1944. Williams also played on the baseball team in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, along with his Red Sox teammate Johnny Pesky in pre-flight training, after eight weeks in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the Civilian Pilot Training Course.[72] While on the baseball team, Williams was sent back to Fenway Park on July 12, 1943, to play on an All-Star team managed by Babe Ruth. The newspapers reported that Babe Ruth said when finally meeting Williams, "Hiya, kid. You remind me a lot of myself. I love to hit. You're one of the most natural ballplayers I've ever seen. And if my record is broken, I hope you're the one to do it".[73] Williams later said he was "flabbergasted" by the incident, as "after all, it was Babe Ruth".[73] In the game, Williams hit a 425-foot home run to help give the American League All-Stars a 98 win.[74]

On September 2, 1945, when the war ended, Lt. Williams was in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii awaiting orders as a replacement pilot. While in Pearl Harbor, Williams played baseball in the Navy League. Also in that eight-team league were Joe DiMaggio, Joe Gordon, and Stan Musial. The Service World Series with the Army versus the Navy attracted crowds of 40,000 for each game. The players said it was even better than the actual World Series being played between the Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs that year.[75]

Williams was discharged by the Marine Corps on January 28, 1946, in time to begin preparations for the upcoming pro baseball season.[76][77] He joined the Red Sox again in 1946, signing a $37,500 contract.[78] On July 14, after Williams hit three home runs and eight RBIs in the first game of a doubleheader, Lou Boudreau, inspired by Williams's consistent pull hitting to right field, created what would later be known as the Boudreau shift (also Williams shift) against Williams, having only one player on the left side of second base (the left fielder). Ignoring the shift, Williams walked twice, doubled, and grounded out to the shortstop, who was positioned in between first and second base.[79][80] Also during 1946, the All-Star Game was held in Fenway Park. In the game, Williams homered in the fourth inning against Kirby Higbe, singled in a run in the fifth inning, singled in the seventh inning, and hit a three-run home run against Rip Sewell's "eephus pitch" in the eighth inning[81] to help the American League win 120.[82]

For the 1946 season, Williams hit .342 with 38 home runs and 123 RBIs,[36] helping the Red Sox win the pennant on September 13. During the season, Williams hit the only inside-the-park home run in his Major League career in a September 10 win at Cleveland,[83][84] and in June hit what is considered the longest home run in Fenway Park history, at 502 feet (153m) and subsequently marked with a lone red seat in the Fenway bleachers.[85] Williams ran away as the winner in the MVP voting.[86] During an exhibition game in Fenway Park against an All-Star team during early October, Williams was hit on the elbow by a curveball by the Washington Senators' pitcher Mickey Haefner. Williams was immediately taken out of the game, and X-rays of his arm showed no damage, but his arm was "swelled up like a boiled egg", according to Williams.[87] Williams could not swing a bat again until four days later, one day before the World Series, when he reported the arm as "sore".[87] During the series, Williams batted .200, going 5-for-25 with no home runs and just one RBI. The Red Sox lost in seven games,[88] with Williams going 0-for-4 in the last game.[89] Fifty years later when asked what one thing he would have done different in his life, Williams replied, "I'd have done better in the '46 World Series. God, I would".[87] The 1946 World Series was the only World Series Williams ever appeared in.[90]

Williams signed a $70,000 contract in 1947.[91] Williams was also almost traded for Joe DiMaggio in 1947. In late April, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey and Yankees owner Dan Topping agreed to swap the players, but a day later canceled the deal when Yawkey requested that Yogi Berra come with DiMaggio.[92] In May, Williams was hitting .337.[93] Williams won the Triple Crown in 1947, but lost the MVP award to Joe DiMaggio, 202 points to 201 points. One writer left Williams off his ballot. Williams thought it was Mel Webb, whom Williams called a "grouchy old guy",[94] although it now appears it was not Webb.[95]

Williams was the third major league player to have had at least four 30-home run and 100-RBI seasons in their first five years, joining Chuck Klein and Joe DiMaggio, and followed by Ralph Kiner, Mark Teixeira, Albert Pujols, and Ryan Braun through 2011.[96]

In 1948, under their new manager, the ex-New York Yankee great skipper Joe McCarthy,[97] Williams hit a league-leading .369 with 25 home runs and 127 RBIs,[36] and was third in MVP voting.[98] On April 29, Williams hit his 200th career home run. He became just the second player to hit 200 home runs in a Red Sox uniform, joining his former teammate Jimmie Foxx.[64] On October 2, against the Yankees, Williams hit his 222nd career home run, tying Foxx for the Red Sox all-time record.[99] In the Red Sox' final two games of the regular schedule, they beat the Yankees (to force a one-game playoff against the Cleveland Indians) and Williams got on base eight times out of ten plate appearances.[97] In the playoff, Williams went 1-for-4,[100] with the Red Sox losing 83.

In 1949, Williams received a new salary of $100,000 ($1,139,000 in current dollar terms).[101] He hit .343 (losing the AL batting title by just .0002 to the Tigers' George Kell, thus missing the Triple Crown that year), hitting 43 home runs, his career high, and driving in 159 runs, tied for highest in the league, and at one point, he got on base in 84 straight games, an MLB record that still stands today, helping him win the MVP trophy.[36][102] On April 28, Williams hit his 223rd career home run, breaking the record for most home runs in a Red Sox uniform, passing Jimmie Foxx.[103] Williams is still the Red Sox career home run leader.[64] However, despite being ahead of the Yankees by one game just beforea 2-game series against them (last regular-season games for both teams),[97] the Red Sox lost both of those games.[104] The Yankees won the first of what would be five straight World Series titles in 1949.[105] For the rest of Williams's career, the Yankees won nine pennants and six World Series titles, while the Red Sox never finished better than third place.[105]

In 1950, Williams was playing in his eighth All-Star Game. In the first inning, Williams caught a line drive by Ralph Kiner, slamming into the Comiskey Park scoreboard and breaking his left arm.[46] Williams played the rest of the game, and he even singled in a run to give the American League the lead in the fifth inning, but by that time Williams's arm was a "balloon" and he was in great pain, so he left the game.[106] Both of the doctors who X-rayed Williams held little hope for a full recovery. The doctors operated on Williams for two hours.[107] When Williams took his cast off, he could only extend the arm to within four inches of his right arm.[108] Williams only played 89 games in 1950.[36] After the baseball season, Williams's elbow hurt so much he considered retirement, since he thought he would never be able to hit again. Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, then sent Jack Fadden to Williams's Florida home to talk to Williams. Williams later thanked Fadden for saving his career.[109]

In 1951, Williams "struggled" to hit .318, with his elbow still hurting.[110] Williams also played in 148 games, 60 more than Williams had played the previous season, 30 home runs, two more than he had hit in 1950, and 126 RBIs, twenty-nine more than 1950.[36][110] Despite his lower-than-usual production at bat, Williams made the All-Star team.[47] On May 15, 1951, Williams became the 11th player in major league history to hit 300 career home runs. On May 21, Williams passed Chuck Klein for 10th place, on May 25 Williams passed Hornsby for ninth place, and on July 5 Williams passed Al Simmons for eighth place all-time in career home runs.[111] After the season, manager Steve O'Neill was fired, with Lou Boudreau replacing him. Boudreau's first announcement as manager was that all Red Sox players were "expendable", including Williams.[110]

Williams's name was called from a list of inactive reserves to serve on active duty in the Korean War on January 9, 1952. Williams, who was livid at his recalling, had a physical scheduled for April 2.[112] Williams passed his physical and in May, after only playing in six major league games, began refresher flight training and qualification prior to service in Korea. Right before he left for Korea, the Red Sox had a "Ted Williams Day" in Fenway Park. Friends of Williams gave him a Cadillac, and the Red Sox gave Williams a memory book that was signed by 400,000 fans. The governor of Massachusetts and mayor of Boston were there, along with a Korean War veteran named Frederick Wolf who used a wheelchair for mobility.[113] At the end of the ceremony, everyone in the park held hands and sang "Auld Lang Syne" to Williams, a moment which he later said "moved me quite a bit."[114] Private Wolf (an injured Korean veteran from Brooklyn) presented gifts from wounded veterans to Ted Williams. Ted choked and was only able to say,"... ok kid...".[115] The Red Sox went on to win the game 53, thanks to a two-run home run by Williams in the seventh inning.[114]

In August 1953, Williams practiced with the Red Sox for ten days before playing in his first game, garnering a large ovation from the crowd and hitting a home run in the eighth inning.[116] In the season, Williams ended up hitting .407 with 13 home runs and 34 RBIs in 37 games and 110 at bats (not nearly enough plate appearances to qualify for that season's batting title).[36] On September 6, Williams hit his 332nd career home run, passing Hank Greenberg for seventh all-time.[117]

On the first day of spring training in 1954, Williams broke his collarbone running after a line drive.[116] Williams was out for six weeks, and in April he wrote an article with Joe Reichler of the Saturday Evening Post saying that he intended to retire at the end of the season.[118] Williams returned to the Red Sox lineup on May 7, and he hit .345 with 386 at bats in 117 games, although Bobby vila, who had hit .341, won the batting championship. This was because it was required then that a batter needed 400 at bats, despite Lou Boudreau's attempt to bat Williams second in the lineup to get more at-bats. Williams led the league in base on balls with 136 which kept him from qualifying under the rules at the time. By today's standards (plate appearances) he would have been the champion. The rule was changed shortly thereafter to keep this from happening again.[36][119] On August 25, Williams passed Johnny Mize for sixth place, and on September 3, Williams passed Joe DiMaggio for fifth all-time in career home runs with his 362nd career home run. He finished the season with 366 career home runs.[120] On September 26, Williams "retired" after the Red Sox's final game of the season.[121]

During the off-season of 1954, Williams was offered the chance to be manager of the Red Sox. Williams declined, and he suggested that Pinky Higgins, who had previously played on the 1946 Red Sox team as the third baseman, become the manager of the team. Higgins later was hired as the Red Sox manager in 1955.[122] Williams sat out the first month of the 1955 season due to a divorce settlement with his wife, Doris. When Williams returned, he signed a $98,000 contract on May 13. Williams batted .356 in 320 at bats on the season, lacking enough at bats to win the batting title over Al Kaline, who batted .340.[123] Williams hit 28 home runs and drove in 83 runs[36] while being named the "Comeback Player of the Year."[124]

On July 17, 1956, Williams became the fifth player to hit 400 home runs, following Mel Ott in 1941, Jimmie Foxx in 1938, Lou Gehrig in 1936, and Babe Ruth in 1927.[125][126] Three weeks later at home against the Yankees on August7, after Williams was booed for dropping a fly ball from Mickey Mantle, he spat at one of the fans who was taunting him on the top of the dugout;[127] Williams was fined $5,000 for the incident.[128][129] The following night against Baltimore, Williams was greeted by a large ovation, and received an even larger one when he hit a home run in the sixth inning to break a 22 tie. In The Boston Globe, the publishers ran a "What Globe Readers Say About Ted" section made out of letters about Williams, which were either the sportswriters or the "loud mouths" in the stands. Williams explained years later, "From '56 on, I realized that people were for me. The writers had written that the fans should show me they didn't want me, and I got the biggest ovation yet".[130] Williams lost the batting title to Mickey Mantle in 1956, batting .345 to Mantle's .353, with Mantle on his way to winning the Triple Crown.[131]

In 1957, Williams batted .388 to lead the majors, then signed a contract in February 1958 for a record high $125,000 (or $135,000).[132][133] At age forty that season, he again led the American League with a .328 batting average.[134]

When Pumpsie Green became the first black player on the Red Soxthe last major league team to integratein 1959, Williams openly welcomed Green.[135]

Williams ended his career with a home run in his last at-bat on September 28, 1960. He refused to salute the fans as he returned the dugout after he crossed home plate or after he was replaced in left field by Carroll Hardy. An essay written by John Updike the following month for The New Yorker, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", chronicles this event.[136]

Williams is one of only 29 players in baseball history to date to have appeared in Major League games in four decades.[137]

Williams was an obsessive student of hitting. He famously used a lighter bat than most sluggers, because it generated a faster swing.[138] In 1970, he wrote a book on the subject, The Science of Hitting (revised 1986), which is still read by many baseball players.[138] The book describes his theory of swinging only at pitches that came into ideal areas of his strike zone, a strategy Williams credited with his success as a hitter. Pitchers apparently feared Williams; his bases-on-balls-to-plate-appearances ratio (.2065) is still the highest of any player in the Hall of Fame.

Williams nearly always took the first pitch.[139]

He helped pass his expertise of playing left-field in front of the Green Monster to his successor on the Red Sox, Carl Yastrzemski.[140]

Williams was on uncomfortable terms with the Boston newspapers for nearly twenty years, as he felt they liked to discuss his personal life as much as his baseball performance. He maintained a career-long feud with Sport due to a 1948 feature article in which the reporter included a quote from Williams's mother. Insecure about his upbringing, and stubborn because of immense confidence in his own talent, Williams made up his mind that the "knights of the keyboard", as he derisively labeled the press, were against him. After having hit for the league's Triple Crown in 1947, Williams narrowly lost the MVP award in a vote where one Midwestern newspaper writer left Williams entirely off his ten-player ballot.

During his career, some sportswriters also criticized aspects of Williams's baseball performance, including what they viewed as his lackadaisical fielding and lack of clutch hitting. Williams pushed back, saying: "They're always saying that I don't hit in the clutches. Well, there are a lot [of games] when I do."[141] He also asserted that it made no sense crashing into an outfield wall to try to make a difficult catch because of the risk of injury or being out of position to make the play after missing the ball.[142]

Williams treated most of the press accordingly, as he described in his 1969 memoir My Turn at Bat. Williams also had an uneasy relationship with the Boston fans, though he could be very cordial one-to-one. He felt at times a good deal of gratitude for their passion and their knowledge of the game. On the other hand, Williams was temperamental, high-strung, and at times tactless. In his biography, Ronald Reis relates how Williams committed two fielding miscues in a doubleheader in 1950 and was roundly booed by Boston fans. He bowed three times to various sections of Fenway Park and made an obscene gesture. When he came to bat he spat in the direction of fans near the dugout. The incident caused an avalanche of negative media reaction, and inspired sportswriter Austen Lake's famous comment that when Williams's name was announced the sound was like "autumn wind moaning through an apple orchard."

Another incident occurred in 1958 in a game against the Washington Senators. Williams struck out, and as he stepped from the batter's box swung his bat violently in anger. The bat slipped from his hands, was launched into the stands and struck a 60-year-old woman who turned out to be the housekeeper of the Red Sox general manager Joe Cronin. While the incident was an accident and Williams apologized to the woman personally, to all appearances it seemed at the time that Williams had hurled the bat in a fit of temper.

Williams gave generously to those in need. He was especially linked with the Jimmy Fund of the DanaFarber Cancer Institute, which provides support for children's cancer research and treatment. Williams used his celebrity to virtually launch the fund, which raised more than $750million between 1948 and 2010. Throughout his career, Williams made countless bedside visits to children being treated for cancer, which Williams insisted go unreported. Often parents of sick children would learn at check-out time that "Mr. Williams has taken care of your bill".[143] The Fund recently stated that "Williams would travel everywhere and anywhere, no strings or paychecks attached, to support the cause... His name is synonymous with our battle against all forms of cancer."[143]

Williams demanded loyalty from those around him. He could not forgive the fickle nature of the fansbooing a player for booting a ground ball, and then turning around and roaring approval of the same player for hitting a home run. Despite the cheers and adulation of most of his fans, the occasional boos directed at him in Fenway Park led Williams to stop tipping his cap in acknowledgment after a home run.

Williams maintained this policy up to and including his swan song in 1960. After hitting a home run at Fenway Park, which would be his last career at-bat, Williams characteristically refused either to tip his cap as he circled the bases or to respond to prolonged cheers of "We want Ted!" from the crowd by making an appearance from the dugout. The Boston manager Pinky Higgins sent Williams to his fielding position in left field to start the ninth inning, but then immediately recalled him for his back-up Carroll Hardy, thus allowing Williams to receive one last ovation as he jogged onto then off the field, and he did so without reacting to the crowd. Williams's aloof attitude led the writer John Updike to observe wryly that "Gods do not answer letters."[136]

Williams's final home run did not take place during the final game of the 1960 season, but rather in the Red Sox's last home game that year. The Red Sox played three more games, but they were on the road in New York City and Williams did not appear in any of them, as it became clear that Williams's final home at-bat would be the last one of his career.

In 1991, on Ted Williams Day at Fenway Park, Williams pulled a Red Sox cap from out of his jacket and tipped it to the crowd. This was the first time that he had done so since his earliest days as a player.

A Red Smith profile from 1956 describes one Boston writer trying to convince Ted Williams that first cheering and then booing a ballplayer was no different from a moviegoer applauding a "western" movie actor one day and saying the next "He stinks! Whatever gave me the idea he could act?" Williams rejected this; when he liked a western actor like Hoot Gibson, he liked him in every picture, and would not think of booing him.

