If you have ever met Mike Perry in his office at Alcor or at his home, you will picture him surrounded by books. Although his background was in mathematics and computer science, Mike was fascinated by the history of cryonics and immortalism. He wrote dozens of articles on this history. Mike also wrote a regular Revival Update, other science news, and many other essays.

You will read about successes, failures, triumphs, and tragedies. Mike looked into the lives of cryonics pioneers such as Evan Cooper, Jerry Leaf, Dante Brunol, Jerry White, Robert Ettinger, and Curtis Henderson. He also explored the activities of early cryonics organizations in New York California, and elsewhere.

Many of his historical pieces go under the heading of “For the Record.” The total of all of Mike’s historical research would fill a thick book, or several. To make it easier to find and read these essays, I decided to compile a handy list. The task turned out to be too much for one blog piece. I worked back through issues of Cryonics magazine to 2009 and ended up with more than 50 historical essays. I also highlighted another 15 non-historical articles. I aim to complete my deep dive into Mike’s writing to create a comprehensive cryo-history archive.

In the meantime, you will find plenty to keep you learning about the history of cryonics and biostasis for a long time.

--Max More

Remembering Joe Hovey
Cryonics, 2024 Issue #2 Second Quarter

Steve Harris in Remembrance
Cryonics, 2024 Issue #1 First Quarter

More on Bredo Morstol
Cryonics, 2023 Issue #4 Fourth Quarter

Remembering Saul Kent
Cryonics, 2023 Issue #3 Third Quarter
Also here.

Search for the Logo of the Cryonics Society of New York
Biostasis.com, September 7, 2022

Evan Cooper: An Untold Story
Cryonics, 2023 Issue #2 Second Quarter

An Institutional History of Alcor
Cryonics, 2022 Issue #1 First Quarter

Alcor’s First Half Century
Cryonics 2021 Issue #3 Third Quarter

A Look Back: Attempts to Establish a Cryonics Community
Cryonics, 2021 Issue #2 Second Quarter

Jerry Leaf: Surgeon, and Cryonics Advocate
Cryonics, 2020 Issue #3 Third Quarter
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For the Record: Cryonics in New York: Years with Alcor, 1986-1994) Part Seven of an Ongoing Series
Cryonics, 2020 Issue #1 First Quarter
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For the Record: Cryonics and Public Skepticism: Meeting the Challenges to Our Credibility
Cryonics, 2019 Issue #4 Fourth Quarter
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For the Record: Cryonics Newsletters: Some Historical Highlights, Part 4a, Cryonics Society of Michigan, 1970-72.
Cryonics, 2019 Issue #3 Third Quarter
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Cryonics Newsletters: Some Historical Highlight, Part 3, Cryonics Society of California
Cryonics November/December 2018. Volume 39:6

For the Record: Cryonics Newsletters: Some Historical Highlights, Part 2b.
(Newsletters of the Cryonics Society of New York from 1969 to 1971.)
Cryonics, 2018 Issue #4 July-August
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For the Record: Cryonics Newsletters: Some Historical Highlights, Part 2a
(Newsletters of the Cryonics Society of New York 1966 to 1969)
Cryonics, 2018 Issue #3 May-June
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For the Record: Cryonics Newsletters: Some Historical Highlights.
(Evan Cooper’s Life Extension Foundation publications.)
Cryonics, 2018 Issue #1 January-February
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For the Record: The Price of Life: Isaac Asimov, Cryonics, and Human Death Extension
Cryonics, November/December 2017 (Cryonics 38-6 2017-06)
(How Isaac Asimov was asked by the publisher to comment on Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality, the edition expanded from his self-published version in 1962. A fascinating account of Asimov and his relation to cryonics ending with a sad death without cryopreservation.)

A Year of Jubilees: Some Important Cryonics Anniversaries
Cryonics, May/June 2017
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The first freezing, April 1966. Bedford. Fred Chamberlain II. Jery Leaf. Very interesting details about Jerry, who was an incredible pioneer and contributed massive advances in cryonics. (I remember him from my 1986 visit to California… driving to UCLA to do animal experiments. I wish I had been bold enough to ask him more about his life.)

Editor’s note: “The Meaning of Life Now and Yet to Come Over his lifetime, Mike Perry has contributed thousands of pages on the history of cryonics, life extension, and human enhancement. Starting this year, under the name of “For the Future” Mike will be writing a new series of articles that will provide a much-needed alternative to all the dystopian and pessimistic visions that characterize most contemporary fiction and non-fiction writing about technology and the future.”
Cryonics, 2017 Issue #1, January/February 2017. 38.1

For the Record: Cryonics in Europe: Some Historical Highlights
Cryonics, 2016 Issue #6, November/December 2017. 37.6

For the Record: The Cinematic Cryonicist: Four Documentary Videos, Early and Later
Cryonics, 2016, Issue #5. 37.5.
[Films/videos by CSNY, 1978 documentary, 2005 Alcor video.]

For the Record: The Cinematic Cryonicist: Two Early, Promotional Films from the New York Group
Cryonics, July/August 2016. 37.4.

Ev Cooper and the Conference that Didn’t Happen
Cryonics, May/June 2016. 37.3

Charity Cases in Cryonics
Cryonics, March/April 2016. 37.2
[James Bedford, Luna Wilson, Frank and Janet Riley, James Swayze, William Constitution O’Rights, Kim Suozzi, Aaron Winborn, Elizabeth Pugliese]

Cryonics Under Fire: Meeting the Challenges of Hostile Scientists Then and Now
Cryonics, January/February 2016. 37.1

What Did Brunol Say? Notes from the Architect of the First Controlled Human Cryonics Preservations
Cryonics, May 2015. 36.05

Society for Venturism End Death Convention 2014, Part 2
Cryonics, March 2015. 36.03

Society for Venturism End Death Convention 2014, Part 1
Cryonics, January 2015. 36.02

Why Not? Cryopreservations That Might Have Been

Cryonics, January 2015. 36.01

Quintessence: Remembering Jerry White
Cryonics, November 2014. 35.11

Cryonics Patient Storage: A Brief History
Cryonics, September 2014. 35.09

The Prospect of Immortality at Age Fifty
Cryonics, June 2014. 35.06

Companion Animals at Alcor: Some Lessons from the Early Years
Cryonics, May 2014. 35.05

Remembering John Bull
Cryonics, April 2014/ 35.04

Russian Scientific Cosmism: A Prelude to Modern Immortalism
Cryonics, March 2014. 35.03

Carrying On: The Aftermath and Legacy of Early New York Cryonics
Cryonics, December 2013. 34.12

The High Price of Life on Hold: Sheskin’s Study and Other Reflections on Cryonics in New York
Cryonics, November 2013. 34.11
Mike’s opening comment: “Whaaat? the reader may ask. Yet another column on cryonics in New York?! Yes, indeed (and one more is planned after this!). But not without good reason, as I hope you will agree. New York, was, after all, an important early staging area for cryonics, and its history has important lessons to teach, besides being just downright interesting.”

Protocols in Cryonics: Prehistory and Early History
Cryonics, September 2013

Cryonics in New York: Decline, Tragedy, and Twilight: 1969-1974 and Later
Cryonics, August 2013. 34.08

Cryonics in New York: Human Freezings and Other Events, 1968-1969
Cryonics, July 2013. 34.7

Cryonics in New York: Optimism Before the First Freezing, 1966-68
Cryonics, June 2013. 34.6

Daoist Roots of Immortalism: A Protoscience of Prolongevity
Cryonics, May 2013.

Cryonics in New York: How it Started
Cryonics, April 2013. 34.4

Jean Finot: Prolongevity Advocate of the Early Twentieth Century
Cryonics, March 2013. 34.3

John Adolphus Etzler: Pioneer Prophet of Radical Abundance
Cryonics, February 2013. 34.2

Robert Ettinger: Some Brief Historical and Personal Notes
Cryonics, Fourth Quarter 2011. 32.4

Member Profile: R. Michael Perry, Ph.D
By Chana de Wolf

Cryonics, Third Quarter 2010

Impressions of Curtis Henderson
Cryonics, Third Quarter 2009

A Freezing Before Bedford’s
Biostasis.com, August 20, 2008

Historical Steps Toward the Scientific Conquest of Death
Biostasis.com, August 4, 2008

Selected non-historical articles

I tried to stay focused on history but also noted some non-historical articles by Mike.

Recent Advances in Dementia Diagnosis
Cryonics, 2023 Issue 1 First Quarter

A Mathematical Model of Infinite Survival
Cryonics, 2022 Issue #4 Fourth Quarter

Our Recent Heavy Caseload: How Often Can We Expect This?
Cryonics, 2022 Issue #4 Fourth Quarter

Mathematical Modeling of Immersion Fixation with Approximation to the Human Brain (with Aschwin de Wolf)
Cryonics, 2022 Issue #3. 43.3

Schrodinger’s Freezer and the Restoration of Lost Information: Some Consequences of an Interesting Variant of the Many Worlds Interpretation.
Cryonics, 2021 Issue #4 Fourth Quarter

Restoration without Recovery: Authentic De Novo Recreation of Lost Information in a Multiple-Worlds Setting.
Cryonics, 2021, Issue #, First Quarter

The S-MIX: A Measure of Ischemic Exposure
With Aschwin de Wolf
Cryonics, 2020 Issue #4 Fourth Quarter

Mathematics and Modeling in Cryonics: Some Historical Highlights (with Aschwin de Wolf)
Cryonics, 2020 Issue #2 Second Quarter

From Bad to Good: Victor Frankenstein and the Modern Quest for the Secrets of Life
Cryonics, 2019 Issue #2 Second Quarter

Contrastive Underdetermination Resolution, with Application to Cryonics Revival and Other Possibilities for Life after Clinical Death.
Cryonics, 2019 Issue #1 First Quarter

A Visit to Oregon Cryonics
Cryonics, 2018 Issue #5 September-October

Viability versus Inferability: A Plea to Consider an Option of Fixative-Stabilized Cryopreservation
Cryonics, 2018 Second Quarter

Scientific Divinitism: A Proposed Immortalist-Transhumanist Life Stance
Cryonics, September-October 2017. Volume 38.5
[Divinitism. “In short we hope to become godlike, to divinize. Divinitism thus seemed an appropriate label of what is herein advocated, as long as it is appreciated that “divinity” can exist in some distributed, naturalistic form without the necessity of extension to a supernatural or metempirical realm.”]

The Future of Sex: Some Contrasting Views
Cryonics, 2017 Issue #2 March-April. 38.2

Estimating and Forecasting Alcor Resource Requirements: Are Cases Random?
Cryonics, December 2015. 36.12

Review of The Transhumanist Reader
Cryonics, November 2013

Carrel and Lindbergh: Why Not Immortality?
Cryonics, October 2013

Bon Voyage Aido
Cryonics, November/December 2012. 33.6

Options for Brain-Threatening Disorders
Cryonics, First Quarter 2010

Is a Life Worth Starting? Some Personal Views
Biostasis.com, December 27, 2010

Review of ‘Better Never to Have Been’
Biostasis.com, December 20, 2010

• Nectome’s origins in the work that won the Brain Preservation Prize

• how Nectome’s offering and business model differ from other biostasis organizations

• whether chemical preservation is tied to uploading

• how Jessica sees the future, what Nectome’s procedure costs

• whether Nectome will develop a patient care trust

• the evidence for the stability of long-term storage

• the requirements for people wanting to use Nectome’s service

• Jessica’s strong optimism about the growth of their business

• her views on “biostasis pluralism”, the topic of an article co-authored with Aschwin de Wolf

• And more!

