Category Archives: Cryonics

The artist known simply as Khu is an #Actress, director and producer who hails from Southern California. She has twelve feature films to her credit--eight of which have been distributed globally. Khu serves as the COO of Pikchure Zero Entertainment and is presently in the process of developing a scripted television series whilst finishing up her second script for a feature film.

In an exclusive #Interview, Khu recently discussed her career, her hopes for the future, and more.

Meagan Meehan (MM): What prompted you to enter the field of acting and how have you landed movie roles?

Khu: I think the want and allure of acting has always been inside of me.

I was brought up in a very conservative household and acting has allowed me to be more outspoken and to break down cultural barriers. I have always had this out-of-body experience of how I am and how I would want to be seen so acting was a natural magnet to gravitate to. When I started to audition for roles, it was easy to fit those model castings since I was 510 and unique looking. First starting out as a producer has helped me understand how characters are portrayed on screen and in turn helped me better understand these roles. Having this experience has helped me land movie roles.

MM: How many projects have you acted in and do you have any favorite characters?

Khu: I have acted in eight projects and my favorite character is El from a romantic comedy called Dark Cupid I produced, directed, and starred in.

The other lead actress was Deanna Congo, as Kit, who also stars in Alien: Reign of Man.

In this movie, my character was kicked out due to bad behavior. She is then warned by G, played by Eric Roberts, if she doesnt change she will never regain her wings. Not heeding his words, El goes around shooting unsuspecting people with her special guns because she believes bow and arrows are out-dated. She dresses the way she wants and acts the way she wants. These guns shoot its target with a temporarily truth serum that makes people reveal what they truly feel. For El, true love is masked with falsity and personal gain and she wants to save these tainted souls and cleanse them. During her rant against love, El meets Kit, the only person who sees her. Even though Els presence was not welcomed, she starts to force herself into Kits everyday life. El tries to show Kit that love is no longer pure; that her relationships and the people around her are not as they seem.

I love the role of El because she started off believing she is the one who was wronged by the people who took her wings.

And with the relationship she builds with Kit, through her relentless torment, she learns that love is more than unfiltered truth and selflessness. I got to play a vengeful trouble maker who had powers, guns, and nice outfits. The dialogue was playful and the story was refreshing, even though I was technically the protagonist; the role was fun.

MM: How did you get involved with "Alien: Reign of Man" and what character do you play?

Khu: This film was a collaboration between Producer/Director Justin Price and me. We produced and distributed a few horror/thriller films and some romantic comedies so we decided a sci-fi/action film was a great change. In this movie, I play Zan, the leader of a secret order on a mission to find a cure for Terminus which is an autoimmune disease plaguing humans on their home planet.

MM: What most interested you about this film and your role in it?

Khu: My favorite genre is science fiction and to be able to work on an original story with open creativity was amazing. The films premise, alongside its diverse cast, is the most interesting aspects. The story touches on the idea of evolution, survival, and ones own personal battle with completing the mission and finding their purpose in life. These soldiers are humanitys last hope and they are individually challenged during their journey. They are led by two headstrong women, played by Susan Traylor and Torrei Hart, with conflicting goals.

Since the movie had no precedent, we were able to be more open in casting, which gave us more female characters and diversity. The best thing about this film is what it represents, hope. And I got to play Zan, the leader in this quest! Zan is a willful, resourceful, and talented soldier. She doesnt use her looks or sex appeal to navigate through dangerous terrains in search of this unknown key, which is destined to save all mankind. She uses her training and intuition to find the Spire that unlocks the cure she seeks, all whilst knowing its a suicide mission.

It was a pleasure to play this role because, as history has shown, there arent many people with my cultural background fulfilling these roles, let alone by a woman. It was also challenging and different to play opposite an invisible creature. I had to be powerful and vulnerable with a CGI creature in scenes by myself.

MM: What were your favorite parts of filming and do you have any interesting behind-the-scenes stories?