Williams once had a friendship with Ty Cobb, with whom he often had discussions about baseball. He often touted Rogers Hornsby as being the greatest right-handed hitter of all time. This assertion actually led to a split in the relationship between Ty Cobb and Ted Williams. Once during one of their yearly debate sessions on the greatest hitters of all time, Williams asserted that Hornsby was one of the greatest of all time. Cobb apparently had strong feelings about Hornsby and he threw a fit, expelling Williams from his hotel room. Their friendship effectively terminated after this altercation.[144] This story was later refuted by Ted Williams himself.[145]

Williams served as a Naval Aviator during World War II and the Korean War. Unlike many other major league players, he did not spend all of his war-time playing on service teams.[146] Williams had been classified 3-A by Selective Service prior to the war, a dependency deferment because he was his mother's sole means of financial support. When his classification was changed to 1-A following the American entry into World War II, Williams appealed to his local draft board. The draft board ruled that his draft status should not have been changed. He made a public statement that once he had built up his mother's trust fund, he intended to enlist. Even so, criticism in the media, including withdrawal of an endorsement contract by Quaker Oats, resulted in his enlistment in the U.S. Naval Reserve on May 22, 1942.

Williams did not opt for an easy assignment playing baseball for the Navy, but rather joined the V-5 program to become a Naval aviator. Williams was first sent to the Navy's Preliminary Ground School at Amherst College for six months of academic instruction in various subjects including math and navigation, where he achieved a 3.85 grade point average.

Williams was talented as a pilot, and so enjoyed it that he had to be ordered by the Navy to leave training to personally accept his American League 1942 Major League Baseball Triple Crown.[146] Williams's Red Sox teammate, Johnny Pesky, who went into the same aviation training program, said this about Williams: "He mastered intricate problems in fifteen minutes which took the average cadet an hour, and half of the other cadets there were college grads." Pesky again described Williams's acumen in the advance training, for which Pesky personally did not qualify: "I heard Ted literally tore the sleeve target to shreds with his angle dives. He'd shoot from wingovers, zooms, and barrel rolls, and after a few passes the sleeve was ribbons. At any rate, I know he broke the all-time record for hits." Ted went to Jacksonville for a course in aerial gunnery, the combat pilot's payoff test, and broke all the records in reflexes, coordination, and visual-reaction time. "From what I heard. Ted could make a plane and its six 'pianos' (machine guns) play like a symphony orchestra", Pesky says. "From what they said, his reflexes, coordination, and visual reaction made him a built-in part of the machine."[147]

Williams completed pre-flight training in Athens, Georgia, his primary training at NAS Bunker Hill, Indiana, and his advanced flight training at NAS Pensacola. He received his gold Naval Aviator wings and his commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps on May 2, 1944.

Williams served as a flight instructor at NAS Pensacola teaching young pilots to fly the complicated F4U Corsair fighter plane. Williams was in Pearl Harbor awaiting orders to join the Fleet in the Western Pacific when the War in the Pacific ended. He finished the war in Hawaii, and then he was released from active duty on January 12, 1946, but he did remain in the Marine Corps Reserve.[77]

On May 1, 1952, 14 months after his promotion to captain in the Marine Corps Reserve, Williams was recalled to active duty for service in the Korean War.[148] He had not flown any aircraft for eight years but he turned down all offers to sit out the war in comfort as a member of a service baseball team. Nevertheless, Williams was resentful of being called up, which he admitted years later, particularly regarding the Navy's policy of calling up Inactive Reservists rather than members of the Active Reserve.

Williams reported for duty on May 2, 1952. After eight weeks of refresher flight training and qualification in the F9F Panther jet fighter with VMF-223 at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Williams was assigned to VMF-311, Marine Aircraft Group 33 (MAG-33), based at the K-3 airfield in Pohang, South Korea.[77]

On February 16, 1953, Williams, flying as the wingman for John Glenn (later an astronaut, then U.S. Senator), was part of a 35-plane raid against a tank and infantry training school just south of Pyongyang, North Korea. As the aircraft from VMF-115 and VMF-311 dove on the target, Williams's plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, a piece of flak knocked out his hydraulics and electrical systems, causing Williams to have to "limp" his plane back to K-3 air base where he made a belly landing. For his actions of this day, he was awarded the Air Medal.[149]

Williams flew 39 combat missions in Korea, earning the Air Medal with two Gold Stars representing second and third awards, before being withdrawn from flight status in June 1953 after a hospitalization for pneumonia. This resulted in the discovery of an inner ear infection that disqualified him from flight status.[150] John Glenn described Williams as one of the best pilots he knew,[146] while his wife Annie described him as the most profane man she ever met.[151] In the last half of his missions, Williams was flying as Glenn's wingman.[152]

Williams likely would have exceeded 600 career home runs if he had not served in the military, and might even have approached Babe Ruth's then record of 714. He might have set the record for career RBIs as well, exceeding Hank Aaron's total.[146] While the absences in the Marine Corps took almost five years out of his baseball career, he never publicly complained about the time devoted to service in the Marine Corps. His biographer, Leigh Montville, argued that Williams was not happy about being pressed into service in South Korea, but he did what he thought was his patriotic duty.

Following his return to the United States in August 1953, he resigned his Reserve commission to resume his baseball career.[148]

After retirement from play, Williams helped Boston's new left fielder, Carl Yastrzemski, in hitting, and was a regular visitor to the Red Sox' spring training camps from 1961 to 1966, where he worked as a special batting instructor. He served as executive assistant to Tom Yawkey (196165), then was named a team vice president (196568) upon his election to the Hall of Fame. He resumed his spring training instruction role with the club in 1978.

Beginning in 1961, he would spend summers at the Ted Williams Baseball Camp in Lakeville, Massachusetts, which he had established in 1958 with his friend Al Cassidy and two other business partners. For eight summers and parts of others after that, he would give hitting clinics and talk baseball at the camp.[5] It was not uncommon to find Williams fishing in the pond at the camp. The area now is owned by the town and a few of the buildings still stand. In the main lodge one can still see memorabilia from Williams's playing days.

Williams served as manager of the Washington Senators, from 19691971, then continued with the team when they became the Texas Rangers after the 1971 season. Williams's best season as a manager was 1969 when he led the expansion Senators to an 8676 record in the team's only winning season in Washington. He was chosen "Manager of the Year" after that season. Like many great players, Williams became impatient with ordinary athletes' abilities and attitudes, particularly those of pitchers, whom he admitted he never respected. Fellow manager Alvin Dark thought Williams "was a smart, fearless manager" who helped his hitters perform better. Williams's issue with Washington/Texas, according to Dark, was when the ownership traded away his third baseman and shortstop, making it difficult for the club to be as competitive.[153]

On the subject of pitchers, in Ted's autobiography written with John Underwood, Ted opines regarding Bob Lemon (a sinker-ball specialist) pitching for the Cleveland Indians around 1951: "I have to rate Lemon as one of the very best pitchers I ever faced. His ball was always moving, hard, sinking, fast-breaking. You could never really uhmmmph with Lemon."

Williams was much more successful in fishing. An avid and expert fly fisherman and deep-sea fisherman, he spent many summers after baseball fishing the Miramichi River, in Miramichi, New Brunswick. Williams was named to the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame in 2000. Williams, Jim Brown, Cumberland Posey, and Cal Hubbard are the only athletes to be inducted into the Halls of Fame of more than one professional sport. Williams was also known as an accomplished hunter; he was fond of pigeon-shooting for sport in Fenway Park during his career, on one occasion drawing the ire of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.[154]

Williams reached an extensive deal with Sears, lending his name and talent toward marketing, developing, and endorsing a line of in-house sports equipmentsuch as the "Ted Williams" edition Gamefisher aluminum boat and 7.5hp "Ted Williams" edition motor, as well as fishing, hunting, and baseball equipment. Williams continued his involvement in the Jimmy Fund, later losing a brother to leukemia, and spending much of his spare time, effort, and money in support of the cancer organization.

In his later years Williams became a fixture at autograph shows and card shows after his son (by his third wife), John Henry Williams, took control of his career, becoming his de facto manager. The younger Williams provided structure to his father's business affairs, exposed forgeries that were flooding the memorabilia market, and rationed his father's public appearances and memorabilia signings to maximize their earnings.

One of Ted Williams's final, and most memorable, public appearances was at the 1999 All-Star Game in Boston. Able to walk only a short distance, Williams was brought to the pitcher's mound in a golf cart. He proudly waved his cap to the crowda gesture he had never done as a player. Fans responded with a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. At the pitcher's mound he was surrounded by players from both teams, including fellow Red Sox player Nomar Garciaparra, and was assisted by Tony Gwynn in throwing out the first pitch of that year's All-Star Game. Later in the year, he was among the members of the Major League Baseball All-Century Team introduced to the crowd at Turner Field in Atlanta prior to Game Two of the World Series.

On May 4, 1944, Williams married Doris Soule, the daughter of his hunting guide. Their daughter, Barbara Joyce ("Bobbi Jo"), was born on January 28, 1948, while Williams was fishing in Florida.[155] They divorced in 1954. Williams married the socialite model Lee Howard on September 10, 1961, and they were divorced in 1967.

Williams married Dolores Wettach, a former Miss Vermont and Vogue model, in 1968. Their son John-Henry was born on August 27, 1968, followed by daughter Claudia, on October 8, 1971. They were divorced in 1972.[156]

Williams lived with Louise Kaufman for twenty years until her death in 1993. In his book, Cramer called her the love of Williams's life.[157] After his death, her sons filed suit to recover her furniture from Williams's condominium as well as a half-interest in the condominium they claimed he gave her.[158]

Williams had a strong respect for General Douglas MacArthur, referring to him as his "idol".[159] For Williams's 40th birthday, MacArthur sent him an oil painting of himself with the inscription "To Ted Williamsnot only America's greatest baseball player, but a great American who served his country. Your friend, Douglas MacArthur. General U.S. Army."[160]

Politically, Williams was a Republican,[161] and was described by one biographer as, "to the right of Attila the Hun" except when it came to Civil Rights.[162] Another writer similarly noted that while in the 1960s he had a liberal attitude on civil rights, he was pretty far right on other cultural issues of the time, calling him ultraconservative in the tradition of Barry Goldwater and John Wayne.[161]

Williams campaigned for Richard Nixon in the 1960 United States Presidential Election, and after Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy, refused several invitations from President Kennedy to gather together in Cape Cod. He supported Nixon again in 1968, and as manager of the Senators, kept a picture of him on his desk, meeting with the President several times while managing the team. In 1972 he called Nixon, the greatest president of my lifetime.[161] In the following years, Williams endorsed several other candidates in Republican Party presidential primaries, including George H. W. Bush in 1988 (whom he also campaigned for in New Hampshire),[163] Bob Dole in 1996, and George W. Bush in 2000.[164]

According to friends, Williams was an atheist[165] and this influenced his decision to be cryogenically frozen. His daughter Claudia stated "It was like a religion, something we could have faith in... no different from holding the belief that you might be reunited with your loved ones in heaven".[166]

Williams's brother Danny and his son John-Henry both died of leukemia.[167]

In his last years, Williams suffered from cardiomyopathy. He had a pacemaker implanted in November 2000 and he underwent open-heart surgery in January 2001. After suffering a series of strokes and congestive heart failure, he died of cardiac arrest at the age of 83 on July 5, 2002, at Citrus Memorial Hospital, Inverness, Florida, near his home in Citrus Hills, Florida.[168]

Though his will stated his desire to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the Florida Keys, Williams' son John-Henry and younger daughter Claudia chose to have his remains frozen cryonically.

Ted's elder daughter, Bobby-Jo Ferrell, brought a suit to have her father's wishes recognized. John-Henry's lawyer then produced an informal "family pact" signed by Ted, Claudia, and John-Henry, in which they agreed "to be put into biostasis after we die" to "be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance."[169] Bobby-Jo and her attorney, Spike Fitzpatrick (former attorney of Ted Williams), contended that the family pact, which was scribbled on an ink-stained napkin, was forged by John-Henry and/or Claudia.[170] Fitzpatrick and Ferrell believed that the signature was not obtained legally.[171] Laboratory analysis proved that the signature was genuine.[171] John-Henry said that his father was a believer in science and was willing to try cryonics if it held the possibility of reuniting the family.[172]

Though the family pact upset some friends, family and fans, a public plea for financial support of the lawsuit by Ferrell produced little result.[172] Citing financial difficulties, Ferrell dropped her lawsuit on the condition that a $645,000 trust fund left by Williams would immediately pay the sum out equally to the three children.[172] Inquiries to cryonics organizations increased after the publicity from the case.[170]

In Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero, author Leigh Montville claims that the family cryonics pact was a practice Ted Williams autograph on a plain piece of paper, around which the agreement had later been hand written. The pact document was signed "Ted Williams", the same as his autographs, whereas he would always sign his legal documents "Theodore Williams", according to Montville. However, Claudia testified to the authenticity of the document in an affidavit.[173]

Williams body was subsequently decapitated for the neuropreservation option from Alcor.[174] Following John-Henry's unexpected illness and death from acute myeloid leukemia on March 6, 2004, John-Henry's body was also transported to Alcor, in fulfillment of the family agreement.[175]

In 1954, Williams was inducted by the San Diego Hall of Champions into the Breitbard Hall of Fame honoring San Diego's finest athletes both on and off the playing surface.[176]

Williams was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 25, 1966.[177] In his induction speech, Williams included a statement calling for the recognition of the great Negro leagues players: "I've been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, and I hope some day the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren't given a chance."[178] Williams was referring to two of the most famous names in the Negro leagues, who were not given the opportunity to play in the Major Leagues before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Gibson died early in 1947 and thus never played in the majors; and Paige's brief major league stint came long past his prime as a player. This powerful and unprecedented statement from the Hall of Fame podium was "a first crack in the door that ultimately would open and include Paige and Gibson and other Negro league stars in the shrine."[178] Paige was the first inducted in 1971. Gibson and others followed, starting in 1972 and continued on and off into the 21st century.

On November 18, 1991, President George H. W. Bush presented Williams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the US.[179]

The Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston, Massachusetts, carrying 1.6 miles (2.6km) of the final 2.3 miles (3.7km) of Interstate 90 under Boston Harbor, opened in December 1995, and Ted Williams Parkway (California State Route 56) in San Diego County, California, opened in 1992, were named in his honor while he was still alive. In 2016, the major league San Diego Padres inducted Williams into their hall of fame for his contributions to baseball in San Diego.[180]

The Tampa Bay Rays home field, Tropicana Field, installed the Ted Williams Museum (formerly in Hernando, Florida, 19942006) behind the left field fence. From the Tampa Bay Rays website: "The Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame brings a special element to the Tropicana Field. Fans can view an array of different artifacts and pictures of the 'Greatest hitter that ever lived.' These memorable displays range from Ted Williams's days in the military through his professional playing career. This museum is dedicated to some of the greatest players to ever 'lace 'em up,' including Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris."

In 2013, the Bob Feller Act of Valor Award honored Williams as one of 37 Baseball Hall of Fame members for his service in the United States Marine Corps during World War II.[181]

At the time of his retirement, Williams ranked third all-time in home runs (behind Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx), seventh in RBIs (after Ruth, Cap Anson, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Foxx, and Mel Ott), and seventh in batting average (behind Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Lefty O'Doul, Ed Delahanty and Tris Speaker). His career batting average of .3444 is the highest of any player who played his entire career in the live-ball era following 1920.

Most modern statistical analyses[which?] place Williams, along with Ruth and Barry Bonds, among the three most potent hitters to have played the game. Williams's baseball season of 1941 is often considered favorably with the greatest seasons of Ruth and Bonds in terms of various offensive statistical measures such as slugging, on-base and "offensive winning percentage." As a further indication, of the ten best seasons for OPS, short for On-Base Plus Slugging Percentage, a popular modern measure of offensive productivity, four each were achieved by Ruth and Bonds, and two by Williams.

In 1999, Williams was ranked as number eight on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, where he was the highest-ranking left fielder.[182]

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Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died | MIT Technology Review

The environment was something of a shift for Drake, who had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Though it was the longtime leader in cryonics, Alcor was still a small nonprofit. It had been freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976.

The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. Typically shunned by the scientific community, cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But its adherents have held on to a dream that at some point in the future, advances in medicine will allow for resuscitation and additional years on Earth. Over decades, small, tantalizing developments in related technology, as well as high-profile frozen test subjects like Ted Williams, have kept the hope alive. Today, nearly 200 dead patients are frozen in Alcors cryogenic chambers at temperatures of 196 C, including a handful of celebrities, who have paid tens of thousands of dollars for the goal of possible revival and ultimately reintegration into society.

But its the recent involvement of Yinfeng that signals something of a new era for cryonics. With impressive financial resources, government support, and scientific staff, its one of a handful of new labs focused on expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and trying anew to bring credibility to the long-disputed theory of human reanimation. Just a year after Drake came on board as research director of the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute, the subsidiary of the Yinfeng Biological Group overseeing the cryonics program, the institute performed its first cryopreservation. Its storage vats now hold about a dozen clients who are paying upwards of $200,000 to preserve the whole body.

Still, the field remains rooted in faith rather than any real evidence that it works. Its a hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology, says Clive Coen, a neuroscientist and professor at Kings College London.

