The Brain on Ice

Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 35 (2004) 391–413 www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc

Technologies of immortality: the brain on ice

Bronwyn Parry

King’s College, Cambridge CB2 1ST, UK

Abstract

One of the first envatted brains, the most cyborgian element of J. D. Bernal’s 1929 futuristic manifesto, The world, the flesh and the the devil, proposed atechnologicalsolution to the dreary certainty of mortality. In Bernal’s scenario the brain is maintained in an ‘out of body’ but ‘like-body’ environment—in a bath of cerebral–spinal fluid held at constant body temperature. In reality, acquiring prospective immortality requires access to very different technologies—those that allow human organs and tissues to be preserved in a quite ‘inhuman’ life-world—the cryogenic storage chamber. Like Bernal, today’s cryonicists consider that immortality can be secured through preservation of the brain alone. In this article I trace attempts to preserve or suspend life, and especially brain function, through the application of new ‘technologies of immortality’. Drawing together historical information on the development of refrigeration, cryopreservation, transplantation, and nanotechnologies, I explore the uneasy relationship between cryonics and the technology on which it depends for its success—cryogenics. In so doing, I argue that the ability to successfully realize the science fiction fantasy of human immortality will rest on a moral and scientific parasitism: the capacity to use the biotechnological artifacts or proxies—cryogenically preserved brains, archived brains, tissues, and immortalized cell lines—derived from the dead, in order to prolong life. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Cryonics; Cryogenics; Transplantation; Immortality; Nanotechnology; Brains

1. Introduction

The science ﬁction scenario of the disembodied brain in a vat had its genesis in a futuristic treatise, published in the 1920s by the visionary Marxist, physicist, and mathematician John Desmond Bernal. Bernal is now renowned primarily for the pioneering research he undertook in the ﬁeld of x-ray crystallography—the study

E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Parry).

1369-8486/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2004.03.012 392 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 of the arrangement of atoms within crystals through the application of the technique of x-ray photographic analysis. Bernal recognized and demonstrated the enormous potential that this technique had for the study not only of crystals, but of the composition of a range of other molecular compounds, both organic and inorganic. Pursuing this research at Cambridge and later Birkbeck, Bernal went from studying the structure of graphite to investigating the composition of biological molecules, such as proteins and viruses, seminal work that was to culminate in his provision of the first definitive analysis of the tobacco mosaic virus. This feat is now widely considered to have provided the foundation for modern molecular biology. His research, as he noted, made it possible to ‘link crystallography to biology on the one hand and technology on the other’.1 Considered by many a true polymath, Bernal himself confessed that in the whole field of thought he had ‘no one supreme interest’, but rather found himself ‘fasci- nated wherever I look’.2 He refused to confine his intellect to applied scientific research, but extended his investigations to include analyses of political, economic, and sociological phenomena. An avid futurist and highly respected historian and philosopher of science, Bernal devoted considerable energies to predicting and analyzing how new scientific developments might transform societal and human relations. He became particularly engrossed by the possibility of fusing body and machine in order to create rudimentary cyborgian entities with enhanced motor and intellectual capabilities. A child of precocious intellect, Bernal displayed an early fascination with empiri- cal research, conducting an experiment on projection at the age of six, involving books and a lantern, which produced few verifiable results but reportedly came close to setting the house on fire. A year later, whilst trying to manufacture hydrogen, he succeeded in producing alargedomestic explosion. 3 This early exposure to the physics of detonation was to stand Bernal in good stead in later life when he went on to conduct wartime experiments with the physiologist Solly Zuckerman on the force of explosions. Bernal, Zuckerman, and later John Kendrew tested their theories about blast injury by exposing themselves to explosions in slit tren- ches, an experiment that nearly went fatally wrong for Kendrew (the 1962 Nobel Prize winner) after Bernal misplaced a decimal point on his slide rule.4 Bernal’s desire to create more robust, engineered beings (he was, along with Hal- dane, among the first to propose the idea of genetic engineering), his applied knowledge of molecular structure, growth, decay, and repair, and his near-death experiences, combined to engender in him alifelong pre-occupationwith methods for securing human immortality. In his 1929 treatise The world, the flesh and the devil, Bernal sets out a conundrum: even if, in a future world, science created a ‘perfect’ man, living perhaps ‘an average of one hundred and twenty years’, he

1 J. D Bernal quoted in Brown (1999), p. 44. 2 Reported in Hodgkin (1980), p. 23. 3 Goldsmith (1980), pp. 15–23. 4 Brown (1999), p. 44. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 393 would nonetheless continue to be dogged by the inevitability of his own mortality. Whether he happened, perchance, to ‘break his neck in a super-civilized accident’ or simply find his body cells ‘worn beyond repair’, the outcome is drearily consistent. Life is impeded by an unreliable, wholly mortal, inexorably degenerating body. Faced with imminent extinction, Bernal’s protagonist must consider radical options—to ‘abandon either his body or his life’.5 That these options are not homologous is explained by reference to Bernal’s belief that it is, as he puts it, ‘the brain that counts’—that to have a brain ‘suffused by fresh and correctly prescribed blood, is to be alive, to think’.6 With the brain reified as the seat of action and identity, a fantastical remedy presented itself to Bernal: one that could simultaneously address what he saw as two of the most complex and seemingly insurmountable shortcomings of the human subject—our mortality and our inability to be readily ‘engineered-up’/upgraded—or ‘moder- nized’.7 In Bernal’s view, the mental capacity required by humankind to deal with the increasingly complex environments of the future would be so great that it would require much more complex sensory and motor organization—in fact, an altogether more sophisticated cerebral mechanism than that currently possessed by the species. Bernal proposes that the acquisition of immortality and the renovation of the human brain could together be achieved through one audacious technological intervention—the surgical removal of the brain and its relocation to a like-body, but out of body environment. This artificial environment is described by Bernal in some detail: he envisages the new housing as ‘a short cylinder, ... [inside of which] and supported very carefully to prevent shock is the brain with its nerve connections, immersed in a liquid of the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid, kept circulating over it at a uniform temperature’. The brain is then carefully connected up to an elaborate external life support system, such that it is ‘guaranteed continuous awareness’.8 Once stabilized, the project of enhancement begins. The brain is pro- gressively endowed with a variety of auxiliary televisual, sensory and motor mechanisms, grafted on to the existing whole in order to create a cyborgian u¨ber- brain that might, in time, be networked to others to produce a dual or multiple organism with a compound brain that could continue to exist for ‘perhaps a thousand years—[or at least] as long as the brain cells might be persuaded to live in [this] favorable environment’.9 As fanciful as these more extreme imaginings now seem, the fantasy of securing immortality through the application of increasingly sophisticated, futuristic technologies has exercised a strong hold on the human imagination in the twentieth century. The notion of extending life by extracting the brain and preserving it in an artificial environment has had a particular resonance. In Bernal’s scenario, the