Khu: Within Pikchure Zero Entertainment, we like to keep our production company fueled with like-minded and talented individuals. Traveling to new countries, while filming, was a highlight in this production. We got to see some amazing views and different cultures and lifestyles. I also got to drive on the opposite side of the road which was challenging and fun! There was one day we even had to delay filming because our path was block by cattle. We waited two hours for them to decide to move. Their owner said they are a rare breed and get spooked easily so we had to be really quiet.

MM: What are a few of your upcoming acting projects?

Khu: I have two acting projects that will be release later this year, The 13th Friday and Almost Amazing, and two new projects that will be in pre-production next month, Reapers and Cryonics. The 13th Friday is about a group of friends who unlock a mysterious calendar that curses them with the task of doing its sacrificial biddings. Almost Amazing is about three friends who lean on each other for love advice, but none of them are qualified to give any. With a wedding and jobs on the line, they end up finding what they werent seeking: love. Reapers is an action/sci-fi thriller about four grim reapers who appears on Earth to restore the balance of good and evil. Each Reaper is given an assignment to take souls spread throughout the wretched city known as Arcane. Cryonics is a sci-fi /action/ thriller about a group of immortals who crash-land in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by an indigenous population. Malach, one of the last to awake, must survive the dangers of the planet in order to complete a sacred mission. There are other projects in the works, but it would be easier to check my Facebook page for current updates.

MM: What are some of your big goals for the future of your career as an entertainer?

Khu: I foresee myself directing, producing, and acting in large scale sci-fi, action thrillers. It would be awesome to be a part of a comic book rendition or pre-existing franchise, like James Bond. I would love to portray the live action film version of Mulan. Ive already got the hair, drive, and stubbornness down. But the ultimate goal is to change a narrative, to make a difference in entertainment and positively impact audiences viewpoint of people like me in this field.

MM: Can you offer any words of advice to aspiring actresses and is there anything else that you would like to discuss?

Khu: The best advice I can give to aspiring actresses now is to never doubt yourself, its never too late to start, and with hard work, a stuck car will start moving if you keep on pushing. There will always be road bumps made to keep you from your goals and I remind myself these are just to make sure you really want it. People like working on projects with like-minded people and kindness is never unwelcomed. #Movies & TV

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Interview with entertainment professional Khu - Blasting News

In one of the most iconically frustrating scenes in all of modern cinema, Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite at the end of Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back. The carbonite chamber fills with clouds of thick, white vapor as Han Solo, his face scrunched up in anxious anticipation, disappears in the carbonite gas. And while the feelings we feel during that famous scene are real, carbonite freezing is (currently) not.

But what if it were? Could our hero survive the freezing process? And if so, could he be successfully thawed? We spoke to cryonics expert Ben Best to find out. He hasnt seen Empire, but he says carbonite freezing seems similar in principle to cryonic preservation, in which human bodies are preserved at extremely low temperatures.

That sounds very similar to what is actually being done in practice by cryonics organizations, Best, the former president and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, tells Inverse. Much like carbonite freezing, cryopreservation involves cooling a body from the outside. Unlike carbonite freezing, though, cryopreservation is a gradual process, involving some very specific precautions meant to help protect the sensitive tissues of the human body against the harm that can occur during freezing. In fact, Best doesnt even like to use the word freeze to describe cryonics.

The patient is cooled down, and their blood is replaced, he explains. The water in their body is actually replaced with a vitrification solution to prevent ice formation so that the tissues harden like glass rather than freeze.

This process of vitrification is key to cryonics, allowing the human body to cool without experiencing the cell damage that can accompany crystallization. To put it crudely, think of freezer burn but inside of you. Cryonics companies avoid freezing by replacing a patients blood with a cryoprotectant, a liquid that will become viscous as it cools but wont form crystals that could damage the tender cells and tissues of the human body.

Heres the thing, though: The carbon freezing chamber in Cloud City didnt utilize any sort of cryoprotectants because, unlike in other cinematic depictions of cryogenic sleep, it wasnt made to preserve humans. Lando Calrissians mining facility was set up to process tibanna gas and encase it in blocks of carbonite so it could be shipped safely. This highly reactive substance, used to power starship blasters, needed to be stabilized for transport but didnt share humanoids unique biological needs. As such, it was fortunate that Han Solo survived freezing in the first place.

