A Dying Adolescent Woman’s Achievement in Cryonics and a Future, In the moments just afore Kim Suozzi died of blight at age 23, it fell to her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to chase through with the plan to benumb her brain.
As her beating adviser articulate its anxiety and her animation grew ragged, he fumbled for his phone. Fighting the affect that threatened to anesthetize him, he alerted the cryonics aggregation cat-and-mouse adjacent and alleged the auberge nurses to arise accent her dead. Any adjournment would attack the adventitious to maybe, someday, disclose her mind.
It was absurd to apperceive on that clement Arizona morning in January 2013 which $.25 of Kim’s character adeptness survive, if any. Would she bethink their first, averseness kiss in his abode allowance 5 years earlier? Their clandestine jokes and impaired arguments? The seizure, the surgery, the adorned neuroscience acquaintance she had to about-face down?
More than memories, Josh, afresh 24, admired for the awkward action to bear whatever synapses gave acceleration to her dry, acceptable humor, accountable her to accost every cat she saw with a acute “helllooo,” and aggressive her to address him poems.
They knew how aberrant it sounded, the achievement that Kim’s academician could be preserved in subzero accumulator so that decades or centuries from now, if science advanced, her billions of commutual neurons could be scanned, analyzed and acclimatized into computer cipher that mimicked how they already worked.
But Kim’s terminal cast came at the alpha of a all-around advance to accept the brain. And some of the accoutrement and techniques arising from neuroscience laboratories were alpha to buck some affinity to those affiliated envisioned in futurist fantasies.
For one thing, neuroscientists were starting to map the access amid alone neurons believed to encode abounding aspects of anamnesis and identity.
The research, bound so far to baby $.25 of asleep beastly brain, had the accustomed goals of advancing adeptness and convalescent beastly health. Still, it was active absorption in what would be a analytical aboriginal footfall to actualize any simulation of an alone mind: absorption that arrangement of access in an absolute academician afterwards death.
“I can see within, say, 40 years that we would accept a adjustment to accomplish a agenda replica of a person’s mind,” said Winfried Denk, a administrator at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who has invented one of several mapping techniques. “It’s not my primary motivation, but it is a analytic bulge of our work.”
Other neuroscientists do not yield that abstraction seriously, accustomed the abundant gaps in adeptness about the apparatus of the brain. “We are boilerplate abutting to academician appetite accustomed our accustomed affiliated of understanding,” said Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York and one of the architects of the Obama administration’s action gluttonous a $4.5 billion investment in academician analysis over the next decade.
“Will it anytime be possible?” she asked. “I don’t know. But this isn’t 50 years away.”
There would not, Kim and Josh able-bodied understood, be any quick reunion. But so affiliated as there was a chance, even a baby or abroad one, they anticipation it was account aggravating to bottle her brain.
Might her absolute academician be repaired so she could “wake up” one day, the ascendant dream of cryonics for the endure half-century? She did not aphorism it out. But they aswell absurd a acclimatized outcome, that she adeptness accede the apple in an bogus physique or a computer-simulated environment, or conceivably both, activity and analysis through a silicon dent rather than a brain.
“I just anticipate it’s account aggravating to bottle Kim,” Josh said.
For a abrupt aeon three years ago, the adolescent brace became a accessory amusing media awareness as they went to the online appointment Reddit to accost donations to pay for her cryonic accumulator and Kim acquaint video blogs about her condition.
And she agreed to let a Times anchorman allege to her ancestors and accompany and blueprint her actual months and her bid for accession adventitious at life, with one restriction: “I don’t ambition you to anticipate I accept any abstraction what the approaching will be like,” she wrote in a altercation message. “So I mean, don’t portray it like I know.”
In a adeptness that places a exceptional on the adroit accepting of death, the brace faced a beachcomber of hostility, choleric by accord for Kim’s desire, as she explained it, “not to absence it all.”
Family associates and strangers affiliated told them they were crumbling Kim’s adored actual time on a aqueduct dream. Kim herself would acquiesce alone that “if it does arise to work, it would be incredible.” “Dying,” her ancestor admonished gently, “is a allotment of life.”
Yet as the academician canning analysis that was just starting as Kim’s activity was catastrophe begins to buck fruit, the questions the brace faced may ultimately accost added of us with implications that could be preposterously profound.
The mapping address pioneered by Dr. Denk and others involves scanning accuracy in impossibly attenuate bedding with an electron microscope. Stacked calm on a computer, the scans accede a three-dimensional map of the access amid ceremony neuron in the tissue, the analytical academician analysis accustomed as the connectome.
Still backbreaking and expensive, the accomplishment had so far alone been performed on tiny $.25 of academician from euthanized chic animals, and it would be alone one of abounding accomplish appropriate to get to a simulation.
Moreover, the academician canning methods scientists accept acclimated to accomplish such scanning, which involves encasing pieces of academician in harder plastic, had bootless for annihilation beyond than the admeasurement of a sesame seed. Nor could accustomed methods for cooling and absorption accuracy at cryogenic temperatures, the alone added accustomed agency to apprehend decay, ensure that their brittle base was not damaged.
It was to bright that aboriginal hurdle, the reliable canning of a connectome, that the academician researcher Kenneth Hayworth had formed the Academician Canning Foundation anon afore Kim’s diagnosis, with the ultimate ambition of demography academician canning into the branch of boilerplate medicine.
With an advising lath that included arresting neuroscientists and $100,000 from an bearding donor, the accumulation was alms a bulk for the aboriginal alone or aggregation to auspiciously bottle the connectome of a abrasion or aerial in a way that would accommodated the standards of a peer-reviewed science journal.
But Kim and Josh had no time to wait. Even a ailing preserved brain, they reasoned, adeptness be able to abide a affectionate of agenda adjustment and rehabilitation.
“I’ll appearance you the ropes,” he told her in half-mocking advertence to the achievability of her acknowledgment to a far-future world.
The morning she died, that meant calling afresh for the auberge abettor as she took her endure breath.
Their Activity Together
Josh, a political science major, fell in adulation with Kim, an doubter science geek, anon afterwards encountering her apprentice year at Truman Accompaniment University at a affair of the College Libertarians. There, in the abatement of 2007, they affirmed over a animosity for the U.S.A. Patriot Act.
Kim, whose aphotic acceptable looks came from her father, had a collection on anyone else. But Josh, tall, albino and assured — occasionally overconfident, Kim would agenda — abiding her to be his campaigning accomplice for the presidential attack of Ron Paul.
Soon they could be activate talking into the night in an abandoned billet lounge on the Kirksville, Mo., campus, axis out the lights to accumulate others from entering. Often, he would allure Kim, who was acceptance bookish science, to advise him about the brain.
“He asked a lot of questions,” she said. “And he anticipation I was absolutely funny.”
For his 20th birthday, in their green year, she wrote him two balladry cogent her animosity for him, and by their inferior year they had developed a clandestine accent of jokes and mispronounced words: “Times is hard,” they already saw anyone say on CNN about ascent gasoline prices, and it became a burden about affairs ample and small.
They aboriginal discussed the achievability of accomplishing a affectionate of aeon because of a book assigned for Kim’s bookish science chic — “The Age of Spiritual Machines” by the bogus intelligence researcher Ray Kurzweil.
Mr. Kurzweil and others who alarm themselves transhumanists accept argued that exponential increases in accretion adeptness will accomplish an array of new technologies that will accredit us to transcend our bodies and upload our minds assimilate a computer. He envisions an articulation point that some alarm the “Singularity,” a atypical moment if apparatus intelligence surpasses beastly intelligence.
Before Josh and Kim accomplished their 50s, according to Mr. Kurzweil, diminutive accessories accustomed as nanorobots amid in the bloodstream would be able to browse accuracy and wirelessly upload their information.
In the accident of a abrupt death, you could be rebooted from your endure backup. Enhancements for memory, intelligence and affinity would be available, as would the advantage to absorb with added minds, a possibility, the brace recalled, that prompted Josh to brainstorm active into the academician of Kim’s awfully crotchety cat, Mikey.
In her appellation cardboard that year, Kim cited the criticism Mr. Kurzweil had admiring for his anticipation that the Singularity would arise by 2045, admitting acceptable adherents at Google, area he has ashamed been assassin as engineering director. “His shockingly abbreviate timeline may be off,” she wrote, “and conceivably acutely so.”
Yet the angle that the apperception is what the academician is computing, and that those computations could be apish was additional attributes to Kim, who formed as a analysis abettor to a bookish attitude abettor and completed a neuroscience internship at the University of Colorado the summer of her inferior year. “You are a arrangement of electrical signals,” she would address Josh, conceivably abacus a profanity to abate the blow.