5 Bernal (1929), pp. 42–43. 6 Ibid., p. 43. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 9 Ibid., p. 53. 394 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 extracted brain is maintained in an out of body, but like-body environment—it languishes in a tank of cerebral–spinal fluid. In reality, however, this science fiction had its preliminary realization in post-war California through the application of a somewhat different set of technologies: those that allow human organs and tissues to be preserved in a quite inhuman life-world, not in a warm environment but in a cold one—the cryogenic storage chamber. In this paper I abandon the warmth of Bernal’s vat for the chill of the deep freeze in order to explore some contemporary incarnations of Bernal’s search for technologically secured forms of immortality. Cryonics, the practice of deep-freezing the bodies of people who have died with the view to reviving them at some future time when new technologies offer a cure for their condition was a proposition, and later, a set of techniques first actively developed in California in the mid 1960s by Robert Ettinger.10 Cryonicists have hailed the procedure as one that affords both a ‘non-final resting place for some of the brightest people on the planet and an audacious symbol of what might be the most optimistic ideain humanhistory’. 11 The costs of whole body suspension are such, however, that attention inevitably came to be focused on the issue of how much, or rather how little, of the body need be preserved in order to successfully resuscitate the patient, indeed, of what, at a minimum, might constitute ‘a patient’. Subscribing unreservedly to Bernal’s essentialist thesis that the brain may effec- tively stand in for the whole being, cryonic practitioners argue that ‘our memories, personalities and most other critical parts of our identities are in our brains’12 [their italics] and that the retention and preservation of self may therefore be secured through the long-term maintenance of that one organ—a procedure known as neuro-suspension or neuro-preservation. After the brain is perfused with glycerol or other cryoprotectants, a ‘cephalic isolation’ (a decapitation to you and me) is performed with a sterilized panel saw and the severed head is placed in a small ‘dewar’ or cryogenic storage container, where it is preserved in liquid nitrogen, until the date of resuscitation. The brain is, at this point, unequivocally, in a vat (see Fig. 1). The ultimate aim of this exercise is not simply to revive the brain in its existing condition. Cryonicists also share Bernal’s desire to enhance cerebral performance and longevity through the application of radical new technologies. As representa- tives of various cryonic organizations suggest, cryopreservation is primarily a tool for preventing bodily decay until new techniques for molecular level repair and enhancement, such as nanotechnology and cloning, mature. It is envisaged that these technologies may then be employed not only to renovate, but also to aug- ment the existing faculties of the subject, completing the project of age-reversal and life extension. In the chimerical world of the cryonics community, it is imagined that revivification, when it occurs, will take place in stages. In offering an account of this process, Steven Bridge, the President of the Alcor Foundation, one of

10 Ettinger (1965). 11 Bridge (1995),p.1. 12 Ibid., p. 2. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 395

Fig. 1. The brain in a vat: a cryopreserved head stored in a small dewar or cryonic storage tank (cour- tesy of the Alcor Foundation).

America’s largest cryonic facilities addresses his clients’ all too Putnamesque anxi- eties by posing the question ‘so, are we planning to revive neurosuspension patients as ‘heads on a plate’, with tubing and wires sticking out?’13

13 Ibid., p. 3. 396 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413

The answer is no, although it is suggested that once thawed and repaired the ‘newly healed brain’ of a cryonics patient might remain, for a brief interregnum at least, ‘suspended in the fluid of a 22nd-century ‘‘artificial womb’’’,14 presumably a tank of archetypical Bernalian constitution and proportion. It is anticipated that the brain would remain there only for as long as it then takes to ‘clone up’ a new and youthful body to which it might be re-attached. Future medicine, cryonicists suggest, will have ‘vast and general capabilities for tissue repair and regener- ation’. They argue that the healing of spinal injuries and re-growth of lost limbs and organs will be ‘relatively simple for a technology with detailed understanding and control of gene expression’.15 The challenge of repairing a brain with extensive microscopic freezing injury will, they acknowledge, prove to be ‘a much more formidable task’. Undeterred by the sheer complexity, if not the potential impracti- cability of this exercise, they maintain that ‘by the time medicine is able to repair this kind of injury, growing a healthy new body will be easy by comparison’ ... ‘genetic reprogramming of a single cell on the surface of [the] brain will begin a process of growth and development that perhaps a year later [will] append to the brain a complete young adult body’.16 The eccentricity, not to mention the profound narcissism, of such conceptions has served to ensure that cryonics remains, along with the Raelians and Clonaid, high on the list of the world’s most deliciously ridiculed quasi-scientific enterprises (see Fig. 2). This is unfortunate, if only in that it has by association also acted to denigrate or obscure the crucial role played in medical research by the technologies and techniques upon which it rests for its potential success: cryogenics. Unlike cryonics, in which a single individual’s prospective immortality is secured through the preservation of their whole body or sizeable part thereof, cryogenic research in the medical sciences has been characterised by a collective, and arguably more democratic, approach to the acquisition of immortality. Those who work in cryogenic research eschew the holism that has characterised the cryonicists’ approach to the human body, preferring to engage with it not as a unique, indissoluble, private entity but rather as a reservoir of tissues and ultimately molecular resources that might be archived for research purposes. Where in cryonics custodial efforts are directed towards preserving a body or brain in order to facilitate the resurrection of an individual, cryogenic research is characterised by a somewhat more altruistic set of practices. Here, tissues are given to the care of custodian-technicians so that they might be used, not for the exclusive benefit of the donors who, unlike their cryonic counterparts, are irretrievably dead, but rather for the collective benefit of all those human beings whose quality of life and longevity is now, or may in the future, be seriously impaired by degenerative diseases.

