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If free lunches and a foosball table aren't enticing work perks, this AI-powered hedge fund is offering new recruits a chance to live forever.

Generous employee perks are as much a part of the tech industry as long work hours, office Nerf gun battles, and people overusing the word disruption. But while most firms only go so far as free meals, on-site yoga classes, and maybe the occasional indoor climbing wall, an artificial intelligence-driven hedge fund is taking things to the next level.

The good news? Numeraisnew employee benefit is quite literally the coolest one we have heard about. The bad news? You wont be able to enjoy it until youre dead.

We are allowing employees cryonic body preservation as a benefit, Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, told Digital Trends. Employees sign up through a life insurance policy and upon legal death, the life insurance claim is handed over to cryonics provider Alcor.

While the idea of whole-body preservation cryonics being a benefit isnt necessarily going to appeal to everyone, the hope is that it will appeal to the right kind of people, who will have something to bring to Numerai. That means folks with an interest (and, preferably, plenty of impressive qualifications) in artificial intelligence. Strong education backgrounds in mathematics and statistics are also advantageous, Craib continued.

The company is clearly doing something right in this department because it already includes former employees from Apple and Google DeepMind among its (soon to be frozen) ranks.

As to how long successful candidates will be frozen for well, that depends on a whole lot on scientific advances. According to Alcors website, Revival of todays cryonics patients will require future repair by highly advanced future technology, such as molecular nanotechnology. Technology that is advanced enough to repair a cryopreserved brain would by its nature also be able to regrow new tissues, organs, and a healthy body for the revived person.

Dont expect too much free time to explore your new futuristic home when you are thawed, though, because Craib is joining employees in the cryonics process. The only worse thing than being reanimated years in the future, to find that all your friends and family are long-since dead and youre a living fossil with outdated 21st-century views? Waking up in the aforementioned scenario, only to immediately be put back to work by your boss.

I personally signed up for Alcor recently, he explained. Many of the other Numerai employees were intrigued as to why and generally agree with the argument that a small chance of eternal life is worth the risk of an unconventional post-death experience. After discussing the idea on This Week In Startups, we decided to offer it to all employees.

Originally posted here:

Forget healthcare this startup offers cryonic freezing as an employee benefit - Digital Trends

Ammentorp/123RF

Generous employee perks are as much a part of the tech industry as long work hours, office Nerf gun battles, and people overusing the word disruption. But while most firms only go so far as free meals, on-site yoga classes, and maybe the occasional indoor climbing wall, an artificial intelligence-driven hedge fund is taking things to the next level.

The good news? Numeraisnew employee benefit is quite literally the coolest one we have heard about. The bad news? You wont be able to enjoy it until youre dead.

We are allowing employees cryonic body preservation as a benefit, Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, told Digital Trends. Employees sign up through a life insurance policy and upon legal death, the life insurance claim is handed over to cryonics provider Alcor.

While the idea of whole-body preservation cryonics being a benefit isnt necessarily going to appeal to everyone, the hope is that it will appeal to the right kind of people, who will have something to bring to Numerai. That means folks with an interest (and, preferably, plenty of impressive qualifications) in artificial intelligence. Strong education backgrounds in mathematics and statistics are also advantageous, Craib continued.

The company is clearly doing something right in this department because it already includes former employees from Apple and Google DeepMind among its (soon to be frozen) ranks.

As to how long successful candidates will be frozen for well, that depends on a whole lot on scientific advances. According to Alcors website, Revival of todays cryonics patients will require future repair by highly advanced future technology, such as molecular nanotechnology. Technology that is advanced enough to repair a cryopreserved brain would by its nature also be able to regrow new tissues, organs, and a healthy body for the revived person.

Dont expect too much free time to explore your new futuristic home when you are thawed, though, because Craib is joining employees in the cryonics process. The only worse thing than being reanimated years in the future, to find that all your friends and family are long-since dead and youre a living fossil with outdated 21st-century views? Waking up in the aforementioned scenario, only to immediately be put back to work by your boss.

I personally signed up for Alcor recently, he explained. Many of the other Numerai employees were intrigued as to why and generally agree with the argument that a small chance of eternal life is worth the risk of an unconventional post-death experience. After discussing the idea on This Week In Startups, we decided to offer it to all employees.

