Life, achieved the right to cryogenic freezing of her body. The girl had to go to court because her parents could not agree on what to do with her remains after death. The news caused a public outcry not only in Britain, but also in Russia. Meanwhile, in our country, more than five dozen people have already been frozen - without a fuss in the press. They signed contracts in the hope that medicine will someday reach such a level that they will be revived and cured.

51 people have been frozen, and more than 200 contracts have been concluded on freezing for the future, ”Valeria Udalova, co-founder and general director of KrioRus, told Life. - Many contracts are concluded before operations. For example, a client says: "My mom with stage 4 cancer is preparing for surgery, we want to cryopreserve in case of death." But then my mother survives - and since April we have had 10 people like that in a row. So the contracts remain for the future.

According to Victoria Udalova, about half of those frozen died from cancer.

I think that in 40 years there will already be such medicines in the world that can save these people, ”she says.

Among the clients are not only Russians, but also citizens of Australia, Holland, Italy, Ukraine and other countries.

Freezing an adult costs 36 thousand dollars in our country. Plus, there may be additional costs, for example, transportation of the body.

We have an endless contract, - says Victoria Udalova. “But we believe that neither such prices, nor higher ones will still be able to recoup our costs, so we are developing a parallel business. Now we have an IT business, and more than one. In general, we started all this for a great cause, not for profit.

Also, about 20 private investors are ready to provide support to the company.

These are fairly small investors, they are ready to allocate 50 thousand dollars each - about the same amount, - says Victoria. - Now we are thinking how to work with them. Basically, they themselves want to be cryopreserved in the future, a very small part of them would like to receive some kind of income from cooperation with us in the future. On the whole, we have grown ourselves practically without investment.

As Victoria said, for future revival, "it is best to store a frozen person at minus 130 degrees." But until recently, people were frozen to minus 196 degrees and below. Freezing is done either with liquid nitrogen vapor or with the help of other special liquids. Now the tanks where the frozen ones are stored look like "huge thermoses".

In the future, these will be such rooms where people enter in spacesuits, and there their beautiful friends and relatives lie, - said Victoria.

The KrioRus company also freezes domestic animals at the request of their owners: dogs, cats, birds and even chinchillas.

Now about 20 animals have been cryopreserved, their owners loved them very much, - said Victoria.

According to her, most doctors are skeptical about cryofreezing and the possibility of revitalization.

The skeptics are mostly elderly doctors, and the younger ones are increasingly being treated well, she said.

There is no evidence that it is possible to revive a person whose body was frozen after an officially registered death. However, there is a letter in support of cryofreezing, signed by 69 scientists. O Official medicine, in exceptional cases, such a method as deliberately lowering body temperature.

As previously reported, KrioRus is one of three companies in the world that provide a full cycle of cryofreezing (the other two operate in the USA). According to the SPARK-Interfax database, revenue for 2015 amounted to 2.5 million rubles, net profit - 56 thousand rubles.

Image copyright Thinkstock

Max More ordered to freeze his brain after death, and he is not alone. The reporter asked him why he made this decision, and tried to figure out how the process of cryopreservation of the human body works.

In 1972, Max More watched the children's science fiction television show Time Slip, in which the characters were frozen in ice. Then he did not pay much attention to this, and remembered about the transfer much later, when he began to discuss the technologies of the future at meetings with friends. "They subscribed to Cryonics magazine and started asking me about this to assess how savvy I was as a futurist. And for me, everything immediately fell into place."

Mohr is now President and CEO of Alcor, one of the world's largest cryonics companies. He himself has been a participant in the posthumous freezing program since 1986, when he chose neuroconservation, in which only the brain is preserved, and not the whole body. “The future, it seems to me, will be good, so I would like to be in it. I want to continue to live, enjoy life and create,” explains More.

Cryopreservation is one of the favorite skates of futurists. The concept is simple: medicine is constantly improving. In the future, people may learn to cure diseases that are now incurable. Cryonics allows us to overcome the annoying gap between the medical technologies of today and tomorrow.

“We see our work as a kind of emergency, - says More. - We step in when modern medicine gives up. would be examined, decided that he was dead, and that's all. Now we do not do that - we begin to provide assistance. People who would have been immediately considered dead 50 years ago, as we now know, were actually still amenable to treatment. cryonics is somewhat similar. We just need to stop the process of deterioration and allow the problem to be solved with the help of more advanced technologies of the future. "

Of course, the concept of cryonics is essentially impossible to test. No one has ever tried to revive a person frozen with this technology. Researchers working on the study of suspended animation have found that a living creature can be cooled to almost death and then successfully revived.

Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Futurists love to talk about how any disease can be cured in the future. And for this it is worth freezing yourself ...