Even if one day you could perfectly thaw a frozen human body, you would still just have a warm dead body on your hands.

The cryonics process typically goes something like this: Upon a persons death, a response team begins the process of cooling the corpse to a low temperature and performs cardiopulmonary support to sustain blood flow to the brain and organs. Then the body is moved to a cryonics facility, where an organ preservation solution is pumped through the veins before the body is submerged in liquid nitrogen. This process should commence within one hour of deaththe longer the wait, the greater the damage to the bodys cells. Then, once the frozen cadaver is ensconced in the cryogenic chamber, the hope of the dead begins.

Since its beginnings in the late 1960s, the field has attracted opprobrium from the scientific community, particularly its more respectable cousin cryobiologythe study of how freezing and low temperatures affect living organisms and biological materials. The Society for Cryobiology even banned its members from involvement in cryonics in the 1980s, with a former society president lambasting the field as closer to fraud than either faith or science.

In recent years, though, it has grabbed the attention of the libertarian techno-optimist crowd, mostly tech moguls dreaming of their own immortality. And a number of new startups are expanding the playing field. Tomorrow Biostasis in Berlin became the first cryonics company in Western Europe in 2019, for example, and in early 2022, Southern Cryonics opened a facility in Australia.

More researchers are open to longer-term, futuristic topics than there might have been 20 years ago or so, says Tomorrow Biostasis founder Emil Kendziorra.

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Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died | MIT Technology Review

What Is Cryonics? – How Cryonics Works | HowStuffWorks

Cryonics is the practice of preserving human bodies in extremely cold temperatures with the hope of reviving them sometime in the future. The idea is that, if someone has "died" from a disease that is incurable today, he or she can be "frozen" and then revived in the future when a cure has been discovered. A person preserved this way is said to be in cryonic suspension.

To understand the technology behind cryonics, think about the news stories you've heard of people who have fallen into an icy lake and have been submerged for up to an hour in the frigid water before being rescued. The ones who survived did so because the icy water put their body into a sort of suspended animation, slowing down their metabolism and brain function to the point where they needed almost no oxygen.

Cryonics is a bit different from being resuscitated after falling into an icy lake, though. First of all, it's illegal to perform cryonic suspension on someone who is still alive. People who undergo this procedure must first be pronounced legally dead -- that is, their heart must have stopped beating. But if they're dead, how can they ever be revived? According to scientists who perform cryonics, "legally dead" is not the same as "totally dead." Total death, they say, is the point at which all brain function ceases. Legal death occurs when the heart has stopped beating, but some cellular brain function remains. Cryonics preserves the little cell function that remains so that, theoretically, the person can be resuscitated in the future.

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What Is Cryonics? - How Cryonics Works | HowStuffWorks

Arizona cryonics facility preserves bodies to revive later

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct 12 (Reuters) - Time and death are "on pause" for some people in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Inside tanks filled with liquid nitrogen are the bodies and heads of 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved in hopes of being revived in the future when science has advanced beyond what it is capable of today. Many of the "patients," as Alcor Life Extension Foundation calls them, were terminally ill with cancer, ALS or other diseases with no present-day cure.

Matheryn Naovaratpong, a Thai girl with brain cancer, is the youngest person to be cryopreserved, at the age of 2 in 2015.

"Both her parents were doctors and she had multiple brain surgeries and nothing worked, unfortunately. So they contacted us," said Max More, chief executive of Alcor, a nonprofit which claims to be the world leader in cryonics.

Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, another Alcor patient, had his body cryopreserved after death from ALS in 2014.

The cryopreservation process begins after a person is declared legally dead. Blood and other fluids are removed from the patient's body and replaced with chemicals designed to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals. Vitrified at extremely cold temperatures, Alcor patients are then placed in tanks at the Arizona facility "for as long as it takes for technology to catch up," More said.

The minimum cost is $200,000 for a body and $80,000 for the brain alone. Most of Alcor's almost 1,400 living "members" pay by making the company the beneficiary of life insurance policies equal to the cost, More said.

More's wife Natasha Vita-More likens the process to taking a trip to the future.

"The disease or injury cured or fixed, and the person has a new body cloned or a whole body prosthetic or their body reanimated and (can) meet up with their friends again," she said.

Many medical professionals disagree, said Arthur Caplan, who heads the medical ethics division at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine.

"This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science fiction and it's naive," he said. "The only group... getting excited about the possibility are people who specialize in studying the distant future or people who have a stake in wanting you to pay the money to do it."

Reporting by Liliana Salgado; Editing by Richard Chang

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Arizona cryonics facility preserves bodies to revive later

Making a Life’s Work of Death: On Hayley Campbell’s All the Living and the Dead – lareviewofbooks

HURRAY THEN FOR FUNERALS! exclaims Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Albert Camuss 1956 novel The Fall. Camus himself was a fan of funerals, according to Olivier Todd in his 1996 biography of the Nobel Prizewinning novelist. As Todd details, Camus became obsessed with American funeral customs on his trip to the United States in 1946. Hayley Campbell, also a funeral fan, reports on what we make of our dead in her new book, All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Lifes Work. She dives far deeper than just a survey of funeral ceremonies, choosing to interview professionals in the death industry in the United States and the United Kingdom, including a doctor who handles cadavers at the Mayo Clinic, a death-mask sculptor, a Black executioner in Virginia, and workers at the largest cryonics center in the world, among others.

Our culture has a sideways fascination with death even if most people dont want to talk about it: all those Law & Order spinoffs, murder mysteries, true crime podcasts (My Favorite Murder has 35 million downloads per month, as of 2020). Campbell engages the topic by curating stories of and interviews with workers in the death industry. Going beyond the gravedigger and the embalmer, she approaches her subjects with kindness and humor, highlighting an industry that will always be in demand. She also makes clear that by looking at death as an inevitable truth of life, we are better able to define and value life itself. Campbell shows that death workers are an essential part of everyday life, tied to many areas of civil society (e.g., the death penalty), reproductive health (e.g., bereavement midwives), and futurism (e.g., cryogenic freezing).

Campbell details the work of anatomical pathology technologist (APT) Lara-Rose Iredale, whose job is to assist pathologists in determining cause of death. Inside the mortuary of St Thomas Hospital in London, Iredale and Campbell meet for the second time, the first being the funeral industry awards ceremony at which Iredale was selected APT of the Year. She describes her job as corpse servant and has a tattoo of a tarot card on each thigh, one of DEATH and the other JUDGEMENT. In addition to assisting at autopsies, APTs deal with families when bodies are identified, liaise with funeral homes, and complete the paperwork that every death requires. Iredale also works with trainee doctors, a group Campbell writes about in a chapter covering the director of anatomical services at the Mayo Clinic. As an ATP, Iredale shows trainees the reality of a diagnosis: what telling someone they have cancer actually means, what cirrhosis of the liver looks like, what obesity means for your cramped organs, and the shocking visual fact that ribcages stay the same size no matter how big you get.

Campbell follows Iredale through an autopsy, from the cracking of the ribcage to the opening of the abdominal cavity, enduring as she scoops the loose pieces of shit from around the rectum, inside the cavity [] One nugget falls off the edge and sits precariously close to my boot for the next three hours. Far more traumatizing is her experience watching a deceased baby undergo an autopsy in a pediatric pathology department. After the investigation into cause of death is complete, the baby must be bathed, as all pathology subjects are, in a blue plastic tub. As the small body sinks into the water, Campbell feels an urge to save him even though she knows he is already dead. Though Iredale congratulates Campbell on not having to step outside at any point during her day of observation, she later has nightmares of babies lying in rows outside her bedroom window and spends the next three weeks in bed.

In the next chapter, Campbells thoughts return to infant mortality when she interviews a bereavement midwife, Clare Beesley, who delivers only dead or soon-to-be-dead babies. Beesley explains that the wing she works in has an entrance separate from the maternity ward, which is filled with the screaming associated with live births. According to Campbell, one in four pregnancies in the United Kingdom results in death either during gestation or shortly after birth. In the United States, the CDC calculates five deaths per 1,000 live births as of 2019, the most recent year data was available, but that figure seems to omit those babies who live briefly outside the mothers body, not to mention the miscarriage rate, which is not tracked. The populations of each country are quite different, however, as is their respective access to healthcare.

Beesley defines her job as look[ing] after a family when they are dealing with the most devastating moment in their lives. To help process her own grief, she creates memory boxes for the bereaved, often including photos to prove that the loss did happen, this greeting and parting all in one breath. Grieving cannot happen without the finality of seeing, [if] youre still trapped in disbelief. Beesley explains that, in the past, it was common practice to remove the dead baby from the mother without any contact or comfort, in the belief that seeing it would upset her. While this attitude is still common, with some family members requesting that the mother not have contact with the deceased infant, Beesley has years of experience and empathy for both sides: They dont want to see somebody they love in [] pain [] and they think by taking whats happened away, it takes the pain away. But it doesnt. Campbell references a 2016 study by the University of Michigan Medical School on the level of PTSD and depression in bereaved mothers. The study was unable to conclude if holding ones baby had any effect on the likelihood of depression or the higher rates of PTSD, since many reported that they were not given the opportunity to hold their child.

Campbell strikes a more lighthearted note in her chapter about a death-mask sculptor in London, Nick Reynolds, whose father was the mastermind of the Great Train Robbery. Death masks, she writes, have been the realm of kings and pharaohs, used in the making of effigies so that dead royalty could travel their land and people could pay their final respects to an imperishable leader, but they were also once an artists reference tool before the invention of photography, created of unknown dead in the hopes of one day identifying them. Campbell references Camus here as the owner of a copy of the most famous death mask in modern history, that of Resusci Anne, who became the face of the CPR training doll. Reynolds, the only person commercially working in the United Kingdom who casts faces of the dead, explains the history of the practice, including its connections to animism, the belief that through concentration one can summon the spirit of a person into an object.

Reynoldss clients are mostly widows who have commissioned their dead husbands masks. Most arent rich, despite the roughly $3,000 price tag. The masks capture a moment in time shortly after death, the culmination of a lifetime lived. As Reynolds puts it, the bereaved have managed to save a part of them that isnt going to become worm food or ashes. Often, he is called to make a mask weeks after the deceased has died, either because an autopsy was required or a drawn-out court case has left them in a mortuary freezer. Reynolds nips, tucks, smooths, and sculpts the remains into an image of what they might have looked like just after they died. The work of creating a mask involves pouring blue alginate, the same liquid used by dentists to make impressions, on the face and letting it set for 20 minutes, then filling the mold with plaster and chiseling any changes after it hardens. Finally, the mold is filled with polyurethane resin mixed with metal powder, creating multiple layers that form one incorruptible bronze face.

The books most heart-wrenching chapter follows an executioner in Virginia, Jerry Givens. Campbell takes great care to humanize Givens, a prison worker who oversaw 62 executions and investigated botched executions in states across the country. Givens explains his reasoning for choosing to do this kind of work: I prepared a guy for his next phase of life [] [M]y thing is to get you ready. How do you prepare yourself to be killed? I studied him, I talked to him, I prayed with him. Because this is his last everything. In Givenss view, death isnt the end because a higher power supersedes the power of the state.

Campbell points out that the official manner of death listed on an executed inmates death certificate is homicide. As David R. Dow, founder of Texass oldest innocence project, wrote, [T]he machinery of death cannot run without human hands to turn the dials. In 62 cases, those hands were Givenss. Rather than accept the verdict of homicide, Givens rationalized his role by equating the deaths with suicides, believing that the inmates had made choices that eventually resulted in their own execution. But he eventually lost faith in judicial accuracy when an inmate on death row was released based on DNA evidence nine days away from meeting Givens at his death chamber. Campbell notes that the death penalty in Virginia was abolished in March 2021, less than a year after Givens, who contracted COVID-19 while singing in his church choir, died.

The 12 stories of death industry professionals outlined in this book are varied and richly wrought, and that enough is reason to read them. The death machine works, Campbell writes, because each cog focuses on their one patch [] It is a series of people, connected in their industry, disconnected in their roles. She closes the book with a quote from William Gladstone, the former prime minister of England, that was framed on the wall of a workers office at Kenyon International Emergency Services, a company that conducts administrative cleanup after airplane crashes and terrorist bombings: Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals. Reading this book because the hidden world of death workers is fascinating is reason enough, but one may find in reading it, as I have, that attending to death deepens ones understanding of its mystery and, by extension, the mystery of life. By considering our common destination, we deepen our understanding of our common humanity.

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Making a Life's Work of Death: On Hayley Campbell's All the Living and the Dead - lareviewofbooks

expert reaction to paper suggesting that cellular and tissue function can be restored in pigs after death – Science Media Centre

August 3, 2022

A paper published in Nature suggests cellular recovery can occur in pigs after death.

Prof Martin Monti, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), said:

Biological death is more like a cascade of dominoes, with one event triggering the next, than an instantaneous transition. What is ground-breaking about this technology is that this cascade can be halted in some organs if only the right cellular environment and metabolic parameters can be restored. The potential implications, if this will ever be successfully translated to humans, are huge: how many more lives could be saved through transplantation each year thanks to greater organ viability?

What this technology did not do, however, was restore any form of brain network activity and any associated function. Whether this is due to brain tissues having a faster death cascade than other organs or other factors remains unclear.

What is clear, however, is that this technology is not about magically reviving dead tissue. It is about expanding the window for restoring organ function by interrupting the death cascade.

Dr Anders Sandberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, said:

When blood circulation stops, cells begin to die due to lack of oxygen, and chemical changes begin that harm tissues and organ function. At normal temperature, irreversible changes set in after a few minutes. What this paper shows is that significant improvements are possible in how long after death preservation methods to keep organs alive can be started (up to an hour), and that some of the cellular damage can be partially reversed.

While the experiment was done on pigs, helping humans is an obvious goal, and the most obvious impact is on organ donation. Currently, most organ donation happens after brain death: the brainstem has permanently ceased functioning, but the body is otherwise functional. These cases are rarer than circulatory death where the heart has irreversibly ceased functioning. However, in these cases, there will be a period of no circulation before artificial circulation can be instituted and organs are likely to be damaged. The system in the paper may help overcome this problem, making more transplants possible.

Ethically, this seems to beunproblematic good news. However, further in the future this kind of method may also make treatment directly after a stroke or major trauma more effective: by saving patients that would otherwise have died, it might reduce the number of available transplants. This may still be good news, but there is a risk that it mainly preventspeople from dying rather than making them recover. There is a challenging ethical issue in determiningwhen radical life support is just futile, and as technology advances we may find more ways of keeping bodies alive despite being unable to revive the person we actually careabout. Much work remainsto find criteria for when further treatment is futile, and alsoin how to get people back from the brink.

Right now, the ethically important aspect of this paper is that it shows that the changes happening after stopped circulation can be slowed or reversed with the right treatment: there is more hope for patients in this state. Death is not an instantaneous event but rather agradual process, and we have gained a further tool to nudge it. Once, lack of breathing was regarded as a sign of permanent death, until artificial breathing merely made it a dangerous state to be in. Later, other technologies have pushed back the point of no return, first to cardiac arrest, and later to brain death. OrganExshows that there is more medical wiggle room in cases with no circulation to fix things than previously looked possible: related methods may make new forms of surgery possible. Paradoxically, this makes the futility debate harder since there is a bit more hope. However, it is better to have more options to save lives than fewer, even if hard moral choices have tobe made.

Doubtless some readers will bring up cryonics, the practice of cooling down bodies to extremely low temperatures after death hasbeen declared in the hope that future medicine will be able to revive them and repair the damage from both the terminal cause and the suspension process. This is not what OrganExis about, but the technology will doubtless be of great interest to cryonics organisations as a way of reducing the damage while temperature is lowered. One of the largest practical hurdles is the often excessivetime between circulation stopping and damage-reducing suspension procedures starting: this technique may buy valuable time. The big question about whether future revival is going to be possible remains, but at least one can improve the present practice to boost the chances.

Dr Sam Parnia MD PhD, Associate Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, said:

The press release is accurate but if anything underestimates the significance of these discoveries.

This is a truly remarkable and incredibly significant study. It demonstrates that after death, cells in mammalian organs (including humans) such as the brain do not die for many hours. This is well into the post-mortem period.

Consequently, by developing this system of organ preservation (using organ Ex in humans, which is entirely feasible), in the near future doctors will be able to provide novel treatments to preserve the organs post-mortem. This will enable access to many more organs for transplantation, which will lead to 1000s of lives saved every year.

Perhaps, as important is the fact that the OrganEx method can be used to preserve organs in people who have died, but in whom the underlying cause of death remains treatable. Today, this would include athletes who die suddenly from a heart defect, people who die from drowning, heart attacks or massive bleeding after trauma (such as car accidents). The OrganEx system can preserve such peoples organs and prevent brain damage for hours in people after death. This will provide time for doctors to fix the underlying condition (such as a blocked blood vessel in the heart that had led to a massive heart attack and death, or repair a torn blood vessel that had led to death from massive bleeding after trauma), restore organ function and bring such people back to life many hours after death. As such otherwise healthy people, including athletes who die, but in whom the cause of death is treatable at any given time can potentially be brought back to life, and if the cause of death is not treatable, then their organs can be preserved to give life to thousands of people every year.