Read this article:

Cryonic freezing is the coolest employee perk in Silicon Valley literally - Yahoo News

Since congressional Republicans voted in a bill containing the Trump administration's roll back of the Affordable Care Act, healthcare is once again a topic on everyone's lips. In the absence of any universal healthcare scheme, employer-provided medical coverage is a crucial benefit for employees, tempting people to stay at jobs they might otherwise have left, or apply for positions they wouldn't otherwise consider.

In the contest to attract new hires, tech companies often supplement already generous salaries with comprehensive benefit packages, and in this vein one company has hit on a novel idea: A health plan that covers its employees beyond death and into the realms of a speculative future rebirth.

Last week Numerai, an AI-driven hedge fund that invests based on models submitted by its anonymous data scientists , announced that it would be giving all its employees the chance to be cryogenically frozen in the event of death and resuscitated at some point in the future. The unusual statement was made in a tweet on Tuesday from founder Richard Craib, with a link to a job posting for a software engineer in which "whole-body preservation cryonics" is listed as a benefit offered.

In a phone call with Motherboard, Craib explained that the idea came from his own personal membership of cryonics provider Alcor, whose services will now be extended to Numerai employees too.

"If you want to have a chance of living much, much longer, then whether cryonics gives a five percent chance or a ten percent chance, it's still very good value for money," Craib said. "When I realized you could do it through a life insurance policy, then you're only paying a few hundred dollars a month for the chance of eternal life."

According to the founder, employees at Numerai had expressed interest and curiosity at Craib's own decision to be cryonically frozen in the event of his death, and after first joking about the idea of offering it to his staff on a startup podcast (discussion from the 1h15 mark) he decided to make it a reality. As far as new hiring goes, he also hopes the unconventional offer will "attract interesting people" to the company.

In practical terms, Numerai takes out an employee life insurance policyin this case provided by Transamericathat will cover cryonic storage, ensuring that on death an employee's body is delivered to Alcor and frozen, to be reanimated at such a future time as medical technology can undo the fatal damage. (A blurb on the Alcor site reads: "Revival of today's cryonics patients will require future repair by highly advanced future technology, such as molecular nanotechnology. Technology that is advanced enough to repair a cryopreserved brain would by its nature also be able to regrow new tissues, organs, and a healthy body for the revived person.")

But as with most other employee medical coverage, leaving the company means an end to the benefits, and thus the loss of a shot at eternal life. Doesn't the founder see anything dystopic about the idea of an employer having control over an employee's afterlife?

"You know, that's more an indictment of other companies," Craib said. "Why doesn't the next company that they join offer cryonics, because they probably do offer healthcare. I think maybe this will start a trend where more forward thinking people will start to offer this."

Currently most Numerai employees have signed up, though Craib says that some have opted out for religious or philosophical reasons. Those who retained the coverage have the chance to join the likes of Hal Finney, computer scientist and bitcoin pioneer, whose body currently rests in the Alcor vaults. But for software engineers who are more focused on bringing new life into the world than extending their own, other Silicon Valley companies might be a better option: big players like Facebook, Apple and Google provide fertility benefits such as egg freezing and IVF as part of their health packages.

Read more:

This AI Company Offers Cryogenic Freezing With Its Health Plan - Motherboard

This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

Republished with permission fromMillenials Strike Back, the 56th edition of Griffith Review. Selected pieces consist of extracts, or long reads in which Generation Y writers address the issues that define and concern them.

The oldest surviving great work of literature tells the story of a Sumerian king,Gilgamesh, whose historical equivalent may have ruled the city of Uruk some time between 2800 and 2500 BC.

Subscribe to Newsweek from $1 per week

A hero of superhuman strength, Gilgamesh becomes instilled with existential dread after witnessing the death of his friend, and travels the Earth in search of a cure for mortality.

Twice the cure slips through his fingers and he learns the futility of fighting the common fate of man.

Merging With Machines

Transhumanism is the idea that we can transcend our biological limits, by merging with machines. The idea was popularised by the renowned technoprophetRay Kurzweil(now a director of engineering at Google), who came to public attention in the 1990s with a string of astute predictions about technology.

Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity in "The Matrix," which made her a household name. Getty Images

In his 1990 book,The Age of Intelligent Machines(MIT Press), Kurzweil predicted that a computer would beat the worlds best chess player by the year 2000. Ithappened in 1997.