But freezing for decades is a completely different matter. Mohr points to studies that have examined the preservation of cells, tissues, and even whole worms, but applying this experience to the human body is not an easy task. Nevertheless, regardless of what stage science is now at, there are already those who want to freeze their bodies in liquid nitrogen in the hope of seeing the distant future.

Death plan

Alcor's customers live all over the world. In an ideal scenario, Mohr explains, the firm has some idea of ​​when the customer will die. Alcor monitors customers who are in poor health and when it looks like their time is about to come, the company sends out a “waiting group”. Its task is clear from the name - to wait at the deathbed. “Hours or days can pass. Once the group was on standby for three weeks,” says Max More.

Image copyright Alcor Image caption Surgeons are always ready to proceed with the necessary procedures - you only need to pay (photo - Alcor)

As soon as the client is declared dead, cryopreservation can begin - and then the work begins to boil. To begin with, the waiting group moves the body from the bed to the ice bed and covers it with a layer of ice crumbs. Alcor then uses a "cardiopulmonary resuscitator" that restores blood circulation. After that, 16 different drugs are injected into the body to prevent the destruction of cells in the body.

The company's website explains: "Since our customers are legally dead, Alcor can use technologies not yet approved for use in traditional medicine."

When the body has cooled down and all the necessary drugs have been injected, it is moved to the operating room. Next, it is necessary to remove blood and other liquids from the client's body as thoroughly as possible, replacing them with a solution in which crystals do not form during freezing (such a liquid is used to preserve organs during transplantation).

Image copyright Alcor Image caption In such an operating room, everything happens (photo - Alcor)

The surgeon opens the chest to gain access to the main blood vessels, connects them to a flushing system - and the blood is replaced with medical antifreeze. Since the client will be stored in a deep-frozen state, it is very important to avoid the formation of ice crystals in the cells of the client's body.

After filling the vessels with antifreeze, the company begins to gradually, by degrees per hour, cooling the body. After about two weeks, his temperature reaches minus 196 degrees. Finally, the client is placed in his last habitat for the foreseeable future - upside down in the refrigerator, often in the company of three others.

This is the perfect scenario. But sometimes everything does not go according to plan - if the client did not notify Alcor about the illness or died suddenly, then the freezing process can be postponed for several hours or days.

Image copyright Alcor Image caption This is where the client is placed - upside down and often in the company of three others (photo - Alcor)

A customer recently committed suicide and Alcor personnel had to negotiate access to the body with the police and the coroner. Mor explains: the more time passes between death and freezing, the more the cells will have time to decompose and the patient will subsequently be more difficult to revive and heal.

It looks like there is a lot of risk in this whole process, and the prospects are dim. Mor readily admits that cryonics does not provide guarantees: "We cannot be sure of anything, any overlaps are possible."

There is nothing attractive about swimming in a tank of liquid nitrogen when nothing depends on you. But it's better than becoming food for worms Max More

For now, Alcor and others like it are basically just storing a lot of dead bodies in liquid nitrogen. But the specialist notes that cryonics has an important difference from other futuristic disciplines. "Tissue repair does not go against the basic laws of physics. This is not a time machine for you," says More.

Tissue repair technologies are constantly being improved. But so far no one knows when it will be possible to reanimate the frozen dead, and whether this is possible in principle. If Mora is nevertheless backed up with the question of when, in his opinion, medicine will be able to revive his clients, then he reluctantly gives an estimate of 50-100 years. With a proviso: "But in reality, you can't guess. We probably don't even imagine now what technology will be used for recovery."

Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Do you want to cheat the time? Freeze it?

To date, 984 clients have agreed to cryopreservation with Alcor. They pay an annual fee of $ 770, and when freezing time comes, the price can range from $ 80,000 for brain cryopreservation to $ 200,000 for full body preservation.

Some of this money, Moore said, goes into a trust fund that pays for the operation of the plant and the long-term storage of the bodies. The head of the firm also notes that many clients take insurance, which includes payment for posthumous cryopreservation. "This is not a whim for the rich. Anyone who is able to buy an insurance policy can afford it," says Max More.

Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption However, there is a risk of being the snow queen forever.

According to him, most clients do not really want to think about the cryopreservation process itself, but they consider it an inevitable evil. “We don’t want to be kept in the cold, in fact, this idea turns us back. There is nothing attractive about floating in a tank of liquid nitrogen when nothing depends on you. But it’s better than being food of worms or turning to ash - such alternatives are certainly not good for anything, "concludes Mor.

Would you voluntarily go for cryopreservation? Write to us.

There are more and more people who want their bodies to be frozen after death. These are mainly those who suffer from incurable diseases - they hope that in the future doctors will learn how to cope with them. In addition, cryopreservation is of interest to people who want to live forever - they plan that in the future they will be defrosted and they will live forever.