Darth Vader, who experienced carbonite freezing in his younger years, probably knew it was safe, but the fact remains that it definitely wasnt designed for living beings.

Neither is cryopreservation, though. This process isnt currently applied to living people, says Best. They have to be legally dead, as far as cryonics is concerned. Theres some talk of doing it to a living person, but its not reversible by current technology. Typically, a person is cryogenically preserved immediately after death. The hope is that science will advance to the point that eventually humans will find a cure for whatever ailment killed the person, whether its cancer, congenital illnesses, or traumatic injuries. At that point, a patient could be reanimated and healed.

As far as reanimating a cryopreserved human, well, the hope is that scientists will find a way to do that too, as there is currently no way to safely warm human tissue back up. Even if human tissue is successfully vitrified without any crystals forming, crystals almost always form during warming. Best explains that part of the problem is that cryoprotectants are too toxic to use in sufficient quantities to fully protect human tissue. And while scientists are working on developing less toxic cryoprotectants, theyre not quite there yet.

So even if Han Solo somehow survived carbonite freezing without his bodily fluids crystallizing and turning his body into a huge mass of destroyed cells, it is highly unlikely that he would be reanimated without suffering cell damage. Granted, crystallization could theoretically be avoided if a cryopreserved body was brought back up to temperature tens or hundreds of times faster than it was cooled. It also must be warmed uniformly, a huge challenge when dealing with a human body, which is made up of many types of tissues. So its possible that the intensely bright light that emanates from the carbonite block during Han Solos thawing is the byproduct of an advanced warming technology. But since the machine in which he was frozen isnt intended for humans, this seems highly unlikely.

Strangely, one of the most notable effects of Han Solos hibernation sickness was blindness, whereas corneas are one of the only human organs that scientists actually have been able to successfully vitrify and warm.

So while it may come as little surprise that a space opera didnt quite hit the mark in terms of scientific accuracy, perhaps its fitting that Han Solo, a pilot known for defying all odds, survived a procedure that should have killed him.

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How Would the Human Body Respond to Carbonite Freezing? - Inverse

Cryonics is an effort to save lives by using temperatures so cold that a person beyond help by today's medicine might be preserved for decades or centuries until a future medical technology can restore that person to full health. Cryonics is a second chance at life. It is the reasoned belief in the advancement of future medicinal technologies being able to cure things we cant today.

Many biological specimens, including whole insects, many types of human tissue including brain tissue, and human embryos have been cryogenically preserved, stored at liquid nitrogen temperature where all decay ceases, and revived. This leads scientists to believe that the same can be done with whole human bodies, and that any minimal harm can be reversed with future advancements in medicine.

Neurosurgeons often cool patients bodies so they can operate on aneurysms without damaging or rupturing the nearby blood vessels. Human embryos that are frozen in fertility clinics, defrosted, and implanted in a mothers uterus grow into perfectly normal human beings. This method isnt new or groundbreaking- successful cryopreservation of human embryos was first reported in 1983 by Trounson and Mohr with multicellular embryos that had been slow-cooled using dimethyl sulphoxide (DMSO).

And just in Feb. of 2016, there was a cryonics breakthrough when for the first time, scientists vitrified a rabbits brain and, after warming it back up, showed that it was in near perfect condition. This was the first time a cryopreservation was provably able to protect everything associated with learning and memory.

More:

What is cryonics?

A burgeoning industry promises to help the wealthy defeat the ultimate equaliser: Death.

In the year 42 I.E. (Inequality Era, post-Piketty), mankind built its first hibernation machine. This allowed some to jump to the future. A brighter future, a better future. More precisely, hibernation machines became an actualisation of a powerful idea that tomorrow is better than today. A tomorrow that has a cure for cancer and diabetes, where strokes, respiratory diseases and heart attacks are a hazy remembrance (much as we think of typhoid and tuberculosis today), where longevity spans centuries, and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity, in which humans merge with A.I. to transcend biological limitations, is within reach. The end of Death and a future everlasting beckon.

