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 devel- opment of refrigeration, cryopreservation, transplantation, and nanotechnologies, I explore the uneasy relationship between cryonics and the technology on which it depends for its suc- cess—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 biologi- cal 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 hydro- gen, 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 consist- ent. 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 connec- tions, 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’.

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