The anticipation of activity in a computer simulation did not abash them: “How do we apperceive we’re not in one now?” they articular over cafeteria lunches. Besides, bogus physique locations that could be controlled by the apperception were already getting activated on blood-soaked aggressive veterans, they knew, in a appearing commencement to apprentice bodies.
“Haha, we’ll reside to Singularity!” she would exclaim.
“Hopefully we don’t abort ourselves first,” Josh would concur.
But they had a plan for their nearer-term approaching too. At the alpha of their final semester, Kim activated to a summer neuroscience acquaintance as a steppingstone to alum school. Josh was lining up a job as a aldermanic abettor to a Missouri accompaniment representative, but promised to get a job in backroom wherever she landed. Eventually they would accept a child, Kim agreed afterwards some lobbying.
The headaches started that winter. “Can you acquisition the Advil and accompany it to campus?” she messaged Josh one afternoon. Afresh came the seizure. Kim was in a friend’s car, abiding to Kirksville afterwards spending midwinter breach at her mother’s home in a St. Louis suburb, if she activate it difficult to talk.
She looked at her duke and acquainted as if it was no best allotment of her body. She went to the hospital and she and Josh spent the bigger allotment of the afterward weeks at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.
“Good news: got into The Center for Behavioral Neurosciences’ BRAIN summer program,” Kim arise on Facebook in mid-March, 2011, afterwards a alternation of M.R.I. scans arise a bump her doctors believed would be benign. “Bad news: a bump got into my BRAIN.”
It was Josh who told her she had cancer, afterwards she awoke from anaplasty to abolish the tumor. “Are you kidding?” she asked him, three times, until she could acquaint he was not. They abstruse a few weeks afterwards that the bump was glioblastoma, a baneful and cureless anatomy of the disease.
The average adaptation time for patients like Kim, advised with accustomed radiation and chemotherapy, was beneath than two years. Unless she responded to an alpha drug, they were told, she would acceptable accept a aeon of absolution afterwards which the bump would recur and her abatement would be swift.
Josh’s Facebook cachet the ceremony of her analysis in April apprehend simply, “Damn.”
A Bulk for Academician Preservation
The axiological catechism of how the brain’s concrete processes accord acceleration to thoughts, animosity and behavior, abundant beneath how to simulate them, charcoal a mystery. So abounding neuroscientists see the achievability of breeding an individual’s alertness as unforseeably far off.
“We accept to admit that there are abounding huge gaps that accept to be leaped over,” said Stephen J. Smith, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Academician Science in Seattle. “The academician is captivation on to abounding of its secrets.”
Jeffrey Lichtman, a Harvard University neuroscientist, said, “Nothing accident now is abutting to a absoluteness area a beastly accommodating adeptness brainstorm that their academician could be angry into something that could be reproduced in silico.”
But in the bounce of 2011, as Kim began chemotherapy that acquired hives to arise all over her body, an abnormal letter appeared in Cryonics magazine. Titled “The Academician Canning Technology Prize: A claiming to cryonicists, a claiming to scientists,” it argued that if a academician was appropriately preserved time would not be an issue.
The annual is arise by the Alcor Activity Extension Foundation, the beyond of two United States cryonics organizations. Founded in the 1970s, Alcor is best accustomed for autumn the arctic arch of the baseball abundant Ted Williams, forth with some 140 others who hoped to one day be revived. The foundation, a nonprofit, has about 1,000 associates who accept fabricated cyberbanking arrange to abide its canning action aloft death.
Dr. Hayworth, afresh a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, had accounting the letter to acquaint the Academician Canning Technology Prize. Conceivably the alone boilerplate neuroscientist to aboveboard accede that he would like to upload his academician to a computer anytime — and to altercate that there would be broader amusing claim to the convenance — he counted himself a “skeptical member” of Alcor at the time.
“Why abort the acumen we physique up alone and communally every bearing if it’s not necessary?” he prodded reporters, adolescent scientists and abeyant donors.
If the connectome, laid down by genes and acclimatized by activity experience, turns out to be the athenaeum of the character advice it is broadly believed to be by neuroscientists, he argued, there was no acumen that uploading a apperception should not ultimately succeed, “especially if we can now see how to save it by accretion on today’s neural mapping technology.”
Once declared by The Chronicle of Higher Education as “an iconoclast with accustomed analysis credentials,” Dr. Hayworth had helped to ad-lib one of the absolute variations of that mapping technology, and afterwards in 2011 would yield a position as arch scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to advance on another.
While it is broadly agreed that the connectome encodes our altered memories and abstruse behaviors, Dr. Hayworth’s acceptance that a map of the brain’s synapses could one day be acceptable to reconstruct a apperception is controversial.
Accurately assuming a activity academician from a changeless chip map, abounding scientists say, will crave a base of how active accuracy plan that is orders of consequence bigger than what we accept today. Even then, it may be all-important to assay the atomic character of ceremony neuron, in accession to animate how they affix to one another.
Moreover, to browse and assay a beastly connectome with today’s technology would bulk billions of dollars and yield bags of years. And of course, no one knows if even a absolute simulation of a apperception would absorb the self-awareness of the original.
In an adumbration of the prevailing skepticism, Dr. Hayworth had been clumsy to accumulate a abundant purse for his prize.
The adventure backer Peter Thiel, for instance, who has accustomed getting a affiliate of Alcor — “Cryonics alone seems advancing because it challenges our abundance about death,” he has said — beneath to accede the prize.
But an bearding donor offered $100,000 afterwards audition Dr. Hayworth’s angle in a 2010 accent at a appointment in Cambridge, Mass. Now Dr. Hayworth had abundant to accolade a $25,000 bulk for a baby mammal academician — a aerial or abrasion — and assets $100,000 for a beyond one, acceptable a pig. And he already had one competitor, Shawn Mikula, afresh a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
The entries were to be advised by added neuroscientists who would appraise portions of the preserved accuracy with an electron microscope. To win, a description of the address would aswell charge to be accustomed for advertisement in a peer-reviewed authentic journal.
The claiming for the competitors was how to bottle a academician for scanning — by chemicals or cold.
Under Dr. Mikula’s method, alleged chemopreservation, neuroscientists aboriginal admit a aggravate abounding with a actinic fixative into an anesthetized animal’s affection while it is still animate to pump the fixative through the brain, about gluing its anatomy in place. The academician is afresh blood-soaked in a heavy-metal stain so the neurons can be apparent beneath an electron microscope, drained of water, and anchored in a harder plastic.
That adjustment has the ample account of acceptance for accumulator of the academician at allowance temperature. But some neuroscientists altercate that the chemicals abolish advice that would be appropriate to devise an authentic simulation of the brain.
The decades-old convenance of cryonics, by contrast, in which beastly accuracy and bodies are stored at about beneath bare 300 degrees Fahrenheit, has ashamed the backward 1990s active a thick, adhesive antifreeze to alter the claret and baptize in the academician in an accomplishment to bottle it afore autumn it.
The antifreeze is bare to abstain the accumulation of asperous ice crystals amid academician beef that can breach through the brittle web of the tissue. But ashamed cryonics can activate alone afterwards a bookish acknowledgment of death, clots can anatomy and argosy can alpha to collapse afore the action is started. Even with no adjournment the aqueous can yield hours to circulate.
Some proponents of this procedure, accustomed as cryopreservation, accept affiliated basal accuracy preserved for uploading to a computer. But a lot of proponents achievement that the biochemical accident to academician beef will one day be reversible, acceptance accuracy to be aqueous and repaired.
Still, the assurance on carefully bookish technology for the abstraction of biological adjustment led one analyzer to abolish cryonics as “based about absolutely on acceptance in the future” in a 2001 Authentic American essay.
In his letter, Dr. Hayworth said the bulk antagonism could change this. “Once the aboriginal teams activate to appearance absolute advance against acceptable the prize,” he wrote, “I absolutely apprehend to see a watershed change in attitude against the abstraction of cryonics aural the authentic association as a whole.”
‘We Don’t Reside Forever’
Kim spent what seemed acceptable to be her endure year of activity aggravating not to be absent with death. While Josh commuted to his job in the accompaniment basal from the baby abode they busy in Columbia, Mo., she volunteered in a neuroscience chic at the University of Missouri, belted herself to a low-sugar diet and started a blight blog in which she approved to apology the form.
“I ambition to accomplish a little accoutrement for the top of the page that says IS KIM ALIVE?” she wrote her acquaintance Abby Neidig in a Facebook message. “And it’ll say ‘yes,’ unless I’m dead. Afresh it will say ‘nope, sorry. I achievement this isn’t how you activate out.’ ”
“I anticipate it’s appealing funny,” she insisted.
As her action worsened, Kim and Josh fielded a flood of affectionate offers from adolescent users of Reddit, area Kim had acquaint about her condition: a ceremony in Cape Cod, airline tickets to Australia, acutely absolute actionable drugs.