But only a select few can afford hibernation machines and jump to the future: The rich and the powerful, the rentiers and the capitalists, the titans of industry and the masters of finance. Those who can afford it skip to a future paradise, while those who cannot remain in what they now perceive as a dark and depressing present, whilst building the paradise for the few.

This is a short chapter in Death's End, the culmination of Liu Cixin's stunning trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past. Former U.S. President Barack Obama recommended it, in a bygone era when leaders used to read, reflect, and write, rather than rant in 140 characters. It is fascinating to think systematically about . Are we willing to tolerate inequality in income and wealth as long as our basic needs in Maslow's hierarchy are satisfied? Or will we have a revolution in our hands when inequality is literally a matter of life and death?1 Hollywood which gave us Elysium which certainly sees revolution as the most probable outcome.

This is not some abstract sci-fi scenario. Today, there are four major companies that provide cryogenic or cryonic services Alcor in Arizona, Cryonics Institute in Michigan, American Cryonics Society in California and KrioRus in Russia. Alcor seems the most developed and well-funded. Morbid as it sounds, this could be you in the future, vitrified and then stored in a thermos. Their pricing policy has a weird two-part tariff structure an annual membership fee of US$525 and then an additional US$200,000 for Whole Body Cryopreservation. There is a discount if you only cryogenically freeze your brain; and a US$10,000 premium if you live outside the United States and Canada which rises to US$50,000 if you live in China. A topic for another day is whether this is price discrimination or whether the price differences reflect cost differences.

Interestingly, only 5 percent of the U.S. population has an annual income exceeding the US$200,000 charged by Alcor. But since the amount can be paid out of retirement savings, slightly more than 10 percent of U.S. households theoretically could afford to freeze at least one person (see below). Ironically, most would be bankrupted in the process, meaning they would thaw out to penury. Theyd have to hope that the utopian future awaiting them would be free of the sort of inequality that enabled them to cheat death in the first place.

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley...

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, are reading Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari. On page 28, the book predicts that they are going to die. Death, after all, is the ultimate equaliser. Steve Jobs was unable to beat pancreatic cancer. Harari is sceptical whether Googles Calico, short for the California Life Company and founded in 2013 with a billion dollars in funding, will solve death in time to make Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin immortal. This is immensely frustrating to the likes of Brin, Page, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, all billionaires eager to stretch lives, or, at least their own, to forever in Thiel's words.

Many believe that aging is encoded in our DNA and if anything is encoded it can be cracked. If something can be cracked, then it can be hacked. Cue applause! And cue billions of dollars for aging research with Bill Maris, the founder and CEO of Google Ventures, leading the way. In the fall of 2016, the life extension start-up Unity Biotechnology raised an enormous round of funding from Silicon Valley billionaires interested in the prospect of humans living much longer lives.

Others are bringing big data and machine learning tools to bear. BioAge Labs, whose tagline is faster drug discovery for aging, has been using machine learning and crunching genomics data to search for biomarkers that predict mortality.

Venture Vampire Capital

In 1615, a German doctor suggested that the hot and spirituous blood of a young man will pour into the old one as if it were from a fountain of youth. In 1924, the physician and Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov performed young-blood transfusions on himself. He claimed that his eyesight improved, that he stopped balding and a fellow-revolutionary wrote that he seems to have become seven, no, ten years younger. Ironically, Bogdanov injected himself with blood from a student who had both malaria and tuberculosis, and subsequently died. Today, this procedure goes by the innocuous-sounding name parabiosis a surgical union of two organisms sharing the circulation of blood. And the search for the fountain of youth continues.

Of mice and men

Researchers at Stanford University showed in a 2014 study that infusions of blood from young mice reversed cognitive and neurological impairments seen in older mice. These reinvigorated mice performed like ones half their age in memory based tests. Immediately, emails flooded the inbox of the lead researcher, Tony Wyss-Coray. Numerous billionaires, some of whom were experiencing onset of Alzheimers, wanted infusions of young blood. Some had even arranged for what the HBO show Silicon Valley termed blood boys.