Dr. Glorioso created the #1 US COVID case prediction model out of 104 global teams from top institutions and companies in the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. She has done pioneering work on aging clocks in the human brain, which forms the basis for her longevity techbio startup, NeuroAge Therapeutics. NeuroAge is helping people track and reverse their brain aging with comprehensive testing and science-backed recommendations personalized to their biomarkers and genetics.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the survival of memories during Alzheimer’s, the prospects for better treatment of dementia, how to think critically about conflicting and confusing health claims, which supplements may be worth taking, the distinction between nootropics and neurorestoratives, the importance of exercise, and more.

No one can predict with any confidence how long it will be before it may be possible to repair and revive patients in biostasis. It is plausible that it will take a century. It could be decades less – especially if artificial intelligence accelerates biomedical advances – or it could be decades longer. But one century gives us something to work with. It is a long time in terms of changes in the world.

This raises an obvious question: How can a biostasis organization survive for a century or more until its patients can be returned to life?

Long-term financial planning is critical here but I wrote about this not long ago – along with a set of questions to ask your biostasis organization – in “Critical Questions About Patient Care in Cryonics and Biostasis.”

The Challenge

When making arrangements for cryonics or biostasis, two core capabilities should be at the forefront in your mind. The first is an organization’s ability to get you preserved quickly and effectively. That includes response readiness and technical capabilities.

The other is the organization’s ability to keep you cryopreserved for the decades that it will take before you can be repaired and revived. You might be preserved in excellent condition but never see the future because the organization eventually failed. Or the organization survived but could not afford to revive you.

Most arguments against biostasis can be dismissed after dissolving them with the acids of science, philosophy, and critical thinking. The argument from organizational mortality is more serious—and much harder to answer convincingly. It is also an argument that we should not dismiss but take seriously. After all, we do not know how long it will be before we can repair, revive, and rehabilitate any cryopreserved people. Prudence implies planning for a very long time horizon. Is it not true that very few organizations survive that long? Some have. What can we learn from them? How can we maximize the chances that our cryonics organizations will endure for a century or more?

When I start to address that argument, I usually point out that Alcor has already been around for over half a century – 54 years as of 2026. Cryonics Institute will be celebrating its 50^th anniversary this September. American Cryonics Society, founded in 1969, still cares for a small number of patients, the rest having been transferred to Cryonics Institute.

On hearing this, many doubters are taken aback. Those with a little historical knowledge of cryonics may respond: “Okay, but isn’t it true that most of the early organizations failed?” Yes, it is true. There were three public organizations that started in the 1960s: Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona; the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY); and the Cryonics Society of California (CSC). You can learn more about these episodes in Mike Perry’s “Suspension Failures: Lessons from the Early Years.”

On one hand, we have two or three cryonics organizations that have reached the half-century mark. On the other hand, we have several organizations that failed within a few years. What kinds of organizations survive unusually long and how are they structured?

Structuring for Survival

Two aspects of this question stand out. First is the issue of legal and corporate structure. The second is the issue of how patient care funds are managed – as I discussed in an earlier essay.

Cryonics involves several aspects – membership, deployment, standby, stabilization, and transport (SST), cryoprotection, long-term maintenance, and finally eventual repair and revival. In some cases, a single organization handles or has handled all aspects. Even if the organization hires external contractors for SST, it remains responsible for their performance. But there is no obvious reason these aspects of cryonics must all be controlled and managed by a single organization.

Historically, we see a mix of all-in-one organizations and more specialized organizations. American Cryonics Society used TransTime. Cryonics Institute uses Suspended Animation (SA) for SST if a member has paid for it. Alcor has sometimes done all its own SST but has also used Cryovita Labs (1980s-1990s), SA, and International Cryomedicine Experts (ICE). Tomorrow Biostasis stores its patients with its sister organization, the European Biostasis Foundation (the organizations share a building).

Membership could be managed by a dedicated organization. It would specialize in providing biostasis information, stirring up interest, attracting members, and then helping members sign up and arrange funding, perhaps also engaging in community building. Such a membership organization could easily be either non-profit or for-profit.

Another function that can be organized separately is standby, stabilization, and transport. Currently, the two main SST providers that are distinct from cryonics organizations – Suspended Animation and International Cryomedicine Experts (I.C.E.) – are nominally for-profit organizations. (In practice, SA works at a loss, subsidized by a cryonics-supportive non-profit.) There is also the budding Australian SST provider, CryoPath and, in the United Kingdom, Cryonics UK has long provided SST to both Alcor and CI.)

For patient storage, a non-profit structure makes the most sense. The simple fact is that most of the most enduring organizations around the world have been non-profits. These include universities and religious organizations but also inns and financial companies. The exceptions are the unusually large number of family-owned Japanese businesses. They even have a term for them – the shinise. Shinise are long-lived companies that have survived for more than a century, retained ownership within the same family, and in the same trade for the duration.

The decision either to keep all biostasis functions in a single organization or to outsource to multiple organizations depends on several factors. Economists analyze these under “the theory of the firm.” The most prominent such analysis was conducted by Ronald Coase and expounded in, “The Nature of the Firm.” In Coase’s view, the choice between firms (organizations) and the market – which tasks and transactions are performed internally and which negotiated on the market – and how firms are internally structured depends on transaction costs. These take various forms including search and information costs, bargaining and decision costs, monitoring and enforcement costs, coordination costs, legal and regulatory costs, opportunity costs, financial costs, and adaptation costs.

Purchasing services on the open market can improve efficiency and effectiveness and lower costs. But it may make sense to keep transactions in-house, within the organization, if market transaction costs are high. For instance, doing tasks in-house may eliminate the costs of searching for materials suppliers, reduce the costs of monitoring outside companies, minimize the legal costs of drawing up contracts, improve coordination, or eliminate the need to renegotiate contracts when unforeseen circumstances arise.

When a biostasis organization is small, it may make sense to keep more functions internal to the organization. This can enable cost sharing. That might mean keeping membership operations, research and development, SST capabilities, and patient storage in the same organization – or at least in the same facility. Sharing facilities while maintaining distinct organizations can bridge the gap between complete in-house integration and contracting. This approach was used by Alcor in the 1980s and 90s when distinct but collaborative organizations shared Alcor’s first building in Fullerton, California. We see a similar arrangement between Tomorrow Biostasis and the European Biostasis Foundation in Switzerland. Whether the space is shared between organizations or just between functions, costs are controlled by sharing a building, personnel, utilities, and insurance.

As biostasis organizations grow, it may make sense to have membership services and operations in a location which is attractive to staff while maintaining patients in a lower cost and more protected location. The location might be further from major populations and perhaps safer from unrest or attacks. However, the storage location would have to be somewhere with reliable and competitive deliveries of liquid nitrogen.

To design a resilient biostasis organization – and to be able to evaluate existing ones – it helps to better understand what kinds of organizations have survived for a century or longer. I will mention a few examples briefly here. For more details and examples, see an earlier version of this essay which appeared in the July 2020 issue of Cryonics: “How to Sustain an Organization for Over a Century: Part One: Corporate Longevity”.

Japanese exemplars: Relative to other countries, there are a remarkable number of Japanese companies, typically family owned. In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old. A 2008 report published by the Bank of Korea that looked at 41 countries found that there were 5,586 companies older than 200 years. 56% are in Japan, 15% in Germany, 4% in the Netherlands, and 3% in France.

The oldest example of the shinise is Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd., a Japanese construction company started in 578 AD which operated continuously as an ongoing independent company for over 1,400 years. Shinise are small, typically family-run, and focus on a central belief or credo that does not revolve solely around profit.

Kongo Gumi, founded 578

Financial: More than most other types of business, financial firms can show impressive longevity. Family ownership is a frequent feature with these also. For instance, The Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust was started “to give the investor of moderate means the same advantages as the large capitalists in diminishing the risk by spreading the investment over a number of stocks”. This is one of 34 investment trusts still trading today which have survived the past 80 years. (Black, 2017) The 34 surviving trusts may be old, but they are healthy. As of 2017, they accounted for 23% of all assets in the investment trust sector.

More examples of enduring family-controlled businesses can be found in the United Kingdom’s Tercentenarians Club – a UK trade association that only accepts as members firms over 300 years old and still owned by the same family that started it.

We should note that “family” can be expanded to meet business needs, especially (but not exclusively) in the Japanese examples. To keep the business in family over long periods of time, the company head legally adopts a suitable person to run his firm and then passes it on. Adult adoption is common in Japan. In 2011, more than 90 percent of the 81,000 individuals adopted in Japan were adults. When someone asks you to join their family and take over running their 1,000-year-old business, that is an offer you cannot refuse. Firms run by adopted heirs outperform biologically related heirs while both adopted and genetic heirs outperform nonfamily firms.

A family-dominated structure probably does not make sense for biostasis, at least at this point. The single example of KrioRus (a husband-and-wife company) is not encouraging. Partnerships might also be risky structures. What is needed is a corporate structure – non-profit in the case of long-term care – and an independent board of directors or trustees. Reasonable corporate forms (in the USA) potentially include C-corporations, S corporations, LLCs, cooperatives, and B corporations.

Religious (non-profit) organizations: You might expect religious institutions and organizations to endure over extended periods of time. Their core goal is not to make a profit (although they usually do) and their finances are often bolstered by required or almost-required donations or by direct government support. Not only are many religious institutions sheltered from economic vicissitudes, but their support is also strengthened by the perceived critical importance of the religion or institution. Just a few enduring institutions:

• The Order of St. Benedict (founded in 529 AD, in Subiaco, Italy).

• The Catholic Church (arguably dating from around 50 AD).

• The Armenian Apostolic Church. The Kingdom of Armenia became the first state to declare Christianity as its official religion in 301 AD.

• Saint Catherine’s in Egypt or, fully named, the Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai, was built between 548 and 565 and has remained in continuous operation through today. Its library contains books that date back to the 4th century.

• Mar Sarkas is a monastery and convent in Syria built before 325 AD. The few English-speaking nuns will be happy to give you a tour.

Universities: Of the 85 institutions over 500 years old, 70 are universities. The champion is the University of Bologna, founded in 1088. The second oldest is the University of Oxford (1096, charter in 1248). In third place and the oldest university in the Hispanic world is the University of Salamanca, Spain, founded in 1134 (charter 1218). All told, 39 still-operating universities were founded before 1500.

The University of Bologna

The bottom line is that two factors stand out as being conducive to organizational longevity: Non-profit structures and/or family-owned companies. The first factor is easily adoptable to biostasis organizations. The second factor seems inappropriate although it may be possible to simulate this beneficial structure by binding executives and directors in various ways. But that intriguing possibility is beyond the scope of the current essay.

Seduction by Management Literature

To shape practices and structures for maximum organizational longevity, why not simply adopt the recommendations in management literature? There is no shortage of promising books, starting with the bestseller, In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman. Jim Collins has built a career on writing books like this, including Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don’t, and Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen.

Built to Last, for instance, tells us that the longest-lasting and most resilient corporations engage in “clock-building” rather than relying on a charismatic leader; that they recognize the “genius of the ‘and’”; that they are “more than profits”; and that they “preserve the core, stimulate progress”. Collins advises us to have “big, hairy, audacious goals”, “experiment a lot and keep what works”; and use “home-grown management.” These may sound both plausible and impressive. They also come backed by copious amounts of research.