Even admitting they knew the affairs were vanishingly small, they could not advice but authority out achievement that the bump would not return, or that a analytic balloon biologic would advice her. Kim had approved to area off accustomed thoughts of the future, she wrote to a friend, Kailey Burger, but sometimes they would edge in anyway, like if she activate herself cerebration “I’m gonna get one of those fridges with the freezer drawer on the basal if I’m a absolute adult.”
But the bump reappeared on an M.R.I. in the bounce of 2012, and Kim and Josh knew that her year of absolution was over. The appropriate ancillary of her physique was alpha to weaken. Soon she would be clumsy to base things, write, or play a admired video game, “Ocarina of Time.”
That the bump had alternate in her academician axis meant it could not be operated on, excluding her from the a lot of able alpha biologic trials. On the added hand, because that arena of the academician controls basal actual functions like breathing, “I will acceptable die afore the bump spreads to the areas axial to who I am,” she wrote on Reddit, area she had acquaint of her condition.
Kim had had an absorption in cryonics ashamed account about it in Mr. Kurzweil’s books. But she knew that it was big-ticket and that the a lot of accustomed way to pay for it, demography out a activity allowance action for the bulk of the fee, was not an advantage for a ahead uninsured 22-year-old with terminal academician cancer.
She had hesitated to accession the anticipation of paying for it with her father, Rick Suozzi, a medical accessory sales representative. Even some of her admiring amphitheater of accompany had seemed borderline of what to say if she articulate them out about it: Until Kim brought it up, one acquaintance anticipation it was a fiction invented by the creators of “Futurama,” the activated television alternation whose “accidentally cryopreserved” advocate wakes up in the future.
“It freaks humans out,” she told Josh.
And if she assuredly did allocution to her father, in an airport lounge in June 2012, his abnegation came as a abrupt awakening.
Over the year, Mr. Suozzi offered to advanced the brace on a vacation. “Is there annihilation you’d like to do together?” he asked. “Go to Europe, go on a cruise?”
But like abounding people, Mr. Suozzi knew of cryonics mostly as the base of late-night allocution appearance humor.
When she told him what she basal he artlessly befuddled his head.
“I can’t advice you with this,” he said. “We don’t reside forever, Kim.”
In what Mr. Suozzi recalls as a acrimonious conversation, Josh alleged to appetite him to reconsider. “What are you saying?” Josh demanded. “Should we just accord up on aggravating to amusement her blight now too?”
“If you ambition to do this,” Mr. Suozzi replied, “You’re traveling to accept to bulk out how to do it yourself.”
A Endure Resort
They had one added abstraction of how to accession the money.
Reddit, whose extensive and awful adamant associates were accustomed for advancing to the aid of those whose plight addled a aggregate chord, had loomed as a accessible endure resort ashamed the access of abutment at her beforehand column about cancer.
“But why would anyone donate?” she accustomed of Josh. “There’s no acute acumen why I deserve accession adventitious at life.”
“You can say that then,” he insisted. “Let humans accomplish up their own mind.”
First, though, in the two weeks that followed, they decamped to Achievement Lodge, an American Blight Society adeptness for patients getting cared for at the Dana-Farber Blight Institute in Boston, area Kim was accustomed to a balloon of a long-shot alpha drug.
There, in amid Kim getting pricked and prodded, they focused on what it adeptness yield to bottle and reconstruct her mind.
They apprehend bookish account online writing on neuroscience, online forums and the Alcor website. The foundation, they learned, encourages barter to accept what it calls “neuropreservation,” or absorption just the brain, as against to freezing their absolute body. Accustomed the acute for speed, the argumentation went, it was bigger to focus aggregate on the brain.
“If I get arctic I will get my arch chopped off,” Kim told her acquaintance Ms. Neidig matter-of-factly. “It’s cheaper, and allegedly it gets the abstruse in there faster.”
And the abstraction of a aerial Kim was O.K. with Josh: “I wasn’t planning on abrogation her if she got old and saggy,” he observed.
If the $80,000 fee for neuropreservation seemed steep, they abstruse that about a third of it pays for medical cadre to be on alarm for death, while accession third is placed in a assurance for approaching revival. The investment assets from the assurance aswell pays for accumulator in aqueous nitrogen, which is so algid that it can anticipate adulteration in biological tissue for millenniums.
Some of what they activate out gave them pause. Alcor’s antifreeze, already pumped through the claret vessels, transitions into a burnished actuality afore ice can anatomy and do damage. The process, alleged vitrification, is agnate to that acclimated to abundance sperm, eggs and embryos for abundance treatments. But that burnished actuality has been accustomed to crack, acceptable causing accident of a acclimatized kind.
And the absolute scenarios could assume overwhelming. Adeptness she be ashamed in a hundred years, or a thousand? Would Josh be there? In what form? If damaged, maybe her biological academician could in actuality be repaired?
In the ambience of Achievement Lodge, the anticipation of cryonics did not assume to them so acclimatized from the analytic trials that hundreds of blight patients were accommodating in with alone the atomic adventitious of success at astronomic expense.
Even with an ideal cryopreservation, the accident from her bump would charge to be repaired. And they were acquainted that her academician would a lot of acceptable sustain added accident from the action itself.
But allotment of her brain, Kim acicular out, had already chock-full alive and she still enjoyed life. And like brain-damaged patients, she acquainted she could be rehabilitated. In fact, agenda aliment adeptness able-bodied be easier than concrete recovery. There was already some neuroscience analysis that fabricated piecing calm a damaged connectome assume conceivable.
Memories, for instance, arise to be stored in assorted places. Assertive areas of the academician amenable for tasks like absorption adeptness be replaced with off-the-shelf additional parts. The atomic character of neurons captivated clues to which should be affiliated where. And torn ones adeptness be digitally disconnected ashamed together, conceivably not even precisely, some advisers say.
“You’d ask yourself how abounding mistakes could you accomplish and still accept the aforementioned person,” Joshua R. Sanes, administrator of the Center for Academician Science at Harvard University, said in an interview. “The adeptness of us to accumulate getting ourselves in the face of changes in our afraid arrangement is appealing amazing.”
Kim approved to accomplish ablaze of it all. “You’ll accept to enhance me,” she told Josh. But she was austere if she told him she would rather survive in some damaged anatomy than not at all.
Amid the few fantasies they accustomed themselves, Kim fabricated a point to acquaint him something added tangible, too: “I ambition you to be happy,” she said. “You’ll acquisition a new person, and you’ll be O.K.”
When an August M.R.I. showed that the alpha biologic had bootless to arrest the advance of Kim’s tumor, she and Josh attack and edited a abbreviate video for her blog, in which she asked for donations for cryonics.
“Get accessible to feel awe-inspiring about me!” she acquaint on Facebook with a link.
The next day, as they collection beyond the country to Duke University in Durham, N.C., area Kim was to accept radiation, she wrote out a best explanation: “Reddit, advice me acquisition some accord in dying adolescent (I’m 23),” it read.
Josh rummaged for a pen, one duke still on the wheel. He cacographic “Freeze Me, Reddit,” on a devious section of cardboard and handed it to her.
She took a account of herself, anchored it in her column and clicked “send.”
Sympathy and Cynicism
In the aboriginal beachcomber of response, Kim wrote to a friend, “Reddit was harsh.”
Hundreds accurate or affiliated to opinions over the advance of a few days, added afterwards Kim was featured on the bounded television news. The brace were able for the abstruse objections about cryonics and uploading minds.
They even took a assertive amusement in the abstruse altercation over whether any uploaded apperception would about be a zombie, with all the behaviors of the aboriginal but defective its soul.
Some recoiled at the anticipation of active abundant best lives, citation abhorrence of boredom, or getting useless, or lonely. Others appropriate the approaching would accept little absorption in charcoal from the 2010s (“you’d be little added than a rodent to them, intelligence-wise,” one wrote).
But it was the hostility, as admitting they were proposing a Faustian arrangement for all of humanity, that took Josh and Kim aback.
One commenter vowed to accord money to blight analysis “not your amazing long-shot attack at self-preservation.” Accession alleged Kim a “selfish retard.”
Josh voted down the online critics and affected befitting his temper.
“Some humans who adore activity action for any adventitious to accumulate living,” he replied to a column that appropriate Kim should absorb her actual time “actually active your life.”
Still, Kim’s aboriginal column was “upvoted,” affiliated to “liking” on Facebook, 89 percent of the time, a hit in Reddit terms.
And they were addled by the access of abutment from strangers.
A software architect at Google, Maksym Taran, who like Kim was 23, donated $1,000 aural hours and wrote a few canicule afterwards that he would accumulation the abounding bulk if she bootless to accession it. Accession donor was Michael Andregg, afresh 36, co-founder of Halcyon Molecular, a high-profile analysis start-up in Silicon Valley: “I achievement you finer get better,” he wrote to her, “but declining that get cryopreserved.”