He also foresaw the explosive growth of the internet, along with the advent of wearable technology, drone warfare and the automated translation of language. Kurzweilsmost famous prediction is what he callsthe singularitythe emergence of an artificial super-intelligence, triggering runaway technological growthwhich he foresees happening somewhere around 2045.

In some sense, the merger of humans and machines has already begun. Bionic implants, such as thecochlear implant, use electrical impulses orchestrated by computer chips to communicate with the brain, and so restore lost senses.

AtSt Vincents Hospitaland theUniversity of Melbourne, my colleagues are developing other ways to tap into neuronal activity, thereby giving people natural control of a robotic hand.

These cases involve sending simple signals between a piece of hardware and the brain. To truly merge minds and machines, however, we need some way to send thoughts and memories.

In 2011, scientists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles took the first step towards this when theyimplanted rats with a computer chipthat worked as a kind of external hard drive for the brain.

First the rats learned a particular skill, pulling a sequence of levers to gain a reward. The silicon implant listened in as that new memory was encoded in the brains hippocampus region, and recorded the pattern of electrical signals it detected.

Next the rats were induced to forget the skill, by giving them a drug that impaired the hippocampus. The silicon implant then took over, firing a bunch of electrical signals to mimic the pattern it had recorded during training.

Amazingly, the rats remembered the skill the electrical signals from the chip were essentially replaying the memory, in a crude version of that scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves learns (downloads) kung-fu.

Again, the potential roadblock: the brain may be more different from a computer than people such as Kurzweil appreciate. AsNicolas Rougier, a computer scientist at Inria (the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation),argues, the brain itself needs the complex sensory input of the body in order to function properly.

Separate the brain from that input and things start to go awry pretty quickly. Hence sensory deprivation is used as a form of torture. Even if artificial intelligence is achieved, that does not mean our brains will be able to integrate with it.

Whatever happens at the singularity (if it ever occurs), Kurzweil, now aged 68, wants to be around to see it. HisFantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever(Rodale Books, 2004) is a guidebook for extending life in the hope of seeing the longevity revolution. In it he details his dietary practices, and outlines some of the 200 supplements he takes daily.

Failing that, he has a plan B.

Freezing Death

The central idea of cryonics is to preserve the body after death in the hope that, one day, future civilisations will have the ability (and the desire) to reanimate the dead.

Both Kurzweil and de Grey, along with about 1,500 others (including, apparently, Britney Spears), aresigned up to be cryopreservedbyAlcor Life Extension Foundationin Arizona.

Offhand, the idea seems crackpot. Even in daily experience, you know that freezing changes stuff: you can tell a strawberry thats been frozen. Taste, and especially texture, change unmistakably. The problem is that when the strawberry cells freeze, they fill with ice crystals. The ice rips them apart, essentially turning them to mush.

Thats why Alcor dont freeze you; they turn you to glass.

After you die, your body is drained of blood and replaced with a special cryogenic mixture of antifreeze and preservatives. When cooled, the liquid turns to a glassy state, but without forming dangerous crystals.

You are placed in a giant thermos flask of liquid nitrogen and cooled to -196, cold enough to effectively stop biological time. There you can stay without changing, for a year or a century, until science discovers the cure for whatever caused your demise.

People dont understand cryonics, says Alcor president Max More in a YouTube tour of his facility. They think its this strange thing we do to dead people, rather than understanding it really is an extension of emergency medicine.

The idea may not be as crackpot as it sounds. Similar cryopreservation techniques are already being used to preserve human embryos used in fertility treatments.

There are people walking around today who have been cryopreserved, More continues. They were just embryos at the time.

One proof of concept, of sorts,was reportedby cryogenics expert Greg Fahy of21st Century Medicine(a privately funded cryonics research lab) in 2009.

Fahys team removed a rabbit kidney, vitrified it, and reimplanted into the rabbit as its only working kidney. Amazingly, the rabbit survived, if only for nine days.

More recently, a new technique developed by Fahy enabled the perfect preservation of a rabbit brain though vitrification and storage at -196. After rewarming, advanced 3D imaging revealed that the rabbits connectomethat is, the connections between neuronswas undisturbed.