More recently, it became known about a 14-year-old British woman suffering from terminal cancer. Shortly before her death, the girl wished that her body would undergo cryopreservation after death. The mother supported the daughter's decision, but the father was against it.

As a result, the body was still frozen: the right to do so was obtained through the courts. The girl received permission to freeze shortly before her death. After she died, the body was shipped to the United States, where it will be stored until it is time to thaw it.

Frozen

It may seem that cryopreservation has become popular only in recent years, but this is not the case. The first patient whose body was frozen was James Bedford. This happened back in 1967.

Now this "cryopatient" is at the Cryonics Institute in the US state of Michigan. This institute was founded by Robert Ettinger, who is considered the pioneer of cryonics. Ettinger died in 2011 at the age of 92 and his body was of course frozen and stored at the Institute.

Freezing and storage services are offered by several commercial organizations. Alcor is perhaps one of the largest. About a thousand people expect their bodies to be frozen after death - they pay $ 770 for such an annual membership. Freezing itself will not be cheap: cryopreservation of the brain will cost 80 thousand dollars, and freezing the whole body will cost 200 thousand.

How it works?

During cryopreservation, the body is first cooled to the freezing point of water, the blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant. Freeze the body gently, as it is important to prevent the formation of ice crystals that can damage tissues. After that, the body is cooled to -130 degrees and placed in liquid nitrogen, where it should be stored until it is time to defrost it.

How defrosting will be carried out is not yet clear. The technology of freezing and long-term storage is already used in medicine: in this way, for example, male and female germ cells and embryos are stored at an early stage of development. They are quite successfully thawed and used. So far, no one has succeeded in unfreezing a human (or other large mammal) entirely.

Is it possible?

Many are skeptical about the very idea of ​​cryopreservation. Even representatives of the freezing and storage services company Alcor admit that no one can guarantee the future and now they have no idea what technology will be used to "revive" patients.

It is also unclear how perfect the freezing technology itself is and whether cryoprotectants actually help avoid crystal formation and prevent tissue damage. A special problem is freezing and subsequent thawing of the brain, in which it is important not to damage its most complex structure, because it is the brain that is responsible for thinking, memory and much more. Chances are high that the revived patient will completely lose all of their memories. The opinion is expressed that the freezing process can damage the DNA structure and therefore it is completely unclear how the organism will function if it can suddenly be revived.

In general, while most scientists do not recognize cryonics as a science, and those who are engaged in cryopreservation are considered swindlers. Research in this area, however, is underway and, who knows, maybe in the future it will really be possible to revive someone from those whose bodies are now in deep freeze.

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Under cryonics understand the technology of deep freezing of a living organism for the purpose of its subsequent defrosting and revitalization, if necessary, to cure diseases.

In particular, thanks to cryonics, wealthy patients with fatal diseases today hope to live to a brighter future, when they can be thawed and healed.

While this all sounds like science fiction, cryonics has a bright future and is already showing significant success.

Nevertheless, nowadays, freezing a person is irreversible - the return to life has not yet been worked out, and it is not clear whether this will be possible.

The roots of the idea

The idea of ​​freezing and thawing people has been present in popular culture for a very long time.

Back in the 1960s, American physics teacher Robert Ettinger, author of the book Perspectives of Immortality, presented the idea of ​​cryonics to the general public. In 1976, he also founded the first institute dealing with this unusual scientific problem.

In his book, Ettinger argued for the need to freeze terminally ill people in order to revive and cure them in the future. In this way, it would be possible to bring a practically dead person back to life, if not a dead person at all.

Cryonics in 2016

Nowadays, this is a very serious scientific field in which millions of dollars are invested and which is in the focus of attention of powerful people.

There is a small circle of officially registered cryonics companies that offer clients, their relatives and pets the Ettinger immortality perspective.

For a lot of money, of course. One of the largest cryonics companies in the United States offers such a procedure for $ 200,000, plus an annual fee.

There are only four companies in the world that are able to freeze the bodies of people with the prospect of revitalization in the future. Three of them work in the States, and the fourth in our country, in Russia (KrioRus). It is reported that a new cryonics company in Australia will be able to accept its first clients this year.

As of 2015, 250 people were frozen, and about 1,500 more were on the waiting list.

How it works?

In an ideal world, a cryonics company would have access to a client's body immediately after cardiac arrest, while their brain is still alive.

This will "restart" the heart and lungs, although the person is in a state of clinical death.

Upon delivery to the company, the client's body temperature is lowered to 0 ° C using an ice bath, although breathing and heartbeat are artificially maintained. To prevent blood clots, heparin is administered, and with it a number of other necessary drugs.