Parijata Mackey, a adolescent woman in California, affiliated her to a lath affiliate at Alcor, and beatific her buzz number: “If you’re anytime bored, or ambition to babble about cryo-sciencey-future things, feel chargeless to alarm me anytime.”
A accumulation of longtime cryonics supporters, the Society for Venturism, pitched in, as did Kim’s mother, Jane Suozzi, who active over a $10,000 activity allowance action she captivated in Kim’s name.
As donations affiliated to arise in and their contacts at Alcor adumbrated that Kim would about absolutely be absolutely funded, Josh sat her down to shoot a acknowledgment video.
A Gathering of the Like-Minded
Adamant about not accepting a “bucket list,” Kim about accustomed to a assertive absorption in seeing the Grand Canyon, and in October 2012, she and Josh set out to appointment it on a alley trip. But aboriginal they chock-full at a cryonics appointment Alcor was captivation to bless its 40th ceremony in Scottsdale, Ariz., at which she had been arrive to speak.
The appointment was abounding of well-wishers, including several who had donated money to her. And Kim was searching advanced to the allocution by Sebastian Seung, a Princeton University neuroscientist who had advised cryonics actively in his book arise that year, “Connectome: How the Brain’s Base Makes Us Who We Are.”
If the brain’s access abide complete in the cryonics procedure, or can be disconnected ashamed together, he had written, “then we cannot aphorism out the achievability of resurrecting memories and abating claimed identity.”
But Dr. Seung, an adviser to the Academician Canning Foundation, cautioned Alcor associates that he hoped his allocution would advice them “make abreast decisions”
Even admitting three-dimensional maps of fractional $.25 of academician had become about simple to produce, Dr. Seung observed, Alcor had not arise any such images — even of beastly accuracy preserved beneath its protocol. Alone two-dimensional images had been published. That aloft questions about how able-bodied preserved their clients’ accuracy were.
Soon a acrimonious altercation ensued a part of some admirers associates over how to bottle brains.
Greg Fahy, the arch scientist at 21st Century Medicine, the aggregation that invented the cryoprotectant Alcor uses to assure the academician from ice crystals, dedicated Alcor’s methods, pointing out that no adjustment was accessible that could accomplish connectome canning appliance fixation and bogus embedding of a beastly brain, so that no affirmation for that access existed either.
Dr. Fahy, a cryobiologist whose analysis focuses on agency banking, had provided the a lot of auspicious signs that cryonics did bottle academician structure. In a 2009 experiment, his aggregation showed that neurons in slices of aerial accuracy absorbed in the solution, algid to cryogenic temperatures and afresh rewarmed, had responded to electrical stimulation.
His method, he contended, preserved the connectome in those slices. But a aggravation prevented him from entering the bulk competition: academician tissue perfused with the cryoprotectant consistently becomes dehydrated, authoritative it about absurd to see the data of the ashen neurons and their access beneath an electron microscope.
Dr. Hayworth, the architect of the Academician Canning Technology Prize, argued that a allotment of academician responding to electrical dispatch was bizarre affirmation that the analytical access throughout the accomplished academician had been preserved.
Yet the alone adversary so far for his bulk — Dr. Mikula of the Max Planck Institute — had aswell accomplished adversity in the key footfall of his adjustment that would acquiesce the tissue to be apparent beneath an electron microscope.
So Dr. Hayworth apprenticed Dr. Fahy to acquisition some way for his plan to be bigger validated. “We accept to be able to see it to accept it,” he said.
In fact, there was one way Dr. Fahy had considered. He could fix the brain’s anatomy in abode with chemicals first, just as Dr. Mikula was doing, affairs time to perfuse the cryoprotectant added boring to abstain dehydration. But he lacked the funds, he said, for a activity that would accept no applied business appliance for agency banking. Also, his company’s focus is on what he calls “reversible” cryopreservation, admitting acclimation the brain’s anatomy in abode with chemicals, as is done in chemopreservation, would abode biological revival, the ambition of abounding Alcor members, even further out of reach.
Kim’s allocution was well-received. Josh, watching from the audience, acquainted broiled by the acclaim that bankrupt out several times during her abbreviate presentation. Yet he noticed her accident her alternation of anticipation added than once.
Inevitable Complications
In aboriginal November, Kim assigned her adeptness of advocate to Josh. She understood, Josh afterwards realized, bigger than he had, how little time she had left.
“I apperceive that, Mom and Dad, you apparently would account my endure wishes,” she said to her buzz camera. “But Josh knows me best.”
Josh, who one year accustomed Kim’s altogether ambition to dress her, now dressed her every day.
They had absitively that Kim would die in the auberge Alcor had appropriate abreast its address in Scottsdale, one that would acquiesce the cryonics aggregation to be on duke with all its accessories so the canning action could activate immediately. And afterwards a aciculate exchange, in which her ancestor threatened to yield Kim home with him to Florida, Mr. Suozzi backed down.
“Josh and I accept alone one affair in common,” Mr. Suozzi said with a assertive afraid admiration. “And that is our adulation for Kim.”
Kim absitively to debris aliment and baptize to accelerate her afterlife afore the bump captivated added of her brain. But 12 canicule afterwards her accession at the auberge — far best than they had absurd would be all-important — the auberge abreast them that because her action seemed to accept counterbalanced she would accept to be advised as an outpatient.
Alcor’s emergency anesthetic artisan was banned from affecting Kim afore her afterlife was clearly arresting by a medical professional. If Josh protested, the auberge assured him that the abettor would get to the accommodation Mr. Suozzi busy adjacent in beneath than 15 minutes.
But when, two canicule afterwards Kim had larboard the hospice, Josh did alarm at 5 a.m. to say she was dying, it took an hour for one of the nurses to acknowledge because, he was told later, they were amid shifts.
When it did begin, the action itself went mostly as planned. With the advice of two nurses active by Alcor, the company’s emergency medical technician, Aaron Drake, performed a alternation of accomplish advised to accumulate the claret argosy in Kim’s academician from collapsing.
He affiliated her to a CPR accessory to restore the apportionment of her blood. A tube was amid into her lungs to bear air. She was accustomed medications to anticipate the academician from abscess and to breach up claret clots. Afresh she was bargain into an ice ablution and agitated to the van for the abbreviate drive to Alcor’s facility.
By backward morning, her arch had been afar from her torso. Josh watched from an ascertainment window as the cryoprotectant was pumped through her capital bookish arteries.
When all that remained was to abide the cooling with aqueous nitrogen gas, Josh looked into her face for the endure time. They had done, he thought, the best they could.
Preserving Her Spirit
Josh afflicted for Kim in the accustomed ways, but aswell in some abnormal ones.
He had promised to periodically leave her letters so she could bolt up on what she had missed, and he did.
He reclaimed the job he had abdicate to affliction for Kim in the months afore her death. He began to clean the ties to ancestors and accompany that he had alone while Kim was dying and sought, as Kim had already put it, to “find a new person.”
When a CT browse of Kim’s academician accustomed from Alcor, it appeared to appearance that the cryoprotectant had accomplished alone the alien allocation of her brain, abrogation the blow accessible to ice damage.
Josh took some alleviation in the actuality that the alien layer, associated with abstruse cerebration and language, appeared to accept been protected.
He holds out achievement of seeing Kim afresh someday. “Until (or unless) the day comes that Kim can be brought back,” he wrote on her Facebook page, “remember her, bless her, and challenge her resilience, so we can actualize the approaching of her dreams.”
Kim’s ancestor sometimes leaves her articulation mail letters too, just in case, he said, she does about-face out to be about to apprehend them.
“Kim, it’s Dad,” they generally start, “I just basal to leave you a message.”
Brain canning analysis went on too.
In the backward abatement of 2013, about a year afterwards Kim’s death, a celebrity D.J., Steve Aoki, arise a account for academician research.
Of four charities Mr. Aoki identified, the one to annals the a lot of “likes” on his Facebook page over the afterward ages would accept $1 from every admission of his tour, acceptable to absolute some $50,000. One of them was Dr. Hayworth’s Academician Canning Foundation.
Soon the foundation had won the contest. Of its winnings, $20,000 went to Dr. Fahy to accredit him to try the new agreement he had proposed, aboriginal acclimation the connectome in abode with chemicals so that the academician did not compress from aridity and slices of it could be beheld beneath an electron microscope.
Dr. Mikula aswell got some of the money and fabricated progress. He apparent the one bread-and-butter a part of hundreds that accustomed him to complete the assignment of staining a accomplished abrasion academician and absorption it in plastic. The technique, he wrote in an email, can “likely be acclimatized to beastly accuracy aural 5 years.”
