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devas comments on [Open Thread] Stupid Questions (2014-02-17) - Less Wrong
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Okay, I believe I have a very stupid question I need to ask:
Why isn't there more research in progress on how to wake up people from cryonics? Or, rather, why aren't more people sticking hamsters and dogs under liquid nitrogen*, then trying to revive them and bring them back to "full life", and seeing if dear ole Spot remembers all the tricks we taught him?
If such things are underway, why aren't there more news and data on this?
*gross oversimplification is funny
Who would be willing to fund this research? The cryonics organizations usually run at losses (membership and preservation fees do not pay 100% of expenses) and don't have the money for much research. And the public doesn't care - have you donated to the nearest available equivalents like the Brain Preservation Prize? If you haven't and are unwilling, then you have your answer.
Because anything bigger than a cubic centimeter or two that you try to vitrify always comes out of vitrification full of massive cuts and chemical toxicity and ice crystals and leaky membranes to the point that calling it temporarily 'alive' is a stretch. This is not a problem with the revival process, but with the preservation process. Even freezing samples of cultured cells has a mortality rate.
Because cryonics is not simply about putting people under liquid oxygen.
It also involve given people a highly toxic substance that prevent ice crystals from forming inside their brains. The substance does no harm if you are frozen is ice but if you would just try to revive people the substance would kill them. You need nanotech to remove it.
Cryonics needs nanotech to revive patients. Currently there no good nanotech for doing so. It makes more sense to wait till we have good nanobots and then attempt to revive organisms.
Well, but for sufficiently small things one may be able to get by without too toxic cryopreservants? Famously, things like embryos and even rabbit kidneys have been frozen and then "revived". If this could be scaled up to e.g. a mouse (something which is big enough to have nontrivial memories), that would resolve lots of worries about there not being enough information preserved in a vitrified brain.
You can freeze nematodes and water bears fairly easily. Notably both of these are evolved to survive dessication and freezing in their normal life cycle and have their largest dimension on the order of one mm. Its a bit of a stretch to call what some frogs can do naturally in the outdoors 'freezing' but again, massive evolutionary pressure.
If you try to freeze a complicated structure bigger than a few cubic centimeters that isn't the ridiculously vascularized and quite small and very homogenous in terms of water content rabbit kidney, you come up with something that is so damaged by the freezing process that it falls apart physically and chemically upon unfreezing. The unfreezing part is not the limiting factor, because there just isn't a paused functional organism left behind by the freezing process.
What about the wood frog?
Because it's a very small industry, and nobody has the money for it?
I'm told that there have been brains with no activity that have been revived, showing that that at least isn't where all the information is stored. It doesn't prove that cryonics is possible, but it disproves the most obvious reason why it wouldn't be.
Indeed, no neurologists propose that activity is important for anything but short-term memory and, of course, all normal functions. Memory and what a bit of tissue is capable of come from physical structure.