Unfortunately, the chemicals used for the new technique are toxic, but the work does raise the hope of some future method that may achieve the same degree of preservation with more friendly substances.

That said, preserving structure does not necessarily preserve function. Our thoughts and memories are not just coded in the physical connections between neurons, but also in the strength of those connectionscoded somehow in the folding of proteins.

Thats why the most remarkable cryonics work to date may be that performed at Alcor in 2015, when scientists managed to glassify a tiny worm for two weeks, and thenreturn it to life with its memory intact.

Now, while the worm has only 302 neurons, you have more than 100 billion, and while the worm has 5,000 neuron-to-neuron connections you have at least 100 trillion. So theres some way to go, but theres certainly hope.

In Australia, a new not-for-profit,Southern Cryonics, is planning to open the first cryonics facility in the Southern Hemisphere.

Eventually, medicine will be able to keep people healthy indefinitely, Southern Cryonics spokesperson and secretary Matt Fisher tells me in a phonecall.

I want to see the other side of that transition. I want to live in a world where everyone can be healthy for as long as they want. And I want everyone I know and care about to have that opportunity as well.

To get Southern Cryonics off the ground, ten founding members have each put in A$50,000, entitling them to a cryonic preservation for themselves or a person of their choice. Given that the company is not-for-profit, Fisher has no financial incentive to campaign for it. He simply believes in it.

Id really like to see [cryonic preservation] become the most common choice for internment across Australia, he says.

Fisher admits there is no proof yet that cryopreservation works. The question is not about what is possible today, he says. Its about what may be possible in the future.

Cathal D. O'Connell is the Centre Manager, BioFab3D (St Vincent's Hospital), University of Melbourne.

Read more:

The Merger of Humans and Machines Has Already Begun - Newsweek

I'd expected to hear a lot of convincing arguments that would persuade me to sign up to have my body cryogenically frozen when I die, but proving that I'm more rational than Paris Hilton wasn't one of them.

"About ten years ago there was a rumor going around that she had signed up to have her body preserved, so my colleagues and I worried that perhaps Paris Hilton was more rational than us," says Anders Sandberg, a research fellow with the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. Sandberg is an expert on human "enhancement" who himself is signed up to be frozen one day.

On one level, of course, doing anything because Paris Hilton pressured you into it is a really bad idea, Sandberg admits. "But we humans are emotional beings, so the fact that some of our Oxford academic pride was wounded really did spurn us to bite the bullet."

As insane, or perhaps creepy, as it sounds, hundreds of people in the US are 'frozen,' stored in stainless steel chambers at a cozy -196C in liquid nitrogen. Their cases are checked daily while they're kept "in stasis," as cryonic believers call it, waiting until new medical technologies can cure or repair whatever ailed them, whether it be a heart attack, dementia, or perhaps even cancer. At the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale Arizona, 150 "patients" are frozen in time, and another 996 have signed up for the same fate.

The Cryonics Institute in Clinton township, Michigan holds a similar number150 humans, plus more than 100 pets. "Maybe the idea of reviving people who are cryogenically frozen sounds far-fetched, but in my field, you know that you can bring back the dead all the time," says Dennis Kowalski, a director at the Cyronics Institute who works as a paramedic by day. "I've been able to take a lot of what I learned from emergency medicine and integrate it into cryonics. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Death is a process, and we simply slow that process down. I like to say that we provide the ambulance to the hospital of the future."

Moreover, Sandberg points out, there are thousandsif not millionsof people alive today who were once frozen sperm or egg cells, or frozen embryos. "In a sense, those people were cryonically frozen, and yet they are today alive," he says. Moving up in size, scientists demonstrated last year that embryonic rabbit kidneys could be frozen, thawed, and grown into full-sized and fully functional organs, capable of transplant into living animals.

In the wild, Canadian wood frogs annually freeze solid, thanks to special proteins in their blood that act as a natural antifreeze and prevent the formation of ice crystals that would cause cell damageso it is theoretically possible for an entire body to be kept below freezing temperature and later revived. Cryonisists have already been replicating this strategy for decades: All preserved bodies are not technically "frozen," because all the blood is drained out the moment they legally die, and slowly replaced with a biological antifreeze (along with a cocktail of more than a dozen different drugs) that perfuses into the body and prevents ice crystals from forming and damaging cells. Hence why a body that would be a toasty 32C can be kept at -196C potentially indefinitely. But sperm, eggs, kidneys, and frogs are one thing. What about that most human of organs, the brain? There's no point in being revived if your memories, knowledge, and personality don't come with you.