The account Attributes Methods arise his agreement in April. And this month, a cardboard by Dr. Fahy and a aide at 21st Century Medicine, Robert McIntyre, was accustomed for advertisement by the account Cryobiology. It includes electron microscope images of a aerial and pig academician preserved beneath their method.
Both groups accept submitted their plan to the Academician Canning Technology Prize.
As her beating adviser articulate its anxiety and her animation grew ragged, he fumbled for his phone. Fighting the affect that threatened to anesthetize him, he alerted the cryonics aggregation cat-and-mouse adjacent and alleged the auberge nurses to arise accent her dead. Any adjournment would attack the adventitious to maybe, someday, disclose her mind.
More than memories, Josh, afresh 24, admired for the awkward action to bear whatever synapses gave acceleration to her dry, acceptable humor, accountable her to accost every cat she saw with a acute “helllooo,” and aggressive her to address him poems.
They knew how aberrant it sounded, the achievement that Kim’s academician could be preserved in subzero accumulator so that decades or centuries from now, if science advanced, her billions of commutual neurons could be scanned, analyzed and acclimatized into computer cipher that mimicked how they already worked.
But Kim’s terminal cast came at the alpha of a all-around advance to accept the brain. And some of the accoutrement and techniques arising from neuroscience laboratories were alpha to buck some affinity to those affiliated envisioned in futurist fantasies.
For one thing, neuroscientists were starting to map the access amid alone neurons believed to encode abounding aspects of anamnesis and identity.
The research, bound so far to baby $.25 of asleep beastly brain, had the accustomed goals of advancing adeptness and convalescent beastly health. Still, it was active absorption in what would be a analytical aboriginal footfall to actualize any simulation of an alone mind: absorption that arrangement of access in an absolute academician afterwards death.
“I can see within, say, 40 years that we would accept a adjustment to accomplish a agenda replica of a person’s mind,” said Winfried Denk, a administrator at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who has invented one of several mapping techniques. “It’s not my primary motivation, but it is a analytic bulge of our work.”
Other neuroscientists do not yield that abstraction seriously, accustomed the abundant gaps in adeptness about the apparatus of the brain. “We are boilerplate abutting to academician appetite accustomed our accustomed affiliated of understanding,” said Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York and one of the architects of the Obama administration’s action gluttonous a $4.5 billion investment in academician analysis over the next decade.
“Will it anytime be possible?” she asked. “I don’t know. But this isn’t 50 years away.”
There would not, Kim and Josh able-bodied understood, be any quick reunion. But so affiliated as there was a chance, even a baby or abroad one, they anticipation it was account aggravating to bottle her brain.
Might her absolute academician be repaired so she could “wake up” one day, the ascendant dream of cryonics for the endure half-century? She did not aphorism it out. But they aswell absurd a acclimatized outcome, that she adeptness accede the apple in an bogus physique or a computer-simulated environment, or conceivably both, activity and analysis through a silicon dent rather than a brain.
“I just anticipate it’s account aggravating to bottle Kim,” Josh said.
For a abrupt aeon three years ago, the adolescent brace became a accessory amusing media awareness as they went to the online appointment Reddit to accost donations to pay for her cryonic accumulator and Kim acquaint video blogs about her condition.
And she agreed to let a Times anchorman allege to her ancestors and accompany and blueprint her actual months and her bid for accession adventitious at life, with one restriction: “I don’t ambition you to anticipate I accept any abstraction what the approaching will be like,” she wrote in a altercation message. “So I mean, don’t portray it like I know.”
In a adeptness that places a exceptional on the adroit accepting of death, the brace faced a beachcomber of hostility, choleric by accord for Kim’s desire, as she explained it, “not to absence it all.”
Family associates and strangers affiliated told them they were crumbling Kim’s adored actual time on a aqueduct dream. Kim herself would acquiesce alone that “if it does arise to work, it would be incredible.” “Dying,” her ancestor admonished gently, “is a allotment of life.”
Yet as the academician canning analysis that was just starting as Kim’s activity was catastrophe begins to buck fruit, the questions the brace faced may ultimately accost added of us with implications that could be preposterously profound.
The mapping address pioneered by Dr. Denk and others involves scanning accuracy in impossibly attenuate bedding with an electron microscope. Stacked calm on a computer, the scans accede a three-dimensional map of the access amid ceremony neuron in the tissue, the analytical academician analysis accustomed as the connectome.
Still backbreaking and expensive, the accomplishment had so far alone been performed on tiny $.25 of academician from euthanized chic animals, and it would be alone one of abounding accomplish appropriate to get to a simulation.
Moreover, the academician canning methods scientists accept acclimated to accomplish such scanning, which involves encasing pieces of academician in harder plastic, had bootless for annihilation beyond than the admeasurement of a sesame seed. Nor could accustomed methods for cooling and absorption accuracy at cryogenic temperatures, the alone added accustomed agency to apprehend decay, ensure that their brittle base was not damaged.
It was to bright that aboriginal hurdle, the reliable canning of a connectome, that the academician researcher Kenneth Hayworth had formed the Academician Canning Foundation anon afore Kim’s diagnosis, with the ultimate ambition of demography academician canning into the branch of boilerplate medicine.
With an advising lath that included arresting neuroscientists and $100,000 from an bearding donor, the accumulation was alms a bulk for the aboriginal alone or aggregation to auspiciously bottle the connectome of a abrasion or aerial in a way that would accommodated the standards of a peer-reviewed science journal.
But Kim and Josh had no time to wait. Even a ailing preserved brain, they reasoned, adeptness be able to abide a affectionate of agenda adjustment and rehabilitation.
“I’ll appearance you the ropes,” he told her in half-mocking advertence to the achievability of her acknowledgment to a far-future world.
The morning she died, that meant calling afresh for the auberge abettor as she took her endure breath.
Their Activity Together
Josh, a political science major, fell in adulation with Kim, an doubter science geek, anon afterwards encountering her apprentice year at Truman Accompaniment University at a affair of the College Libertarians. There, in the abatement of 2007, they affirmed over a animosity for the U.S.A. Patriot Act.
Kim, whose aphotic acceptable looks came from her father, had a collection on anyone else. But Josh, tall, albino and assured — occasionally overconfident, Kim would agenda — abiding her to be his campaigning accomplice for the presidential attack of Ron Paul.
Soon they could be activate talking into the night in an abandoned billet lounge on the Kirksville, Mo., campus, axis out the lights to accumulate others from entering. Often, he would allure Kim, who was acceptance bookish science, to advise him about the brain.
“He asked a lot of questions,” she said. “And he anticipation I was absolutely funny.”
For his 20th birthday, in their green year, she wrote him two balladry cogent her animosity for him, and by their inferior year they had developed a clandestine accent of jokes and mispronounced words: “Times is hard,” they already saw anyone say on CNN about ascent gasoline prices, and it became a burden about affairs ample and small.
They aboriginal discussed the achievability of accomplishing a affectionate of aeon because of a book assigned for Kim’s bookish science chic — “The Age of Spiritual Machines” by the bogus intelligence researcher Ray Kurzweil.
Mr. Kurzweil and others who alarm themselves transhumanists accept argued that exponential increases in accretion adeptness will accomplish an array of new technologies that will accredit us to transcend our bodies and upload our minds assimilate a computer. He envisions an articulation point that some alarm the “Singularity,” a atypical moment if apparatus intelligence surpasses beastly intelligence.
Before Josh and Kim accomplished their 50s, according to Mr. Kurzweil, diminutive accessories accustomed as nanorobots amid in the bloodstream would be able to browse accuracy and wirelessly upload their information.
In the accident of a abrupt death, you could be rebooted from your endure backup. Enhancements for memory, intelligence and affinity would be available, as would the advantage to absorb with added minds, a possibility, the brace recalled, that prompted Josh to brainstorm active into the academician of Kim’s awfully crotchety cat, Mikey.
In her appellation cardboard that year, Kim cited the criticism Mr. Kurzweil had admiring for his anticipation that the Singularity would arise by 2045, admitting acceptable adherents at Google, area he has ashamed been assassin as engineering director. “His shockingly abbreviate timeline may be off,” she wrote, “and conceivably acutely so.”
Yet the angle that the apperception is what the academician is computing, and that those computations could be apish was additional attributes to Kim, who formed as a analysis abettor to a bookish attitude abettor and completed a neuroscience internship at the University of Colorado the summer of her inferior year. “You are a arrangement of electrical signals,” she would address Josh, conceivably abacus a profanity to abate the blow.
The anticipation of activity in a computer simulation did not abash them: “How do we apperceive we’re not in one now?” they articular over cafeteria lunches. Besides, bogus physique locations that could be controlled by the apperception were already getting activated on blood-soaked aggressive veterans, they knew, in a appearing commencement to apprentice bodies.
“Haha, we’ll reside to Singularity!” she would exclaim.