14 Cryocare.org. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 397

Fig. 2. Akbar and Jeﬀ’s Cryonics Hut. (From The big book of Hell #1990 by Matt Groening. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. NYC.) 398 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413

Some of these donors, it could be argued, acquire through their actions an altogether more fragmentary though no less meaningful form of eternity. Their cells and tissues are ‘immortalized’ through cryo-preservation for use in the development of radical new regenerative techniques. Donated whole brains, and tissues sourced from them, have proven to be particularly important in this enterprise, providing an essential resource for research into conditions that afflict the ageing, such as Alzheimer’s, neurological decline, and degenerative disease. It is surely ironic that the cryonicists’ only hope for resurrection will rest on the beneficence of those many donors who have contributed their bodies and organs to create collections of cryogenically stored tissues, cell lines, and extracted DNA without which research into life-threatening diseases could not proceed. Although cryonicists themselves promote their project as a futuristic one, attempts to preserve, suspend, or extend life through the application of techniques of cryo-preservation have a long history, although not one that has been well documented. Here I attempt to remedy this by sketching out something of this history through an analysis of early observations of the effects of cold on biological matter and the development of refrigeration and the applied physics of ultra low temperature storage. I then turn to consider how cryogenic technologies have facilitated research into the preservation of mammalian cells tissues and bodies, the project of transplantation, and more recently, stem cell research and nanotechnologies. In so doing, I draw out the central tension that exists between cryonics and cryogenics: that the ability to successfully realise the science fiction fantasy of human immortality will rest on a moral and scientific parasitism: the capacity to use the biotechnological artifacts or proxies—cryogenically preserved brains, archived brains, and tissues and ‘immortalised’ cell lines derived from the dead in order to prolong life.

2. The race to absolute zero

The ability to preserve biological materials so that they might remain available for future investigation has long been a concern of natural philosophy. As Robert Boyle noted in 1662, ‘it cannot but be a great help to the Student of Anatomy, to be able to preserve the parts of the humane Bodies ... and contemplate each of them so often and so considerately, till he have ... firmly impressed an Idea of it upon his memory’.17 Boyle devised anumber of methods for preserving body parts, including schemes to immerse specimens in resins, Oyl of Spikes, to inject them with burnt Alabster, to smoke, stuff, or embalm them with Liquors.18 Inspired by Frances Bacon’s earlier explorations into the preservative effects of snow on newly deceased chickens, he began to conduct a series of experiments and observations relating to the actions of ‘Cold’ on corporeal bodies.19

17 Hunter & Davis (1999), pp. 21–22. 18 Ibid., pp. 21–27. 19 Boyle (1665). B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 399

Preliminary experiments on ox brains revealed that ‘they may by congelation [freezing] be made very manageable.’ However, Boyle observed that when dissect- ing the hardened brain, ‘it sometimes seemed that the knife did cut through multi- tudes of icy corpuscles (as when one cuts a frozen apple). The substance of the brain seemed ... to be stuffed with them, and the Ventricles of it did at least con- spicuously harbour pieces of ice, if it were not filled up with them’.20 Boyle goes on to provide a surprisingly accurate theorization of the damage to the structure of soft tissue wrought by the presence of these crystals: ‘the innumerable icy Corpus- cles, into which the Alimental juice is turned by the frost, being each of them expanded proportionably to their respective bignesses may not only prejudice the whole by having their own constitution impaired ... but may upon their expansion crush in some places, and distend in others the more stable parts ... vitiating their texture ... and accelerating putrefaction [upon thawing]’.21 The preservative effects of snow and ice on foodstuffs had been well established historically, and the desirability of being able to employ the technique of freezing as a method of storage for corporeal bodies—meat for consumption, for example, as well as specimens for scientific research, was noted by Boyle and widely accepted. However, two factors: the inability to prevent ice artefact blight; and to re-produce cold environments artificially, threatened its viability. An important technological advancement: the ‘snow pit’ or ice-house was first described to Boyle by the diarist John Evelyn, who had encountered one in Italy in 1683. Early examples were little more than thatched huts placed over insulated conical shaped excavations filled with blocks of ice and layers of straw. Later technological and design innovations improved their effectiveness and by 1818 the renowned rural architect J. B. Papworth was moved to declare that he considered them ‘an excel- lent larder for the preservation of every kind of food that is liable to be injured by heat in summer: thus, fish, game poultry butter, etc. may be kept for a considerable time’.22 Although effective, they had serious limitations. They were immobile and needed to be continually replenished with stocks of natural ice. The growing demands of the burgeoning nineteenth-century European brewing and meat packing industries were such that they would only be met through the development of a mechanical and transportable method of refrigeration. Both Boyle and Bacon had observed that absorption of heat takes place when substances pass from a solid to a liquid state, and that accelerating this process would increase the rate of heat absorption, creating a fall in temperature. They achieved this by adding substances such as saltpetre or acid to existing ice baths, enabling any mixtures that were held in close proximity to the baths to freeze with great rapidity. In the late eighteenth century the Scottish physician William Cullen established that the evaporation of volatile liquids such as ethel ether and sulphuric acid created even more dramatic falls in temperature. He also noted that when