There is currently a clinical trial called Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers looking for participants. The trial, run by a start-up called Ambrosia, injects young people's blood into older people. Healthy participants aged 35 and older, pay US$8000 for a transfusion of blood plasma from donors under 25, and researchers monitor their blood over the next two years for indicators (biomarkers) of health and aging. Thiel (yes, him again) is looking seriously into parabiosis.

Today, most reporting on these advances takes one of two perspectives: weary scepticism or unadulterated wonder. In either case, my grim forecast is that a world where such miracles of longevity are confined to billionaires will see socio-political upheaval, the likes of which will make the current hand-wringing and brow-furrowing on the rise of inequality seem quaint in comparison. In the meantime, expect a lot of books and articles and blog posts, targeted at the thought-leader industrial complex, that will at the least, make for stimulating conversation.

Pushan Dutt is the Shell Fellow of Economic Transformation and a Professor of Economics and Political Science at INSEAD. Professor Dutt directs the Asian International Executive Programme.

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1Of course, with unequal access to health care in many countries, with direct consequences for differential mortality rates among the rich and the poor, we already live in such a world.

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From Inequality to Immortality - INSEAD Knowledge (blog)

...And this was the survivor.

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Riplay: He figured he could get an alien back through quarantine if one of us was... impregnated, of whatever you call it... then frozen for the trip home. Nobody would know about the embryos we were carrying; me and Newt. Hicks: No, wait a minute, we'd all know. Ripley: Yes, the only way he'd be able to do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home, namely yours. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he liked. Hudson: You're dead... you're dog meat, pal!

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Wheatley: The reserve power ran out, so of course the whole Relaxation Center stops waking up the bloody test subjects. [...] And of course, nobody tells me anything. Nooooooo, why should they tell me anything? [...] And who's fault do you think it's going to be when the management comes down here and finds ten thousand flippin' vegetables. [...] We should get our stories straight. If anyone asks and no-one's going to ask, don't worry but if anyone asks, tell them as far as you know, the last time you checked, everyone looked pretty much alive. Alright? Not dead.

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Cryonics Failure - TV Tropes

about 18 hours ago Updated: about 5 hours ago

Sudan, slow, unhappy and torpid as he pads glumly around the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, his retirement home

The love life of Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros in the world, is understandably complicated. Currently, it is as slow, unhappy and torpid as he is, padding glumly around the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, his retirement home.

In Sudan: The Last of the Rhinos (Wednesday, BBC Two, 9pm), he makes for an unlikely celebrity, but extinction can do a lot to raise your profile.

Recently, in an occurrence this nature documentary finds too trivial to mention, Sudan joined Tinder. For a creature with no opposable thumbs, this really seemed like a last throw of the dice for the species. Otherwise, mention of his predicament trends under the hashtag: #lastmalestanding.

Both social media campaign are gloomily ironic, because although there are two remaining females, there is no procreational hope for the once-plentiful African species. It is already extinct. Humans did this, says the biologist Thomas Hildebrant, and humans should correct it.

Directed by Rowan Deacon and prepared to travel the world for its detail, the documentary is unsure whether to proceed with a light step or a heavy heart. It proceeds with biographical cinereel, before building up a dual picture of threat: poachers in an unstable continent on one side, peddling its horn as an aphrodisiac, and safari park rustlers on the other. Sudan was captured by the latter and brought, of all places, to the former Czechoslovakia in 1974.

Repairing to present-day Dvur Kralove, where Josef Vgners zoo once held seven white rhinos, family and staff recall the animals passivity in captivity. I guess they had no choice, says one keeper. If anything, though, Sudan himself had grown violently disturbed; refusing to mate, attacking the females and killing one of his keepers. Once again, though, its the humans who take the blame.

Even before we follow the international efforts to revive the species by flying Sudan to Garamba Make love and multiply, instructs a Czech politician, with an ill-fitting levity that informs much of the programme. You are not tourists. the programmes focus shifts to human efforts. Cryonics, gamete harvesting, surrogate species and artificial insemination will play a more significant role in re-starting the northern white rhino than Sudan will.