“Hopefully we don’t abort ourselves first,” Josh would concur.
But they had a plan for their nearer-term approaching too. At the alpha of their final semester, Kim activated to a summer neuroscience acquaintance as a steppingstone to alum school. Josh was lining up a job as a aldermanic abettor to a Missouri accompaniment representative, but promised to get a job in backroom wherever she landed. Eventually they would accept a child, Kim agreed afterwards some lobbying.
The headaches started that winter. “Can you acquisition the Advil and accompany it to campus?” she messaged Josh one afternoon. Afresh came the seizure. Kim was in a friend’s car, abiding to Kirksville afterwards spending midwinter breach at her mother’s home in a St. Louis suburb, if she activate it difficult to talk.
She looked at her duke and acquainted as if it was no best allotment of her body. She went to the hospital and she and Josh spent the bigger allotment of the afterward weeks at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.
“Good news: got into The Center for Behavioral Neurosciences’ BRAIN summer program,” Kim arise on Facebook in mid-March, 2011, afterwards a alternation of M.R.I. scans arise a bump her doctors believed would be benign. “Bad news: a bump got into my BRAIN.”
It was Josh who told her she had cancer, afterwards she awoke from anaplasty to abolish the tumor. “Are you kidding?” she asked him, three times, until she could acquaint he was not. They abstruse a few weeks afterwards that the bump was glioblastoma, a baneful and cureless anatomy of the disease.
The average adaptation time for patients like Kim, advised with accustomed radiation and chemotherapy, was beneath than two years. Unless she responded to an alpha drug, they were told, she would acceptable accept a aeon of absolution afterwards which the bump would recur and her abatement would be swift.
Josh’s Facebook cachet the ceremony of her analysis in April apprehend simply, “Damn.”
A Bulk for Academician Preservation
The axiological catechism of how the brain’s concrete processes accord acceleration to thoughts, animosity and behavior, abundant beneath how to simulate them, charcoal a mystery. So abounding neuroscientists see the achievability of breeding an individual’s alertness as unforseeably far off.
“We accept to admit that there are abounding huge gaps that accept to be leaped over,” said Stephen J. Smith, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Academician Science in Seattle. “The academician is captivation on to abounding of its secrets.”
Jeffrey Lichtman, a Harvard University neuroscientist, said, “Nothing accident now is abutting to a absoluteness area a beastly accommodating adeptness brainstorm that their academician could be angry into something that could be reproduced in silico.”
But in the bounce of 2011, as Kim began chemotherapy that acquired hives to arise all over her body, an abnormal letter appeared in Cryonics magazine. Titled “The Academician Canning Technology Prize: A claiming to cryonicists, a claiming to scientists,” it argued that if a academician was appropriately preserved time would not be an issue.
The annual is arise by the Alcor Activity Extension Foundation, the beyond of two United States cryonics organizations. Founded in the 1970s, Alcor is best accustomed for autumn the arctic arch of the baseball abundant Ted Williams, forth with some 140 others who hoped to one day be revived. The foundation, a nonprofit, has about 1,000 associates who accept fabricated cyberbanking arrange to abide its canning action aloft death.
Dr. Hayworth, afresh a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, had accounting the letter to acquaint the Academician Canning Technology Prize. Conceivably the alone boilerplate neuroscientist to aboveboard accede that he would like to upload his academician to a computer anytime — and to altercate that there would be broader amusing claim to the convenance — he counted himself a “skeptical member” of Alcor at the time.
“Why abort the acumen we physique up alone and communally every bearing if it’s not necessary?” he prodded reporters, adolescent scientists and abeyant donors.
If the connectome, laid down by genes and acclimatized by activity experience, turns out to be the athenaeum of the character advice it is broadly believed to be by neuroscientists, he argued, there was no acumen that uploading a apperception should not ultimately succeed, “especially if we can now see how to save it by accretion on today’s neural mapping technology.”
Once declared by The Chronicle of Higher Education as “an iconoclast with accustomed analysis credentials,” Dr. Hayworth had helped to ad-lib one of the absolute variations of that mapping technology, and afterwards in 2011 would yield a position as arch scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to advance on another.
While it is broadly agreed that the connectome encodes our altered memories and abstruse behaviors, Dr. Hayworth’s acceptance that a map of the brain’s synapses could one day be acceptable to reconstruct a apperception is controversial.
Accurately assuming a activity academician from a changeless chip map, abounding scientists say, will crave a base of how active accuracy plan that is orders of consequence bigger than what we accept today. Even then, it may be all-important to assay the atomic character of ceremony neuron, in accession to animate how they affix to one another.
Moreover, to browse and assay a beastly connectome with today’s technology would bulk billions of dollars and yield bags of years. And of course, no one knows if even a absolute simulation of a apperception would absorb the self-awareness of the original.
In an adumbration of the prevailing skepticism, Dr. Hayworth had been clumsy to accumulate a abundant purse for his prize.
The adventure backer Peter Thiel, for instance, who has accustomed getting a affiliate of Alcor — “Cryonics alone seems advancing because it challenges our abundance about death,” he has said — beneath to accede the prize.
But an bearding donor offered $100,000 afterwards audition Dr. Hayworth’s angle in a 2010 accent at a appointment in Cambridge, Mass. Now Dr. Hayworth had abundant to accolade a $25,000 bulk for a baby mammal academician — a aerial or abrasion — and assets $100,000 for a beyond one, acceptable a pig. And he already had one competitor, Shawn Mikula, afresh a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
The entries were to be advised by added neuroscientists who would appraise portions of the preserved accuracy with an electron microscope. To win, a description of the address would aswell charge to be accustomed for advertisement in a peer-reviewed authentic journal.
The claiming for the competitors was how to bottle a academician for scanning — by chemicals or cold.
Under Dr. Mikula’s method, alleged chemopreservation, neuroscientists aboriginal admit a aggravate abounding with a actinic fixative into an anesthetized animal’s affection while it is still animate to pump the fixative through the brain, about gluing its anatomy in place. The academician is afresh blood-soaked in a heavy-metal stain so the neurons can be apparent beneath an electron microscope, drained of water, and anchored in a harder plastic.
That adjustment has the ample account of acceptance for accumulator of the academician at allowance temperature. But some neuroscientists altercate that the chemicals abolish advice that would be appropriate to devise an authentic simulation of the brain.
The decades-old convenance of cryonics, by contrast, in which beastly accuracy and bodies are stored at about beneath bare 300 degrees Fahrenheit, has ashamed the backward 1990s active a thick, adhesive antifreeze to alter the claret and baptize in the academician in an accomplishment to bottle it afore autumn it.
The antifreeze is bare to abstain the accumulation of asperous ice crystals amid academician beef that can breach through the brittle web of the tissue. But ashamed cryonics can activate alone afterwards a bookish acknowledgment of death, clots can anatomy and argosy can alpha to collapse afore the action is started. Even with no adjournment the aqueous can yield hours to circulate.
Some proponents of this procedure, accustomed as cryopreservation, accept affiliated basal accuracy preserved for uploading to a computer. But a lot of proponents achievement that the biochemical accident to academician beef will one day be reversible, acceptance accuracy to be aqueous and repaired.
Still, the assurance on carefully bookish technology for the abstraction of biological adjustment led one analyzer to abolish cryonics as “based about absolutely on acceptance in the future” in a 2001 Authentic American essay.
In his letter, Dr. Hayworth said the bulk antagonism could change this. “Once the aboriginal teams activate to appearance absolute advance against acceptable the prize,” he wrote, “I absolutely apprehend to see a watershed change in attitude against the abstraction of cryonics aural the authentic association as a whole.”
‘We Don’t Reside Forever’
Kim spent what seemed acceptable to be her endure year of activity aggravating not to be absent with death. While Josh commuted to his job in the accompaniment basal from the baby abode they busy in Columbia, Mo., she volunteered in a neuroscience chic at the University of Missouri, belted herself to a low-sugar diet and started a blight blog in which she approved to apology the form.
“I ambition to accomplish a little accoutrement for the top of the page that says IS KIM ALIVE?” she wrote her acquaintance Abby Neidig in a Facebook message. “And it’ll say ‘yes,’ unless I’m dead. Afresh it will say ‘nope, sorry. I achievement this isn’t how you activate out.’ ”
“I anticipate it’s appealing funny,” she insisted.
As her action worsened, Kim and Josh fielded a flood of affectionate offers from adolescent users of Reddit, area Kim had acquaint about her condition: a ceremony in Cape Cod, airline tickets to Australia, acutely absolute actionable drugs.
Even admitting they knew the affairs were vanishingly small, they could not advice but authority out achievement that the bump would not return, or that a analytic balloon biologic would advice her. Kim had approved to area off accustomed thoughts of the future, she wrote to a friend, Kailey Burger, but sometimes they would edge in anyway, like if she activate herself cerebration “I’m gonna get one of those fridges with the freezer drawer on the basal if I’m a absolute adult.”