Finally, this study demonstrates that our social convention regarding death, ie. as an absolute black and white end is not scientifically valid. By contrast, scientifically, death is a biological process that remains treatable and reversible for hours after it has occurred.

For decades millions of people have reported lucid consciousness and a detailed reevaluation of all their own actions, thoughts and intentions throughout life, when on the brink of death, or after crossing the threshold of death. These recalled experiences surrounding death or so called near death experiences were often been dismissed. However, this study and others suggest consciousness may not be annihilated at the time of death. This further reinforces the need to study consciousness and recalled experiences surrounding death in an unbiased scientific manner. Scientists can study what happens to the human mind and consciousness after death and provide answers to the age old question of what happens to us all after we die through the prism of science.

Cellular recovery after prolonged warm ischaemia of the whole body by David Andrijevic et al. was published in Nature at 16:00 UK time on Wednesday 3rd August 2022.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05016-1

Declared interests

Prof Martin Monti: No conflict of interest.

Dr Sam Parnia: I donthave any conflicts. However, I do conduct other research into methods to preserve the brain after cardiac arrest.

For all other experts, no reply to our request for DOIswas received.

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expert reaction to paper suggesting that cellular and tissue function can be restored in pigs after death - Science Media Centre

Does Life on Earth Have a Purpose to Ancient Ghost Tracks of the West (Planet Earth Report) – The Daily Galaxy –Great Discoveries Channel

Posted on Aug 4, 2022 in Planet Earth, Science

Todays stories range from NASA Seeks the Science behind UFOs to The Origins of the Universe may be Hidden in the Voids of Space, and much more. The Planet Earth Report connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.

Does life on Earth have a purpose? The answer is both disappointing and exciting, reports Marcelo Gleiser for Big Think. Is the incredible diversity of species a random accident? Or does life on Earth follow a plan of becoming ever more complex? Those who think there is such a plan believe the apex of this process would, of course, be us. The answer is both disappointing and exciting, given that we are the ones asking the question.

Footprints Discovery Suggests Ancient Ghost Tracks May Cover the WestThe set of 88 prints is about 12,000 years old, scientists say, and was found in the militarys Utah Test and Training Range, reports The New York Times.

Why We Need to Study Nothing -The origins of the universe may be hidden in the voids of space, reports Paul Sutter for Nautil.us.

Chinese and US scientists build bridges with cutting-edge Hale telescope project, reports South China MOrning Post. Work to build an advanced spectrograph which will help explore distant corners of the universe is a rare example of cooperation between the two countries

With New Study, NASA Seeks the Science behind UFOs Although modest in scope, a NASA research project reflects shifting attitudes toward the formerly taboo subject of UFOs, reports Scientific American.

When Will the Next Supernova in Our Galaxy Occur? -Scientists have new tools at their disposal to detect and study the dramatic explosion of a star, reports The Smithsonian. Its been a long wait418 years since weve seen a star explode in our galaxy. So are we overdue for a bright, nearby supernova?

Earth is spinning faster than usual and had its shortest day ever, reports CBS News. Since 2016 the Earth started to accelerate, said Leonid Zotov, who works at works for Lomonosov Moscow State University and recently published a study on what might cause the changes in Earths rotation. This year it rotates quicker than in 2021 and 2020.

Gigantic jet lightning is a mystery. These researchers are solving it--The extreme electrical discharges can tower 50 miles above a thunderstorm, reports the Washington Post.

This Map Lets You Plug in Your Address to See How Its Changed Over the Past 750 Million Years, reports The Smithsonian. The interactive tool enables users to home in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.

A China-Taiwan conflict could lead to a catastrophic semiconductor shortage in the world Taiwan manufactures roughly 50 percent of all the worlds semiconductors, reports Interesting Engineering.

Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortalityFor decades people have arranged to freeze their bodies after death, dreaming of resurrection by advanced future medicine. Many met a fate far grislier than death, reports Big Think.

How the secrets of ancient cuneiform texts are being revealed by AI--Much of the worlds first writing, carved into clay tablets, remains undeciphered. Now AI is helping us piece together this ancient Mesopotamian script, revealing the incredible stories of men, women and children at the dawn of history, reports New Scientist.

Hubbles Future in the Webb Era -We believe that we can keep Hubble doing the ground-breaking science it is known for through the latter part of this decade and possibly into the next, says public affairs officer Claire Andreoli (NASA Goddard).

Citizen future: Why we need a new story of self and society, reports BBC Future. Are you a subject, a consumer or a citizen? The authors Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad argue that our societies need a new narrative, and it starts by ditching the stories sold by authoritarianism and consumerism.

The Crypto Market Crashed. Theyre Still Buying Bitcoin Hard-core Bitcoin evangelists are making the case that Bitcoin differs from the unstable crypto projects that sent the market into a tailspin, reports The New York Times. Cory Klippsten started issuing warnings about the cryptocurrency market in March. The digital coin Luna, Mr. Klippsten tweeted, was a scam, run by an entrepreneur with major Elizabeth Holmes vibes. The newfangled crypto bank Celsius Network was a massive blowup risk, he said.

Semiotics of dogs In all its baroque and sometimes cruelly overbred forms, the dog is a paramount symbol of both human hopes and foibles, reports Aeon. After millennia of domestication, we gave our pets family trees, and named them as breeds. They acquired an identity reflecting human projection, and symbolized our own increased focus on lineage and breeding. Lady is purebred, Tramp is a mutt.

New algorithm aces university math course questions Researchers use machine learning to automatically solve, explain, and generate university-level math problems at a human level, reports MIT News. a multidisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere, led by Iddo Drori, a lecturer in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has used a neural network model to solve university-level math problems in a few seconds at a human level.

North Korea-backed hackers have a clever way to read your Gmail, reports Ars Technica. SHARPEXT has slurped up thousands of emails in the past year and keeps getting better.

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

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The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

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Does Life on Earth Have a Purpose to Ancient Ghost Tracks of the West (Planet Earth Report) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

David Suzuki: Gaia theorist James Lovelock was always ahead of the times – The Georgia Straight

Although most of the world knew James Lovelock as an independent scientist and originator of the Gaia hypothesis, he had a slightly different take. Im not a scientist really. Im an inventor or a mechanic. Its a different thing. The Gaia theory is just engineering written very large indeed, hetold theGuardianin 2020.

Regardless of labels, theres no denying the significant influence of Lovelock, whodied July 26on his 103rdbirthday. Although many of his discoveries and ideason subjects ranging from cryonics to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and climate to nuclear powerwere controversial, most gained acceptance as the world caught up.

Named for the Greek Earth goddess, hisGaia theorydeveloped with evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis during the 1960s when he was working for NASAs moon and Mars programssaw the world with its natural cycles as a living, self-regulating organism. When one cycle is knocked out of equilibrium, others work to restore balance.

At the time, many prominent scientists ridiculed the hypothesis, but it has continued to gain acceptance because it helps to explain the chemical and physical balances in air, land, and water that make life possible. It underpins much of climate science. The idea isnt that Earth is conscious of these processes; just that the cycles work together to keep the planet healthy and able to support life.

Its similar to the ways in which many Indigenous Peoples worldwide view the living Earth. Everything is interconnected. He understood that human activities that destroy rainforests and reduce biodiversity, for example, hinder Gaias ability to minimize the impacts of runaway greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Lovelock wasnt afraid to change his views in the face of evolving evidence, but he also refused to ever soften his message, something I learned from interviewing him several times.

His research revealed the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, and he warned that burning fossil fuels was changing the climate before these issues were on most peoples radar. His electron-capture device, invented in the late 1960s, detected rising CFC levels in the atmosphereas well as pollutants like PCBs in air, soil, and waterand led to the discovery that this was causing ozone depletion. That eventually resulted in theMontreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, adopted in 1987 by all countries, thus helping the ozone layer to recover and preventing millions of cases of skin and other cancers and eye cataracts.

Like many who clearly see the environmental predicaments weve created, Lovelock wasnt always optimistic, despite his knowledge of the many available and emerging solutions. I would say the biosphere and I are both in the last one percent or our lives, he told theGuardiantwo years ago.

Lovelock, who started out in medicine, even thought pandemics such as COVID-19 could be related to planetary self-regulation: I could easily make you a model and demonstrate that as the human population on the planet grew larger and larger, the probability of a virus evolving that would cut back the population is quite marked.

He said opposition to the Gaia hypothesis surprised him: Im wondering to what extent you can put that down to the coal and oil industries who fought against any kind of message that would be bad for them.

As for solutions to the climate crisis, he advocated for technologies that havent always been popular, including nuclear energy and Edward Tellers suggestion of a sunshade in a heliocentric orbit that would diffuse a few percent of sunlight from the Earth.

However, he cautioned, I dont think we should start messing about with the Gaia system until we know a hell of a lot more about it. It is beginning to look as if renewable energywind and solarif properly used, may be the answer to the energy problems of humanity.

James Lovelock continued to work, write, and speak until his final days. My main reason for not relaxing into contented retirement is that like most of you I am deeply concerned about the probability of massively harmful climate change and the need to do something about it now, he said.

Lovelock may have left Gaia, but the knowledge he left endures and is essential to understanding our place, predicament, and future.

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Frequently Asked Questions | Cryonics Institute

Good news: you heard wrong! With CI, the minimum fee for cryopreservation at CI (which includes vitrification perfusion and long term storage) is $28,000 a one-time fee, due at time of death. And though the fee can be paid in cash, usually a member has a life insurance policy made that pays the amount to CI upon death. A term life insurance policy in the amount of the minimum fee often costs around $30 per month for a person starting their policy in good health at middle age. Funding at a higher level can be used to defray additional costs, including transportation (which is not included in CIs base fee) or even a cryonics standby team to perform rapid cooling and cardiopulmonary support upon pronouncement of death.

Advice from an insurance professional is recommended before selecting a policy.

A person who wishes to become a Lifetime CI Member can make a single membership payment of $1,250 with no further payment required. If a new member would rather pay a smaller amount up front, in exchange for funding a slightly higher cryopreservation fee later on ($35,000), he or she can join with a $75 initiation fee, and pay annual dues of only $120, which are also payable in quarterly installments of $35. (And such a dues-paying member can upgrade to Lifetime Membership at any time, saving $7,000 and future any dues.) Members at a distance may have to pay local funeral director fees and transportation costs to Michigan to be cryopreserved. These payments are not made to CI, and are not included in the figures outlined above.

Take a look at our Membership FAQ and the membership application forms to find out more. And if you've got any questions, or want to talk about making special arrangements? Give us a call at (586) 791-5961 or drop us an email at CIHQ@aol.com. We're more than happy to help.

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Frequently Asked Questions | Cryonics Institute

Frozen for the future: Does Minnesota have any cryonics …

A number of Minnesotans have made plans to be frozen, and a passionate group of cryonics enthusiasts is trying to ease the transition.

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Minnesotans are used to life in subzero temperatures, but what about death?

Reader Sharon Carlson wanted to know if Minnesota is home to any cryonics facilities, where bodies are kept frozen until theoretical future technology is able to reanimate them. She posed the question to Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune's reader-powered reporting project.

"I'm just kind of having a hard time with the idea of dying," said the 62-year-old Andover resident. "I'm not philosophical I'm kind of pissed off about it."

There are actually only two cryonics facilities in the nation, in Arizona and Michigan. But a number of Minnesotans have made plans to be frozen, and a passionate group of cryonics enthusiasts is trying to ease the transition from life to long-term storage.

Minnesota Cryonics Rapid Response counts about two dozen members. Most if not all have signed up to spend their postmortem days in large freezers at either the Cryonics Institute (CI) in Clinton Township, Mich., or the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz.

When a member dies, time is of the essence.

Other Rapid Response members must stabilize the body as quickly as possible, usually by packing it in ice. The body must be kept cold until it can be shipped to CI or Alcor, where it will be "vitrified" at about 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit in a vacuum-sealed tube of liquid nitrogen. The response team may administer anti-coagulants to keep the blood from thickening after death.

"Our biggest expense last year was about $150 for ice," said Chris Petersen of Minneapolis, a board member of the rapid response group. "Knowing where your closest 24-hour gas station with an ice freezer has turned out to be a big role."

'Freeze Hank'

Last year, the group launched a GoFundMe fundraiser to help get one of their members, Hank, to the Michigan facility after his death. The "Freeze Hank" campaign didn't raise much only about $2,300. But when Hank died earlier this year, members successfully preserved his body and got it to Michigan.

The primary goal of the fundraiser was to raise money for long-term needs such as an emergency vehicle and monitors that could alert the group when a member's vital functions are failing. They also hope to develop educational materials for paramedics, funeral homes and hospitals, to teach them how to process the body of someone who wants cryonic preservation.

Freezing and reanimation is a frequent theme of Hollywood, playing a prominent role in movies like "Captain America," "Demolition Man" and "Austin Powers."In fact, many of the members of the Rapid Response group were first drawn to cryonics through sci-fi.

"I've always liked the harder part of sci-fi, where the science is plausible," Petersen said. He admits that when he first heard about cryonics, "I thought it sounded kind of quacky."

But Petersen and others maintain that what seems out of the realm of possibility today may be routine in the future. Nobody thought humans could fly; then the Wright brothers did it. A century ago, nobody would have believed a heart transplant was possible, yet today they're not even newsworthy.

Advances in cellular and molecular science are opening doors to medical advances that would have been unheard of even a decade ago, said Dennis Kowalski, president of CI. Scientists routinely freeze and thaw human eggs, sperm, embryos and tissue samples with no ill effects. Who's to say a whole body couldn't be frozen and thawed successfully?

"I don't believe we're at the zenith of human technological knowledge," Kowalski said. "We're going to be smarter in the future than we are today."

Health care of the future

CI has about 200 bodies in vitrification right now, Kowalski said, along with about 200 pets. Walt Disney is not among them, despite rumors that the famed animator had his head frozen after death a rumor Kowalski said is false.

But there is at least one famous person at his facility, Kowalski said, although he can't reveal who it is.

CI, which is a nonprofit organization, requires a donation of $28,000 to be stored at the facility indefinitely, Kowalski said. Many members donate more, with the money often coming from life insurance policies. The institute invests the donations in mutual funds, which are expected to provide money to keep the facility operating into the future.

Of course, if you're frozen after dying of cancer, you will still have a cancer-ridden body when you wake up.

"The issue is when you wake up, they have to fix what killed you," said Gene Shaver of St. Louis Park, another rapid response team member. But that's where members believe science will find a way.

"Let's be very honest here," Petersen said. "This is a long shot that we're doing. But if humanity and civilization is still around 500 or 1,000 years from now, if they have the technology to bring someone back to life, they probably have the technology to do nanotechnology or gene therapy" to treat the cause of death.

And for cryonics advocates, that long shot is better than nothing at all.

As Kowalski put it: "I can be sure that if you don't try, you're going to be worm dirt."

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Correction: Previous versions of this article misspelled Chris Petersens name.

John Reinan is a news reporter covering Greater Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. For the Star Tribune, he's also covered the western Twin Cities suburbs, as well as marketing, advertising and consumer news. He's been a reporter for more than 20 years and also did a stint at a marketing agency.

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Cryonics Technology Market Key Trends, Drivers, Challenges and Standardization To 2020-2026 – PRnews Leader

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Cryonics Technology Market Key Trends, Drivers, Challenges and Standardization To 2020-2026 - PRnews Leader

Cryonics – Wikipedia

For the study of the production of very low temperatures, see Cryogenics. For the low-temperature preservation of living tissue and organisms in general, see Cryopreservation. For the Hot Cross album, see Cryonics (album).

Freezing of a human corpse

Cryonics (from Greek: kryos meaning 'cold') is the low-temperature freezing (usually at 196C or 320.8F or 77.1K) and storage of a human corpse or severed head, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future.[1][2] Cryonics is regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community. It is generally viewed as a pseudoscience,[3] and its practice has been characterized as quackery.[4][5]

Cryonics procedures can begin only after clinical death, and cryonics "patients" are legally dead. Cryonics procedures may begin within minutes of death,[6] and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation.[7] It is, however, not possible for a corpse to be reanimated after undergoing vitrification, as this causes damage to the brain including its neural networks.[8] The first corpse to be frozen was that of Dr. James Bedford in 1967.[9] As of 2014, about 250 dead bodies had been cryopreserved in the United States, and 1,500 people had made arrangements for cryopreservation of their corpses.[10]

Economic reality means it is highly improbable that any cryonics corporation could continue in business long enough to take advantage of the claimed long-term benefits offered.[11] Early attempts of cryonic preservations were performed in the 1960s and early 1970s which ended in failure with companies going out of business, and their stored corpses thawed and disposed of.[12]

Cryonicists argue that as long as brain structure remains intact, there is no fundamental barrier, given our current understanding of physical law, to recovering its information content. Cryonics proponents go further than the mainstream consensus in saying that the brain does not have to be continuously active to survive or retain memory. Cryonics controversially states that a human survives even within an inactive brain that has been badly damaged, provided that original encoding of memory and personality can, in theory, be adequately inferred and reconstituted from what structure remains.[10][13]

Cryonics uses temperatures below 130C, called cryopreservation, in an attempt to preserve enough brain information to permit future revival of the cryopreserved person. Cryopreservation may be accomplished by freezing, freezing with cryoprotectant to reduce ice damage, or by vitrification to avoid ice damage. Even using the best methods, cryopreservation of whole bodies or brains is very damaging and irreversible with current technology.