Its morally incumbent on us to try to make this happen, says Hildebrandt. The programme wishes it had better news on that front a breakthrough is hoped for this year but so far nothing. It ends then, not as a lament for a celebrity rhino and his species, but as a study in human endeavours, whether perverse and ruinous, or shame-faced and progressive.

The northern white rhino is extinct, it knows, but were the ones who are threatened.

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A last-ditch attempt to stave off extinction as Sudan goes on Tinder - Irish Times

Chart of the day: Which age groups are coming to Invercargill? Stuff.co.nz There seems to be an influx aged 65 upwards. Just checked other cities in NZ and they are losing people in these age brackets. So what do the aged and wiser population know that the rest of us don't ?? Invercargill is closer too cryonics than the rest ...

Originally posted here:

Chart of the day: Which age groups are coming to Invercargill? - Stuff.co.nz

Reconstruction, a project by Greek photographer Kosmas Pavlidis, explores the boundaries between documentation and fiction. The photograps that make up the project were taken over the course of six years.

This years Athens Photo Festival, spread across two floors of the Benaki Museums Pireos Street annex, provides insights into developments in contemporary international photography by bringing together the work of 85 photographers and other artists from 30 countries who are known for exploring photographic techniques in their work.

The show, now in its 30th year, also explores the evolution of the medium and the adoption of new techniques, as well as the growing relationship between photography and other art forms.

About 2,000 photographers submitted work following an open call for this years event, whose rather abstract title is Still Searching. After reviewing the proposals, the curators set up an exhibition that is divided into eight sections.

Among the highlights that are on display are Murray Ballards Prospect of Immortality, an investigation of cryonics the process of freezing a human body after death in the hope that scientific advances may one day bring him or her back to life.

The 34-year-olds project can be found in the section of the show titled Fluid Body.

In the same section, visitors can also see Lilly Lulays Liquid Portrait a photographic portrait that consists of a sculpture and a moving collage both sourcing visual content from a single Facebook account.

In the section Role Play, Luisa Whitton showcases part of her What About the Heart? project. Whitton, who has been selected as one of Magnums Top 30 Under 30, explores the relationship between humans and machines.

Among the festivals side events are portfolio reviews, projections, seminars, family labs and the established Athens Photo Marathon. Dates will be announced in the coming days.

The Athens Photo Festival runs through July 30 at the Benaki Museum (138 Pireos). For more information log into http://www.benaki.gr

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Thirty years since its launch, Athens Photo Festival is 'still searching' - Kathimerini

Sergio Canavero, the Italian surgeon who audaciously plans to perform the worlds first human head transplant within the next 10 months (pending the availability of a donor body) is now preparing to reawaken cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone elses skull.

In an interview with a German-language magazine, Canavero says he will attempt to bring the first brainsfrozen in liquid nitrogen at an Arizona-based cryogenics bank back to life not in 100 years, but three years at the latest.

Transplanting a brain only and not an entire head gets around formidable rejection issues, Canavero said, sincethere will be no need to reconnect and stitch up severed vessels, nerves, tendons and muscles as there is when a new head is fused onto abrain-dead donor body.

Canavero allows that one problematic issue with brain transplants, however, would be that no aspect of your original external body remains the same.

Your head is no longer there, your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull, he told OOOM magazine, published by the same company that handles the Italian brain surgeonspublic relations.

The flamboyant neuroscientist who some ethicists have decried as nuts rattled the transplant world when he first outlined his plans for a human head transplant two years ago in the journal, Surgical Neurology International.

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan called Canaveros latest proposal to merge head transplants with resurrecting the frozen dead beyond ridiculous. People have their own doubts about whether anything can be salvaged from these frozen heads or bodies because of the damage freezing does, said Caplan, head of ethics at NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York City.

Then saying that he has some technique for making this happen, that has never been demonstrated in frozen animals, is absurd.

Caplan accused the maverick surgeon of playing to peoples fantasies, that somehow you can come back from death, fantasies that you can live forever if you just keep moving your head around and to fears science is out of control. Thats why I pay attention to him.

