"Brain degradation after death" is the key point in this list that I'd be interested in learning about. I'm not sure if it's proper to ask this in a comment now or should I be studying diligently around the issue, but I think it's also an interesting subject so excuse me.

The cryonics process is often analoguously compared the the event of a harddrive being broken, and the data being retrievable, but brains and harddrives store information in very different ways and this problem always strikes me as very unnerving. Without going into too much detail, it's very easy to see how something that is be mostly truthful for harddrives might turn out not to be true at all for brains.

Personally I would already be signed up for cryonics if I only had the money for that, and I think it's very important to discuss the topic. This is very much related because when I've had those few discussions around cryonics it has usually stumbled on this particular detail. Can the information of the brain really be preserved via cryonics? Does the brain not deteriorate before the actual event of cryopreservation?

Considering how microinfarctions seem to be an irreversible problem even with live human beings for the time being, I'm very skeptical about frequency of the tissue surviving to the point where it's finally frozen.

<EDIT> Just to point out the cited paragraph in the main post did not cover this area exactly, but instead focused on the process of the cryopreservation, and personally I completely disagree with the skepticism of that neuroscientist. If you're interested in why: With his current knowledge the neuroscientist might be underestimating the capacity of future technologies and he is just concentrating on his view of not being able to solve the problem with present technology. As long as the information is stored well enough to be reconstructed in theory, I think it's plausible to say it will be possible in practice later. And the neuroscientist did not seem to (from my extremely layman perspective) concentrate on the issue from the aspect of information theoretic loss, but rather from a practical aspect of extracting that warped information. I think the cryopreservation process is kind of a stable environment where changes to the brain can be traced back and the damage caused by the process potentially reversible.

Meanwhile I think occurring chemical reactions, damage from microbes, etc. prior to cryopreservation pose the threat of the information being completely lost, degradation of the brain prior to preservation being they key problem.Something missing as opposed to something being distorted.

That's what I think anyway - which is not much in terms of reliability </EDIT>

Could anyone please be nice and elaborate on this?