20 Ibid., pp. 660–661. 21 Ibid., pp. 662–663. 22 Quoted in Cooper (1998),p.8. 400 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 liquids are rapidly vaporized (through compression) the transition demands greater kinetic energy which must be drawn from the surrounding (ideally enclosed) environment, which then becomes cooler. He demonstrated this at Glasgow University in 1748, but never employed the technique commercially. The first port- able vapour compression refrigeration systems used highly volatile refrigerants such as ammonia, ether, and sulphur dioxide, but their toxicity and flammability made them inappropriate for use in confined spaces, especially on board ships, and were later replaced by gases such as Freon. Interest in the liquefaction of gases and the extremely low temperatures that might be produced by this process also remained strong. Although by 1845 Faraday had demonstrated that it was possible to liquefy condensable or ‘non- permanent’ gases such as chlorine and carbon dioxide, he had also discovered that gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon monoxide could not be liquefied even at pressures as high as 400 atmospheres. It was believed that these gasses were simply non-liquefiable or ‘permanent’. However, on Christmas Eve, 1887, the secretary to the French Academie des Sciences announced that he had received, not one, but two communications from scientists claiming to have produced a transi- tory liquefaction of one of these permanent gases—oxygen. Cailletet and Pictet’s breakthroughs started a race to liquefy the other permanent gases, which it was believed would produce temperatures at or near zero Kelvin or absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion is believed to cease. James Dewar, who had assumed the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge in 1875, began work on low temperatures in earnest in 1877. He obtained a Caillitet apparatus from Paris to demonstrate at the Royal Institution. He began to explore methods for storing liquid gases, experimenting with the creation of double-walled vacuum flasks. With controlled trials he was able to establish that internal ‘silver- ing’ of the void between the inner and outer skins of the vessel produced a greater degree of insulation than that obtained by packing it with charcoal, silica, alumina, or other substances.23 Dewar further refined the receptacle, which was to take his name, and by 1897 it had become the preferred container for all liquefied gases. Dewar successfully produced liquid oxygen in quantity in the late 1890s and went on to liquefy hydrogen in 1898. In 1901 he attempted to liquefy helium by using aCailletet tube cooled to 20.5K using liquid hydrogen, but this experiment failed. Although, as Scurlock has noted, Dewar had a vast array of hardware, compressors, and pumps used in the creation of cascade systems of liquefaction at his disposal at the Royal Institution, he did not possess the ability to work colla- boratively, a failing that would fatally impede his efforts to be the first to successfully liquefy helium.24 This collective approach was only available in one laboratory, that established by Professor Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at Leiden in 1887. It was here, in 1908, that helium was first liquefied, an achievement for which Onnes was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913. The boiling temperature of helium

23 Ibid. 24 Scurlock (1992), p. 18. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 401

v was found to be 4.25K (–268 C). The race to absolute zero, for the present at least, had been won. The progressive liquefaction of the ‘permanent’ gases allowed for the emergence of disciplines and institutions devoted exclusively to low temperature research and, with the liquefaction of helium, ultra-low temperature research and superconductivity. A new term was required to encompass these ﬁelds of the research and ‘cryogenic’ (or cryogenique) was adopted by the Onnes laboratory in 1894 for this purpose. Although the term was ﬁrst used to describe low and ultra v low temperature research (that relating to temperatures of 120K (À153 C) or the level below which permanent gases boil), the same term was later adopted to apply to research, particularly biological and medical research, conducted in the range between ambient and 120K.

3. The emergence of cryobiology

This field of research, which burgeoned in the mid-twentieth century, had its genesis in much earlier studies into the effect of cold on the preservation of bodily parts, and more particularly, gametes. Inspired by Van Leeuwenhoek’s earlier investigations into the nature and composition of sperm, the Italian Jesuit priest and naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799), determined to ‘follow this race of little animals to the end ... [to] investigate with exactitude their shape their laws and the laws they observe amongst themselves’.25 As part of his analyses he sub- jected the sperm to a range of environmental conditions. He noted that when cooled by exposure to snow, they did not die, but were rather rendered motionless: a first foray into suspended animation. Obsessed with the question of whether gametes and other small organisms might survive complete arrest at sub-zero temperatures Spallanzani and his contemporary Reáumur began to conduct cryogenic experiments, enclosing small microorganisms, the eggs of butterflies, silkworms, and other insects, and semen in glass vessels immersed in freezing mixtures of rock v v salt and ice (recorded at À17 on the Reáumur scale or À21 C) and spirits of nitre at v temperatures of À24R or À30 C. The eggs and some of the insects survived, retaining their regenerative capacities.26 Survival rates improved when even a minute portion of bodily fluid remained unfrozen. Mantegazza, an Italian naturalist, repeated Spallanzanni’s experiments in 1866 using human sperm, reporting survival v at temperatures of À17 C.27 Despite these advances, few further investigations into the freezing of human sperm were carried out until the late 1930s. Research into the effects of super-cooling on organisms advanced significantly with the liquefaction of the permanent gases. Although it is little known, Pictet and his co-workers tested the effects of the extreme cold that they produced through the vaporization of oxygen on bacteria, demonstrating that they could survive exposure v v to À70 C for three days and a subsequent exposure of À120 C for 36 hours.28

25 Pinto-Correia(1997) , p. 62. 26 Smith (1962), pp. 138, 272. 27 Ibid., p. 8. 28 Ibid., p.74. 402 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413

By 1900, liquid nitrogen, air, and oxygen were being produced in sizeable quantities by Linde and Dewar, and experiments were begun exposing bacteria to liquid air (freeze-drying) and plunging tissues into baths of liquefied gases. Two biologists, Jahnel and Shettles, drew on these techniques when furthering investigations into the resistance of human spermatozoa to freezing, successfully recovering a pro- portionate amount of sperm frozen to temperatures of solid carbon dioxide v v v (À79 C), liquid nitrogen (–196 C), and liquid helium (–265 C). 29 The formalization of research into the study of the function of biological systems at low temperatures (the discipline of cryobiology), and of studies into methods of storing biological materials using low temperatures (cryo-preservation) did not occur, however, until the early 1940s. In 1938, another Jesuit priest and natural scientist, Basil Luyet, took up where Spallanzanni had left off 200 years earlier, undertaking systematic studies into the effect of freezing on survival rates of yeast and frog spermatozoa. Luyet had been inspired by experiments undertaken at Leiden from 1908–1935 by the French biologist Paul Becquerel into the effects of cryopreservation on living cells and whole, if minute, animals, such as insects. Becquerel demonstrated that if first dehydrated, the latter might be frozen to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, and later successfully revived after re-hydration and re-warming. This suggested that recovery from super-cooling might be effected if the formation of ice crystals could be avoided.30 Luyet specu- lated in his pioneering work ‘Life and death at low temperatures’,31 that the meta- bolic substrate of sperm, which is fructose, might be used as a protective media in which to suspend the sperm for cryo-preservation. Later research revealed that this method induced both a loss of viability and motility of the sperm. Luyet’s speculation did, however, spark considerable interest in the role that cryoprotecants might play in reducing or eliminating the damaging effects of ice artefacts. The breakthrough, when it came, was the result of a serendipitous methodological error. In the immediate post-war period, a new generation of cryo- biologists, including Chris Polge, Audrey Smith, and Alan Parkes began working on the preservation of fowl semen at the National Institute for Medical Research Laboratory at Mill Hill in London. Despite their intensive efforts, by 1948, in Smith’s own estimation ‘there seemed little prospect of any progress in the use of low temperatures for the prolonged storage of cells.’32 Their research revealed that freezing injuries were caused in large part by extracellular crystallization of water— the expansion of water between, rather than within, cells. As a consequence, few spermatozoa regained their motility after thawing. Staining of specimens revealed that the mid piece and head of the sperm were ‘completely disorganized’.33 In order to perform their morphological examinations it was necessary to fix the sperm, and glycerol was employed as an immobiliser. Following a routine day of