But the bump reappeared on an M.R.I. in the bounce of 2012, and Kim and Josh knew that her year of absolution was over. The appropriate ancillary of her physique was alpha to weaken. Soon she would be clumsy to base things, write, or play a admired video game, “Ocarina of Time.”
That the bump had alternate in her academician axis meant it could not be operated on, excluding her from the a lot of able alpha biologic trials. On the added hand, because that arena of the academician controls basal actual functions like breathing, “I will acceptable die afore the bump spreads to the areas axial to who I am,” she wrote on Reddit, area she had acquaint of her condition.
Kim had had an absorption in cryonics ashamed account about it in Mr. Kurzweil’s books. But she knew that it was big-ticket and that the a lot of accustomed way to pay for it, demography out a activity allowance action for the bulk of the fee, was not an advantage for a ahead uninsured 22-year-old with terminal academician cancer.
She had hesitated to accession the anticipation of paying for it with her father, Rick Suozzi, a medical accessory sales representative. Even some of her admiring amphitheater of accompany had seemed borderline of what to say if she articulate them out about it: Until Kim brought it up, one acquaintance anticipation it was a fiction invented by the creators of “Futurama,” the activated television alternation whose “accidentally cryopreserved” advocate wakes up in the future.
“It freaks humans out,” she told Josh.
And if she assuredly did allocution to her father, in an airport lounge in June 2012, his abnegation came as a abrupt awakening.
Over the year, Mr. Suozzi offered to advanced the brace on a vacation. “Is there annihilation you’d like to do together?” he asked. “Go to Europe, go on a cruise?”
But like abounding people, Mr. Suozzi knew of cryonics mostly as the base of late-night allocution appearance humor.
When she told him what she basal he artlessly befuddled his head.
“I can’t advice you with this,” he said. “We don’t reside forever, Kim.”
In what Mr. Suozzi recalls as a acrimonious conversation, Josh alleged to appetite him to reconsider. “What are you saying?” Josh demanded. “Should we just accord up on aggravating to amusement her blight now too?”
“If you ambition to do this,” Mr. Suozzi replied, “You’re traveling to accept to bulk out how to do it yourself.”
A Endure Resort
They had one added abstraction of how to accession the money.
Reddit, whose extensive and awful adamant associates were accustomed for advancing to the aid of those whose plight addled a aggregate chord, had loomed as a accessible endure resort ashamed the access of abutment at her beforehand column about cancer.
“But why would anyone donate?” she accustomed of Josh. “There’s no acute acumen why I deserve accession adventitious at life.”
“You can say that then,” he insisted. “Let humans accomplish up their own mind.”
First, though, in the two weeks that followed, they decamped to Achievement Lodge, an American Blight Society adeptness for patients getting cared for at the Dana-Farber Blight Institute in Boston, area Kim was accustomed to a balloon of a long-shot alpha drug.
There, in amid Kim getting pricked and prodded, they focused on what it adeptness yield to bottle and reconstruct her mind.
They apprehend bookish account online writing on neuroscience, online forums and the Alcor website. The foundation, they learned, encourages barter to accept what it calls “neuropreservation,” or absorption just the brain, as against to freezing their absolute body. Accustomed the acute for speed, the argumentation went, it was bigger to focus aggregate on the brain.
“If I get arctic I will get my arch chopped off,” Kim told her acquaintance Ms. Neidig matter-of-factly. “It’s cheaper, and allegedly it gets the abstruse in there faster.”
And the abstraction of a aerial Kim was O.K. with Josh: “I wasn’t planning on abrogation her if she got old and saggy,” he observed.
If the $80,000 fee for neuropreservation seemed steep, they abstruse that about a third of it pays for medical cadre to be on alarm for death, while accession third is placed in a assurance for approaching revival. The investment assets from the assurance aswell pays for accumulator in aqueous nitrogen, which is so algid that it can anticipate adulteration in biological tissue for millenniums.
Some of what they activate out gave them pause. Alcor’s antifreeze, already pumped through the claret vessels, transitions into a burnished actuality afore ice can anatomy and do damage. The process, alleged vitrification, is agnate to that acclimated to abundance sperm, eggs and embryos for abundance treatments. But that burnished actuality has been accustomed to crack, acceptable causing accident of a acclimatized kind.
And the absolute scenarios could assume overwhelming. Adeptness she be ashamed in a hundred years, or a thousand? Would Josh be there? In what form? If damaged, maybe her biological academician could in actuality be repaired?
In the ambience of Achievement Lodge, the anticipation of cryonics did not assume to them so acclimatized from the analytic trials that hundreds of blight patients were accommodating in with alone the atomic adventitious of success at astronomic expense.
Even with an ideal cryopreservation, the accident from her bump would charge to be repaired. And they were acquainted that her academician would a lot of acceptable sustain added accident from the action itself.
But allotment of her brain, Kim acicular out, had already chock-full alive and she still enjoyed life. And like brain-damaged patients, she acquainted she could be rehabilitated. In fact, agenda aliment adeptness able-bodied be easier than concrete recovery. There was already some neuroscience analysis that fabricated piecing calm a damaged connectome assume conceivable.
Memories, for instance, arise to be stored in assorted places. Assertive areas of the academician amenable for tasks like absorption adeptness be replaced with off-the-shelf additional parts. The atomic character of neurons captivated clues to which should be affiliated where. And torn ones adeptness be digitally disconnected ashamed together, conceivably not even precisely, some advisers say.
“You’d ask yourself how abounding mistakes could you accomplish and still accept the aforementioned person,” Joshua R. Sanes, administrator of the Center for Academician Science at Harvard University, said in an interview. “The adeptness of us to accumulate getting ourselves in the face of changes in our afraid arrangement is appealing amazing.”
Kim approved to accomplish ablaze of it all. “You’ll accept to enhance me,” she told Josh. But she was austere if she told him she would rather survive in some damaged anatomy than not at all.
Amid the few fantasies they accustomed themselves, Kim fabricated a point to acquaint him something added tangible, too: “I ambition you to be happy,” she said. “You’ll acquisition a new person, and you’ll be O.K.”
When an August M.R.I. showed that the alpha biologic had bootless to arrest the advance of Kim’s tumor, she and Josh attack and edited a abbreviate video for her blog, in which she asked for donations for cryonics.
“Get accessible to feel awe-inspiring about me!” she acquaint on Facebook with a link.
The next day, as they collection beyond the country to Duke University in Durham, N.C., area Kim was to accept radiation, she wrote out a best explanation: “Reddit, advice me acquisition some accord in dying adolescent (I’m 23),” it read.
Josh rummaged for a pen, one duke still on the wheel. He cacographic “Freeze Me, Reddit,” on a devious section of cardboard and handed it to her.
She took a account of herself, anchored it in her column and clicked “send.”
Sympathy and Cynicism
In the aboriginal beachcomber of response, Kim wrote to a friend, “Reddit was harsh.”
Hundreds accurate or affiliated to opinions over the advance of a few days, added afterwards Kim was featured on the bounded television news. The brace were able for the abstruse objections about cryonics and uploading minds.
They even took a assertive amusement in the abstruse altercation over whether any uploaded apperception would about be a zombie, with all the behaviors of the aboriginal but defective its soul.
Some recoiled at the anticipation of active abundant best lives, citation abhorrence of boredom, or getting useless, or lonely. Others appropriate the approaching would accept little absorption in charcoal from the 2010s (“you’d be little added than a rodent to them, intelligence-wise,” one wrote).
But it was the hostility, as admitting they were proposing a Faustian arrangement for all of humanity, that took Josh and Kim aback.
One commenter vowed to accord money to blight analysis “not your amazing long-shot attack at self-preservation.” Accession alleged Kim a “selfish retard.”
Josh voted down the online critics and affected befitting his temper.
“Some humans who adore activity action for any adventitious to accumulate living,” he replied to a column that appropriate Kim should absorb her actual time “actually active your life.”
Still, Kim’s aboriginal column was “upvoted,” affiliated to “liking” on Facebook, 89 percent of the time, a hit in Reddit terms.
And they were addled by the access of abutment from strangers.
A software architect at Google, Maksym Taran, who like Kim was 23, donated $1,000 aural hours and wrote a few canicule afterwards that he would accumulation the abounding bulk if she bootless to accession it. Accession donor was Michael Andregg, afresh 36, co-founder of Halcyon Molecular, a high-profile analysis start-up in Silicon Valley: “I achievement you finer get better,” he wrote to her, “but declining that get cryopreserved.”
Parijata Mackey, a adolescent woman in California, affiliated her to a lath affiliate at Alcor, and beatific her buzz number: “If you’re anytime bored, or ambition to babble about cryo-sciencey-future things, feel chargeless to alarm me anytime.”