However, as Phil Rosenzweig argues in The Halo Effect, much business writing is what Richard Feynman called “cargo cult science”, having the superficial trappings of science but operating at the level of storytelling. Many of the principles still hold up today, partly because some of them are so broad as to appear applicable to virtually everyone. The principles, while perhaps inspiring, are vague. That leads to a framework that explains everything but predicts nothing. That suggests that the future depends on much more subtle issues than can be captured with coarse-grained principles abstracted from the past.

The Halo Effect explains nine “delusions” or mistakes of reasoning that undermine these formulas for business success. For example:

• The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots: Looking only at successful companies and finding their common features, without comparing them against unsuccessful companies. Those features may be found just as often in failures. This is a common error in management literature.

• The Delusion of Rigorous Research: Some writers can show off the sheer amount of research they have done, as if that had any bearing on the validity of the conclusions.

• The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick: Getting cause and effect the wrong way around. Since many successful companies have a Corporate Social Responsibility policy, should we infer that CSR contributes to success, or that profitable companies have money to spend on CSR?

• The Delusion of Organizational Physics: The idea that business performance is non-chaotically determined by discoverable factors, so that there are rules for success out there if only we can find them.

Similar criticisms are made by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman argues that Collins overstates the importance of good practices relative to sheer luck. Previously excellent companies may not change their practices and yet fall on their face as they undergo a typical regression to the mean. Others have pointed out how many of these built-to-last companies went downhill not long after Collins’ book was published. The bottom line is a rather pessimistic one: We cannot simply look at the most successful organizations and easily or reliably extract lessons to apply.

Having been critical of Built to Last, we can acknowledge that many of the principles it proclaims are plausible – if only because they are vague enough to encompass our own views of what works. For instance, Collins talks of “clock-building”. By this, he meant the companies that succeed over the long term are not built on a great idea or a charismatic, visionary leader. Instead, they succeed and endure because they build on strong foundations that carry them through the years and far beyond the active span of a generation of leaders. Biostasis organizations should keep working on their organizational design, recognizing the value of strong foundations. That leads me to the area of governance.

Governance

Board structure: The basic choice in the structure of a non-profit organization is whether to have a self-perpetuating board of directors or a board elected by members. In the former case, new board members are elected to that position by existing Board members.

The two leading US-based organizations have taken differing approaches. Alcor has a self-perpetuating board whereas Cryonics Institute (CI) has a member-elected board. In either case, the duties and authority of the board should be described in the Bylaws, Articles of Incorporation, and by applicable law. The board should seek to achieve the fundamental goals of the organization as described by the Mission Statement.

The self-perpetuating board has advantages and is probably the most common structure among non-profit organizations. Among the advantages:

• Continuity of purpose and stability over a long period of time: New board members are selected by existing board members based on who can best preserve the organization’s core values and carry out its mission.

• Consistency in expertise and knowledge: Existing board members are likely to select new members who have similar levels of expertise and commitment to the organization’s goals. This can help maintain a consistent level of knowledge and experience on the board. The downside is that misalignment can be irreversible.

• Alignment: Members of self-perpetuating boards are often deeply aligned with the organization’s objectives and culture, which can lead to more cohesive and effective governance.

• Efficiency: These boards may make decisions more efficiently, not having to be slowed or interrupted by member elections.

• Less influence of external politics: Self-perpetuating boards can potentially reduce the influence of external politics or shifting member interests that might arise with elected boards, thus focusing more on the organization’s primary mission and long-term interests.

• Control of board composition: Such boards can strategically plan their composition, ensuring a mix of skills and perspectives that align with the organization’s current and future needs.

• Fundraising and resource mobilization: Board members in self-perpetuating boards are often selected for their ability to contribute resources, networks, or fundraising capabilities, which can be vital for the financial sustainability of the non-profit.

From my personal and lengthy experience with Alcor, a self-perpetuating board does not at all guarantee effectiveness or wise decision making, even though it does tend to preserve knowledge. Whether the problems result from the self-perpetuation or from a poor mix of skills is not clear.

On the other hand, member-elected boards of directors in non-profit organizations offer several benefits.

• Representation: Member-elected boards allow the broader membership or stakeholder group to have a say in the governance of the organization. This can lead to a board that is more representative of the organization’s constituency.

• Accountability: Elected board members are accountable to the members who elect them. This accountability can drive board members to be more responsive to the needs and concerns of the membership and to work towards the organization’s best interests.

• Diversity of perspectives: Elections can bring in board members from a wide range of backgrounds, leading to a diversity of viewpoints and experiences. This diversity can enhance creativity, innovation, and the quality of decision-making. (But recent research points to costs of diversity in some cases.) This is not a guaranteed advantage of a member-elected board since it depends on who runs for election and on how a self-perpetuating board selects new directors. Currently, half of Alcor’s board consists of attorneys – an unbalanced composition that deprives the organization of skills in areas such as business management, and communication and marketing.

• Adaptability: Regular elections allow for the periodic introduction of new members with fresh ideas and skills, which can help the organization adapt to changing circumstances and stay relevant.

• Limit on power concentration: Elections serve as a check against the concentration of power in a small, self-selected group, potentially reducing the risk of groupthink or entrenchment of board members.

• Community and member engagement: The process of nominating and electing board members can foster a sense of community and participation among members, strengthening their connection to the organization.

We should be careful not to lean toward member-elected boards on the basis that they are “more democratic.” Unlimited democracy can be dangerous, as the Founders of the United States recognized. One danger of a member-elected board is takeover by outsiders with very different ends – perhaps destroying the organization or else diverting it from its mission. That gets harder as an organization grows but biostasis organizations are still small. As an organization gets older and bigger, the bylaws can be further strengthened to tighten Board selection criteria.

Only a small fraction (15%) of CI members vote in their elections so it is a real danger, although how likely that is to happen is hard to say. The temptation for outsiders to attempt a takeover will grow along with the organization’s assets. But asset size presumably will grow with the number of members, making a takeover more difficult. Cryonics Institute sensibly limits this risk by restricting voting to lifetime members or members of at least three years standing who must also have made arrangements to be cryopreserved. This protection is limited, however, since a lifetime membership is not expensive.

Over the course of two decades, observing Alcor decision making from the inside and CI’s from the outside, I have come to think that any new biostasis organization should have a board that is split between member-elected and self-perpetuating. What the ideal proportions are remains an open question. A good approach may be a 7-person board where 4 directors are self-electing and the other 3 are elected by members. Or a 9-person board with a 5/4 split. With this structure, you improve the chances of getting useful input from people who are not semi-permanently on the board while maintaining protection against usurpation by outsiders. Add to this a requirement for 3 or 5 years as a member before being eligible.

A hybrid board structure for non-profit organizations, combining elements of both self-perpetuating and member-elected boards, can offer benefits by merging the strengths of each approach:

• Balanced representation and expertise: A hybrid board can ensure that there is a balance between elected members who represent the broader stakeholder community and appointed members who bring specific skills, expertise, or resources. This can enhance the board’s overall effectiveness and diversity.

• Stability with member engagement: The self-perpetuating element can provide continuity and stability in governance, while the elected portion ensures that the board remains connected to and accountable to the broader membership or community.

• Flexibility in board composition: This model allows for strategic planning in board composition. It can be designed to ensure a mix of skills and perspectives that align with the organization’s current needs and future goals while maintaining input from members.

• Increased legitimacy and trust: The inclusion of elected members can increase the organization’s legitimacy and the trust it enjoys from its members or constituents, as it reflects a commitment to inclusivity and representation.

• Reduced risk of groupthink: The diverse origins of board members in a hybrid model can mitigate the risk of groupthink, fostering a culture of open discussion and diverse viewpoints.

• Adaptability: A hybrid board can adapt more easily to changing circumstances. The elected component can bring in new perspectives and skills as needed, while the self-perpetuating members ensure continuity and institutional memory.

• Efficient decision-making with accountability: The model can balance efficient decision-making, a characteristic of self-perpetuating boards, with the accountability seen in member-elected boards.

• Member engagement and renewal: Regular elections for a portion of the board positions can maintain member engagement and facilitate periodic renewal of the board, bringing in fresh ideas and energy.

A hybrid board structure looks likely to be an effective model for biostasis organizations, at least those that offer member services, SST, and patient storage, either directly or through contractors. For an organization that focuses solely on patient storage and maintenance, it could be that a self-perpetuating board works better. Such an organization will not have members directly, being a service provider to a general biostasis service organization (BSO). Consider that many—and eventually most – of its “members” will be in biostasis and unable to participate.

Based on my experience in more than one non-profit, I was startled to learn that the average non-profit board has 17 directors. This seems far too large if the board is to operate effectively as a whole. Presumably, organizations with that many directors do not expect or want all directors to be actively involved in most decisions. At that board size, an Executive Committee is needed.

Internal leadership: Apart from the board, governance and succession management can be improved by having a large and active body of advisors. Alcor has such a group – although little utilized – and typically draws new directors from the advisors. The advisor group enables the board to see how advisors think and cooperate before considering them for a director position. Harvard University has a similar structure with a smaller board and the larger, 32-person Board of Overseers, from which directors may be acquired.

In the case of the Japanese shinise, we saw that these remarkably long-lived companies were run by the same family over generations – with a little help from adoption into the family. We see something similar in the longest-lived European corporations. Practices and processes that enable interested persons to get up to speed on organizational workings and strategies and that allow them to demonstrate their expertise, amount to something like bringing new individuals into the family. Another way of fostering something like a multi-generational family is to require that all directors and senior officers be members of the organization. This seems to be a common policy in the major biostasis organizations.

As a non-profit grows it can make sense to create focused committees for areas such as nominating, fundraising, finance, personnel, legal, research, and operational improvement. These committees can include both directors and executives as well as voting or non-voting staff members.

Conclusion

The organizational challenge facing biostasis is unusual because success must be measured over a century rather than a decade. Technical excellence is essential, but institutional resilience is equally important. If we expect patients to entrust us with their futures, we must design organizations that are capable of surviving long enough to deliver on that promise.

References

“100-year-old Trusts that Still Make Top Returns: Golden oldies trump their rivals with up to 70% over three years.” Holly Black, The Daily Mail, December 15, 2017.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras. Collins Business; 3rd edition, September 1, 2002.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don’t, by Jim C. Collins, HarperCollins October 16, 2001.

Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, HarperBusiness Oct 11, 2011.

“The Armories of the Latter Day Laputas, Part 6”, by Mike Darwin, July 12, 2011.

Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market—And How to Successfully Transform Them, chapter 1. Richard Foster, Sarah Kaplan. Broadway Business 2001.

The Living Company, by Arie de Geus. Harvard Business Review, March–April 1997. (Also in his book, 1997, 2002.)

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition, April 2, 2013.

“Suspension Failures: Lessons from the Early Years”, by Michael Perry. https://alcor.org/Library/html/suspensionfailures.html

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. HarperTrade, New York, NY, U.S.A. January 1, 1982

“Die Another Day: What Leaders Can Do About the Shrinking Life Expectancy of Corporations.” Martin Reeves and Lisanne Püschel

Boston Consulting Group, December 2, 2015

The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, by Phil Rosenzweig. Free Press, February 6, 2007.