According to Canavero, the greatest technical hurdle to a head transplant is fusing the donor and recipients severed spinal cords, something never before achieved in humans, and restoring function, without causing massive, irreversible brain damage or death.

In an exclusive interview with the National Post last year, Canavero said what makeshisbrazen, and critics say ethically reckless, protocolpossible isa special fusogen, a waxy, glue-like substance developed by a young B.C.-born chemist that will be used to reconnect the severed spinal cord stumps and coax axons and neurons to regrow across the gap.

Canavero said the first head transplant will be performed in Harbin, China, and the surgical team led by Xiaoping Ren, a Chinese orthopedic surgeon who participated in the first hand transplant in the U.S. in 1999. Ren has been performing hundreds of head transplants in mice in preparation.

The first patient will be an unidentified Chinese citizen, and not, as originally planned, Valery Spiridonov, a 31-year-old Russian man who suffers from a rare and devastating form of spinal muscular dystrophy.

Canavero called Ren a close friend of mine and an extraordinarily capable surgeon.

At the moment, I can only disclose that there has been massive progress in medical experiments that would have seemed impossible even as recently as a few months ago, Canavero told OOOM. The milestones that have been reached will undoubtedly revolutionize medicine.

He declined to offer up exactly what those milestones are, saying that results of the most recent animal experimentshave been submitted for publication in renowned scientific medical journals.

Last September, the team reported they had succeeded in restoring functionality and mobility in mice with severed spinal cords using the special fusogen, dubbed Texas-PEG. Canavero claims the mice were able to run again.

Your head is no longer there, your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull

He said numerous experiments have been conducted since then on an array of different animals in South Korea and China and the results are unambiguous: the spinal cord and with it the ability to move can be entirely restored, he told OOOM.

Canavero envisions the head (or, perhaps more accurately, body) grafting venture as a cure for people living with horrible medical conditions. The plan is to cut off the head of two people one, the recipient, the other, the donor whose brain is dead but whose body is otherwise healthy, an accident victim for example. Surgeons will then shift the recipients head onto the donor body using a custom-made swivel crane. They will have less than an hour to re-establish blood supply before risking irreversible brain damage.

In a few months we will sever a body from a head in an unprecedented medical procedure, Canavero said. At the moment of decapitation, the patient will be clinically dead. If we bring this person back to life, we will receive the first real account of what actually happens after death, he told the magazine, meaning, he said, whether there is an afterlife, a heaven, a hereafter or whatever you may want to call it or whether death is simply a flicking off of the light switch and thats it.

Canavero said a brain transplant has several advantages over a head-swap, including that there is barely any immune reaction, which means the problem of rejection does not exist. The brain is, in a manner of speaking, a neutral organ, he said.

Others are hugely skeptical of the prospect of reawakening brains, or bodies, frozen after death. In an interview with the Posts Joe OConnor two years ago, Eike-Henner Kluge, a bio-ethicist at the University of Victoria, refers to cryonics patients as corpsesicles.

Unless it is technically possible, and it is not, to replace all the water left in a bodys cells with glycol, unfreezing a frozen corpse will rupture the cell walls ensuring that you are mush a corpsesicle.

However, two years ago researchers with 21st Century Medicine, a California cryobiology research company, reported they had succeeded in freezing a rabbits brain using a flash-freezing technique to protect and stabilize the tissue. After the vitrified brains were rewarmed, electron microscope imaging from across the rabbit brains showed neurons and synapses were crisp and intact.

Canavero hopesto get his first brains from Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz. Alcors most famous patient is Red Sox baseball legend Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball history, whose head was detached from his body and cryopreserved after his death at 83 in 2002.

Email: skirkey@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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The plan to 'reawaken' cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone else's skull - National Post

NICOLE LAWTON

Last updated05:00, June 18 2017

CHRIS MCKEEN/FAIRFAX NZ

Stem cells, skin, red blood cells and platelets are all frozen in liquid nitrogen freezer at the New Zealand Blood Service for later use - but not whole bodies.