Cryonics advocates hold that in the future the use of some kind of presently-nonexistent nanotechnology may be able to help bring the dead back to life and treat the diseases which killed them.[14] Mind uploading has also been proposed.[15]

Cryonics can be expensive. As of 2018[update] the cost of preparing and storing corpses using cryonics ranged from US$28,000 to $200,000.[16]

When used at high concentrations, cryoprotectants can stop ice formation completely. Cooling and solidification without crystal formation is called vitrification.[17] The first cryoprotectant solutions able to vitrify at very slow cooling rates while still being compatible with whole organ survival were developed in the late 1990s by cryobiologists Gregory Fahy and Brian Wowk for the purpose of banking transplantable organs.[18][19][20] This has allowed animal brains to be vitrified, warmed back up, and examined for ice damage using light and electron microscopy. No ice crystal damage was found;[21] cellular damage was due to dehydration and toxicity of the cryoprotectant solutions.

Costs can include payment for medical personnel to be on call for death, vitrification, transportation in dry ice to a preservation facility, and payment into a trust fund intended to cover indefinite storage in liquid nitrogen and future revival costs.[22][23] As of 2011, U.S. cryopreservation costs can range from $28,000 to $200,000, and are often financed via life insurance.[22] KrioRus, which stores bodies communally in large dewars, charges $12,000 to $36,000 for the procedure.[24] Some customers opt to have only their brain cryopreserved ("neuropreservation"), rather than their whole body.

As of 2014, about 250 corpses have been cryogenically preserved in the U.S., and around 1,500 people have signed up to have their remains preserved.[10] As of 2016, four facilities exist in the world to retain cryopreserved bodies: three in the U.S. and one in Russia.[2][25]

Taking into account the lifecycle of corporations, it is extremely unlikely that any cryonics company could continue to exist for sufficient time to take advantage even of the supposed benefits offered: historically, even the most robust corporations have only a one-in-a-thousand chance of surviving even one hundred years.[11] Many cryonics companies have failed: as of 2018[update] all but one of the pre-1973 batch had gone out of business, and their stored corpses have been defrosted and disposed of.[12]

Without cryoprotectants, cell shrinkage and high salt concentrations during freezing usually prevent frozen cells from functioning again after thawing. Ice crystals can also disrupt connections between cells that are necessary for organs to function.[26] The difficulties of recovering large animals and their individual organs from a frozen state have been long known. Attempts to recover frozen mammals by simply rewarming them were abandoned by 1957.[27] At humanity's present level of scientific knowledge, only cells, tissues, and some small organs can be reversibly cryopreserved.[18][28]

Large vitrified organs tend to develop fractures during cooling,[29] a problem worsened by the large tissue masses and very low temperatures of cryonics.[30]

Actual cryonics organizations use vitrification without a chemical fixation step,[31] sacrificing some structural preservation quality for less damage at the molecular level. Some scientists, like Joao Pedro Magalhaes, have questioned whether using a deadly chemical for fixation eliminates the possibility of biological revival, making chemical fixation unsuitable for cryonics.[32]

In 2016, Robert L. McIntyre and Gregory Fahy at the cryobiology research company 21st Century Medicine, Inc. won the Small Animal Brain Preservation Prize of the Brain Preservation Foundation by demonstrating to the satisfaction of neuroscientist judges that a particular implementation of fixation and vitrification called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation[33] could preserve a rabbit brain in "near perfect" condition at 135C, with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact in electron micrographs.[34][35] Brain Preservation Foundation President, Ken Hayworth, said, "This result directly answers a main skeptical and scientific criticism against cryonicsthat it does not provably preserve the delicate synaptic circuitry of the brain.[36] However the price paid for perfect preservation as seen by microscopy was tying up all protein molecules with chemical crosslinks, completely eliminating biological viability.

Outside the cryonics community, many scientists have strong skepticism toward cryonics methods. Cryobiologist Dayong Gao states that "we simply don't know if (subjects have) been damaged to the point where they've 'died' during vitrification because the subjects are now inside liquid nitrogen canisters." Biochemist Ken Storey argues (based on experience with organ transplants), that "even if you only wanted to preserve the brain, it has dozens of different areas, which would need to be cryopreserved using different protocols."[37]

Revival would require repairing damage from lack of oxygen, cryoprotectant toxicity, thermal stress (fracturing), freezing in tissues that do not successfully vitrify, finally followed by reversing the cause of death. In many cases extensive tissue regeneration would be necessary.[38]

Historically, a person had little control regarding how their body was treated after death as religion held jurisdiction over the ultimate fate of their body.[39] However, secular courts began to exercise jurisdiction over the body and use discretion in carrying out of the wishes of the deceased person.[39] Most countries legally treat preserved individuals as deceased persons because of laws that forbid vitrifying someone who is medically alive.[40] In France, cryonics is not considered a legal mode of body disposal;[41] only burial, cremation, and formal donation to science are allowed. However, bodies may legally be shipped to other countries for cryonic freezing.[42] As of 2015, the Canadian province of British Columbia prohibits the sale of arrangements for body preservation based on cryonics.[43] In Russia, cryonics falls outside both the medical industry and the funeral services industry, making it easier in Russia than in the U.S. to get hospitals and morgues to release cryonics candidates.[24]

In London in 2016, the English High Court ruled in favor of a mother's right to seek cryopreservation of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter, as the girl wanted, contrary to the father's wishes. The decision was made on the basis that the case represented a conventional dispute over the disposal of the girl's body, although the judge urged ministers to seek "proper regulation" for the future of cryonic preservation following concerns raised by the hospital about the competence and professionalism of the team that conducted the preservation procedures.[44] In Alcor Life Extension Foundation v. Richardson, the Iowa Court of Appeals ordered for the disinterment of Richardson, who was buried against his wishes for cryopreservation.[39][45]

A detailed legal examination by Jochen Taupitz concludes that cryonic storage is legal in Germany for an indefinite period of time.[46]

In 2009, writing in Bioethics, David Shaw examines the ethical status of cryonics. The arguments against it include changing the concept of death, the expense of preservation and revival, lack of scientific advancement to permit revival, temptation to use premature euthanasia, and failure due to catastrophe. Arguments in favor of cryonics include the potential benefit to society, the prospect of immortality, and the benefits associated with avoiding death. Shaw explores the expense and the potential payoff, and applies an adapted version of Pascal's Wager to the question.[47]

In 2016, Charles Tandy wrote in favor of cryonics, arguing that honoring someone's last wishes is seen as a benevolent duty in American and many other cultures.[48]

Cryopreservation was applied to human cells beginning in 1954 with frozen sperm, which was thawed and used to inseminate three women.[49] The freezing of humans was first scientifically proposed by Michigan professor Robert Ettinger when he wrote The Prospect of Immortality (1962).[50] In April 1966, the first human body was frozenthough it had been embalmed for two monthsby being placed in liquid nitrogen and stored at just above freezing. The middle-aged woman from Los Angeles, whose name is unknown, was soon thawed out and buried by relatives.[51]

The first body to be frozen with the hope of future revival was James Bedford's, a few hours after his cancer-caused death in 1967.[52] Bedford's corpse is the only one frozen before 1974 still preserved today.[51] In 1976, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute; his corpse was cryopreserved in 2011.[50] Robert Nelson, "a former TV repairman with no scientific background" who led the Cryonics Society of California, was sued in 1981 for allowing nine bodies to thaw and decompose in the 1970s; in his defense, he claimed that the Cryonics Society had run out of money.[51] This led to the lowered reputation of cryonics in the U.S.[24]

In 2018, a Y-Combinator startup called Nectome was recognized for developing a method of preserving brains with chemicals rather than by freezing. The method is fatal, performed as euthanasia under general anethesia, but the hope is that future technology would allow the brain to be physically scanned into a computer simulation, neuron by neuron.[53]

According to The New York Times, cryonicists are predominantly nonreligious white males, outnumbering women by about three to one.[54] According to The Guardian, as of 2008, while most cryonicists used to be young, male and "geeky" recent demographics have shifted slightly towards whole families.[40]

In 2015 Du Hong, a 61-year-old female writer of children's literature, became the first known Chinese national to have their head cryopreserved.[55]

Cryonics is generally regarded as a fringe pseudoscience.[3] The Society for Cryobiology have rejected as members those who practiced cryonics,[3] and have issued a public statement saying that cryonics is "not science", and that it is a "personal choice" how people want to have their dead bodies disposed of.[56]

Russian company KrioRus is the only non-US vendor of cryonics services. Yevgeny Alexandrov, chair of the Russian Academy of Sciences commission against pseudoscience, said there was "no scientific basis" for cryonics, and that the company's offering was based on "unfounded speculation".[57]

Although scientists have expressed skepticism about cryonics in media sources,[24] the Norwegian philosopher Ole Martin Moen has written that it only receives a "miniscule" amount of attention from academia.[10]

While some neuroscientists contend that all the subtleties of a human mind are contained in its anatomical structure,[58] few neuroscientists will comment directly upon the topic of cryonics due to its speculative nature. Individuals who intend to be frozen are often "looked at as a bunch of kooks".[59] Cryobiologist Kenneth B. Storey said in 2004 that cryonics is impossible and will never be possible, as cryonics proponents are proposing to "over-turn the laws of physics, chemistry, and molecular science".[60] Neurobiologist Michael Hendricks has said that "Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry".[24]

William T. Jarvis has written that "Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery".[4][5]

According to cryonicist Aschwin de Wolf and others, cryonics can often produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists. James Hughes, the executive director of the pro-life-extension Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, chooses not to personally sign up for cryonics, calling it a worthy experiment but stating laconically that "I value my relationship with my wife."[54]

Cryobiologist Dayong Gao states that "People can always have hope that things will change in the future, but there is no scientific foundation supporting cryonics at this time."[37] As well, while it is universally agreed that "personal identity" is uninterrupted when brain activity temporarily ceases during incidents of accidental drowning (where people have been restored to normal functioning after being completely submerged in cold water for up to 66 minutes), some people express concern that a centuries-long cryopreservation might interrupt their conception of personal identity, such that the revived person would "not be you".[10]

Maastricht University bioethicist David Shaw raises the argument that there would be no point in being revived in the far future if one's friends and families are dead, leaving them all alone; he notes, however, that family and friends can also be frozen, that there is "nothing to prevent the thawed-out freezee from making new friends", and that a lonely existence may be preferable to no existence at all for the revived.[47] The technology required to actually revive any corpse preserved in such a manner does not currently exist, and so any such conjecture remains speculative.[1]

Suspended animation is a popular subject in science fiction and fantasy settings. It is often the means by which a character is transported into the future.

A survey in Germany found that about half of the respondents were familiar with cryonics, and about half of those familiar with cryonics had learned of the subject from films or television.[61]

Corpses subjected to the cryonics process include those of baseball players Ted Williams and son John Henry Williams (in 2002 & 2004),[62] engineer and doctor L. Stephen Coles (in 2014),[63] and software engineer Hal Finney (in 2014).[64]

People known to have arranged for cryonics upon death include television host Larry King[65] and PayPal founders Luke Nosek[66] and Peter Thiel.[67]

Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein wanted to have his head and penis frozen after death so that he could "seed the human race with his DNA".[68][69]

The corpses of some are mistakenly believed to have undergone cryonics for instance, the urban legend suggesting Walt Disney's corpse was cryopreserved is false; it was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.[70][a] Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote enthusiastically of the concept in The Door into Summer (serialized in 1956), was cremated and had his ashes distributed over the Pacific Ocean. Timothy Leary was a long-time cryonics advocate and signed up with a major cryonics provider, but he changed his mind shortly before his death, and was not cryopreserved.[72]

Originally posted here:

Cryonics - Wikipedia

Cryonics – RationalWiki

That is not dead which can eternal lie.And with strange aeons even death may die.

Cryonics is the practice of freezing clinically-dead people in liquid nitrogen (N2) with the hope of future reanimation.

Many scientists will admit that some sort of cryogenic preservation and revival does not provably violate known physics. But they stress that, in practical terms, freezing and reviving dead humans is so far off as to hardly be worth taking seriously; present cryonics practices are speculation at best, and quackery and pseudoscience at worst.

Nevertheless, cryonicists will accept considerable amounts of money right now for procedures based only on vague science fiction-level speculations, with no scientific evidence whatsoever that any of their present actions will help achieve their declared aims. (Cryonicists often point to presently-nonexistent "sufficiently advanced" nanotechnology or mind uploading as favored methods for revival.) They sincerely consider this an obviously sensible idea so common-sense that one would have to be stupid not to sign up.

Cryonics should not be confused with cryobiology (the study of living things at low temperatures), cryotherapy (the use of cold in medicine), cryogenics (subjecting things to cold temperatures in general) or Whole-body cryotherapy (alternative medicine for the living).

Alcor's "bigfoot" dewar can contain 4 whole-bodies and 6 brains immersed in liquid nitrogen

Robert Ettinger, a teacher of physics and mathematics, published The Prospect of Immortality in 1964. He then founded the Cryonics Institute and the related Immortalist Society. Ettinger was inspired by "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones (Amazing Stories, July 1931).[1] Lots of science fiction fans and early transhumanists then seized upon the notion with tremendous enthusiasm.

Corpses were being frozen in liquid nitrogen by the early 1960s, though only for cosmetic preservation. The first person to be frozen with the aim of revival was James Bedford, frozen in early 1967. Bedford remains frozen (at Alcor Life Extension Foundation) to this day.

New hope came with K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, postulating nanobots as a mechanism for cell repair in 1986. That Drexlerian nanobots are utterly impossible has not affected cryonics advocates' enthusiasm for them in the slightest, and they remain a standard proposed revival mechanism.[2]

A major advance in tissue preservation came in the late 1990s with vitrification, where chemicals are added to the tissue so as to allow it to freeze as a glass rather than as ice crystals. This all but eliminated ice crystal damage, at the cost of toxicity of the chemicals.

(Cryonicists are very big on asserting that putting a human substantially made of water into liquid nitrogen at -196C, turning them into a lump of ice, is not "freezing" at all but vitrification if you added enough antifreeze, and will get very shirty at people calling it "freezing" and claim this makes every further criticism wrong. In real medical technology, e.g. embryo preservation, vitrification is spoken of as a kind of freezing, which of course it is.)

Upon his death in 2011, Ettinger himself was stored at the Cryonics Institute in Detroit, the 106th person to be stored there. In all, about 250 people had been "preserved" as of 2015.[3] There are about 2000 living people presently signed up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute the cryonics subculture is very small for its cultural impact.

Cryonics, in various forms, has become a theme in science fiction,[4], either as a serious plot device (The Door into Summer, the Alien tetralogy), or a source of humor (Futurama, Sleeper). Its usual job is one-way time travel, the cryonics itself being handwaved (as you are allowed to do in science fiction, though not in reality) as a pretext for one of various Rip Van Winkle scenarios.

As a fictional concept, "cryogenics" generally refers to a not-yet-invented form of suspended animation rather than present-day cryonics, in that the worst technical issue to be resolved (if at all) in the far future is either aging, or the cause of death/whatever killed you.

Timothy Leary, the famous LSD-dropper, was also famously interested in the "one in a thousand" chance of revival. He signed up with Alcor soon after it opened.[5] Eventually, the cryonicists themselves creeped him out so much[6] that he opted for cremation.[7]

Walt Disney often believed (in urban legend) to have had his head or body frozen died in December 1966, a few weeks before the first cryonic freezing process in early 1967.[citationneeded]

Hall of Fame baseball player and all-time Red Sox great Ted Williams was frozen after he died in 2002. A nasty fight broke out between his oldest children, who had a will saying he wished to be cremated, and his youngest son John-Henry who produced an informal family agreement saying he was to be frozen. This resulted in a macabre family feud for much of the summer of 2002. Williams was eventually frozen.[8]

Cryonics enthusiasts will allow that a person is entirely dead when they reach "information-theoretic death", where the information that makes up their mind is beyond recovery.

The purpose of freezing the recently dead is to stop chemistry. This is intended to allow hypothetical future science and technology to recover the information in the frozen cells and repair them or otherwise reconstruct the person, or at least their mind. We have literally no idea how to do the revival now or how it might be done in the future but cryonicists believe that scientific and technological progress will, if sustained for a sufficient time, advance to the point where the information can be recovered and the mind restarted, in a body (for those who see cryonics as a medical procedure) or a computer running an emulator (for the transhumanists).

Most of the problems with cryonics relate to the massive physical damage caused by the freezing process. Attempts to alleviate this cause chemical damage.

Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

Cryonics for dead humans currently consists of a ritual that many find reminiscent of those performed by practitioners of the world's major religions:

As the Society for Cryobiology puts it:[9]

The Society does, however, take the position that the knowledge necessary for the revival of live or dead whole mammals following cryopreservation does not currently exist and can come only from conscientious and patient research in cryobiology and medicine. In short, the act of preserving a body, head or brain after clinical death and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of speculation or hope, not science, and as such is outside the purview of the Society for Cryobiology.

In the US, cryonics is legally considered an extremely elaborate form of burial (At Cryonics Institute in Michigan),[10] or as a donation to science (at Alcor in Arizona) and cannot be performed on someone who has not been declared medically dead (i.e., "brain dead"). Once you are declared legally dead, your fellow cryonicists swoop in to preserve you as quickly as possible.

The body, or just the head, is given large doses of anti-clotting drugs, as well as being infused with cryoprotectant chemicals to allow vitrification. It is then frozen by being put into a bath of liquid nitrogen at -196C. At this temperature chemical reactions all but stop.

The body is stored upside down so that if staff are unable for any reason to "top off" the liquid nitrogen in the tank, the head will be the last part to thaw. The Cryonics Institute only allows for full-body freezing, but Alcor will let you freeze only your head. The heads are stored in the center of their dewars (big aluminum frozen coffins), so if your head is close to the top and they can't refill it with nitrogen then you're just out of luck.

You can also have your pet frozen, because future societies will not only be able and willing to resurrect centuries old humans, but Fido as well.

Long-term memory is stored in physical form in the neural network as proteins accumulated at a chemical synapse to change the strength of the interconnection between neurons. So if you freeze the brain without crystals forming, the information may not be lost. As such. Hopefully. Though we have no idea if current cryonics techniques preserve the physical and chemical structure in sufficient detail to recover the information even in principle. Samples look good, though at least one working scientist with a strong interest in preserving the information disagrees.[11]

Recovering the information is another matter. We have not even the start of an idea how to get it back out again. No revival method is proposed beyond "one day we will be able to do anything!" Some advocates literally propose a magic-equivalent future artificial superintelligence that will make everything better as the universal slam-dunk counterargument to all doubts.[12]

Ben Best, CEO of the Cryonics Institute, supplies in Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice[13] a list of cryobiology findings that suggest that cryonicists might not be completely wrong; however, this paper (contrary to the promise of its title) also contains a liberal admixture of "then a miracle occurs." His assertions as to what cited papers say also vary considerably from what the cited papers' abstracts state.

Alcor Corporation calls cryonics "a scientific approach to extending human life" and compares it to heart surgery.[14] This is a gross misrepresentation of the state of both the science and technology and verges on both pseudoscience and quackery. Alcor also has a tendency to use invented pseudomedical terminology in its suspension reports.[15][16]

To date, the strongest evidence for cryonics comes from experiments with mammal brains. In 2016, researchers showed that a rabbit's brain could be frozen and thawed while keeping interconnections between neurons intact.[17]

Keeping the head or entire body at -196C stops chemistry, but the freezing process itself causes massive physical damage to the cells. The following problems (many of which are acknowledged by cryonicists[18]) would all need to be solved to bring a frozen head or body back to life. Many would need breakthroughs not merely in engineering, but in scientific understanding itself, which we simply cannot predict.

This is the big problem. The existing cryonics facilities are charities with large operational expenses run by obsessive enthusiasts. They are small and financially shaky.[28][29] In 1979, the Chatsworth facility (Cryonics Company of California, run by Robert Nelson) ran out of money and the frozen bodies thawed.[30][31] The cryonics movement as a whole was outraged and facility operators are much more careful these days. But it's an expensive business to operate as a charity.

The more general problem is that many cryonicists are libertarians and, unsurprisingly, have proven rather bad at putting together highly social nonprofits designed well enough to work in society on timescales of decades, let alone centuries. The movement has severe and obvious financial problems the cash flows just aren't sustainable, and Alcor relies on occasional large donations from rich members to make up the deficit.[32][33]

Insurance companies are barely willing to consider cryonics. You will have to work rather hard to find someone to even sell you the policy. There are, however, cryonicist insurance agents who specialise in the area.[34]

Furthermore, Alcor are distressingly slapdash and amateur in their procedures, as per the famed case of Kim Suozzi's 2013 cryopreservation:[35]

Within minutes of taking custody of the body, the bumbling Alcor team began experiencing a series of equipment failures. A temperature monitor didn't work because, as it turned out, the batteries were dead. Shortly thereafter, their expensive mechanical chest-compression device stopped functioning. Then, having moved Suozzis body into a tub of ice, the Alcor team realized they'd forgotten to bring along a key piece of cooling equipment. Alcor's after-action report, compiled from the haphazard "free-form" observations of an unnamed but "experienced" observer, determined that such mistakes could in the future be remedied by "the use of a checklist." Now theres a thought.

Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong signed up with the Cryonics Institute, but recommends Alcor as the "high-priced high-quality organization".[36]

Of the early frozen corpses, only James Bedford remains, due to tremendous effort on the part of his surviving relatives. Though they didn't do anything to alleviate ice crystals, so his remains are likely just broken cell mush by now.

Terry [dramatically]: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!!Lou: Why do you always have to say it that way?

There are many medical issues connected with reanimation, but it is worth pointing out that a reanimated person faces numerous non-medical issues after returning to society. These might include:

All of these could cause the person great social, not to mention psychological, problems after revival. The person may also experience an identity crisis or delusions of grandeur.

Cryonics is not considered a part of cryobiology, and cryobiologists consider cryonicists nuisances. The Society for Cryobiology banned cryonicists from membership in 1982, specifically those "misrepresenting the science of cryobiology, including any practice or application of freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation."[note 1] (This specific provision was not present in the 2017 revision of the bylaws.[38]) As they put it in an official statement:

The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science.

The Society's planned statement was actually considerably toned down (it originally called cryonics a "fraud") after threats of litigation from Mike Darwin of Alcor.[39]

It can be difficult to find scientific critics willing to bother detailing why they think what the cryonics industry does is silly,[40] though some will detail just why the fundamental notions of present-day cryonics practice are biologically ludicrous.[11] Mostly, scientists consider that cryonicists are failing to acknowledge the hard, grinding work needed to advance the several sciences and technologies that are prerequisites for their goals.[41] Castles in the air are a completely acceptable, indeed standard, part of turning science fiction into practical technology, but you do have to go through the brick-by-brick slog of building the foundations underneath. Or, indeed, inventing the grains of sand each brick is made of. (Some cryonicists are cryobiologists and so are personally putting in the hard slog needed to get there.)

Cryonicists, like many technologists, also frequently show arrogant ignorance of fields not their own not just sciences[42] but even directly-related medicine[43][44] leaving people in those fields disinclined to take them seriously.

William T. Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, said, "Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery."[45] Mostly, doctors ignore cryonics and consider it a nice, but expensive, long shot.

Demographically, cryonics advocates tend to intersect strongly with transhumanists and singularitarians: almost all well-educated, mostly male to the point where the phrase "hostile wife syndrome" is commonplace[46] mostly atheist or agnostic but with some being religious, and disproportionately involved in mathematics, computers, or physics.[47] Belief in cryonics is pretty much required on LessWrong to be accepted as "rational."[48]

Hardly any celebrities have signed up to be frozen in hopes of being brought back to life in the distant future.[49] (This may be a net win.)

Cryonicists are some of the smartest people you will ever meet and provide sterling evidence that humans are just monkeys with shiny toys, who mostly use intelligence to implement stupidity faster and better.

When arguing their case, cryonics advocates tend to conflate non-existent technologies that might someday be plausible with science-fiction-level speculation, and speak of "first, achieve the singularity" as if it were a minor detail that will just happen, rather than a huge amount of work by a huge number of people working out the many, many tiny details.

The proposals and speculations are so vague as to be pretty much unfalsifiable. Solid objection to a speculation is met with another speculation that may (but does not necessarily, or sometimes even probably) escape the problem. Cryonicists will often tell you that there isn't any proof it won't work. You will find many attempts to reverse the burden of proof and demand that you prove a given speculation isn't possible. Answering can involve trying to compress a degree in biology into a few paragraphs.[42] Most cryonicists' knowledge of biology appears severely deficient.

Cryonicists also tend to assert unsupported high probabilities for as-yet nonexistent technologies and as-yet nonexistent science.[50][51][52] Figures are derived on the basis of no evidence at all, concerning the behaviour of systems we've built nothing like and therefore have no empirical understanding of they even assert probabilities of particular as-yet unrealised scientific breakthroughs occurring. (Saying "Bayesian!" is apparently sufficient support with no further working being shown under any circumstances.) If someone gives a number or even says the word "probable," ask them to show their working.

One must also take care to make very precise queries, distinguishing between, "Is some sort of cryogenic suspension and revival not theoretically impossible with as yet unrealised future technologies?" and "Is there any evidence that what the cryonics industry is doing right now does any good at all?" Cryonics advocates who have been asked the second question tend to answer the first, at which point it is almost entirely impossible to pry a falsifiable claim out of them.

When you ask about a particularly tricky part and the answer is "but, nanobots!" take a drink. If it's "but, future nigh-magical artificial superintelligence!", down the bottle.

Cryonicists are almost all sincere and exceedingly smart people. However, they are also by and large absolute fanatics, and really believe that freezing your freshly-dead body is the best current hope of evading permanent death and that the $30200,000 this costs is an obviously sensible investment in the distant future. There is little, if any, deliberate fraud going on.

Some cryonicists considered the Chatsworth facility going broke to be due to fraud, but there's little to suggest it wasn't primarily the owner just being out of his depth.

Alcor have multiple reports of being incredibly careless with the frozen heads in their care.[53] Despite suing to get a book on the subject dropped from publication[54] and threating further legal action, their carelessness further came to light in the case of Kim Suozzi, a breathtaking saga of slapdash amateurism, particularly for an organisation that has been doing this for four decades.[35]

One cryonics fanatic, scientist Kurt Pilgeram, had been giving lectures for Alcor since 1971.[55] Only his head was preserved by Alcor after his death in 2015, but according to a lawsuit by his son, Laurence Pilgeram, Alcor had been mandated to preserve all of his father's remains, no matter how damaged.[55]

Cryonics enthusiasts are fond of applying a variant of Pascal's wager to cryonics[56] and saying that being a Pascal's Wager variant doesn't make their argument fallacious.[51][52][57] Ralph Merkle gives us Merkle's Matrix:

The questionable aspect here is omitting the bit where "sign up" means "spend $30,000 (at the Cryonics Institute), $80,000 (at Alcor; head-only), or $200,000 (at Alcor; whole-body) of your children's inheritance for a spot in the freezer and a bunch of completely scientifically unjustified promises from shaky organizations run by strange people who are medical incompetents." It also assumes that living at some undetermined future date is sufficiently bonum in se that it is worth spending all that money that could be used to feed starving children now. Or, if you care only about your own survival, on medicine today which is much more likely to extend your life.

When you freeze a steak and bring it back to edible, I'll believe it.

The basic notion of freezing and reviving an animal, e.g. a human, is far from completely implausible.

Continue reading here:

Cryonics - RationalWiki

Cryonics: Could you live forever? – BBC Science Focus Magazine

For centuries, the worlds physicists, writers and philosophers have argued over whether time travel is possible, with most coming to the conclusion that its never going to happen.

But on an 800-acre plot of land just outside the small town of Comfort, Texas, a group of architects, engineers and scientists are building a Timeship that they say could transport tens of thousands of individuals to a far-distant future.

Their approach does not involve the use of flux capacitors, or zooming at light-speed through black holes.

Instead, the Timeship aims to store people at such low temperatures that their bodies are preserved for a future civilisation to reanimate them, a concept known as cryonics.

Read more about cryonics:

Just as a spaceship allows people to move through space, Timeship will allow people to travel to another time in the future, explains Stephen Valentine, who is the director and principal architect of the Timeship project.

Valentine has been given a multimillion-dollar budget from anonymous donors to develop a Mecca for cryonics and life extension.

As well as a fortress-like building that can store frozen people, Timeship plans to store other precious biological samples such as organs, stem cells, embryos, and even the DNA of rare or threatened species.

The site will also house the worlds largest life extension research centre, the Stasis Research Park.

This concept shows how Timeship might look. The inner region is used for liquid nitrogen storage. The eight square-shaped structures house hundreds of frozen patients Timeship

The entire facility will be off-grid, using wind and solar energy to avoid potential power outages, and the location has been carefully chosen to be far from earthquakes, tornadoes, snowstorms and any other turmoil the world might throw at it in the next few hundred years.

You dont want to be near a military base or nuclear plant either, says Valentine, who speaks at a frantic pace with a theatrical Boston drawl.

He spent five years finding and designing the site, while studying pyramids, ancient tombs, bank vaults and medieval fortresses anything that has stood the test of time. He has even consulted experts on how to protect frozen time-travellers from the effects of a nearby two-megaton nuclear bomb.

The resulting design is an epic spaceship-castle hybrid, with thick, low, circular walls surrounding a central tomb-like chamber, where thousands of storage pods will be held under high security.

The exact technique that will be used to cool the bodies is not yet clear, but it is likely to involve the bodily fluids being drained and replaced with a solution that helps protect tissue from the formation of ice crystals.

The storage pods will use the cooling power of liquid nitrogen to keep the bodies at around -130C, and should be able to maintain low temperatures without power or human maintenance for up to six months, says Valentine.

He hopes to start testing the first prototype pods next year.

The idea of freezing people in the hope of reawakening them is not new.

In January 1967, cancer patient James Bedford became the first person to be cryogenically frozen, and his body remains in cold storage to this day, in a capsule designed by American wigmaker and cryopioneer Edward Hope.

Various organisations and companies have offered similar services over the past decades, often using hopelessly crude freezing techniques or failing to store the bodies properly.

Edward Hopes cryocapsule deisgned to freeze James H. Bedford. Getty Images

Today, the cryogenic freezing of human stem cells, sperm, eggs, embryos and other small tissue samples is a routine part of scientific research and reproductive medicine in many countries.

Vitrification, a process that turns samples into a glass-like state rather than ice, was developed in the early 2000s as a way of overcoming the problems of ice formation in and around cells. Ice formation is an issue because it can cause dramatic differences in concentration inside and outside the cell, sucking water out and destroying it.

In late 2002 and early 2003, a team led by vitrification pioneer Gregory Fahy used a cocktail of antifreezes and chemicals to cryopreserve a whole rabbit kidney. The organ appeared to function normally after it was thawed and transplanted back into its donor.

Several other breakthroughs have encouraged Valentine, and the wealthy entrepreneurs backing Timeship, that freezing a person properly is now feasible. In 2015, a team from the company 21st Century Medicine claimed to have developed a new vitrification technique that preserved pig and rabbit brains without any visible damage.

Freezing embryos, eggs and sperm has become a normal part of modern science and medicine Getty Images

That same year, scientists from Alcor, a company associated with Timeship, found that when microscopic worms were deep-frozen and thawed, they not only survived but could remember associations they had learnt before they were frozen.

For Valentine and the cryonics community, these studies are proof that if the most advanced scientific techniques are used, then human organs, brains, and even memories and personalities could survive being frozen.

However, cryonics is unique in that it is utterly reliant on technology that does not exist yet. Even if so-called patients are frozen perfectly after death, they are simply guessing that scientists will one day be able to reanimate them and cure their illnesses and will want to.

Prof Brian Grout, chairman of the Society for Low-Temperature Biology, says that cryonics has become more credible in recent years, and that it would be wrong to dismiss the idea of whole-body freezing.

Read more about extending life:

But he does have one big problem with the central idea of the Timeship mission: the preservation of dead bodies.

The biggest difficulty is not whether it is possible to recover a whole person from ultra-low temperatures there is a reasonable chance that will happen in the future. It is the fact that they will be dead. If they were dead when they were frozen, they will still very much be dead when you thaw them out.

Timeship wouldnt tell us what these glacial pods would be used for Timeship

Freezing people alive could mean they can be placed in suspended animation for, say, long-term space flights, says Grout.

Technology that may be able to cure what are now incurable illnesses is also not hard to imagine, he says, but overcoming death is another matter.

The technology they will need is not cryotechnology, its reversing death. Thats a pretty big leap for me.

Valentine refuses to be drawn into a debate on whether Timeship would accept living patients if the authorities allowed such a thing, saying that it is a matter for the medical and legal professions.

But he and others believe that various technologies such as gene editing and nanotechnology could one day change how we perceive death, and reverse it.

Other futurists believe that it may one day be possible to upload our minds onto a computer, freeing humanity from the restraints of a physical form entirely.

Read more about death:

Banking on these future technologies may seem like a pretty big gamble, especially when the costs of cryonic preservation start at around $30,000. Yet for people whose lives are cut short by illness, a miraculous breakthrough may literally be the only hope they have.

An example is the14-year-old British girl known as JS who made global headlinesin 2016 after writing, before she died of cancer, that shewanted to be frozen. A judge ruled that her wishes must be respected, and her body was sent to the US to be frozen.

She wrote: Im only 14 years old and I dont want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years time.

What the world will look like in hundreds of years time is anyones guess, but there are many logistical challenges for anyone is woken from the dead.