List of Oldest Companies. Wikipedia page, accessed June 27, 2020.

Summary

Our inherited vocabulary is like an old map. Every map leaves something out. As explorers discover new lands, the map must be redrawn. The same is true of our conceptual maps. For centuries, medicine divided people into just two territories: alive and dead. Biostasis reveals that the landscape is richer than that. Between those familiar regions lies another territory—one our inherited vocabulary never anticipated. People involved in cryonics have been thinking about this for decades and have come up with a range of candidate terms and concepts. Among the terms referring to a person in the third state are deanimated, inactivated, in a biostatic coma, in an ametabolic coma, suspended, preserved, in stasis. Yet more options come to mind. Which terms should we prefer and why?

Importance of Terminology

When we talk about patients in biostasis we are referring to something that does not fit existing, recognized categories. Our vocabulary is inherited furniture. Most of the time it serves us well. But every so often science builds a new room, and suddenly none of the old furniture fits. The difficulty of naming biostasis patients may itself be evidence that we are encountering a genuinely new category that inherited language was never designed to describe. This is a case of scientific and technical developments revealing the need for new categories. The history of science is littered with conceptual potholes dug by bad terminology. The right word can make a concept seem natural; the wrong word can make it seem strange or misleading.

If we talk about cryonics and biostasis without challenging existing categories, we will run into problems including lack of comprehension and resistance. To illustrate the point, consider some analogous examples.

Survival of the fittest: This term is unfortunate and has led to confusion and misunderstanding. To most people, “fittest” means strongest, fastest, most aggressive. But in evolutionary biology it means organisms that leave the most descendants. An organism can be physically weak and still be evolutionarily “fit.” The phrase has contributed to misunderstandings of evolution and even to misguided social and political doctrines – misunderstandings that have persisted for many decades.

The Big Bang: This brings to mind a huge bomb exploding into empty space. The term was coined derisively by Fred Hoyle but caught on in common usage. The image is misleading because cosmologists are not talking about an explosion in space. They are talking about an expansion of space itself.

Brain death: In this case it is not so much that the term is confusing, although it was when first introduced. Many people found it contradictory: How can someone be dead if their heart is beating? The term forced medicine and the public to rethink what death actually means. That makes it a good parallel to terms describing the third state.

Left vs. right: Political thinking and understanding have long been distorted by use of the simplistic, one-dimensional left/right spectrum. This distinction originated in late 18^th century France where the supporters of the king sat to the president’s right and supporters of revolutionary change sat to the left. As political thought evolved, however, it became increasingly clear that one dimension could not adequately describe all political philosophies.

Imagine trying to describe every location on Earth using only latitude. Entire continents disappear into a single number. The traditional life-death distinction similarly compresses metabolism, consciousness, and informational integrity into one dimension. The third state functions like a bridge suspended across time. Traffic has stopped, but the structure remains intact, waiting for travel to resume.

The Nolan Chart plotted political views along two dimensions: economic freedom and personal freedom. This new representation made sense of how “extreme” left and “extreme” right views can look similar in outcome. It also makes room for views like classical liberalism and libertarianism which never fit into the left/right spectrum and yet is a consistent view.

The left-right spectrum did not become false; it became incomplete. By collapsing multiple dimensions into one, it obscured important distinctions. The traditional life-death dichotomy may suffer from the same limitation. It compresses several independent variables—metabolism, consciousness, and preservation of identity-critical information—into a single binary classification.

Analogies

The introduction of the third state is not a unique phenomenon. Plenty of analogous cases illustrate the point that improved understanding of the world sometimes requires new categories. Briefly, here are three of them.

States of matter: Ancient and early modern thinkers recognized three familiar states: solid, liquid, gas. Nature turned out to be more complicated. Plasma did not fit the old categories, and eventually physicists expanded their framework. Modern physics recognizes many additional states or phases: superfluids, superconductors, Bose-Einstein condensates, quark-gluon plasma, liquid crystals, and others.

Likewise, we have traditionally divided people into only two states: alive and dead. Biostasis may reveal a third condition that fits neither category. Categories should be tailored to reality, not reality squeezed into inherited categories. Few analogies are exact. In this case you could argue that the additional states of matter are still all forms of matter. We could reply that life, death, and the third state are all forms of biological organization. Regardless, the analogy works primarily as a lesson about taxonomy and conceptual evolution, not as a direct physical parallel.

Legal status: Historically, people were classified as either citizen or foreigner. Eventually societies created intermediate categories: permanent resident, protected person, refugee, dual citizen, stateless person. These new categories reflected important practical and political considerations.

Information: Given this essay’s concern with information-theoretic death and the third state, this is probably the most direct analogy. A computer can be (a) running; (b) permanently destroyed; or (c) powered off but retaining all of its information. Nobody confuses the third condition with the second. The machine is not operating, but neither is its information lost. Biostasis advocates would argue that a cryopreserved person occupies an analogous condition: inactive but information-preserved. Critics may object that people are not computers, but the analogy gets directly at the central issue: preservation versus destruction of information.

Language Suggestions from 1983, 1988, and 1991

The “third state” seems to have been first used by Mike Darwin in a 1983 Cryonics article, but while the concept continued, the term was largely forgotten. I used the term in a 1991 Cryonics magazine article titled “The Third State.” In that piece, I argued that biostasis shines a light through cracks that have always existed in our categories but were previously invisible. The traditional classification of alive or dead was explained by the fact (until the mid-20^th century) that “when heartbeat and respiration stopped there was no way to return a person to life. It seemed that there was a point beyond which life had permanently ceased, and so it was natural to assume that life suddenly turned into death.” Widespread belief in a non-physical “soul” also made it seem natural to understand death as the point at which the soul left the body—a sudden event rather than a gradual process.

I continued: “Dying can no longer be thought of as a sudden event. Since the personality is encoded in the structure of the brain, dying is a gradual process of degradation in the neural structures embodying personality. The possibility of halting the dying process demands a new term to describe the condition of someone in the stages between the first state of normal conscious function and the second state of death. This Third State (in historical, not logical order) is the condition cryonic suspension patients are in.”

An important piece of writing that dealt carefully with this terminological and philosophical issue was Brian Wowk’s 1988 article, “The Death of ‘Death’ in Cryonics.” Brian articulated a point now widely accepted among biostasis advocates: “Death: the absolute and irreversible loss of life, which occurs in human beings when their brain structure is destroyed.” It was common at that time and for decades after to refer to biostasis patients as “deanimated.” Brian suggested alternatives: “In an ametabolic coma” or “biostatic coma.”

In the debate following Brian’s article, Jerry Leaf and Hugh Hixon rejected Brian’s suggestion that we refer to suspension patients as being in an “ametabolic coma” or in an “ischemic coma,” on the grounds that these terms already have defined senses incompatible with our desired usage.

That was my motivation for suggesting “inactivate” – an absence of biological activity. That term did not catch on – for understandable reasons – and most cryonicists continued to use “deanimated” or “suspended.” (It would have been better to suggest “inactivated” since saying someone ‘is inactivate’ sounds awkward.)

Can we do better?

Another Use of “Third State”

To avoid confusion, I will note that there is another, quite different use of “the third state” in biology. It is not clear how widely this has been adopted but it is worth mentioning. In this usage the “third state” describes a condition where cells of a deceased organism continue to function and even acquire new capabilities after death. Researchers Peter Noble and Alex Pozhitkov found that certain cells, when provided with nutrients, oxygen, or biochemical signals, can reorganize into new multicellular forms called xenobots or anthrobots, exhibiting behaviors like movement, self-repair, and limited replication beyond their original biological roles.

In other words, the third state is where life persists after death at the cellular level. This differs importantly from my use of the term which refers to the state of the entire organism (or at least the brain). Some collections of cells may persist after the person has died but that in no way means that the person has not died.

The Third State and Information-Theoretic Death

The relationship between the third state and Information-theoretic death may be clear to most readers but I will make it explicit.

We inherited a picture of death as a light switch. Information-theoretic death suggests something closer to a dimmer switch. Or a symphony stored on paper which is silent but has not ceased to exist. Silence is not destruction.

Information-theoretic death is a concept primarily used in biostasis and neuroscience to define death in terms of the irreversible loss of information stored in the brain, rather than the cessation of biological functions like heartbeat or respiration. Information-theoretic death occurs when the brain’s structures encoding memory, personality, and cognition are irreversibly destroyed, making recovery of the original mind impossible, even with any physically possible future technology.

People in the third state – if they have been preserved sufficiently well – possess informational integrity and continuity. They occupy conceptual territory that medicine only recently discovered. Information-theoretic death will be avoided so long as the person is kept in the third state until technology is available to revive them. People in the third state are not alive because they have no metabolism. They are not dead because the structures in their brain still encode personal identity-critical information. The third state functions like a bridge suspended across time. Traffic has stopped, but the structure remains intact, waiting for travel to resume.

Strictly speaking, the Third State is a collection of states, all of which preserve identity-critical information. The term “biostasis” itself covers more than one possibility. Until recently, it has been almost exclusively used to refer to cryopreserved people. We could distinguish between cryopreservation without concentrated cryoprotectants from vitrified patients but this is not a major conceptual distinction. Besides biostasis, informational continuity could be preserved through chemical fixation such as current methods relying on glutaraldehyde.

The third state also encompasses the preservation of one’s identity-critical information in digital form. The most obvious scenario is to use this information to create a brain emulation. So long as you agree with some form of functionalism in the philosophy of mind, this allows for personal continuity without biology.

A less discussed possibility is to use the digital information to grow a new brain containing all the memories and personalities of the person from which the information was extracted. Someone existing in the form of stored information would not be dead, since there would be no irreversible loss of the information necessary to restore function.

How to Describe Someone in the Third State?

Inactivate(d): In my 1991 article, I suggested “inactivate” as a term to describe a patient in the third state. I preferred it to “deanimated” for two reasons: “Deanimated” connotes a lack of observable movement. People who are not animated in the normal sense may be sleeping, comatose, resting, and so on. Saying that they are inactivate more strongly implies that biological activity at the cellular and molecular level has ceased. Secondly, the movie Reanimator has, for some people, produced negative connotations regarding “reanimation” and “deanimation.”

On the pro side, “inactivate” implies reversibility. The term suggests that something has ceased functioning but has not been destroyed. We say that an enzyme or a virus or a machine has been inactivated. (“Deactivate” is mostly used for mechanical systems, “inactivate” for biological systems.) “Inactivate” bypasses the emotional baggage of death terminology. The term also implies stasis: inactivity suggests an unchanging condition rather than an ongoing process of deterioration. Finally, “inactivate” has a biomedical flavor that may appeal to technically minded audiences.

On the downside, it is grammatically awkward. You can say “the virus was inactivated” but saying “John is inactivate” sounds ungrammatical. More expected would be “John is inactivated.” But that creates other problems. Like “sleeping,” “sedated,” “anesthetized,” “inactivated” may not sound like a new category alongside life and death. It also has an established meaning in biology. “Inactivated virus” generally means “rendered nonfunctional and incapable of replication” which is a different use from the one I intended.

Deanimated: I do not hate this term. It has the virtues of being immediately understandable, suggesting absence of animation rather than destruction, and it has historical roots in cryonics. But it may sound archaic, it may carry science-fiction or zombie connotations, and it is too easily heard as a euphemism for dead. The term has something going for it but I do not think it is ideal.