Cryonics, the practice of deep-freezing bodies, remains a controversial area of research with many scientists in New Zealand reluctant to wade into the freezer.

Not surprisingly, the art of filling the deceased with antifreeze, suspending them in liquid nitrogen in the vain hopes that scientific break-throughs will one day reanimate them and cure them isnot an accepted academic discipline New Zealand, and therefore isn't pursued in any official capacity.

But that hasn't stopped a few individuals from trying.

CHRIS MCKEEN/FAIRFAX NZ

Dr Richard Charlewood, is the medical director of the national tissue bank, run by the New Zealand Blood Service.

Two New Zealand foundations -The Foundation for Anti-aging Research and the Foundation for Reversal of Solid State Hypothermia - were given the cold shoulder in 2013 when applying to be considered a charity from the Charities Registration Boards (CRB).

READ MORE: Kiwi'sbody hangs upside-down in a -196C vat

The board rejected the foundations on the basis that cryonics was not an accepted academic discipline based on the lack, in mainstream science, of feasibility and benefits of the research.

This decision was then successfully appealed in october 2016 - when Justice Rebecca Ellis found cryonics research to fall squarely under the 'advancement of education' heading and therefore had 'charitable purpose'.

She said there was evidence that the proposed research was likely to lead to advances in areas such as organ transplant medicine, stem cell research, and treating a range of diseases and disorders.

The listed officers and trustees for both foundations have addresses Monaco, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Others, Saul Kent and William Faloon bought an old church in downtown Hollywood in 2013 for $880,000 and founded the Church of Perpetual Life.

The pair are big were the cryonics world and both personally signed up for their shot at eternal life.

Nothing has been heard from the foundations since the CRB appeal and all attempts to contact the trustees were unsuccessful.

The closet thing that happens to freezing humans in New Zealand is cryogenically freezing tissue through the tissue banks of the New Zealand Blood Service.

Stem cells, skin, red blood cells and platelets are all submerged in a cryoprotectant and frozen to liquid nitrogen temperatures of around negative 196 degrees Celsius - for later human use.

"The skin cells last for up to 5 years, and stem cells up to ten years," said Richard Charlewood, the national tissue bank's medical director.

"We don't like keeping it for any longer than that because most of the studies only go up as far as ten years.

"At liquid nitrogen temperatures very little is actually happening at molecular level. So it's possible that they would be fine well beyond ten years, we just don't know for sure."

Charlewood said when cryo-preserving, the key thing is to get the cryoprotectant into all the cells that you want to keep alive, otherwise the formation of ice crystals can burst the cells and kill them.

"In terms of whole body freezing, my understanding is that you have to get the cryo-protectant to all the cells in the body, so you'd have to pump it around the body really thoroughly."

Fertility specialists in New Zealand also offer cryogenic preservation of eggs, ovarian tissue, sperm and embryos for reproductively-challenged patients who wish to conceive later.

Otago University's associate professor in botany, David Burritt, also regularly employs cryopreservation in his line of study.

Ina 2016 research paper he said cryopreservation was a great method for long-term storage ofreproductive plant material - such as seeds, pollen, dormant buds, shoot tips, embryos, or isolated plant cells or tissues.

"Plant material is first preconditioned, using chemical and physical treatments, so that it remains viable when it is frozen and during ultra-low temperature storage."

"Following re-warming, seeds and embryos can germinate, buds or shoot tips can be induced to grow, and whole plants can be regenerated from cryopreserved cells or tissues."

He said the samples could, in theory, be conserved indefinitely as "no metabolic activity occurs at these ultra-low temperatures."

'Cryobanking' enables large numbers of important crops, such as wheat, potato and various fruit and forest trees, to be cryopreserved, rewarmed and then allowed to grow into complete plants.

In March, scientists in the UK succeeded in cryogenically freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue for the first time, in an advance that could pave the way for organs to be stored for months or years.

-Sunday Star Times

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The confounding world of Cryonics, and the Kiwi scientists trying to make it a charitable pursuit - Stuff.co.nz