For a start, all your money, friends and family would be long gone, and youd probably struggle to find work in whatever hyper-advanced society has managed to resurrect you.

And there are bigger questions about how the planet would cope with a human population living far longer than it does now.

We are not going to have to worry about all that right now, says Valentine, frustrated by questions he sees as pointless hypothesising. The world may have changed in ways we cant even imagine! We could be inhabiting other planets or have modified ourselves to live in other environments.

Futurist body modification Getty Images

Its certainly hard to dismiss these ideas completely, given the remarkable progress our species has made in just the last few decades. And Valentine is confident that a change of mindset is just round the corner.

If scientists one day freeze a rabbit and bring it back to life, then the idea will spread so fast. People will start to think: why am I being buried in the ground? Why am I being cremated? Ill get frozen, and then one day, who knows. There could be many of these places around the world. This might become the norm.

Valentine himself is not currently signed up to be frozen at the Timeship he says it would distract from his architectural mission and could look like he was designing some kind of monument for myself. But his excitement and enthusiasm for this ambitious project is clear.

Will the travellers in the Timeship find themselves alive and well in the future, freed from the limitations of todays medical science? Or is it an expensive folly, doomed to result in several thousand bodies denied a proper burial?

Theres really only one way to find out and it involves a very long, very cold wait.

1 Upload your consciousness to a computer

Getty Images

Some believe that we may one day be able to recreate every detail of our brains on powerful computers, enabling our thoughts and experiences to live on without physical bodies. However, neuroscientists still struggle to simulate the workings of the most primitive animal brains, so it remains a distant prospect.

Read more about cryonics and life extension:

2 Hibernate

Hibernation, like this dormouse is enjoying, could be one solution for inter-planetary space flight Getty Images

Doctors sometimes lower the body temperature of patients dying from severe injuries to buy more time while they perform emergency surgery.

Lowering the bodys temperature from 37C to around 10C slows down all biological processes, resulting in a kind of induced hibernation.

A similar technique has been proposed as a way of putting long-distance astronauts into a deep sleep.

3 Build a new body for yourself

Vampirism has literary roots in disease, manifesting as a malignant way of cheating death iStock

After research in mice showed that the blood of young animals helped old animals memory, endurance and tissue repair, trials have begun to see if blood transfusions from young people can reduce or reverse ageing in older humans, too.

Scientists hope to identify the blood-borne chemical components of ageing.

4 Travel through time

If time machines ever get invented, chances are they wont look like this Getty Images

If it was possible for a person to travel at very close to the speed of light, then time would slow down for them relative to everyone else.

This means that when they return to Earth, thousands of years may have flown by. However, unlike in Back To The Future, there would be no way back to the past.

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Cryonics: Could you live forever? - BBC Science Focus Magazine

Cryonics, brain preservation and the weird science of …

Linda Chamberlain works just down the hallway from her husband. She walks past him every day. Occasionally she'll stop by to check in on him and say hello.

The only problem is, Fred Chamberlain has been dead for eight years. Shortly after he was pronounced legally dead from prostate cancer, Fred was cryopreserved -- his body was filled with a medical-grade antifreeze, cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius and carefully lowered into a giant vat of liquid nitrogen.

So when Linda visits Fred, she talks to him through the insulated, stainless-steel wall of a 10-foot-tall preservation chamber. And he's not alone in there. Eight people reside in that massive cylinder along with him, and more than 170 are preserved in similar chambers in the same room. All of them elected to have their bodies stored in subzero temperatures, to await a future when they could be brought back to life. Cryonically preserved in the middle of the Arizona desert.

This story is part of Hacking the Apocalypse, CNET's documentary series on the tech saving us from the end of the world.

Linda Chamberlain is cheerful as she shows me her husband's perhaps-not-final resting place. She places her hand on the cool steel and gives it a loving pat. Being in a room with 170 dead people isn't morbid to her.

"It makes me feel happy," she says. "Because I know that they have the potential to be restored to life and health. And I have the potential of being with them again."

Alcor proclaims itself a world leader in cryonics, offering customers the chance to preserve their bodies indefinitely, until they can be restored to full health and function through medical discoveries that have yet to be made. For the low price of $220,000, Alcor is selling the chance to live a second life.

It's a slim chance.

Critics say cryonics is a pipe dream, no different from age-old chimeras like the fountain of youth. Scientists say there's no way to adequately preserve a human body or brain, and that the promise of bringing a dead brain back to life is thousands of years away.

But Alcor is still selling that chance. And ever since Linda and Fred Chamberlain founded the Alcor Life Extension Foundation back in 1972, Linda has watched Alcor's membership swell with more people wanting to take that chance. More than 1,300 people have now signed up to have their bodies sent to Alcor instead of the graveyard.

And when her time is up, Linda Chamberlain plans to join them.

Hacking the Apocalypseis CNET's new documentary series digging into the science and technology that could save us from the end of the world. You can check out our episodes onPandemic,Nuclear Winter,Global Drought,Tsunamis,CryonicsandEscaping the Planetand see the full series onYouTube.

Photographs of "patients" line the walls of Alcor's offices.

From the outside, Alcor's facilities don't look like the kind of place you'd come to live forever.

When I arrived at the company's headquarters, a nondescript office block in Scottsdale, Arizona, a short drive out of Phoenix, I expected something grander. After all, this is a place that's attempting to answer the question at the heart of human existence: Can we cheat death?

I've come here to find out why someone would choose cryonics. What drives someone to reject the natural order of life and death, and embrace an end that's seen by many, scientists and lay people alike, as the stuff of science fiction?

But after a short time at Alcor, I realize the true believers here don't see cryonics as a way to cheat death. They don't even see death as the end.

"Legal death only really means that your heart and your lungs have stopped functioning without intervention," Linda Chamberlain tells me. "It doesn't mean your cells are dead, it doesn't mean even your organs are dead."

Alcor refers to the people preserved in its facilities as "patients" for that very reason -- it doesn't consider them to be dead.

In Chamberlain's view, the idea of death as an "on-off switch" is outdated. People that died 100 years ago could well have been saved by modern medical interventions that we take for granted in the 21st century. So what about 100 years from now? Alcor hopes that by pressing pause on life, its patients might be revived when medical technology has improved.

"Our best estimates are that within 50 to 100 years, we will have the medical technologies needed to restore our patients to health and function," says Chamberlain.

We're killing people who could potentially be preserved. We're just throwing them in the ground so they can be eaten by worms and bacteria.

Alcor CEO Max More

Alcor CEO Max More agrees. In his view, cryonics is about giving people who die today a second chance. And he says our current views about death and burial are robbing people of a potential future.

"We're killing people who could potentially be preserved," More says. "We're just throwing them in the ground so they can be eaten by worms and bacteria, or we're burning them up. And to me, that's kind of crazy when we could give them a chance if they want it.

"If you think about life insurance, it's actually death insurance -- it pays out on death. This really is life insurance. It's a backup plan."

An early copy of Cryonics magazine sits in Alcor's offices, showing the inside of one of its preservation chambers.

Alcor hasn't exactly mapped out how its patients will be brought back to full function and health, or what revival technologies the future will bring. Its website speaks about the possibility of molecular nanotechnology -- that is, using microscopic nano-robots to "replace old damaged chromosomes with new ones in every cell."

But that level of cellular regeneration isn't something Alcor is working on. The company is in the business of selling preservation, but it's not developing the technologies for restoration. In fact, no one currently working at Alcor is likely to be responsible for reviving patients. That responsibility will be handed on to the next generation (and potentially many more generations after that) -- scientists of some undetermined time in the future, who will have developed the technology necessary to reverse the work that Alcor is doing now. It seems like a convenient gap for cryonics: Sell the promise in the present without the burden of proving the end result.

Our goal is to have reversible suspended animation, just like in the movies. We want it to be that perfect.

Alcor founder Linda Chamberlain

Chamberlain herself admits the future is ultimately unclear and that they "don't know how powerful the revival technologies are going to be." But she does know the end result Alcor is aiming for.

"Our goal is to have reversible suspended animation, just like in the movies," she says. "We want it to be that perfect. We're not there yet, but we're always working on improving our techniques."

The science behind cryonics is unproven. The procedures are highly experimental. No human -- specifically, no human brain -- has been brought back from death or from a state of postmortem preservation. Alcor points to research in worms and the organs of small mammals that it says indicates the potential for cryonics. There are famous names associated with the movement (Alcor admits famed baseballer Ted Williams is a patient), but there aren't exactly any human success stories who've awoken from cryonic preservation to hit the motivational speaking circuit.

James Bedford, the first man to enter cryonic suspension, according to Alcor. Bedford was preserved in a "cryocapsule" in 1967 (five years before Alcor was founded), before being transferred into Alcor's facilities in 1991.

Even More isn't making any promises. He acknowledges that the company may not even exist when it comes time for its patients to wake up.

"There are no guarantees," he says. "We're not promising to bring you back on May 27th, 2082, or whatever. We don't know officially this will work. We don't know for sure that the organization [Alcor] will survive... We don't know if an asteroid will land on us. There's no guarantees. But it's a shot. It's an opportunity. And it just seems to be better than the alternative."

The way the Alcor team sees it, you have a better chance of waking up from here than you do if you're sent to the crematorium.

One of the central questions of cryonics is how you preserve a dead body if you hope to revive it.

Even if they don't know exactly when or how patients will be brought back, the team at Alcor knows one thing is vital: They need to preserve as much of the brain and body as perfectly as possible.

While they may be clinically dead when they arrive in the operating room, Alcor's "patients" are intubated and kept on ice while a mechanical thumper (shown here on a dummy) keeps blood flowing around the body, all in a bid to preserve the body as thoroughly as possible.

That life-saving mortuary practice takes place inside Alcor's operating room -- a sort of hospital-meets-morgue where the organization prepares bodies for "long-term care."

When patients come through the doors at Alcor, they've already been pronounced legally dead. Ideally, they haven't had to travel far to get here and they've had their body put on ice as soon as possible after clinical death. According to Chamberlain, that hypothermia is vital for "slowing down the dying process." I didn't think I'd hear someone say that about a dead person.

During the first stages of cryonic preservation, bodies are "perfused" with a medical-grade antifreeze, all in a bid to prevent ice crystals forming. From here, the body vitrifies, rather than freezing.

(I also didn't expect to see a dead person in the operating room. At least, that's what I thought when I saw a human dummy waiting in the ice bath by the door. One of Alcor's employees picked up the dummy's hand to wave at me and I genuinely think that moment shortened my life span by two years.)

The ice bath is the first step in the preservation process, and it's here where the patient is placed in a kind of post-death life support. Drugs are administered to slow down metabolic processes, the body is intubated to maintain oxygen levels, and a mechanical thumper pumps the heart to ensure blood keeps flowing around the body.

The team then prepares the body to be cooled down to its permanent storage temperature. The blood is replaced with cryoprotectant (think of it like medical-grade antifreeze), which is pumped through the veins, all in a bid to (surprisingly) prevent the body freezing.

Freezing might sound like the natural end goal of cryopreservation, but it's actually incredibly damaging. Our bodies are made up of about 50 to 60% water, and when this water starts to freeze, it forms ice crystals which damage the body's organs and veins.

But if that water is replaced with cryoprotectant, Alcor says it can slowly reduce temperatures so the body vitrifies -- turning into a kind of glass-like state, rather than freezing. From here, the body is placed in a giant stainless steel chamber, known as a dewar. And Alcor says a cryopreserved body can be stored in this "long-term care" for decades.

I missed something when I first walked into the operating room. At the back, behind the ice bath and medical instruments (including surgical scissors and, chillingly, unexplained saws), there's a clear box, about the size of a milk crate, with a circular metal ring clamped inside.

It's a box for human heads.

This is designed for patients who've elected to preserve their head only, removed from the body from the collarbone up. These preserved heads are referred to as "neuro patients."

This small perspex box in the Alcor operating room is used to clamp human heads in place for cryopreservation.

If putting my whole body on ice was a bridge too far, then cutting off and preserving my head is beyond anything I can fathom. But it's a choice some of Alcor's patients make. The neuro patients are stored in small, barrel-sized vats while they wait for long-term care. The moment I lifted the lid on one of these vats -- nitrogen gas billowing out, human head obscured just inches below -- will stay with me forever.

Each preservation chamber can hold four bodies (positioned with the head at the bottom, to keep the brain as cool as possible) and five "neuro patients" stacked down the center.

It's cheaper if you elect to preserve just your head. Alcor charges only $80,000 for the head, compared with $220,000 for the full body. But there are also pragmatic reasons for choosing this more selective form of cryonic preservation.

When Alcor cryopreserves a body, the main priority is to preserve the brain and cause as little damage as possible. After all, the brain is not only the center of cognitive function, but also long-term memory. Essentially everything that makes you who you are.

You might be attached to your body now (both figuratively and literally), but many people at Alcor believe that, by the time medical science has advanced enough to bring a person back to life, their full body won't be needed. Whether you're regenerating a human body from DNA found in the head or uploading a person's consciousness to a new physical body, if we reach a point where cryonic preservation can be reversed, potentially hundreds of years in the future, your 20th or 21st century body will be outdated hardware.

That's certainly a view Linda Chamberlain takes. When she goes, only her head will stay.

"There's a lot of DNA in all that tissue and material," she says of the human head. "A new body can be grown for you from your own DNA. It's just a new, beautiful body that hasn't aged and hasn't had damage from disease."

In fact, when Chamberlain thinks of her future body, she doesn't want to limit herself to the kind of human form she has now.

"I hope that I won't have a biological body, but I'll have a body made out of nanobots," she tells me. "I can be as beautiful as I want to be. I won't be old anymore."

I hope that I won't have a biological body, but I'll have a body made out of nanobots.

Alcor founder Linda Chamberlain

I tell her she's already beautiful. She laughs.

"But if you have a nanobot swarm, it can reconfigure itself any way you want!" she replies, completely serious. "If I want to go swimming in the ocean, I have to worry about sharks. But after I have my nanobots body, if I want to go swimming in the ocean, I can just reconfigure myself to be like an orca, a killer whale. And then the sharks have to look out for me."

Waking up 100 years from now as a fully reconfigurable, shark-hunting nanobot orca sounds like fun.

But this kind of future is possible only if the process of going into cryonic preservation doesn't damage your brain. The brain is a staggeringly complex organ, and storing it at subzero temperatures for decades at a time has the potential to cause serious cellular damage.

And according to some scientists, that's the main issue with cryonics. Before you even get to the issue of reanimation, they say, cryonics doesn't come close to delivering on the promise of preservation.

Surgical instruments in Alcor's operating room.

Neuroscientist Ken Hayworth is one expert who's highly skeptical. Hayworth isn't opposed to preservation -- he was a member of Alcor before he left to found the Brain Preservation Foundation with the goal of building dialogue between cryonicists and the broader scientific community. He wants brain preservation to be a respected field of scientific study. And in 2010, he laid down a challenge to help build that credibility.

"[We] put out a very concrete challenge that said, 'Hey, cryonics community, prove to us that you can at least preserve those structures of the brain that neuroscience knows are critical to long-term memory, meaning the synaptic connectivity of the brain," he says.

"The cryonics community, unfortunately, has not met the bare minimum requirements of that prize."

Hayworth says he's seen examples of animal brains preserved using techniques very similar to what cryonics companies say they use, but the samples showed a significant number of dead cells.

"I take that to mean that there was probably a lot of damage to those structures that encode memory," he says. "It was like, 'We're looking at something that doesn't look right at all.'"

We're looking at something that doesn't look right at all.

Ken Hayworth

However, Hayworth has seen a technique that successfully preserved a brain so well that it was awarded the Brain Preservation Prizeby his foundation. This prize recognized a team of researchers for preserving synapses across the whole brain of a pig. But the technique, known as "aldehyde stabilized cryopreservation," has two limitations that differ from the promise of cryonics. Firstly, it requires the brain to be filled with gluteraldehyde, a kind of embalming fluid, which means the brain can never be revived. And secondly? It's a lethal process that needs to be conducted while a mammal is living.

"It almost instantly glues together all the proteins in the brain," says Hayworth. "Now you're as dead as a rock at that point. You ain't coming back. But the advantage of that is it glues all of them in position, it doesn't destroy information."

Retaining that information is vital because, according to Hayworth, it could allow you to re-create a person's mind in the future. Forget transplanting your head onto a new body. Hayworth says the information from a preserved brain could potentially be scanned and uploaded into another space, such as a computer, allowing you to live on as a simulation.

You might not be a walking, talking human like you once were. But, in Hayworth's view, that's not the only way to live again.

"I think there's plenty of reason to suspect that future technologies will be able to bring somebody back -- future technologies like brain scanning, and mind uploading and brain simulation."

Being preserved long enough (and well enough) that you can live on as a simulation may be one of the end goals that cryonicists hope to achieve.

But there are plenty of critics who say we won't reach that point anytime soon. They say there's no way to know whether cryonics adequately preserves the brain, because we don't fully understand how the mind works, let alone how to physically preserve its complexity.

Ken Miller is a professor of neuroscience and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York. He's spent his life trying to understand the complexity of the human brain.

"Some people say [the brain] is the most complicated thing in the universe," says Miller.