Ametabolic coma: On a less serious note, I have long found it amusing that the Alcor Foundation has (for three decades) been situated on Acoma Drive. “Acoma” looks a lot like an abbreviated version of “ametabolic coma.” How appropriate!

On the pro side, “ametabolic coma” is technically precise and it describes an objective physiological condition. On the con side, the term is cumbersome, probably dooming it for general usage. In addition, few people know what “ametabolic” means. These are not objections to using it in technical contexts but are problems for a more general context. Another issue is that a coma ordinarily involves a living, metabolizing patient, so the phrase may create confusion. Let us keep this as a scientific descriptor, not a public-facing term.

Biostatic coma: This may be easier to understand than “ametabolic coma.” It also connects directly to biostasis. On the downside, again “coma” implies ongoing life and metabolism. But a patient in biostasis is not merely unconscious. In the end, any term incorporating “coma” is an uneasy fit.

Suspended: Some objections to this term may come from the related term “in suspension.” For those with a background in chemistry or medicine, a suspension is a mixture where tiny, undissolved particles are suspended or floating throughout a liquid (e.g., many liquid antibiotics or muddy water). Clearly, this is not what would be meant in a biostasis context. Words can have more than one very distinct meaning and that is not a problem if context makes clear which is intended. In general use, I do not see people confusing the suspension of undissolved particles with its use in biostasis.

Also in its favor, the term is already familiar from “suspended animation.” This seems helpful but the same fact could be seen as a downside. “Suspended animation” is typically used to refer to perfected cryopreservation – or some other form of perfected preservation. Talking of patients “in suspension” or “being suspended” might imply a perfected process that we do not yet possess. It is in this sense that it implies that life is merely paused. In reality – to date and for the foreseeable future – cryopreserved and especially chemically preserved people cannot simply be restarted. Massive repair will be needed.

Also in its favor, in common usage “in suspension” or “suspended” means that something is temporarily delayed, paused, or put on hold until a later decision is made. In disciplinary contexts in work, school, or sports, it refers to the temporary removal of a person from their job, team, or school due to rule violations. This is a state that can be reversed.

In stasis: This is one of the strongest formulations. “She is in stasis,” or, better, “He is in biostasis” sounds natural, is concise, and it avoids life/death implication. Of course, there are meanings that diverge from our desired use. It can imply an undesirable lack of change. But it does generally imply an equilibrium, inactivity, or a period where there is no change, development, or motion.

And the winner is…

The crowd is expectant and hushed as the language officiator comes to the stage. He clutches an envelope. “And the winner is…” he intones as he opens the envelope. “… it depends!” The crowd boos.

The trouble with picking a single term is that we can score terms by ease, clarity, connotation, and accuracy. “Ametabolic coma” is fairly good in a technical context although it still suffers from using “coma” in a nonstandard way. Some will dislike the term but I still find “deanimated” to be a reasonable term. The problem is that using the term in a form that refers to the state of a person – “deanimate” – sounds strange. There is also the problem that it can easily sound like a synonym for “dead.”

We can fix some of the problems with “ametabolic coma” by changing it to “ametabolic state.” That leaves the issue of the likely obscure-to-many quality of “ametabolic.”

Overall, I favor “in biostasis.” We could also say a patient is “biostatic” but that sounds awkward. “John Smith is in biostasis” sounds much more natural. “Suspended” also works fairly well, especially in an informal context. “In biostasis” wins because it works in both technical and general contexts.

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments but please provide arguments rather than mere emotional responses – unless you can plausibly argue that your emotional response is representative.

In this conversation, Ralph explains a recent major advance in nanotechnology capabilities in the form of Inverted-Mode Scanning Tunneling Microscopy – an encouraging step toward nanofactories and fabrication of medical nanotechnology devices. He considers how AI might boost nanotechnology progress, the role of prediction markets, and the concept of information theoretic death.

The paper we discussed can be found HERE.

A more detailed review of the recent breakthroughs produced by Inverted-Mode Scanning Tunneling Microscopy can be found HERE.

Robert Freitas’ “Cryostasis Revival” is available as a PDF or as a hardcover book from Amazon.

Ralph’s paper about using prediction markets for public governance is available on his website HERE.

The life extension, biostasis, and transhumanist communities includes many unusual and sometimes eccentric figures. Among them Dr. Michael Perry stood out as especially kind, having a lack of interest in personal benefit – he refused a salary increase at Alcor despite very low pay – and for his unwavering willingness to help out those in distress.

I knew Mike for 40 years and I hope to enjoy his presence again some decades in the future. On April 15, 2026 Mike was hit by a car as he walked home from work at the Alcor Foundation. In his late seventies, Mike continued to walk to and from work in all kinds of weather. As he crossed Scottsdale Road and Thunderbird (just a few blocks from where I live) he was run over by a car. He suffered major injuries to his legs and abdomen. He remained conscious and lucid. Alcor’s standby team had been in town for training and immediately deployed. Hospital staff were cooperative. Mike went into surgery but died a few hours after the procedure failed.

A serious threat to his successful cryopreservation arose when the medical examiner considered doing an autopsy because criminal proceedings were possible but he was ultimately released to Alcor. Around 20 minutes after Mike was released, he was moved to Alcor and was cryopreserved. Mike was the first human perfused on a new automated neuro perfusion machine he helped design. Having recently restarted CT scans – after years out of action – Mike was CT scanned during perfusion to determine cryoprotectant distribution. I am told that preliminary signs point to an ideal or near-ideal perfusion with minimal clotting and no obvious brain injury. We will have to wait for the final CT scans and case report for more details. [Most of this information comes from an Alcor email.]

This was not Mike’s first brush with death. In July of 1991, he and I and two others drove from California a thousand miles south into Baja Mexico to La Paz to watch an unusually long full eclipse of the sun. On the way back, the vehicle went off the side of the road and flipped over. I was asleep in the truck’s shell and somehow landed on my feet with no injuries. Mike had been in the passenger seat and was not so lucky. Some of his fingers were pulled out of their joints and his head was gashed open, exposing his brain.

The automatic weapon-toting Mexican police did not help but other Americans stopped and assisted. We went to a “clinic” in Guerrero Negro. It was a dirty shack. They wanted to operate on his head. Fortunately, thanks to the foresight of (I think) Regina Pancake, we had emergency medical insurance and so Mike was taken by helicopter to San Diego where his fingers were put back in place and his head injury tended to. That almost certainly saved his life. The rest of us took a bus for the 500 miles to San Diego. What we did not know at the time was that Jerry Leaf – Alcor’s surgeon and main driving force (along with Mike Darwin) – had also been declared clinically dead, creating a crisis that left Alcor scrambling.

I first met Mike in the summer of 1986 when I came to California from England to spend six weeks being trained and tested by Darwin and Leaf. That is also when I first met Dr. Steve Harris – now also cryopreserved – and Dr. Brian Wowk (thankfully still alive and very active).

In 1994, Mike gave a talk at our EXTRO-1 (Extropy Institute) conference on “Mathematical Immortality: A Progress Report.” Wired magazine covered the conference and included a photo of Mike taking care of cryopreserved patients at Alcor (October 1994. “Meet the Extropians” by Ed Regis).

In 1996, Mike (as Venturist minister) presided at the wedding of myself and my long-time love Natasha Vita-More.

Although Mike had radical views and did not shy away from the term “immortality,” his views were actually more cautious than those of many others then and now. He was restrained in his expectations of a cure for aging and for when biostasis might be repaired and revived. From a 2004 interview: “’Real’ life extension for me means basically at least a cure or remedy for biological aging and now-terminal diseases, with the possibility of extending an individual’s life for many centuries. Guessing “when” is hazardous of course, but my gut feeling is sometime around the mid 21st century to early 22nd century, say 50-100 years from now.”

On revival from biostasis: “As above, I would estimate 50-100 years for this to happen.”

On “the Singularity”: “I’d like to believe Kurzweil’s estimate of 2045 as ‘when it will happen.’ More conservatively, perhaps it will happen a bit later; I will offer my usual time estimate of 50-100 years.”

Mike also said: “With a bit of luck, I may have another 30 years or so until I am cryopreserved.” If not for the accident, that would have been quite likely.

Some biographical information, mostly from a profile I did in the May/June 1996 issue of Exponent, the Extropy Institute newsletter:

Michael Perry was born in 1947 in Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. Part of a military family, he travelled a great deal as a youngster. Soon after being born, he moved to South Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama. At age 12 he moved to Morocco for a year and a half. Returning to the US, he stayed in Colorado, and then Hawaii, where he graduated from high school. In 1965 he got a summer job with a solar astronomer with a telescope atop Mount Haleakala. He became an agnostic at age 15 in 1962. This started his evolution toward becoming a cryonics advocate.

As his first exposure to the cryonics idea, Mike pointed to “Dead Storage,” an episode of Science Fiction Theater (1955). At college in 1965, at lecture at the University of Chicago, he heard that some people were thinking of freezing people at death for later revival. (This was before the first human cryopreservation.) This was probably the result of the lecturer being aware of Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality which was published the previous year.

He became an agnostic at age 15 in 1962. This started his evolution toward becoming a cryonics advocate. Mike came to see death as a problem that needed to be solved. Cryonics seemed to be the only way to help people avoid death now. At school, when he hard someone talking about the freezing idea, “It became clear to me that there was no reason anyone could definitely point to for why it wouldn’t work. I realized it was the logical choice to make, and I told the others right there that I was going to be frozen myself.”

In August 1976, Mike subscribed to Robert Ettinger’s newsletter, The Immortalist. He completed his cryonics arrangements in 1977. In 1984, he switched to Alcor as a “neuro” member. He also received a PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1984) and began working as a computer programmer. He started the Church of Venturism (later the Society for Venturism) with David Pizer in July 1986. Mission: “a nonprofit organization promoting the achievement of immortality and happiness through reason and science.”

In May 1987 Mike became a live-in Alcor volunteer. In 1989 he was put on the payroll, and continued as patient caretaker (and resident cryonics historian) during the many changes at Alcor. Mike participated in many cryopreservations in his first decade or so, and he edited Alcor’s former newsletter, The Alcor Phoenix, for several years. He has written numerous essays on cryonics history – these deserve to be collected in one place.

Mike wrote the book, Forever for All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality (available as a PDF here). He also wrote Toward Self-Optimization of Machine Intelligence (Ph.D. Thesis). In his earlier years, he authored or coauthored several journal papers and technical reports on computerized tomography, for applications ranging from medicine to solar physics. For Cryonics magazine, Mike wrote many fascinating and detailed articles about the history of cryonics, including Suspension Failures: Lessons from the Early Years. He also dug into a seminal precursor to modern “immortalists” and life extensionists in The Anti-Death Philosophy of N.F. Fedorov.

Mike enjoyed composing electronic music (a more-or-less baroque style) and we have a couple of his CDs. In the 2004 interview, he was asked about his favorite music and movies. His favorite style was 18th-century baroque (perhaps not surprising for a mathematician) and his favorite song in the pop genre was “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens, followed by “Tambourine Man” as done by the Byrds and “Please Please Me” by the Beatles. He said that he mainly listened “to these songs (and others) for the melodies rather than the words or message.”