29 Jahnel (1938); Shettles (1940). 30 Becquerel (1950), p. 265. 31 Luyet & Gehenio (1940). 32 Smith (1962),p.10 33 Ibid. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 403 testing cryopreserved semen the researchers were astonished to discover that a particular combination of their current cryopreservatives seemed to have allowed for a post-thaw motility rate in excess of 50%. Having replicated these results several times during the afternoon they retired to a local public house to celebrate. However, on demonstrating the technique to colleagues the following day, they were both dismayed and embarrassed to discover that post-thaw motility rates had sunk to a characteristic 5%. Re-tracing their protocol they determined that the only variable that had altered was that they had opened a new bottle of one of the cryopreservatives. After retrieving and ana- lysing the last few drops remaining in the old bottle they discovered that it, in fact, contained glycerol—the fixative—rather than the expected cryoprotectant. The labels had fallen off in the refrigerator and had subsequently been re-affixed wrongly by a technician. As another leading cryo-biologist Solviter was to note it was, therefore, ‘the relatively poor quality of labels in the post-war period in England that led to an important scientific discovery: the successful preservation of cells with glycerol in afrozen state’. 34

4. Banking the body: new technologies,new imaginaries

The invention and application of effective cryoprotectants such as glycerol revo- lutionised the practice of storing mammalian cells cryogenically. The advantages of doing so had long been evident: as Smith has noted, when living cells are cooled to v below À79 C all biochemical changes are either slowed to a minute fraction of their normal rate or halted altogether, arresting processes of decay and ageing. With their development, the dream of archiving human tissues at low temperatures for indefinite periods of time became a reality, paving the way for the creation of that most contemporary phenomenon—the human tissue ‘bank’. The bank, it seemed, might now act as a kind of immortal, artificial body: an environmentally controlled, long-term and secure repository for exploitable molecular resources. With this realization came a profound shift in attitudes towards the preservation and renovation of the body. Three related developments arose as a direct consequence of these advances in cryogenic preservation, each of which was of key importance in suggesting the apparent feasibility of the emergent project of cryonics. The first, the successful suspension and re-animation of whole mammalian animals, implied the possibility of applying these techniques to human beings. The second, the ability to archive preserved but recoverable human tissue, suggested that the project of human organ and tissue transplantation might be realizeable. The third, the capacity to employ cryogenically stored tissues and cells as tools for research into the molecular basis of degenerative disease suggested that workable methods could be found to remedy them. Successful techniques for both transplantation and

34 Quoted in Rowe, Lenny, & Mannoni (1980), p. 87. 404 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 molecular level repair would be necessary if the damage induced by injury or disease in cryonically suspended patients were to be reversed prior to re-animation. The first major development that inspired the notion of cryonic suspension of whole human beings was Smith’s successful experiments freezing whole mammals in the 1950s. Following their early triumphs with fowl semen, Smith and her colleagues began to turn their attention to developing protocols for freezing and re-animating small living mammals, such as rats and hamsters. Having anaes- thetised the latter until breathing ceased, Smith transferred them to melting ice v baths containing 50 percent propylene glycerol at À5 C until the colonic tempera- v tures of the animals reached between À1andÀ5 C. They were maintained at this temperature for between 50 and 60 minutes, until they were frozen stiff. Despite the use of glycerol, subsequent dissection of some specimens revealed the presence of some ice in the internal organs including the brain. Aware that these ice artefacts could rupture cell membranes during the thawing as well as the freezing process, and in anticipation of this eventuality, they had begun to develop an apparatus to rapidly thaw the frozen hamsters. As Lovelock, the inventor of the ‘diathermy apparatus’, noted, it worked with surprising efficiency: hamsters that were frozen at v À5 C for 70 minutes were completely thawed in three minutes. Although, the researchers at Mill Hill also reportedly employed Lovelock’s device to cook their sausages at the annual summer barbeque, they were not quick to grasp the potential commercial applications of their invention, at least not until it was marketed globally as ‘the microwave’. Astonishingly, many of the hamsters were successfully resuscitated using this technique: of the 20 hamsters that had been frozen for 50–70 minutes, seventeen recovered normal posture, although seven of these died within 24 hours and a further two more within ten days of re-animation. The remaining eight survived up to 450 further days (approaching this animal’s normal life span). However, those frozen for longer—between 70 and 90 minutes—rarely recovered; most convulsed and died within minutes of revival. Analysis revealed that adult golden hamsters v would not survive freezing for more than one hour at À5 C if more than 50% of the animal’s body water had been frozen. They concluded that there was, in fact, ‘no prospect of storing the animals [long term] in a state of suspended animation in a partially frozen condition at temperatures close to zero and little hope of reviving them after complete freezing at lower temperatures’.35 Despite this, Smith’s research and other allied research in cryopreservation had inspired in Robert Ettinger, an individual with, as he himself suggested, ‘no creden- tials worth mentioning [apart from] being a (now retired) teacher of college physics and math’36, a belief that it might be possible to freeze biologically dead human bodies. This, he suggested, would enable them to be stored at very low temperatures, until a time when medical science was able to repair almost any damage they