"The most basic answer to how the brain works is, we don't know. We know how a lot of pieces work ... but we're very far from understanding the system."

It's at least thousands of years before we would know and really understand how the brain works.

Ken Miller

According to Miller, while we know a lot about parts of the brain -- how the neurons function, how electrical signals travel to the brain -- the complete picture is still a mystery.

"In my opinion, it's at least thousands of years before we would know and really understand how the brain works to the point where you could take all the pieces ... and put it back together and make a mind out of it," says Miller.

"It's just the complexity. Levels and levels and levels and levels -- it's beyond the imagination."

And what if we reach that point? What if, a thousand years from now, science was capable of restoring my cryonically preserved brain and uploading it to some kind of simulator -- would I still be me?

Sitting in his office, I put the question to Miller. And in the kind of meta way that I've realized is normal when speaking to a professor of theoretical neuroscience, I see the cogs of his mind working. His brain, thinking about another brain, living on as a simulated brain. My brain is melting.

"I think so, but it's a funny question," he says. "Because of course, if it was all information that you got up into a computer... making something feel like Claire, we could have a million of them on a million different machines. And each of them would feel like Claire.

"But immediately, just like twins -- immediately, identical twins start having divergent experiences and becoming different people. And so all the different Claires would immediately start having different experiences and becoming different Claires."

Back in Arizona, with the vision of a million computerized versions of myself enslaving the human race far from my mind, the promise of cryonics still feels like a dream.

I'm walking through the long-term care room as waterfalls of fog cascade from the cryonic chambers. These dewars need to be regularly refilled with liquid nitrogen to make sure patients stay at the perfect temperature, and today's the day they're getting topped up.

As I slowly step through the fog, stainless steel chambers loom large around me. Visibility drops, so I can barely see my outstretched hand in front of my face. For just the tiniest moment, as my feet disappear beneath me and I'm surrounded by reflections on reflections of white vapor, I lose my bearings. I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience.

Walking through Alcor's long-term preservation room is a surreal experience.

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Cryonics, brain preservation and the weird science of ...

Here’s How Far Cryonic Preservation Has Come in the 50 …

(Inside Science) Early in the 1960s, a group of enthusiasts advanced the concept of freezing humans as soon as they die, in hopes of reviving them after the arrival of medical advances able to cure the conditions that killed them. The idea went into practice for the first time 50 years ago.

On Jan. 12, 1967, James Bedford, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, became the first person to be "cyropreserved." A small team of doctors and other enthusiasts froze him a few hours after he died from liver cancer that had spread to his lungs.

A few days later the team placed the body into an insulated container packed with dry ice. Later still, Bedford was immersed in liquid nitrogen in a large Dewar container. Fifteen years on, after a series of moves from one cryopreservation facility to another, his body found a home at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it still resides.

By current standards of cryonics, the procedure was remarkably untidy and disorganized. Nevertheless, a visual evaluation of Bedford's condition in 1991 found that his body had remained frozen and suffered no obvious deterioration.

"There's no date set for another examination," said R. Michael Perry, care services manager at Alcor.

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But as promoters of cryopreservation celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bedford's death and freezing known to some as "Bedford Day" they emphasize improvements to the freezing and preservation procedures that Bedford's experiences advanced.

The community is also undergoing a significant change in its expectations for reviving frozen patients. Rather than planning for a Lazarus-like resuscitation of the entire body, some proponents of the technology focus more on saving individuals' stored memories, and perhaps incorporating them into robots.

Beyond the cryopreservation community, however, an aura of scientific suspicion that surrounded Bedford's freezing remains.

"Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry," neuroscientist Michael Hendricks of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, wrote in Technology Review.

Scientists aren't the industry's only critics.

Families of individuals designated for freezing including Bedford's own family have gone to court to protest or defend loved ones' decisions to undergo freezing.

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In a more recent case, in 2011, a Colorado probate judge upheld a contract that Mary Robbins had signed with Alcor over objections from Robbins' children. And last year the High Court of England upheld a mother's right to seek cryonic treatment of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter after her death, despite the father's wishes.

Public reaction to the technology reached its nadir in New England in 2002, when court documents revealed that Boston Red Sox baseball icon Ted Williams was frozen in the Alcor facility, with his head severed from his body. Williams' son John Henry, who arranged the process, was himself frozen after he died of leukemia.

Politics has also impacted the technology's progress. In 2004, for example, Michigan's state government voted to license a facility called the Cryonics Institute, located in Clinton, as a cemetery. That move, reversed eight years later, prevented the institute from preparing bodies for cryopreservation on its own, because applying such procedures to a dead body required the services of a licensed funeral director.

The cryonics industry flatly disagrees with its critics.

Alcor asserts on its website that "[t]here are no known credible technical arguments that lead one to conclude that cryonics, carried out under good conditions today, would not work." The company adds: "Cryonics is a belief that no one is really dead until the information content of the brain is lost, and that low temperatures can prevent this loss."

Related: How Computers are Learning to Predict the Future

Certainly the controversies have not discouraged candidates for cryopreservation.

Worldwide, more than 250 individuals are now housed in cryonic facilities, at a minimum per-person cost of about $28,000 in the U.S.

Russia's KrioRus company offers a cut-rate level starting at $12,000, with the condition that it stores several human bodies and assorted pets and other animals in communal Dewar containers. Individual contracts can specify the length of storage. At present, the U.S. and Russia are the only countries with facilities that offer human cryopreservation.

The first attempt at cryopreservation did not go particularly smoothly.

Bedford died before all preparations for his cryopreservation were complete. So instead of draining his blood and replacing it with a customized antifreeze solution to protect the body's tissues from freezing damage, the team simply injected the antifreeze into Bedford's arteries without removing the blood.

The team then surrounded the body in dry ice, and started it on a series of transfers from one container to another that ended up in a Dewar container in Alcor's facility.

Because of those difficulties, cryonics experts feared that the body had suffered serious damage. But the examination in 1991 quelled those concerns.

"We were really relieved that he was not discolored," Perry recalled. "And corners of the ice cubes [around him] were still sharp; he had stayed frozen all the time."

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In recent years, cryonics promoters have borrowed from medical advances in such fields as cryobiology and nanobiology.

To prevent ice crystals from damaging cell walls in the frozen state, cryopreservationists replace the body's blood supply with mixtures of antifreeze compounds and organ preservatives a technique developed to preserve frozen eggs for fertility treatments.

Another emerging approach accounts for the separation of Ted Williams' head and body. Based on studies of roundworms, promoters of cryonics argue that freezing can preserve the contents of individuals' brains even if their bodies can't be revived. That opens the possibility of downloading cryopreserved personalities into a robotic future body.

Hendricks disagrees. "While it may be possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that is certainly not happening now," he pointed out in Technology Review.

Scientists such as Barry Fuller, a professor of surgical science and low temperature medicine at England's University College, London, emphasize that even preserving body parts in such a way that they remain viable on thawing remains a distant dream.

"There is ongoing research into these scientific challenges, and a potential future demonstration of the ability to cryopreserve human organs for transplantation would be a major first step into proving the concept," he told The Guardian. "But at the moment we cannot achieve that."

Nevertheless, Perry expresses optimism about a timeline for the revival of frozen humans.

"We think in terms of decades," he said. "Sometimes we say fifty to a hundred years."

David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University Medical Center in Michigan, takes a darker view.

"Fifty years from now," he said, "it's likely that all that will remain of my existence will be some scientific papers and a faint memory held by my nieces and nephews and maybe, if I'm lucky, a few of my youngest readers."

Reprinted with permission from Inside Science, an editorially independent news product of the American Institute of Physics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing, promoting and serving the physical sciences.

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Here's How Far Cryonic Preservation Has Come in the 50 ...

‘Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice’: Release date, plot, trailer and all you need to know about the Netflix d – MEAWW

Science has evolved significantly over the past century, characterized by a number of innovations specifically in the medical field. One of the groundbreaking and skeptical techniques to ever be invented is that of Cryonics, the low-temperature freezing and storage of a human corpse with the speculative hope that they can be resurrected and restored back to full health in the possible future. A subject that has been regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community, there has been little to no visual documentation of this process until now.

Adding to its ever-growing library of poignant and impactful documentaries, Netflix is set to premiere an incredible moving unscripted film entitled 'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' that touches upon Cryonics. It is the story of a Thai Buddhist family and their unorthodox decision to have their two-year-old daughter cryogenically frozen after she died from brain cancer. Here's all you need to know about the film.

'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' will be available on Netflix starting September 15.

The documentary chronicles the heart-wrenching journey of Thai Buddhist parents, who make an unconventional decision after the death of their baby daughter. Einz, a two-year-old toddler passed away in January 2015 in Bangkok, Thailand, after battling brain cancer. Her parents had her body cryonically frozen in the hope that she can one day be revived and will fulfill her life in a new body.

Einz became the youngest person in the world to undergo this preservation procedure. Her remains are stored in an American lab, while her head and brain rest inside a tank in Arizona. The 79-minute documentary follows the family who made this unorthodox decision and includes a montage of the family's archival footage.

Einz's father, a laser scientist, yearns to give his deceased daughter the opportunity to experience a rebirth inside a regenerated body, He instills this dream within his son, a precocious 15-year-old named Matrix who also wants to play a role in the revival of his little sister. But what the boy later discovers will rattle the family's radical hope in science.

"It's been an emotional journey to cover Einzs family on their biggest decision and dedication for their daughter. Witnessing the pivotal moments that the family went through was a privilege and a mind-expanding experience. Their story has led me to ask fundamental questions about life, faith, and love. It has touched me in so many ways. I'm so thrilled to share this experience with worldwide viewers on Netflix," said Pailin Wedel, the director and producer of 'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice'.

"We are delighted to welcome 'Hope Frozen' to our growing slate of award-winning documentaries on Netflix. What makes this announcement extra special, is that the story comes from Thailand, and authentically crafted by Pailin and her team of talented Thai producers. We fully support Pailins vision with the creative freedom to express this unique story of unconditional love, which resonates universally," Adam Del Deo, Vice President of Original Documentary Features said in an official press statement.

The Netflix edition of 'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' will be available in 31 languages including dubbing in Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian, Latin Spanish, Polish, Spanish (Castilian), Thai and Turkish.

'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice' is directed by journalist-filmmaker Pailin Wedel who followed the story of the family for the documentary. The film has been recognized with numerous international awards, including the Best International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2019. At San Antonio Independent Film Festival 2020, Pailin won Best Documentary Feature for her documentary from more than 900 films that were presented.

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'Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice': Release date, plot, trailer and all you need to know about the Netflix d - MEAWW

These are the best films and TV shows to watch on Netflix in September – Milton Keynes Citizen

There is a wide range of new titles set for release this month. (Shutterstock)

If the unseasonable weather kept you inside more than you anticipated in August, causing you to binge watch the entirety of Netflixs collection, theres no need to fear.

Throughout the month of September the streaming service is releasing a whole new batch of films and series to keep you fully entertained as the summer creeps to a close.

Here are the top titles set for release this month.

The Duchess

UK Netflix release date: Friday 11 September

Stand up comedian and occasional 8 out of 10 Cats panelist Katherine Ryan has an exciting new sitcom set for release this month. The Duchess follows Ryan, who plays an exaggerated version of herself as a flawed but loving single mum. Katherine decides to have a second child, but there is one issue: shes not in a relationship. The series follows her as she tries to find a way to make this dream a reality from considering sperm donors to asking her ex.

The Devil All the Time

UK Netflix release date: Wednesday 16 September

The Devil All the Time is an American psychological thriller film based on the novel of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock. It follows Arvin Russell (played by Tom Holland) as he tries to protect his loved ones in a town filled with sinister characters such as a suspicious preacher played by Robert Pattinson, an ominous couple played by Jason Clarke and Riley Keough and a corrupt sheriff played by Sebastian Stan. Also starring Bill Skarsgrd - known for his role as Pennywise in Stephen Kings IT - and Mia Wasikowski (Jane Eyre).

Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice (2020)

UK Netflix release date: Wednesday 15 September

This emotional documentary follows a Thai Buddhist family as they make the unconventional choice to have their terminally ill two-year-old daughter cryogenically frozen in the hope that she will be resurrected and restored back to health in the future. The documentary provides rare insight into not only grief, but the largely undocumented, new scientific fringe innovation of Cryonics, a subject that has been criticised by the wider scientific community.

Bookmarks

UK Netflix release date: Tuesday 1 September

This new Netflix kids show tells childrens stories with an angle on race, features several big names such as Lupita Nyong'o (Us), Caleb McLaughlin (Stranger Things), and Tiffany Haddish (The Lego Movie 2). Bookmarks tells stories specifically from black points of view, covering themes of identity, respect, justice and action.

Im Thinking of Ending Things

UK Netflix release date: Friday 4 September

Charlie Kaufmans new psychological horror film, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Iain Reid, is quite an unnerving watch. The story captures the doubts and anxieties of a nervous woman meeting her boyfriends rather strange parents for the first time. Starring Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, Jesse Plemons and David Thewlis.

Enola Holmes

UK Netflix release date: Wednesday 23 September

Written by Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials) and directed by Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag), Enola Holmes puts a feministic spin on the classic Sherlock Holmes story, by focusing on the tales of Sherlock and Mycrofts lesser-known sister Enola, played by Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things). The film follows the lively Enola and friends as she tries to find her newly missing mother (Helena Bonham Carter). Starring Henry Cavill and Sam Claflin play Sherlock and Mycroft.

Zodiac

UK Netflix release date: Tuesday 1 September

This crime thriller from director David Fincher is based on a true story and has a star studded line up, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. Zodiac follows a crime reporter, a political cartoonist, and a couple of cops as they work to investigate San Francisco's infamous Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer operating in the late 60s and early 70s, who is thought to have killed over 20 people and who remains unknown.

The full list of releases coming to Netflix in September:

A Beautiful Mind (2001)BookmarksBorgen, seasons 1-3Demolition Man (1993)Indecent Proposal (1993)The Sum of All Fears (2002)Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)Zodiac (2007)

Chefs Table: BBQ, season 1

Afonso Padilha: ClasslessCall the Midwife, season 8Young Wallander

AwayIm Thinking of Ending Things

Get Organised With the Home EditLa Linea: Shadow of NarcoThe Social DilemmaSo Much Love to Give

The DuchessFamily Business, season 2

Hope Frozen: a Quest to Live TwiceMichael McIntyre: ShowmanMisfits, seasons 1-5

Challenger: The Final FlightCriminal, season 2The Devil All the Time

GIMS: On the RecordThe Last WordThe School Nurse Files

Jurassic World: Camp CretaceousRatchedWhipped

The School Nurse FilesSneakerheads

American Murder: The Family Next Door

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These are the best films and TV shows to watch on Netflix in September - Milton Keynes Citizen

Cryonics: can death be avoided by freezing someone to revive in the future? – Explica

The idea that it is possible freeze someone immediately after he is declared legally dead to try to revive it in the future it is present in popular culture.

The cryonic It is the technique used to freeze a living being to the boiling point of nitrogen and thus avoid the decomposition of vital organs, the tissues that form them and the rest of the organism, all with the intention of prolonging their life even when they have been declared dead.

We have seen it in movies, series and science fiction stories. The fame of cryonics is such that the myth that Walt Disney remains in a frozen nitrogen chamber is globally recognized, although in reality the body of the creator of Mickey Mouse was cremated and his ashes remain in Glendale, California.

After all, cryonics starts with a principle that, at first glance, seems completely logical: as it happens with the food that we keep in the refrigerator, the cold and the low temperatures slow down the decomposition process, avoiding the proliferation of bacteria and slowing down the action of enzymes.

Photo: Unsplash

Although some species of insects, worms, and amphibians have the ability to remain in a been frozen for months and get on with your life once the low temperatures rise, when it comes to humans, the situation is radically opposite.

Our cells are unable to tolerate temperatures below -5 degrees Celsius and therefore, the first step in making human cryonics a tangible reality lies in finding cryoprotectants effective enough to prevent cell freezing and instead bring it to a state of vitrificationwhich would prevent the collapse and breakdown of cells:

According to David Denlinger, an entomologist at Ohio State University for Particle, One of the big problems with low temperatures is that the water in our cells can freeze and therefore break cells, so we have the option of add an agent that lowers the freezing point or some other way to prevent ice crystallization inside the cell.

Another obstacle to successfully freezing a person is finding the suitable temperature so that each organ and tissue can be preserved. The most realistic application of cryonics in the present is carried out with organs intended for transplants and cells such as ovules or sperm.

In this process, each organ requires a certain temperature to keep its functioning intact; however, trying to bring this to the entire human body complicates the scenario and involves a bigger problem: we dont know enough about the brain function to determine if it can maintain its functions after being frozen.

For now, applying cryonics in humans still belongs more to terrain of science fiction than reality. And although nanotechnology is advancing by leaps and bounds as a possible solution to temperature changes capable of avoiding damage in the process, the idea of bringing life back to a body that was kept at -190 degrees Celsius still requires scientific research. to be treated as a tangible reality.

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Cryonics: can death be avoided by freezing someone to revive in the future? - Explica