Read the full story at Tonic.

Go here to read the rest:

The Creepy, Insane, and Undeniably Romantic World of Cryonics - VICE

Can technology help us to beat death?

ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY

The oldest surviving great work of literature tells the story of a Sumerian king, Gilgamesh, whose historical equivalent may have ruled the city of Uruk some time between 2800 and 2500 BC.

A hero of superhuman strength, Gilgamesh becomes instilled with existential dread after witnessing the death of his friend, and travels the Earth in search of a cure for mortality.

Twice the cure slips through his fingers and he learns the futility of fighting the common fate of man.

Transhumanism is the idea that we can transcend our biological limits, by merging with machines. The idea was popularised by the renowned technoprophet Ray Kurzweil (now a director of engineering at Google), who came to public attention in the 1990s with a string of astute predictions about technology.

In his 1990 book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT Press), Kurzweil predicted that a computer would beat the worlds best chess player by the year 2000. It happened in 1997.

He also foresaw the explosive growth of the internet, along with the advent of wearable technology, drone warfare and the automated translation of language. Kurzweils most famous prediction is what he calls the singularity the emergence of an artificial super-intelligence, triggering runaway technological growth which he foresees happening somewhere around 2045.

In some sense, the merger of humans and machines has already begun. Bionic implants, such as the cochlear implant, use electrical impulses orchestrated by computer chips to communicate with the brain, and so restore lost senses.

At St Vincents Hospital and the University of Melbourne, my colleagues are developing other ways to tap into neuronal activity, thereby giving people natural control of a robotic hand.

These cases involve sending simple signals between a piece of hardware and the brain. To truly merge minds and machines, however, we need some way to send thoughts and memories.

In 2011, scientists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles took the first step towards this when they implanted rats with a computer chip that worked as a kind of external hard drive for the brain.

First the rats learned a particular skill, pulling a sequence of levers to gain a reward. The silicon implant listened in as that new memory was encoded in the brains hippocampus region, and recorded the pattern of electrical signals it detected.

Next the rats were induced to forget the skill, by giving them a drug that impaired the hippocampus. The silicon implant then took over, firing a bunch of electrical signals to mimic the pattern it had recorded during training.

Amazingly, the rats remembered the skill the electrical signals from the chip were essentially replaying the memory, in a crude version of that scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves learns (downloads) kung-fu.

Again, the potential roadblock: the brain may be more different from a computer than people such as Kurzweil appreciate. As Nicolas Rougier, a computer scientist at Inria (the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation), argues, the brain itself needs the complex sensory input of the body in order to function properly.

Separate the brain from that input and things start to go awry pretty quickly. Hence sensory deprivation is used as a form of torture. Even if artificial intelligence is achieved, that does not mean our brains will be able to integrate with it.

Whatever happens at the singularity (if it ever occurs), Kurzweil, now aged 68, wants to be around to see it. His Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale Books, 2004) is a guidebook for extending life in the hope of seeing the longevity revolution. In it he details his dietary practices, and outlines some of the 200 supplements he takes daily.

Failing that, he has a plan B.

The central idea of cryonics is to preserve the body after death in the hope that, one day, future civilisations will have the ability (and the desire) to reanimate the dead.

Both Kurzweil and de Grey, along with about 1,500 others (including, apparently, Britney Spears), are signed up to be cryopreserved by Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.

Offhand, the idea seems crackpot. Even in daily experience, you know that freezing changes stuff: you can tell a strawberry thats been frozen. Taste, and especially texture, change unmistakably. The problem is that when the strawberry cells freeze, they fill with ice crystals. The ice rips them apart, essentially turning them to mush.

Thats why Alcor dont freeze you; they turn you to glass.

After you die, your body is drained of blood and replaced with a special cryogenic mixture of antifreeze and preservatives. When cooled, the liquid turns to a glassy state, but without forming dangerous crystals.

You are placed in a giant thermos flask of liquid nitrogen and cooled to -196, cold enough to effectively stop biological time. There you can stay without changing, for a year or a century, until science discovers the cure for whatever caused your demise.