35 Smith (1962), p. 332. 36 Ettinger (1987),p.i. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 405 had received, ‘including freezing damage and senile debility or other cause of death’.37 Ettinger’s thesis, which was first published in 1964 under the title The prospect of immortality, 38 created the impetus for the growth of the entire immor- talist/cryonics movement. It provided a quasi-scientific assessment of the prob- ability of successfully deep freezing and re-animating human bodies, purporting to answer some of the ‘host of troublesome questions’ that had served to relegate cryonics to ‘the realm of thin, hazy speculation or daydreams’.39 These included how severe freezing damage might be, and how it might be prevented or reversed, whether functions such as memory might survive cryopreservation unimpaired, and indeed where identity might reside in cases where the ‘resuscitee’ emerges as a wholly engineered artefact, ‘a patchwork of grafts, implants and tiny motors’. 40 In addressing the first of these questions, Ettinger cites Smith’s work with golden hamsters. He produces her finding that some of the animals recovered, in his words ‘apparently normal activity’ after more than half the water in the brains had turned to ice as ‘evidence that mental faculties can survive freezing and thawing’.41 Undeterred by the incomparability of the subjects, or the incommensurability of human and hamster mental functioning, or the conditions under which the experiment was conducted (the hamsters were only frozen for one hour at a temperature of just below zero) Ettinger employed Smith’s findings to suggest that the project of long term storage and recovery of human beings from ultra-low temperatures was viable. All that was required, he argued, was to find suitable means of ‘ramp- ing-up’ existing techniques for cryopreserving other cells. In fact, as Smith’s research clearly demonstrated, it was extremely difficult to devise a single protocol capable of coping with the varied cellular composition, and thus differential rates of freeze and thaw of complex structures such as organs and whole bodies. It became evident to Smith and her colleagues that any success in this endeavour would only be achieved through a much more nuanced investigation of the effects of the freezing process on different tissues and organs. The foundational research necessary to support the project of cryonics—the preservation and renovation of the dead—was thus conducted by those working on the project of renovating the living—in the field of organ transplantation. Researchers had long been aware that the ability to store human tissue in a living, vital, and recoverable state could provide an important means of overcoming two historical impediments to the successful transplantation of human tissues and organs: the rapid deterioration of donor tissue, and the inability to retain donated tissues for cross-matching. Much of the initial work on the development of specific protocols for the cryopreservation of body parts was undertaken at the US Navy Medical Research Centre during the 1950s. They had early successes developing techniques for freeze-drying bone, skin, dura, cartilage, and cardiovascular tissues

37 Ettinger (1965),p.1. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 40 Ibid., pp. 129–130. 41 Ibid., p. 14. 406 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 for use as grafts in human transplantation surgery, establishing the first major tissue bank of this kind in the US in 1950. Much of this tissue was, however, used for ‘non-vital’ purposes: the skin was used as temporary burn dressings, the bone- grafts were used as ‘scaffolding’ into which the cells of the host could grow. Other types of transplantation were more complex as they required ‘vital’ tissues—those retaining full enzymic and cellular function. The temporal, and indeed physical parameters of much transplant surgery had historically been proscribed by the fact that tissues only retain this function when refrigerated at temperatures just above zero for a period of not more than three to four days.42 The task of developing specific protocols for retaining cellular integrity and function through the process of cryopreservation proved to be an immensely difficult one. It took many years of applied research before it became possible to successfully cryopreserve even blood, let alone excised tissues and organs. Early techniques involved suspending blood cells in solutions of glycerol, which would permeate the cell wall, and prevent ice artefact formation. It was soon revealed, however, that the cellular structure of blood was very easily damaged by the osmotic stress induced by this perfusion. In searching for a way to remedy this problem, researchers in Britain returned to some earlier work undertaken by Luyet in 1938 into the cryopreservation of frog spermatozoa. This research had revealed that the material might revive after exposure to liquid air at the ultra low tempera- v ture of À192 C but only after it had been dehydrated and then frozen and thawed at an extremely rapid rate.43 Luyet hypothesised that the success was due to the fact that what little water remained within or between the cells could transition directly from an aqueous solution to an amorphous glassy solid—without ever passing through the stage of ice formation—a process he referred to as ‘vitrification’. With this theory in mind, Rinfret and others began to develop alternative cryoprotectants, such as polymers, which could bind available extracellular water to the molecule, without ever penetrating the cell wall. Having been perfused in this way, the blood could then be plunged rapidly to an ultra-low temperature v (0 to À196 C in 90 seconds) and thawed with equal rapidity. With most of the available extracellular water absorbed, cryo-freezing injuries were minimized. Blood was first successfully cryopreserved using this method in the early 1960s. It has since been established that blood cryopreserved at ultra low temperatures will retain full enzymic function even after 11 years of storage.44 Attempts were then made during the 1960s to cryopreserve whole organs by perfusing them with preservative solutions pumped through the vasculature before death. Most of these experiments failed. As Kenneth Iserson, a prominent American professor of medicine and bioethicist has recently suggested, there are clear physiological explanations for this outcome. As he notes, ‘a kidney, for example, has about 10 trillion times the volume of a single cell. If a kidney is to

