L. Stephen Coles, a gerontologist who died of pancreatic cancer in 2014, had his brain frozen at minus 146 degrees Celsius at Alcor's facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. Cryobiologist Greg Fahy, tasked by Coles before his death to study tissue samples, has found the brain 'astonishingly well preserved.' Alcor also stores the body of James Bedford, a psychology professor frozen in 1967 by the Cryonics Society of California, making him the first person ever cryonically preserved.
Worldwide, only 5,000 to 6,000 people have signed up for cryopreservation. Alcor charges $80,000 for brain storage and $220,000 for whole-body storage. A 2021 survey of 1,478 US internet users found that just over a third of male respondents expressed a desire to live indefinitely, and men were more optimistic about cryonics outcomes than women. Emil Kendziorra, CEO of Tomorrow.Bio, reports 20 to 50 new signups per month globally.
Every scientist interviewed for this piece acknowledges that the probability of reanimation is vanishingly small. Yet Nick Llewellyn, director of R&D at Alcor, has signed up for brain preservation anyway. Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, would decline even if reanimation were proven to work, citing the philosophical weight of waking centuries later with no family and an alien legal and social landscape. The article is worth reading in full for its account of how the science of cryopreservation actually works, and what Fahy found when he examined Coles's tissue.
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