Then the blood is completely removed from the body, and the vascular bed is filled with cryoprotectants - substances that protect cells from damage caused by deep cold. This is necessary for vitrification, or glass transition.

After the introduction of cryoprotectants, the temperature is lowered to -130 ° C with nitrogen. And in this state it should remain until the onset of a bright future.

The technology of deep freezing without tissue damage is relatively safe and has been worked out in living organisms for decades. But, of course, this is only half the way: thawing and reviving humans and large animals is still problematic.

Anti-cryonics rhetoric

Cryonics among the scientific community has never been bathed in glory, and in the 1970s its already weak authority was hit hard.

The Cryonics Society of California, led by former TV master Robert Nelson, made headlines at the time.

Nelson's organization, for lack of money and inability to maintain the life support of the bodies, unceremoniously unfrozen and threw out nine of its clients. The scandal then turned out to be grandiose.

But the problem does not even lie in this plane.

The problem is the practical feasibility of the plans. Most scientists and medical professionals are still skeptical about the idea of ​​cryonics.

Renowned neuroscience expert Michael Hendricks said of cryonics: “This is a false hope for the definitely impossible manipulation of dead tissue offered by the cryonics industry. Those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt. "

Despite the lack of much support from the "official" science, cryonics continues to grab the attention of society and excite the minds of those who want to believe in the possibility of immortality. And, I must say, the latest advances in cryonics reinforce this belief.

Rats of Lazarus

Today, the concept of death is very different from what the ancients were guided by.

A person is dead when his brain died, not when his heart stopped beating.

But even this cannot be considered a point in the question. Back in 1955, James Lovelock chilled the body of rats below 0 ° C, until the complete cessation of brain activity. The most amazing thing is that after that he managed to revive the animals.

"Thawed" pigs

And more recently, an amazing experiment was carried out with the cooling of the body of pigs.

In 2006, animals were put into deep hypothermia (10 ° C) for 60 minutes, after which most were successfully brought back to life.

Four years earlier, scientists injected a high-potassium solution cooled to 4 ° C into the aorta of Yorkshire pigs and revived them. The learning ability of the thawed pigs was not impaired and this was confirmed by tests.

Ice bath in traumatology

In 2015, UPMC Presbyterian Hospital (Pittsburgh, USA) introduced a revolutionary treatment for patients with severe injuries, including gunshot and stab wounds.

The bottom line is this: the team of doctors quickly replaces the patient's blood with chilled saline, causing an almost complete stop of cellular activity, including the work of the brain.

At low temperatures, oxygen consumption decreases, so the brain tissue can live in this state much longer.

This condition is called induced hypothermia. It gives surgeons more time for surgery, after which the blood is returned back to the vascular system, and the patient is resuscitated using traditional means.

Miraculous survival

In real life, there are situations when people drowning in icy water miraculously survive.

The literature describes the reliable fact of the survival of a girl who was completely immersed in ice water for 66 minutes. After an hour under water, the doctors had nothing to do, but in this case, the girl was able to reanimate. Moreover, her personality and memories were not affected.

And this is not the only case when, thanks to the cold, a person “survived clinical death”. In 1999, 29-year-old Anna Begenholm spent 80 minutes in an ice trap after a skiing accident. Her body temperature dropped to 13.7 ° C, but the woman not only survived, but also fully recovered.

Such cases gave rise to the saying among American paramedics "Nobody is dead until warm and dead" (literally - Nobody died until he was dead and warm). In practice, this means that people with prolonged cardiac arrest and hypothermia must be persistently resuscitated.

And the brain is whole!

In early 2016, 21CM decided to conduct a deep-freeze rabbit brain experiment.

We are talking about a temperature of -135 ° C, which was achieved thanks to aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. This, it would seem, is nothing new, but for the first time in history, researchers thawed the brain without damage.

The team returned the brain to room temperature and examined its structure under an electron microscope, finding no visible abnormalities in cellular structure.

It was at this moment that cryonics from science fiction turned into a distant, but still real perspective of medicine.

On the other hand, doctors have long been using frozen human eggs, sperm and embryos, which are perfectly preserved and give rise to a new life after many years.

Cryonics technical issues

Freezing and then revitalizing a cell is not easy, experts say.

During the thawing process, numerous problems arise that modern science is unable to solve.

In every large organ, such as the human kidney, there are many zones that require different conditions to preserve their structure. For this, it is planned to use vitrification, which already allows the preservation of the rabbit kidney, but the human kidney is still a long way off.

Another problem is that frozen human tissue becomes fragile and can simply break.

Although vitrification solves this problem at the cellular level, vitrified human flesh is still fragile, and scientists cannot do anything about it.

Be that as it may, the concept itself has a right to exist. Another thing is that many years will pass before scientists can unfreeze a person without consequences for his body and brain.