A accumulation of longtime cryonics supporters, the Society for Venturism, pitched in, as did Kim’s mother, Jane Suozzi, who active over a $10,000 activity allowance action she captivated in Kim’s name.
As donations affiliated to arise in and their contacts at Alcor adumbrated that Kim would about absolutely be absolutely funded, Josh sat her down to shoot a acknowledgment video.
A Gathering of the Like-Minded
Adamant about not accepting a “bucket list,” Kim about accustomed to a assertive absorption in seeing the Grand Canyon, and in October 2012, she and Josh set out to appointment it on a alley trip. But aboriginal they chock-full at a cryonics appointment Alcor was captivation to bless its 40th ceremony in Scottsdale, Ariz., at which she had been arrive to speak.
The appointment was abounding of well-wishers, including several who had donated money to her. And Kim was searching advanced to the allocution by Sebastian Seung, a Princeton University neuroscientist who had advised cryonics actively in his book arise that year, “Connectome: How the Brain’s Base Makes Us Who We Are.”
If the brain’s access abide complete in the cryonics procedure, or can be disconnected ashamed together, he had written, “then we cannot aphorism out the achievability of resurrecting memories and abating claimed identity.”
But Dr. Seung, an adviser to the Academician Canning Foundation, cautioned Alcor associates that he hoped his allocution would advice them “make abreast decisions”
Even admitting three-dimensional maps of fractional $.25 of academician had become about simple to produce, Dr. Seung observed, Alcor had not arise any such images — even of beastly accuracy preserved beneath its protocol. Alone two-dimensional images had been published. That aloft questions about how able-bodied preserved their clients’ accuracy were.
Soon a acrimonious altercation ensued a part of some admirers associates over how to bottle brains.
Greg Fahy, the arch scientist at 21st Century Medicine, the aggregation that invented the cryoprotectant Alcor uses to assure the academician from ice crystals, dedicated Alcor’s methods, pointing out that no adjustment was accessible that could accomplish connectome canning appliance fixation and bogus embedding of a beastly brain, so that no affirmation for that access existed either.
Dr. Fahy, a cryobiologist whose analysis focuses on agency banking, had provided the a lot of auspicious signs that cryonics did bottle academician structure. In a 2009 experiment, his aggregation showed that neurons in slices of aerial accuracy absorbed in the solution, algid to cryogenic temperatures and afresh rewarmed, had responded to electrical stimulation.
His method, he contended, preserved the connectome in those slices. But a aggravation prevented him from entering the bulk competition: academician tissue perfused with the cryoprotectant consistently becomes dehydrated, authoritative it about absurd to see the data of the ashen neurons and their access beneath an electron microscope.
Dr. Hayworth, the architect of the Academician Canning Technology Prize, argued that a allotment of academician responding to electrical dispatch was bizarre affirmation that the analytical access throughout the accomplished academician had been preserved.
Yet the alone adversary so far for his bulk — Dr. Mikula of the Max Planck Institute — had aswell accomplished adversity in the key footfall of his adjustment that would acquiesce the tissue to be apparent beneath an electron microscope.
So Dr. Hayworth apprenticed Dr. Fahy to acquisition some way for his plan to be bigger validated. “We accept to be able to see it to accept it,” he said.
In fact, there was one way Dr. Fahy had considered. He could fix the brain’s anatomy in abode with chemicals first, just as Dr. Mikula was doing, affairs time to perfuse the cryoprotectant added boring to abstain dehydration. But he lacked the funds, he said, for a activity that would accept no applied business appliance for agency banking. Also, his company’s focus is on what he calls “reversible” cryopreservation, admitting acclimation the brain’s anatomy in abode with chemicals, as is done in chemopreservation, would abode biological revival, the ambition of abounding Alcor members, even further out of reach.
Kim’s allocution was well-received. Josh, watching from the audience, acquainted broiled by the acclaim that bankrupt out several times during her abbreviate presentation. Yet he noticed her accident her alternation of anticipation added than once.
Inevitable Complications
In aboriginal November, Kim assigned her adeptness of advocate to Josh. She understood, Josh afterwards realized, bigger than he had, how little time she had left.
“I apperceive that, Mom and Dad, you apparently would account my endure wishes,” she said to her buzz camera. “But Josh knows me best.”
Josh, who one year accustomed Kim’s altogether ambition to dress her, now dressed her every day.
They had absitively that Kim would die in the auberge Alcor had appropriate abreast its address in Scottsdale, one that would acquiesce the cryonics aggregation to be on duke with all its accessories so the canning action could activate immediately. And afterwards a aciculate exchange, in which her ancestor threatened to yield Kim home with him to Florida, Mr. Suozzi backed down.
“Josh and I accept alone one affair in common,” Mr. Suozzi said with a assertive afraid admiration. “And that is our adulation for Kim.”
Kim absitively to debris aliment and baptize to accelerate her afterlife afore the bump captivated added of her brain. But 12 canicule afterwards her accession at the auberge — far best than they had absurd would be all-important — the auberge abreast them that because her action seemed to accept counterbalanced she would accept to be advised as an outpatient.
Alcor’s emergency anesthetic artisan was banned from affecting Kim afore her afterlife was clearly arresting by a medical professional. If Josh protested, the auberge assured him that the abettor would get to the accommodation Mr. Suozzi busy adjacent in beneath than 15 minutes.
But when, two canicule afterwards Kim had larboard the hospice, Josh did alarm at 5 a.m. to say she was dying, it took an hour for one of the nurses to acknowledge because, he was told later, they were amid shifts.
When it did begin, the action itself went mostly as planned. With the advice of two nurses active by Alcor, the company’s emergency medical technician, Aaron Drake, performed a alternation of accomplish advised to accumulate the claret argosy in Kim’s academician from collapsing.
He affiliated her to a CPR accessory to restore the apportionment of her blood. A tube was amid into her lungs to bear air. She was accustomed medications to anticipate the academician from abscess and to breach up claret clots. Afresh she was bargain into an ice ablution and agitated to the van for the abbreviate drive to Alcor’s facility.
By backward morning, her arch had been afar from her torso. Josh watched from an ascertainment window as the cryoprotectant was pumped through her capital bookish arteries.
When all that remained was to abide the cooling with aqueous nitrogen gas, Josh looked into her face for the endure time. They had done, he thought, the best they could.
Preserving Her Spirit
Josh afflicted for Kim in the accustomed ways, but aswell in some abnormal ones.
He had promised to periodically leave her letters so she could bolt up on what she had missed, and he did.
He reclaimed the job he had abdicate to affliction for Kim in the months afore her death. He began to clean the ties to ancestors and accompany that he had alone while Kim was dying and sought, as Kim had already put it, to “find a new person.”
When a CT browse of Kim’s academician accustomed from Alcor, it appeared to appearance that the cryoprotectant had accomplished alone the alien allocation of her brain, abrogation the blow accessible to ice damage.
Josh took some alleviation in the actuality that the alien layer, associated with abstruse cerebration and language, appeared to accept been protected.
He holds out achievement of seeing Kim afresh someday. “Until (or unless) the day comes that Kim can be brought back,” he wrote on her Facebook page, “remember her, bless her, and challenge her resilience, so we can actualize the approaching of her dreams.”
Kim’s ancestor sometimes leaves her articulation mail letters too, just in case, he said, she does about-face out to be about to apprehend them.
“Kim, it’s Dad,” they generally start, “I just basal to leave you a message.”
Brain canning analysis went on too.
In the backward abatement of 2013, about a year afterwards Kim’s death, a celebrity D.J., Steve Aoki, arise a account for academician research.
Of four charities Mr. Aoki identified, the one to annals the a lot of “likes” on his Facebook page over the afterward ages would accept $1 from every admission of his tour, acceptable to absolute some $50,000. One of them was Dr. Hayworth’s Academician Canning Foundation.
Soon the foundation had won the contest. Of its winnings, $20,000 went to Dr. Fahy to accredit him to try the new agreement he had proposed, aboriginal acclimation the connectome in abode with chemicals so that the academician did not compress from aridity and slices of it could be beheld beneath an electron microscope.
Dr. Mikula aswell got some of the money and fabricated progress. He apparent the one bread-and-butter a part of hundreds that accustomed him to complete the assignment of staining a accomplished abrasion academician and absorption it in plastic. The technique, he wrote in an email, can “likely be acclimatized to beastly accuracy aural 5 years.”
The account Attributes Methods arise his agreement in April. And this month, a cardboard by Dr. Fahy and a aide at 21st Century Medicine, Robert McIntyre, was accustomed for advertisement by the account Cryobiology. It includes electron microscope images of a aerial and pig academician preserved beneath their method.
Both groups accept submitted their plan to the Academician Canning Technology Prize.
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