42 For afuller description see Sell & Friedlaender (1976). 43 Smith (1962),p.9. 44 Rowe et al. (1980), p. 94. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 407 work like a kidney after being thawed, its cells cannot be separated to optimise the rate at which each cell type freezes or thaws. The result is that complex cells and organs do not survive cryonic preservation with their functions intact’.45 Although there was little evidence to suggest that perfusing organs or bodies with preserv- v ative solutions and freezing them to temperatures of À179 C in liquid nitrogen would not result in immediate, irreversible cell death, these techniques were first used to place a human being (James Bedford, a retired psychology professor) into astateof cryonic suspension in 1967. While this remains the current standard protocol for preserving whole and neuro-suspension patients, work on refining the techniques of cryopreservation has continued. In the mid 1980s two biologists working at America’s National Institute of Health, Greg Fahy and William Rall, began to consider the possibility of applying Luyet’s technique of vitrification to the preservation of whole organs and bodies, a project enthusiastically embraced by the cryonics community. Fahy successfully developed a new cryopreservative that would protect cells from ice-crystal v formation during an ultra rapid transition to À196 C and he and his current col- laborator Brian Wouwk have very recently reported that they had cooled rabbit v kidneys to À7 C for periods of an hour before re-warming and successfully trans- planting them. Although this hardly constitutes a great advance on Smith’s successes of nearly fifty years ago, Fahy argues that the experiments are important in ‘allowing us to debug the fine details of the process’.46 The bugs, as Fahy describes them, are, by his own admission, considerable. They include the very substantial problem of how to get high enough concentrations of vitrification solutions into the organ or body and of how to remove them upon thawing; how to cool organs or bodies fast enough to prevent ice crystal formation and how to re-warm them quickly enough to prevent ‘de-vitrification’ or cellular collapse. Perhaps the most potentially serious problem of all, however, is that of fracturing. As Fahy has confirmed in his experiments, and Wowk has so succinctly noted in an online discussion on vitrification: ... the price paid for turning an organ into a single piece of glass is that glass v tends to break. Above the glass transition temperature (usually between À110 C v and À130 C), this is not a concern because organs are then more like a thick syrup than a glass. [However] As the temperature is lowered below the glass transition point, fracturing becomes more likely. The risk becomes significant about 20 degrees below the glass transition, and becomes certain at liquid nitrogen temperature for large samples.47 Gross mechanical injuries, including cracking of the brain, spinal cord and other organs are inevitable in this temperature range if the organs or bodies are not perfused with a sufficient amount of cryoprotectant, or if they are cooled too

45 Iserson (2001), p. 38. 46 Friend (2002), p. 12. 47 Wowk (1999), p. 1. See also Fahy (1990). 408 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 quickly. Hyperperfusion was proven to cause a shrinkage of the brain that seemed to aﬀord it some protection from cracking, although, as Fahy has noted from his own experiments on rabbit brains, the histological distortion that arose was so great as to suggest that the shrinkage may well have altered the chemical make up of the brain, causing him to question whether ‘the shrinkage causes far more serious injury on a chemical and infrastructural level than the fracturing that is being avoided’.48 Although cryopreserved human beings, or human brains, may appear to be intact and capable of full re-animation at any time, the cellular damage induced by current preservation processes, even vitriﬁcation, are profound. As Fahy reminds us ‘just because a dead body looks a lot like a living body to the naked eye, it does not follow that the two are in an equivalent state of health’.49

5. Renovation and re-animation

This brings us to the heart of Ettinger’s thesis, at which lies a crucial assump- tion: that no matter how great the physical damage induced by the freezing process it will still be possible to reverse it through the application of new biomedical technologies. In fact, for re-animation to occur, it would be necessary to remedy both the damage inflicted to cells by the disease or injuries that caused death, as well as that inflicted by the freezing process. If this were ever to happen it would only be as a consequence of work currently being undertaken in molecular biology into methods of arresting or reversing degenerative disease and, in the new field of nanotechnology: molecular level cellular repair systems. It is, again, paradoxical that the advances that have been made in both these domains in recent years have depended, in large part, on the ability to access and utilize archives of cryogenically preserved collections of donated human tissues, cell lines and DNA, which have proven to be invaluable bio-molecular research tools. Two examples may serve to illustrate the point. If, as cryonicists are wont to argue, identity rests wholly within the brain, then it remains a prerequisite for success that this organ, at the very least, be subject to full renovation. The best chances of revival would occur if healthy living patients/ brains were frozen, however, it is of course illegal to freeze the living. Most ‘patients’, including neuro-suspension patients, are over 60 years of age at death, and many are reported to already be showing signs of dementia or other neuro- degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The ability to cryogenically store or bank fresh brain tissue has revolutionized approaches to the study of brain function, disease, and repair. Prior to the development of cryopreservation, donated brain tissues could only be fixed in formalin—this allowed for examin- ation of the gross morphology of the tissue, but not for the analysis of genetic or biochemical function. The significance of cryopreservation is that it allows tissues to be stored in a living, if suspended, state. Molecular level interactions between

48 Fahy (1994),p.1. 49 Ibid. B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 409 proteins, such as immuno-reactivity, are not destroyed, as they had been when fixed in alcohol, but remain available for study over time.50 From the early 1960s onwards, brain banking centres in the US and the UK began to develop techniques for cryopreserving the brain, not as a single potentially revivable entity, but rather as a cache of exploitable resources that might be widely employed in studies of the causation and treatment of neuro-degenerative disease. Simple and effective protocols for cryopreserving brain tissues are now employed routinely in brain v banking centres worldwide, enabling brain tissues to be archived at À85 C for future microscopic, radiographic, or neuro-chemical investigation. More recent cutting edge research depends on the use of other collections of cryogenically preserved tissues. These include, for example, collections of human embryonic stem cells and cell lines. Several recent studies have demonstrated that human neural tissue extracted from donated foetuses and cultured in vitro may be successfully transplanted into the brains of Parkinson’s sufferers, where it begins to establish new synaptic connections, becoming partially integrated into the circuitry of adjacent neural tissue. The self-renewing and pluripotent properties of embryonic stem cells are such that they may be used to generate a potentially unlimited supply of donor cells for transplantation therapy of this kind. They may also be used as vectors to deliver molecules for gene therapies devised to address degenerative diseases of the central nervous system.51 However, in order to undertake this research it has been necessary to develop new methodologies for storing and hand- ling stem cells. A great variety of cell lines, including those derived from donated human embryos, may now be induced in culture, but it is technically and economi- cally infeasible for researchers to maintain all the cell lines they need for their research in culture over an indefinite period of time. Key lines may be lost to infection or corrupted by genetic drift or contamination. Were it not for the capacity to freeze down and indefinitely archive the vast number of primary and genetically modified cell lines that are now being produced and employed as tools in biomolecular research, current projects on transplant therapies for diabetes, spinal cord injuries, neurological disorders, arteriosclerosis, and very many other degenerative diseases simply could not proceed. Very recently, an Israeli research team announced that they had successfully developed a method of vitrifying human embryonic stem cells, noting that this breakthrough would facilitate the establishment of large-scale human embryonic stem cell banks that could benefit millions of patients worldwide.52 Molecular biology and cryogenics are also central to another project upon which cryonicists intend to rely for their success: nanotechnology. It was the Nobel prize- winning physicist Richard Feynman who first suggested in 1959 that the principles of physics did not militate against the possibility of manoeuvring matter ‘atom by atom’. Adopting Feynman’s hypothesis, Eric Drexler, a molecular engineer at