He did not watch many movies but, when prompted, said he enjoyed Rain Man and Pay It Forward, as well as the first Star Wars, The Ten Commandments, Saving Private Ryan, No Time for Sergeants, and Some Like It Hot. He also highlighted two of my favorites: Forbidden Planet and Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

For more biographical detail, see this profile in the Q# 2010 issue of Cryonics.

Mike, I will do my best to be there when you are revived, if I come back before you.

Michael Benjamin Cryopreserved

We are very sad to report that one of our long-term staff members Michael Benjamin was cryopreserved on March 11, 2026, after a long struggle with scleroderma. Michael was a versatile, productive, and public, cryonics activist who played a significant role in the Alcor meta-analysis project, implementing S-MIX in cryonics casework and the formation of Biostasis Technologies in New York City. You can read more about Mike’s life here.

New York Mixing

In April Biostasis Technologies staff and contractors gathered at the New York City facility to successfully mix a number of test batches of MHP-2 and VM-1, validating our large volume mixing capabilities. Having established these capabilities, we can now proceed to mix large batch organ preservation and vitrification solutions for the larger consortium (Resurgence Biomedical Sciences, Suspended Animation etc.)

Training Sessions

Biostasis Technologies staff participated in two training sessions in NYC and Portland aimed to train existing paramedics and educate members of existing organizations about the basics of Standby, Stabilization, and Transport (SST) and how to apply this knowledge to build more robust local capabilities. In these meetings, BT President Aschwin de Wolf presented an analytic framework how to think about mitigating damage during the 1st 10 minutes of a cryonics case.

Biostasis Summit

In May, Biostasis Technologies staff members Max More and Aschwin de Wolf attended the Biostasis Summit at the Vitalist Bay in Berkeley, California. Max was the opening speaker in an impressive line-up of speakers and researchers. Aschwin de Wolf participated in the research panel and other panels about the state of biostasis today.

Enlightenment Salon Talk

On May 31, 2026, Biostasis Technologies President Aschwin de Wolf was a guest at Gennady Stolyarov’s U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Enlightenment Salon. Topics discussed include the current state of the biostasis field, AI use in research, real-world biostasis protocols, and field cryoprotection. A recording of this event is available here.

Partnering

Biostasis Technologies has partnered with the Cryonics Institute in a technical advisory capacity to support the development, expansion, and evidence-based modernization of CI’s cryonics capabilities and research initiatives.

Reorganizing SST

In collaboration with Laura Atkinson and LeAnn Cusick of RBS, Biostasis Technologies completed a significant reorganization of its regional SST capabilities (for RBS and SA use) and layout, improving efficiency, equipment management, and facility readiness through the introduction of a new inventory system, a centralized charging station, and the installation of new epoxy flooring throughout the facility.

Taiwan Talk

In early June, Max More traveled to Taipei, Taiwan to participate in the Buddhist Woodenfish Foundation’s Forum on Buddhism, Science, & Future. He was able to present the core ideas behind biostasis which were new to many of the attendees. He also made connections with several medical and scientific experts.

Why an Abstract Question Matters

Many readers of this blog probably regard the concept of a soul with skepticism and see little reason to discuss it. It is true that many objections to biostasis are practical: It won’t work. Revival is impossible. It costs too much. The world of the future will be a horrible place. Yet philosophical and religious objections sway many people.

Many people instinctively feel that cryonics must somehow interfere with the soul. This issue may be abstract but abstract beliefs influence real decisions. People who believe that death triggers an immediate spiritual transition may view preservation not merely as futile but as spiritually misguided. So, it is worth the effort to ponder the question: What exactly is a soul, and does the concept create any genuine problem for biostasis?

The Soul Objection

A common belief, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, is that the soul enters the body at a specific point – usually at the point of conception – and leaves at a specific point – at death. If the soul leaves at death, what would be left for future technology to revive? Revival would merely create an empty shell.

In extreme and fictional variations, people revived from cryonics are indeed soulless and then go on a killing spree. A good example of this is Wes Craven’s 1985 movie, Chiller. Miles Creighton dies and is cryogenically preserved by his mother. When revived, he is soulless and utterly lacking in morality or empathy. He becomes a violent, cut-throat killer. I doubt this trope has any real influence since soul-believers would not expect any person to return to life.

One complication with this view is that “death” is more complicated than understood by soul believers. For centuries, it was thought that death was when the heart stopped beating and breathing ceased. Since resuscitation became routine decades ago, I am not aware of anyone who thinks that revived patients lack a soul.

My Usual Response

I gave many tours of Alcor’s facility over the years, sometimes for individuals or couples and sometimes for larger groups. One day I was to do the tour for a class. The teacher had offered the students several alternatives but they overwhelmingly chose to visit Alcor. Among the many questions, the topic of the soul inevitably arose.

I explained how in vitro fertilization (IVF) works. I pointed out that there are millions of people living today who began life as cryopreserved embryos (specifically blastocysts). In the 1970s, some people said it either would not work or would lead to people lacking souls. I asked if any of the students were IVF babies. One young woman said she was. Someone in the group piped up: “It’s true, Kathryn doesn’t have a soul!” Everyone laughed, fortunately, including the soulless one.

Some people in the past actually did worry that babies conceived in a petri dish might be missing something. Given our experience with IVF and people made that way and now grown up, no one takes that worry seriously anymore. Nor does anyone report a memory of waiting to be embodied. This point is part of my standard response to the soul question. Notice that I did not argue that there is no soul. I am open about my physicalist views but emphasize that there is no conflict between souls and biostasis. There are several strong arguments against the existence of souls – such as the neural dependence of mental phenomena and the lack of explanatory power of the dualist view – but typically avoid doing so in this context. Rather than opposing anyone’s view, I sidestep them.

No scientist has ever been able to detect a soul. A reasonable conclusion is that there is nothing there to measure. For believers, the conclusion is that the soul is non-physical. If it is non-physical then it does not exist in space and time the way physical objects do. If the soul is outside spacetime then it makes no sense to worry about a “trapped” soul hanging around a body, awaiting revival. In the eternal realm of souls, a century is the same as a day.

Depending on who I am talking to, I might also explain the concept of information theoretic death. On this view, patients in biostasis are not dead so long as sufficient structure is preserved. If the soul leaves the body at death, presumably it will not leave the body of biostasis patients. Whether the soul stays with the body or is somehow elsewhere – it is unclear what that means outside of a spacetime framework – it experiences no passage of time.

At least as far as the soul objection is concerned, the problem largely disappears.

Let us dig a little deeper.

Before going any further, we should try to figure out what people mean by “soul.”

The Problem of Defining the Soul

The concept of soul varies considerably across religions and cultures. In the United States, the primary understanding of the concept is based on Christianity, although some non-Christians seem to share a similar conception.

Christianity: The soul is immortal, created by God with free will, the soul is a non-corporeal entity which goes to Heaven or Hell.

Plato: The soul is a non-physical entity that exists in a perfect and eternal world of forms.

Aristotle: The soul is not separate from the body but is the “formal cause” of the body.

Hinduism: The soul (atman) is an eternal, unchanging part of divine reality. Reincarnation (samsara) until moksha is attained.

Buddhism: Anatta (no-self) undergoes rebirth. It is not a thing like the Christian soul but more like a flame passed from candle to candle.

Islam: The soul is seen as a combination of Ruh (spirit), which is incorruptible, and Al-Nafs (self), which is corruptible and goes to Paradise (Jannah) or Hellfire (Jahannam).

Judaism: The soul (neshamah) is a divine gift; varied views on resurrection.

Polytheism: The soul is not the creation of God but is part of a larger cosmic reality.

Materialism: Some materialists retain the word ‘soul’ as a metaphor for the deepest aspects of personality, character, and subjective experience.

So, we have soul as metaphor, soul as immortal and indivisible entity, soul as abstraction that does not sustain a personality, and a two-part soul, as the main conceptions. In most of these views – Buddhism being a clear example with Hinduism being unclear – the soul seems to “carry” the personality. If the soul is eternal and unchanging (as in some Hindu conceptions), it becomes difficult to see how it could be the bearer of a personality that clearly changes over time.

The Soul as a Prescientific Explanation

Conceptions of soul arose as humans naturally sought explanations for consciousness, personality, memory, dreams, and death. The soul provides a unifying explanation – or gives the impression of doing so.

But concepts that seem explanatory at one time are abandoned when deeper scientific understanding replaces them. Consider the once-widely accepted notions of phlogiston, caloric, and the ether. The ether seemed a useful explanation (or pseudo explanation) until relativity firmly threw it out. Caloric is interesting in that we still use the derivative term “calorie” despite having dropped any belief in an invisible fluid that explains heat transfer. Caloric seems to be a pretty good explanation. Fluids pass more quickly through wide pipes and, indeed, heat was observed to transfer between objects proportionally to the extent of their contact. Yet we came to understand that caloric does not exist. Heat is molecular motion.

The soul idea remains outside of the scientific realm and resists any attempt to test it with evidence. That does not make it false. It makes it explanatorily inert. We cannot prove that there is no such thing as the soul.

Suppose someone claimed that a blue elf lives on the Moon and secretly influences what happens on Earth. Everyone would find this arbitrary hypothesis ludicrous. But suppose a blue-elf true believer challenges you: “Okay, smartass, prove that the blue elf does not exist!” For any proposed test, the true believer will have a response. “It’s invisible to X-ray, sonar, infrared, etc.” The reason we do not believe in the blue elf is that it does not explain anything and we have no need of the hypothesis.

Buddhism and the Curious Case of the Missing Soul

On this topic, Buddhism is especially interesting and confounding. Buddhism famously rejects a permanent self and yet Buddhism still speaks of rebirth. How can something be reborn if there is no enduring soul? As noted above, Buddhists conceive of this continuity not as a unified entity that persists but more like a series of candles. One lighted candle passes the flame to the next, and then the next. The second flame is neither identical nor entirely separate.

If we squint a little, the Buddhist view looks rather like certain contemporary theories of mind and identity. Rather than a substance being transferred, a pattern is continued. This begins to sound surprisingly close to functionalism in the philosophy of mind, information-theoretic approaches, and continuity-based views of identity. Functionalism in this domain means that the person is not identical to a specific material substrate (that is the Identity view) but neither is the person a separate thing from the substrate in which it is instantiated at any time.

In other words, it is a physicalist view in that your continuity depends on being embodied but you could be embodied in different substrates. This lends support to the idea that, in principle, we could upload our minds into a non-biological system. There is no “thing” being transferred. The function is continued on the new substrate.

What Actually Needs to Survive?

I have covered this in detail recently, so I will be brief here. What future revival requires is not a mysterious essence but preservation of the structures that encode memories, dispositions, learned knowledge, values, personality and psychological continuity. Whatever survives must somehow preserve these features. Some soul views seem to sustain some of these factors, others less so. The Christian view of soul – the dominant conception in the USA – does seem to allow for these elements to continue. Some lack of clarity arises from the idea that a person is transformed in Heaven. Some theologians may have focused on this issue but I have seen no evidence that most Christians have a clear idea of how much of themselves will persist in an afterlife.

Life, Death, and the Third State

Once you grasp the idea of information theoretic death you realize that the simple binary alive/dead distinction is inadequate. Since personal continuity is a matter of degree – with how much fidelity has your personal identity-critical information been preserved? – survival is not all-or-nothing. This differs from the concept of “clinical death.” People who are clinically dead are usually either alive or actually dead. The latter would be the case where damage was massive and resuscitation or revival obviously impossible. With clinically dead people the question is: Is this person retrievable (with current capabilities)? In today’s standard medicine, you either are or are not and so you either are or are not alive. It is still binary.