People dont understand cryonics, says Alcor president Max More in a YouTube tour of his facility. They think its this strange thing we do to dead people, rather than understanding it really is an extension of emergency medicine.

The idea may not be as crackpot as it sounds. Similar cryopreservation techniques are already being used to preserve human embryos used in fertility treatments.

There are people walking around today who have been cryopreserved, More continues. They were just embryos at the time.

One proof of concept, of sorts, was reported by cryogenics expert Greg Fahy of 21st Century Medicine (a privately funded cryonics research lab) in 2009.

Fahys team removed a rabbit kidney, vitrified it, and reimplanted into the rabbit as its only working kidney. Amazingly, the rabbit survived, if only for nine days.

More recently, a new technique developed by Fahy enabled the perfect preservation of a rabbit brain though vitrification and storage at -196. After rewarming, advanced 3D imaging revealed that the rabbits connectome that is, the connections between neurons was undisturbed.

Unfortunately, the chemicals used for the new technique are toxic, but the work does raise the hope of some future method that may achieve the same degree of preservation with more friendly substances.

That said, preserving structure does not necessarily preserve function. Our thoughts and memories are not just coded in the physical connections between neurons, but also in the strength of those connections coded somehow in the folding of proteins.

Thats why the most remarkable cryonics work to date may be that performed at Alcor in 2015, when scientists managed to glassify a tiny worm for two weeks, and then return it to life with its memory intact.

Now, while the worm has only 302 neurons, you have more than 100 billion, and while the worm has 5,000 neuron-to-neuron connections you have at least 100 trillion. So theres some way to go, but theres certainly hope.

In Australia, a new not-for-profit, Southern Cryonics, is planning to open the first cryonics facility in the Southern Hemisphere.

Eventually, medicine will be able to keep people healthy indefinitely, Southern Cryonics spokesperson and secretary Matt Fisher tells me in a phonecall.

I want to see the other side of that transition. I want to live in a world where everyone can be healthy for as long as they want. And I want everyone I know and care about to have that opportunity as well.

To get Southern Cryonics off the ground, ten founding members have each put in A$50,000, entitling them to a cryonic preservation for themselves or a person of their choice. Given that the company is not-for-profit, Fisher has no financial incentive to campaign for it. He simply believes in it.

Id really like to see [cryonic preservation] become the most common choice for internment across Australia, he says.

Fisher admits there is no proof yet that cryopreservation works. The question is not about what is possible today, he says. Its about what may be possible in the future.

Cathal D. O'Connell, Centre Manager, BioFab3D (St Vincent's Hospital), University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation and republished here with permission. Read the original article.

This piece is republished with permission from Millenials Strike Back, the 56th edition of Griffith Review. Selected pieces consist of extracts, or long reads in which Generation Y writers address the issues that define and concern them.

More from Cosmos Conversation

View original post here:

Fighting the common fate of humans: to better life and beat death - Cosmos

Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero will undertake the first human head transplant later this year in China, the doctor told German magazineOoomin an article published Thursday. And, following that effort, he will revive a cryogenically frozen brain and transplant it into a donor body within the next three years.

The plans, completely disconnected from reality and the state of modern medicine, are at least in line with his previous outlandish goals and dubious animal research.

Canavero made headlines in the past few years by claiming that transplanting the whole head of a human onto a donor body is currently possible. A Russian man, suffering from a spinal muscular atrophy malady called Werdnig-Hoffmann Disease, even publicly volunteered for the procedure.

As proof that the transplant could work, Canavero published gruesome experiments in 2016, said to have repaired the severely injured spinal cords of mice, rats, and a dog. The experiments came complete with cringe-worthy video of recovering animals struggling to drag their limp bodies around. Yet, the study lacked controls, detailed methods, and data on the injuries and recoveries. Canavero claimed to perform a head transplant on a monkey but did not publish the experiment.

Mouse limping after experimental spinal cord repair.

Sergio Canavero giving a TEDX talk.

Sergio Canavero with his Chinese partner, Dr. Xiaoping Ren, who will lead the operation team onsite during an attempted head transplant procedure.

