A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future: Cancer claimed Kim Suozzi at age 23, but ...

[Baobab]

A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future: Cancer claimed Kim Suozzi at age 23, but she chose to have her brain
preserved with the dream that neuroscience might one day revive her mind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html

In the moments just before Kim Suozzi died of cancer at age 23, it fell to her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to follow through with the plan to freeze her brain.

As her pulse monitor sounded its alarm and her breath grew ragged, he fumbled for his phone. Fighting the emotion that threatened to paralyze him, he alerted the cryonics team waiting nearby and called the hospice nurses to come pronounce her dead. Any delay would jeopardize the chance to maybe, someday, resurrect her mind.

It was impossible to know on that cloudless Arizona morning in January 2013 which fragments of Kim’s identity might survive, if any. Would she remember their first, fumbling kiss in his dorm room five years earlier? Their private jokes and dumb arguments? The seizure, the surgery, the fancy neuroscience fellowship she had to turn down?

More than memories, Josh, then 24, wished for the crude procedure to salvage whatever synapses gave rise to her dry, generous humor, compelled her to greet every cat she saw with a high-pitched “helllooo,” and inspired her to write him poems.

They knew how strange it sounded, the hope that Kim’s brain could be preserved in subzero storage so that decades or centuries from now, if science advanced, her billions of interconnected neurons could be scanned, analyzed and converted into computer code that mimicked how they once worked.

But Kim’s terminal prognosis came at the start of a global push to understand the brain. And some of the tools and techniques emerging from neuroscience laboratories were beginning to bear some resemblance to those long envisioned in futurist fantasies.

Continued: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html
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http://video1.nytimes.com/video/2015/09/11/19269_1_cryonics_wg_360p.mp4

[Scootaloo]

1. Sigh. Cryonics is an enormous and expensive scam.

I understand the desire for "cheating death," but the cryonics industry is one of many end-of-life exploitation industries.

Start with the basics. Forget the science for moment. What are the odds that this company you're signing up with will even exist decades - Centuries?! - in the future? No. Odds are they'll go bankrupt and your remains will just end up in a biohazard bag, tossed into an incinerator. It's happened in the past. After all, frozen corpses aren't considered an asset to potential buyers, are they? Next, what guarantees do you have that, even if the company lasts that long, that you will be maintained? There are numerous reports of the "caretakers" being, to use a gentle turn of phrase, "fucking incompetent." What if they fuck up. it's not like you can file suit, or an insurance claim, 'cause you're more dead and chilly than that head of iceberg lettuce in your crisper right now.

And then the science. I could go for days.

People can wish what they want. They can do what they want with their dead bodies. But I hate that desperate people are getting exploited by these fly-by-night fuckheads promising eternal life.

[Baobab]

2. People these days have more rights than a frozen person, I agree, but less all the time.

I think that we will figure out how to make our bodies self-regenerate, like the MRL mouse but without autoimmune illness.

[Scootaloo]

3. I hope not

Death is a feature of the biological process for a good reason.

[Baobab]

4. Yes, but perhaps death has "outlived its usefulness"

in a similar way to a number of other things that are getting long in the tooth.

[Scootaloo]

5. Our planet can't even handle mortal humans.

[Baobab]

9. If we had immortality, we would treat each other and the planet far better.

because we would have to live with and on it forever.

People would reduce pollution to the lowest possible levels because otherwise because of bio- persistence of carcinogens in the environment, everybody likely will be getting cancer at 40 or 50 in a few years. You wont be able to escape it. (not that you can now)

[Scootaloo]

10. Let's achieve all that first, and then talk about immortality.

[jberryhill]

6. Reproduction maybe, but not death

Yeah, like anyone wants to be born into a world in which 200 year old wealthy people pretty much have everything sewn up.

[Baobab]

8. Peoples brains wouldnt age- so they would just get smarter.

I think its clear that life isnt long enough for all we have to learn. Not far into the future, jobs will be so scarce and machines so good at work people will find that they will likely be 30 or older, before they have the education and skill level needed to get any job and then it will only be maybe 10-15 years before their mental abilities are in very substantial decline. Long before then people will likely get laid off because they are getting gray, etc, it varies quite a bit but many people start getting creaky.

Thats just unacceptable.

the continuous learning / growing model is better. Even without faster than light travel they would be able to live long enough to travel the very long distances between the stars.

[marble falls]

7. An amazing and heart breaking story. I think anyone interested in this bid to overcome ...

a being cheated out of living should be encouraged and those who think they know better need to butt out.