For many years, I have used the term “The Third State” to describe a condition in which a person is neither alive nor dead. I am not sure if I coined the usage but I have probably used it more than anyone, starting with an article of that title in Cryonics #126, Vol.12, No.1, January 1991, page 8.

Patients in biostasis who retain sufficient identity-relevant information are clearly not alive. They are not conscious, their body is not functioning, and they have no metabolism. They are missing many elements characteristic of being alive. But neither are they dead according to the information theoretic view. We therefore need a third category.

In cryonics, this has often been referred to as being “suspended.” In perfected form this would be suspended animation. Not everyone likes the term “suspended” or “cryonic suspension. I do not object to it since it implies a suspension of metabolic activity. Sometimes I have used the term “inactivate” but that has not caught on.

For those who believe in a soul, when some is inactivate, in suspension, in biostasis (biostatic?), the soul presumably has no problem. It exists independently from the body (not in Aristotle’s view). We could say that the soul waits for the body to transition from suspended to living. However, as we saw, that does not make much sense in the absence of a spatiotemporal context. We could say that the soul is dormant but for no time. I do not see a good way to describe this and the reason is the lack of any scientific framework to make sense of the situation.

Conclusion: An Aikido Approach

I do not believe in a soul. I find the idea incoherent. This does not mean that I make a priority of attacking or dismissing the idea when explaining biostasis. I would rather understand their perspective – as far as I can – and work around it. I take religious opposition and, instead of pushing back, I redirect thinking around it. Consider it a kind of intellectual or persuasional Aikido.

If souls exist, biostasis appears compatible with them.

If souls do not exist, biostasis still makes sense.

Either way, the soul concept provides no compelling reason to reject preservation.

The deeper lesson may be that debates about souls often distract from the real question: What must be preserved for a person to survive? Biostasis offers a practical answer to that question. And once we focus on preservation rather than metaphysical labels, the supposed conflict between souls and biostasis largely dissolves.

Introduction

In the year 79 of the Common Era, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the Roman town of Herculaneum under volcanic ash. Among the buildings destroyed was a private library, today known as the Villa of the Papyri. The scrolls in that library, hundreds of them, were not destroyed in the way fire usually destroys paper. They were carbonized, cooked to charcoal by superheated volcanic gas. When archaeologists rediscovered them in the eighteenth century, the scrolls were too fragile to unroll. Every attempt to open them physically risked turning them into fragments or dust. For nearly two thousand years, the texts were considered effectively lost.

They were not lost.

The Vesuvius Challenge was launched in 2023 by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales, with the goal of reading the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum without physically opening them. The scrolls had been studied for centuries. Earlier attempts to unroll them had destroyed or damaged many of them. Mechanical and chemical methods had largely failed. By the early twenty-first century, the remaining unopened scrolls were often treated as unreadable.

This essay is about what that recovery tells us about cryonics.

The Vesuvius Challenge does not prove that cryonics will work. It proves something narrower: information can survive catastrophic physical transformation in a form that remains unreadable for centuries, until imaging, computation, and inference catch up.

The conceptual parallel is not perfect, but it is unusually instructive. In both cases, the goal is to recover delicate, highly complex information from a medium compromised by extreme conditions. In one case, the destructive event was a volcanic eruption. In the other, it is the biological damage that produces legal death, followed by the cryopreservation procedure. The question in both cases is whether the information survives the destructive event in a form that future technologies could recover.

The argument that cryonics could work in principle was made decades ago. The Vesuvius Challenge provides a vivid empirical analogy for the underlying logic of that argument. And recent advances in vitrification, including detailed ultrastructural work on mammalian and human brain tissue suggest that the cryonics application of this logic is not merely abstract speculation.

Ralph Merkle’s Argument

The case for cryonics rests on a distinction most people never encounter: the distinction between clinical death and information-theoretic death.

Clinical death is what current medical practice declares when the heart stops and cannot be restarted, or when the brain has irreversibly ceased functioning by present medical standards. It is a functional and legal criterion, defined relative to the resuscitation technologies presently available. Two hundred years ago, drowning was often death. Today, under the right circumstances, drowning can be survivable, especially in cold water and with rapid medical intervention. Cardiac arrest was once final in a way it is no longer final. The line between “dead” and “not dead” has repeatedly shifted.

Information-theoretic death is different. It occurs when the physical structure that encodes a person’s memories, personality, dispositions, and identity has been so thoroughly destroyed that no possible future technology could recover what was lost. Cremation with the ashes scattered is one example. There is no organized brain structure left to examine, infer from, or repair.

Cryonics is best understood as an attempt to prevent the transition from clinical death to information-theoretic death. This distinction was central to Ralph Merkle’s 1994 paper Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Merkle argued that cryonics should not be judged by whether current technology can revive a patient. Current technology obviously cannot. The proper question is whether cryopreservation preserves enough of the physical structure of the brain that future technology could, in principle, reconstruct the person.

Merkle made this argument by analogy to cryptanalysis. A cipher is a transformation applied to a message to obscure it. Decoding the cipher requires inferring the transformation from properties of the ciphertext and from prior knowledge of how plaintext tends to look. Language is redundant. Letters are not randomly distributed. Words follow patterns. Grammar constrains what counts as a plausible sentence. Because of this redundancy, a cryptanalyst can often recover a message even when the original has been obscured.

Merkle’s insight was that the damage done to a brain by ischemia, cryoprotectant toxicity, and freezing can also be thought of as a transformation, though not a deliberate or clean one. The damaged preserved brain is, in a loose sense, ciphertext. The original living brain is the plaintext. The question is whether the transformation has destroyed the message, or merely made it difficult to read.

Merkle pointed to Maximum Likelihood Estimation as a formal way of thinking about the problem. In cryptanalysis, a model can be refined by comparing proposed decodings against expectations of what valid plaintext looks like. Models that produce nonsense are rejected. Models that produce increasingly plausible language are more likely to be on the right track.

The same broad logic could apply to neuronal reconstruction. The brain’s structure is redundant. Neurons follow developmental, anatomical, and functional constraints. Synapses do not occur in arbitrary patterns. Axons and dendrites travel through tissue in ways that are physically and biologically constrained. If a preserved brain retains enough of these structural traces, then future reconstruction may not require every molecular detail to be perfectly preserved. It may require enough surviving information for the missing or damaged pieces to be inferred.

This was a theoretical argument when Merkle made it in 1994. The necessary imaging technologies did not exist. The computational tools did not exist. The molecular repair tools did not exist. Critics could reasonably say that the argument depended on technologies that might never be developed. Thirty years later, the situation looks different.

The Vesuvius Challenge

Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, had spent years developing techniques to virtually unroll damaged manuscripts using high-resolution X-ray scans. The basic idea was simple to state but extremely hard to execute. If a scroll could be scanned in three dimensions, then software could identify the layers, flatten them virtually, and search for traces of ink. Traditional image analysis was not enough.

Machine learning changed the problem. The organizers released CT scans of unopened scrolls and offered prizes for teams that could identify ink and reconstruct legible text. There were smaller prizes for first letters and larger prizes for substantial passages. The structure rewarded incremental progress and made it worthwhile for machine learning researchers to work on a problem that had previously belonged mostly to classics, archaeology, and manuscript studies.

The prize structure worked. Luke Farritor won the First Letters prize in 2023. In 2024, Farritor, Youssef Nader, and Julian Schilliger won the Grand Prize for recovering substantial Greek text from a previously unreadable scroll. The text appears to be Epicurean philosophy, likely connected to Philodemus, on the subject of pleasure.

The deeper significance is methodological. The Vesuvius Challenge showed that a destructive physical transformation does not necessarily equal information-theoretic destruction. The text had been unreadable for nearly two thousand years. The substrate did not need to be readable by the technology that existed at the time of preservation. It became readable only when imaging resolution, computational power, machine learning, and organized incentives advanced enough to extract the signal. And the redundancy of the original signal mattered. Greek has structure. Letters form words. Words form grammatical phrases. Models that produced gibberish were wrong. Models that produced plausible Greek were more likely to be right.

The same general principle appears in Merkle’s cryonics argument. Recovery depends not only on raw preservation, but on the redundancy and constraints in the original system. A damaged substrate is not necessarily a random substrate. If the damage preserves enough structure, and if the original object had enough internal order, then future inference may be possible.

The Vesuvius Challenge is not a perfect comparison for cryonics patients. A scroll is not a brain. Greek text is not personal identity. Volcanic carbonization and cryopreservation are radically different physical processes. But the analogy captures the central information-theoretic question: can a damaged substrate preserve enough structure that a future civilization, using better tools, can recover what earlier observers thought was lost?

For the scrolls, the answer was yes.

Where Cryonics Stands Today

Whether the cryonics application of this logic is empirically supported is a different question from whether the analogy is conceptually useful. The evidence has changed substantially in recent years, and especially with recent work on vitrified brain tissue.

Early brain cryopreservation involved freezing tissue with cryoprotectants. The problem with freezing is ice. Ice formation can be mechanically destructive. Ice crystals can distort, rupture, and displace delicate cellular structures. Even when cryoprotectants reduce ice formation, conventional freezing can still produce serious injury. Isamu Suda’s experiments with cat brains in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that some electrical activity could return after crude cryopreservation and thawing, but the methods were far from proving preservation of the fine ultrastructure thought to matter for memory and identity.

The major advance was vitrification: cooling tissue into a glass-like solid state without ice formation. Vitrification uses high concentrations of cryoprotectants to suppress ice formation. Instead of freezing into crystalline ice, the tissue becomes a solid amorphous glass.

That solves one problem while creating others. The cryoprotectant concentrations required for vitrification are high. They are toxic and create osmotic stress. The blood-brain barrier and tissue diffusion limits uniform cryoprotectant loading. Tissues shrink when water leaves and the cells themselves deform and shrink. Membranes, proteins, and cellular compartments are stressed. Vitrification is not harmless but it also can preserve the information that matters.

In 2015, Aurelia Song (formerly known as Robert McIntyre) and Greg Fahy demonstrated aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) on a whole pig brain. This work later won the Mammal Brain Preservation Prize. ASC combines glutaraldehyde fixation with vitrification. It produced electron microscopy evidence of excellent connectome-level structural preservation. That was a major result, but ASC is not traditional cryopreservation in the method cryonicists are being preserved today. ASC relies on chemical fixation before vitrification. The remaining question was whether vitrification alone, without prior aldehyde fixation, could preserve brain ultrastructure well enough to support the cryonics argument.

In a 2026 bioRxiv preprint, Greg Fahy and colleagues at 21st Century Medicine and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation reported detailed ultrastructural and histological study of mammalian brains preserved by vitrification without prior fixation. The study included a human brain donor: a seventy-three-year-old man with terminal pancreatic cancer who consented to brain donation for research. His brain was perfused with the M22 vitrification solution and vitrified approximately seven hours after legal death, following two days of agonal hypotensive hypoxia and three hours of post-cardiac arrest cooling. These are realistic conditions, not the ideal laboratory scenario that critics often cite as the only context in which preservation could possibly work.