Experts decidedly consider his research on spinal cord repair, let alone whole head transplants, unconvincing. A medical ethicist dubbed Canavero out of his mind for sweeping past the currently insurmountable challenges of such feats. These include intricately repairing and reattaching thousands of delicate nerves and restoring function. Right now, doctors cant even convince the immune system to accept far simpler transplants consistently. Theres also the completely unknown effects of such a transplant on the powerful human psyche.

Canavero is carrying on, undeterred it seems. In his Ooom interview, he not only glided through the idea of successfully transplanting a head, he made an even more absurd claim: that he would revive a cryogenically frozen brain and transplant it into a donor body. Canavero said he would obtain a preserved brain from Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company located in Scottsdale, Arizona, according to Gizmodo.

There is currently no way to revive and molecularly repair a frozen human brain. And such transplants havent even been attempted in animals. Thus, the surgical procedure is decades if not centuries away.

As Gizmodo also reports, Alcor said that Canavera hadnt even contacted the company. It distanced itself from the doctor, as did other cryonics leaders, and noted that his efforts are not realistic or even a shared goal.

In a statement, the company said:

The Alcor Life Extension has had no contact with Dr. Canavero. It is not yet possible to revive human brains cryopreserved with present methods. Revival of todays cryonics patients will require future repair by highly advanced future technology, such as molecular nanotechnology. Technology that is advanced enough to repair a cryopreserved brain would by its nature also be able to regrow new tissues, organs, and a healthy body for the revived person. Therefore Alcor does not expect body donations or transplants to ever be necessary for revival of cryonics patients. Until advanced tissue regeneration technology is developed, we wish Dr. Canavero well in his development of body transplant surgery for living patients today who might benefit.

See original here:

Out of his mind surgeon plans human head transplant, revival of frozen brain - Ars Technica

Financial Times

The 'fortress' designed to help people live forever Financial Times Valentine was commissioned to design Timeship in 1997. He had just returned to New York, having worked on the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. He began attending meetings on cryonics because they seemed like cool gatherings. He met ...

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The 'fortress' designed to help people live forever - Financial Times

A peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance grips most people who talk about death. On one hand, death is awful: It is the most tragic fate that can befall somebody, murderers are the lowest of the low, and the death of a loved one, even an elderly loved one who has lived a long life, clogs us with sadness.

On the other hand, any intimation that we might wish to, I dont know, abolish death is met with deep suspicion. Everyones time comes eventually, I have been told. Or: Itd be unnatural any other way. Even: But would you really want to live forever?

Yes, actually. Yes I would. I have wanted to live forever for as long as I can remember. My instinctive response when asked why is, well, why not? Life is a self-evident good to me. Justifying that seems absurd dont you like happiness? And love? And experiencing things? Dont you like being alive? Peoples tendency to reply, Well yes, but and trail off, looking vaguely concerned for my mental wellbeing, continues to mystify me.

Like large swathes of secular ethics, I suspect that this hesitancy is, in some sense, a hangover from Christianity. Christians, of course, might reasonably shun the idea of earthly immortality, but the basic impulse underlying Christianitys doctrine of life and death that one must endure an imperfect and pious life on Earth before rejoicing in the eternity of the empyrean is the same one that motivates me. I just have less faith that death brings anything other than an ineffable and everlasting nothingness.

Immortality is no longer, however, as niche an aspiration as it was even five, ten years ago. Tad Friend recently published a (highly recommended) piece in The New Yorker that documents the recent anti-aging buzz that has overcome Silicon Valley. Iconoclastic tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, ever ahead of the zeitgeist, wrote in 2009 that he stand[s] against the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.

Since then, a steadily growing number of futurists have become interested in abolishing aging in one form or another. Donald Trump considered appointing Jim ONeill, a man who considers aging a disease to be overcome, to head the FDA, before, disappointingly, settling on the more establishment, Big Pharma-friendly Scott Gottlieb. Cryonics (freezing ones corpse in the hope that future technology may breathe life into it anew), once dismissed as mere science fiction, has slowly but surely gained popularity among Silicon Valleys elite. Futurist and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man unafraid of polemical positions (he once argued on utilitarian grounds that a single person being tortured for fifty years was preferable to a sufficiently large number of people getting dust specks in their eyes), wrote in a post on the website Less Wrong that If you dont sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent. Thinking about cryonics reminds me of an H.P. Lovecraft line from the fictional text The Necronomicon, an esoteric book filled with secrets so vast in their cosmic implications that readers are sent insane merely by reading it. One of the few lines that Lovecraft reveals from the book goes like so: That is not dead which can eternal lie,/And with strange aeons even death may die. Strange aeons indeed, but perhaps ones not so far away.