50 My thanks to Prof. Anne Cooke for this information. 51 See Reubinoﬀ et al. (2001a). 52 Reubinoﬀ et al. (2001b). 410 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413

MIT, began to theorize the possibility of creating molecular level manufacturing systems capable of piecing together atoms and molecules one at a time to create miniature bespoke molecular structures. The scale at which these manipulations occur—movements of one billionth of ametre, or ananometre,inspired Drexler to name this new science ‘nanotechnology’. Again, the science of cryogenics has played a crucial, if inconspicuous, role in realizing the potential of this new technology. In 1990 two researchers at IBM reported that they had succeeded in using a scanning tunnelling microscope operating at cryonic temperatures of 4K to slow down and position individual atoms on a single crystal nickel surface with atomic precision. This process could, they noted, also be applied to the manipulation of molecules.53 This, and other developments, signalled the potential applications of nanotechnologies in the biological domain, prompting the creation of the sub-discipline of bionanotechnology. This field encompasses research that either employs biological starting materials, biological design principles, or which has biological (life science) applications. In his ground-breaking work Engines of Creation, Drexler advances the theory that nanotechnologists may be able to create assemblers— microscopic, possibly self-replicating robotic devices. It has been proposed by Drexler and his colleague Ralph Merckle that these self assemblers could potentially act as cell-repair machines capable of moving through even frozen tissue without further disrupting cell walls, identifying damaged tissue and repairing it. Although, as Merckle admits, single repair devices would not have sufficient memory to store the programs designed to perform all repairs they could, theoretically, be networked together through asingle ‘file server’ which might store allof the information the repair devices might need. 54 The fantastical nature of these musings has, unsurprisingly, proven to have great appeal within the cryonics community and Merckle himself has been drawn into providing a quite detailed analysis of the potential role of bionanotechnologies in the renovation of the cryonically suspended.55 Once more the focus of attention devolves, with surprising rapidity, to the fate of the frozen brain. Merckle subscribes unquestioningly to the view that ‘we need only repair the frozen brain, for the brain is the most critical and important structure in the body’.56 Proceeed- ing from an argument that all that ails the frozen brain is that the atoms within it are ‘in the wrong places’, he suggests that having first established the ideal coordi- nates of these atoms, it should be possible to employ assemblers to rearrange the atomic structure ‘in virtually any fashion consistent with the laws of chemistry and physics’, a process that would ‘clearly let us restore the frozen structure to a fully functional and healthy state’.57 At present, of course, this remains an improbable dream—as Scientific American reported recently, Drexler and Merckle’s predictions

53 See Eigler & Schweizer (1990). 54 Merckle (1994), p. 11. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 12 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 411 have ‘assumed a certain quaintness [as] science is nowhere near to being able to produce nanoscopic machines that can help revive frozen brains from suspended animation.’58

6. Conclusion

The fusing of one science fiction fantasy with another is producing an extraordi- narily potent and resonant imaginary—one that takes us full circle, back from the icy depths of the cryonic storage chamber to the relative warmth of room temperature, a new vision for securing immortality. The ‘transhumanists’ that populate the most peripheral zone of the futurist community are currently galvanized by the idea of ‘uploading’—the ‘process of copying one’s mind from the natural substrate of the brain into an artificial one, manufactured by humans’ or of transferring human individual identity into an artificial system via ‘whole brain emulation’. 59 The brain of the cryonics patient undergoes one final act of translation. Having been frozen into a solid mass, it is sliced on a microtome. Each slice is then scanned by a computer using very high-resolution instruments. The computer then (apparently) employs this data to reconstruct the patient’s brain circuitry in ‘an artificial substrate (probably dedicated brain-simulating hardware). The simulation is activated, and the patient finds herself or himself in a shiny new body’.60 Or at least they think they do ... Whether the neurosuspension subject might one day wake up in a cloned body or be recovered as an uploaded icon on a desktop computer, either outcome will only be realised if, and when, we acquire a mastery of molecular understanding and manipulation equal to that of Putnam’s demonic scientist. If any of us needs to worry about whether or not he or she is a brain in a vat, surely it is the cryonics patient? Although the project of cryonics has attracted much ridicule, it would be unfortunate indeed if the central role that cryogenics has played in the biomedical sciences and in new nanotechnologies were to be overlooked as a consequence. As the curator of one US cryogenics research institute informed me ruefully, ‘the most common question people ask when they come to the lab is ‘‘have you got Walt Disney’s head here somewhere?’’’.61 It would be equally disappointing if the narcissism of the project of cryonics were to obscure the very major contribution that is made to contemporary biomedical research by those tissue donors and research scientists who together create the archives of cryogenically stored tissues and cells lines that have been employed for the collective benefit of all human beings. ‘Immortalised’ in a quite different, but arguably much more meaningful

58 Stix (2001). 59 Strout (1997),p.1. 60 Ibid. 61 Personal communication with Dr. Robert Hanner, Curator Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection at the American Museum of Natural History, July 12, 2002. 412 B.Parry / Stud.Hist.Phil.Biol.& Biomed.Sci.35 (2004) 391–413 way than their cryonic counterparts these donors may, at least, take their ease in death. Neurosuspension patients, conversely, may have every reason to consider what instantiation they might wake up to, and indeed, several lifetimes in which to contemplate their fate.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleague Cathy Gere for the intermittent use/loan of her inimitable brain, during the writing of this and other pieces. I am also indebted to my two referees for their helpful comments. Thanks also to Cathy and Neil Manson for making ‘the hive’ such a terriﬁc place to work, and to King’s College, Cambridge for providing the space, and The Wellcome Trust the money, to undertake this research. My thanks also to CFAS and the Addenbrookes Hospital Brain Bank where we have undertaken much primary research. Especial thanks to Sondra Gatewood and Matt Groening for their generosity in allowing me to repro- duce ‘Jeﬀ and Akbar’s Cryonics Hut’ for this erudite audience.

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