I find this exhilarating. The world especially outside of Silicon Valley is starved of the kind of grand projects that can inspire a nation. Something like the space race would be nigh-unthinkable today (just ask Newt Gingrich). Even political projects like the New Deal or the Great Society, whatever you think of their outcomes, had an idealistic flavor to them that neither side of mainstream politics except, arguably, parts of Trumpism and Sanders-esque social democracy is really willing to embrace anymore. The prospect of seizing a truly fundamental part of human destiny the inevitability of death and forging it into a shape that befits our will is intoxicating in its grandiosity.

I think that one day the idea that death was so readily embraced, and that there was resistance against a project to eliminate it, will be incomprehensible to people. Life, and as much life as possible, will simply be taken for granted as a wonderful thing. Perhaps thats naive of me.

Tell you what, if Im still wrong in a thousand years, Ill write an apology column.

Contact Sam Wolfe at swolfe2 at stanford.edu.

Original post:

The technologist's stone - The Stanford Daily

When Philip Rhoades' parents died he put their brains on ice. Journalist SHERELE MOODY finds out what he plans to do with his own body after death.

IN an ideal world, Philip Rhoades will die peacefully and pain-free, his body will be put on ice and he will be brought back to life in a time when illness does not exist and people live forever.

And when he does come back, the cryonics expert will have his deceased mum and dad for company.

After Gerald and Dorothy Rhoades died in May of 2016, Philip placed their brains in a commercial cryogenic facility - the kind that stores animal semen for artificial insemination and human eggs for IVF.

Philip froze his parents' brains because it only costs about $35,000 to keep each organ for perpetuity compared to $200,000 each to have their bodies frozen, transported and stored in cryonics facilities overseas.

"The key thing is being able to download the information in the brain," Philip said of keeping his mum and dad's neurological remains on ice.

"In the case of a neural archive, we're not concerned about reviving the body's cells, we're concerned with the neural architecture that has the information in it.

"It's likely that we will be able to in the next 10 or 20 years be able to extract that information with high-resolution brain scans.

"We'd then dump the information into a super computer."

When a cryonics candidate dies, a team of medical experts prepares them for transport to a storage facility by stabilising their body, packing it with ice, lacing the blood with an anti-coagulant and feeding oxygen to the brain.

When the body arrives at its final destination the blood is drained and the water in the cells is replaced by a liquid "anti-freeze" that ensures the organs and tissues do not shatter when ice crystals form during the freezing process.

The body is then cooled by dry ice to minus 130 degrees before being placed in a protective body bag and lowered, head first, into a metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen that is kept at minus 196 degrees.

Bodies are stored upside down to ensure the brains are the last thing to thaw if the tank leaks.

While Philip could only afford to freeze his parents' brains, he hopes to have his entire body put on ice for re-animation "as soon as possible" but he acknowledged he could be waiting around for quite a while.

"Trying to revive a whole human being is a difficult operation," he said of the process that some scientists say won't work because of the damage extreme temperatures cause to human cells.

"If you're getting a cryonic suspension then the intention is that modern scientific technology will allow the body to be thawed out, completely revived and rejuvenated so you look like you're 25 and you feel like you're 25 again.

"Life is too short - it shouldn't be three score and 10 years, it should be thousands of years."

Philip hopes he does not get Alzheimer's disease like his father had in the years before he died.

If he does end up with the same illness, Philip is considering what he calls "pre-mortal suspension" before the dementia renders him unable to make his own decisions.

His plan is to end his own life while connected to machinery that will prepare his body for the cryonics process.

Philip is currently working on a way to remove the need for human intervention when he dies and the process of initiating the cryonic state because of the potential legal implications for anyone seen to be assisting in his death.

"It will involve technology that will drain my blood, undertake the automatic perfusion and all of that," Philip said.

- ARM NEWSDESK

Read the original here:

Brains on ice: The Aussie man planning to live forever - Northern Star