This study was closer to the sort of compromised biological condition cryonicists must actually deal with. The reported findings are important. Cortical biopsies examined after vitrification showed dehydrated but largely intact cells, neuropil, synapses, myelin, and capillaries. The authors reported no ice damage at the examined levels of magnification. Differential scanning calorimetry supported the conclusion that the tissue vitrified rather than froze. Partial rehydration restored more normal pyramidal cell shape, suggesting that at least some membrane integrity and osmotic responsiveness survived the vitrification and warming cycle.

These findings do not prove that a cryopreserved person can be revived. They do not prove that every relevant memory trace is preserved. They do not solve the molecular repair problem. But they do substantially weaken the casual objection that cryonics produces only “frozen mush.”

The best current evidence suggests that much of the relevant structural information may survive high-quality vitrification. That is a much more serious position than cryonics critics usually acknowledge.

Redundancy in the Brain

The most important point is not that preservation is perfect. It is that imperfect preservation may still retain enough information for future inference.

This is where the Vesuvius analogy becomes useful again. The scrolls did not preserve an easy-to-read ink layer. The signal was faint, buried, warped, and entangled in a damaged substrate. But enough of the signal remained. Machine learning models could extract it because the substrate still contained traces, and because Greek text has redundancy.

Brains also contain redundancy. A synapse is not just a point in space. It exists within a larger anatomical context. Axons run through tissue. Dendrites branch in patterned ways. Myelin sheaths, capillary beds, cell bodies, synaptic densities, and surrounding neuropil all provide contextual clues. Even where one signal channel is degraded, surrounding structures may preserve information about what was originally there.

This idea has a longer history than the current Vesuvius work or even Ralph’s work in 1994. In 1987, Thomas Donaldson described the recovery task ahead of cryonicists as “neural archaeology,” borrowing directly from traditional archaeology. When archaeologists find a site, they record not only the artifacts but the spatial relationships between them, because those relationships often preserve more information than any single fragment. Donaldson’s argument was that a cryopreserved brain is the same kind of object: a damaged but structured record, where the spatial relationships among the surviving pieces carry information that no single piece carries alone. More recently, researchers including Chana Phaedra and Aschwin de Wolf have developed this idea and coined the term “reconstructive connectomics” to describe it. Reconstructive connectomics characterizes specific types of preservation damage and develops computational methods to infer the original state from the damaged one.

This does not make reconstruction easy. It makes it conceivable. If some fine structures are ambiguous, the question becomes whether nearby anatomical features constrain the possible interpretations. This is the same kind of inference problem that appears in damaged manuscripts, cryptography, archaeology, paleontology, and medical imaging. The object is damaged, but not arbitrary. The original system had structure. The damage had structure. Recovery depends on exploiting both.

That is the strongest form of the cryonics argument. It does not require claiming that current preservation is perfect. It requires claiming that current preservation may prevent information-theoretic death by retaining enough structure for future tools to work with.

Cryonics Prize Formats for Future Civilizations

The Vesuvius Challenge succeeded for reasons worth examining directly, because they may matter for cryonics. It had a clear deliverable: read the text. It had verifiable success criteria: legible passages in a known ancient language. It had substantial prize money, including a large Grand Prize and smaller milestone prizes that rewarded early progress. It had open methods, allowing teams to build on each other’s work. And it had sustained organizational backing.

Without that scaffolding, the scrolls might still be unread. Brent Seales had been working on virtual unrolling for many years before the Vesuvius Challenge. The technical foundation existed. What the prize added was attention, incentive, coordination, and public progress. It pulled in researchers who would not otherwise have spent their time on a problem in papyrology and made the work legible to a broader public.

Cryonics has its own prize history. The Brain Preservation Prize, organized by Kenneth Hayworth’s Brain Preservation Foundation, established a concrete bar for evaluating brain preservation methods. The Small Mammal Prize was awarded in 2016. The Large Mammal Prize was awarded to Aurelia Song and 21st Century Medicine in 2018 for aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. The prize forced the field to define success and produced a concrete demonstration that the bar could be met.

But the deeper question is whether prize structures could be designed not only for present researchers, but for future civilizations. A cryopreserved patient in a dewar is, in one sense, already a prize: a sealed package of information waiting for a sufficiently advanced civilization to decode. The question is how to make that prize legible, valuable, and incentive-compatible across timescales no current cryonics institution has yet had to navigate.

A patient’s private trust could, at least in principle, be structured as revival bounties, payable to whoever successfully restores the patient. Research endowments could be tiered like the Vesuvius Challenge, with milestone prizes for partial connectome reading, molecular reconstruction, memory-relevant validation, and eventually revival. These are not easy structures to design. A prize meant to survive two hundred years would have to endure institutional drift, currency changes, legal changes, and technological discontinuity. It would also have to avoid perverse incentives, fraud, and premature claims of success.

The Vesuvius Challenge had one major advantage cryonics does not. Continuous human civilization often preserved the scrolls, even if accidentally. The scrolls were not actively maintained for two thousand years. They were buried, rediscovered, conserved, scanned, and studied. The substrate was inadvertently robust. Volcanic burial turned out to be a strangely effective preservation medium, though no one designed it for that purpose.

Cryonics is betting on something harder. It is betting that an organization, or its successor, will still exist when the tools arrive. It is betting that patients will remain vitrified, identifiable, legally protected, and physically accessible. It is betting not only on future technology, but on institutional continuity.

The science of preservation is only half the battle. The other half is building institutions that can keep patients intact long enough for future technology to matter.

What Remains

The argument Ralph Merkle made from theory in 1994 now has much more empirical support than it did when he made it. The Vesuvius Challenge has shown that complex information can survive destructive physical transformation and remain recoverable long after the original tools for reading it have failed. Recent vitrification research, meanwhile, suggests that high-quality brain cryopreservation can preserve far more ultrastructure than previous critics assumed. These developments do not prove revival, and they do not settle every question about memory, identity, or future repair. But they do make the cryonics argument much harder to dismiss as fantasy.

The central point is not that a cryopreserved brain looks alive today. It does not. Nor is the claim that current technology can reverse the damage of ischemia, cryoprotectant toxicity, and vitrification. It cannot. The relevant question is narrower and more fundamental: have the structures that encode the person been irreversibly erased, or do they remain present in a damaged but interpretable form? That is the question critics often skip over when they reduce cryonics to “freezing the dead.” Cryonics is not claiming that the patient is currently retrievable. It is claiming that the patient may not yet be information-theoretically gone.

The Herculaneum scrolls waited about 1,945 years to be read. The technology that read them did not exist for almost all of that time. The carbon was always there. The ink was always there. The missing ingredient was not the text, but the ability to see it. What looked like a charred lump to one century became a recoverable manuscript to another.

Cryonics is the same kind of proposition applied to a different substrate and a different timescale. The substrate is the human brain rather than carbonized papyrus. The timescale is decades or centuries rather than millennia. The patience required is institutional rather than geological. That last difference matters enormously. The scrolls survived because volcanic burial accidentally preserved them and later human institutions happened to value them. Cryonics patients require active maintenance, legal continuity, funding, competence, and care across generations. The scientific question is difficult, but the institutional question may be just as difficult.

Still, the underlying logic is no longer speculative in the way it once was. We now have a spectacular example of information surviving a catastrophic physical transformation for nearly two thousand years, unreadable until imaging and machine learning caught up. We also have growing evidence that modern vitrification can preserve the fine structure of brain tissue far better than most people imagine. The analogy is not proof, but it is evidence for the plausibility of the broader idea: unreadable is not the same as erased, and damaged is not the same as destroyed.

The scrolls are speaking now because someone built the imaging hardware, someone wrote the machine learning code, someone organized the prize structure, and someone kept the carbonized remains intact enough that all of that work still had something to address. Cryonics is making a similar bet. It is betting that the substrate will hold, that the tools will improve, and that future people or institutions will care enough to do the work of recovery.

References and Further Reading

Primary sources cited

Donaldson, T. (1987). Neural Archaeology. Cryonics, June 1987.

Fahy, G.M., Spindler, R., Wowk, B.G., et al. (2026). Ultrastructural and Histological Cryopreservation of Mammalian Brains by Vitrification. bioRxiv preprint.

Freitas, R.A. (2022). Cryostasis Revival: The Recovery of Cryonics Patients through Nanomedicine. Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

McIntyre, R.L. and Fahy, G.M. (2015). Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. Cryobiology, 71, 448–458.

Merkle, R.C. (1994). Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Proceedings of the First Extropy Institute Conference.

Phaedra, C. (2013). Reconstructive Connectomics. Cryonics, July 2013.

The Vesuvius Challenge: scrollprize.org

The Brain Preservation Foundation: brainpreservation.org

Further reading on brain preservation science

Krassner, M.M., Kauffman, J., Sowa, A., et al. (2023). Postmortem changes in brain cell structure: a review. Free Neuropathology, 4, 10.

McKenzie, A.T. (2023). What should we be measuring in brain preservation? Neurobiology Notes.

McKenzie, A.T., et al. (2024). Structural brain preservation: a potential bridge to future medical technologies. Frontiers in Medical Technology, 6, 1400615.

McKenzie, A.T., et al. (2024). Biostasis: A roadmap for research in preservation and potential revival of humans. Brain Sciences, 14, 942.

The Rapid Cooling Imperative

Biostasis aims to bring the patient into a stable, non-deteriorating state where they can wait for as many decades as it may take before repair and revival may be possible. The speed with which the patient is cooled matters a great deal.

The faster cryonics procedures begin after legal death, the better the outcome. Every delay worsens preservation. The more time that has passed before starting each part of the cryonics procedure, the worse the outcome (all other factors being equal).

Other factors are not equal, however, one of the biggest being the temperature of the patient. (Others being cause of clinical death and the general condition of the patient.) Once circulation ceases, ischemic injury begins immediately. Oxygen deprivation (hypoxia) follows, with the brain being the most vulnerable tissue

The biostasis process consists of multiple stages. To avoid long ischemic delays, it is crucial to have effective and timely standby, stabilization, and transport (SST). During that process, practitioners use cardiopulmonary support (CPS) to maintain circulation and to accelerate cooling. Effective cooling requires immersion in an ice-water slurry with active circulation, not simply packing the patient in ice.

You can see the importance of using proper technique from this well-used chart comparing the cooling rate of three Alcor patients. The “squid” is shorthand for the SCCD – surface convective cooling device – the device that circulates the icy water. The SCCD consists of a system of perforated tubing that circulates the water and emphasizes cooling of the head and areas with major surface blood vessels. Combining cooling with CPS accelerates cooling by moving warm blood from the core of the patient to the surface.

Patients cooled with active circulation and slurry-based methods show dramatically faster temperature decline than passive cooling.

An important transition occurs when a CPS is terminated in order to gain access to the patient’s vascular system. Once completed, the patient can be cooled much more rapidly by passing their blood and cryoprotectants through a heat exchanger. In past practice, this has meant a period during which there is no circulation while surgery is performed and until perfusion can begin. This creates a central operational dilemma: when should CPS be stopped and surgery started?

If you stop CPS at a relatively high temperature you will allow the patient to continue deteriorating at an uncomfortable rate while preparing them for perfusion. Why not cool the patient close to freezing before moving on to the perfusion? But this could take hours. Once the patient is connected to a pump and heat exchanger, they can be cooled much faster. So, at what temperature should you discontinue CPS and move to perfusion?

Why the 20°C Historical Cutoff?

For many years, 20°C was used as the temperature at which to stop doing CPS. A temperature near 20°C is not arbitrary. In conventional medicine, deep hypothermia has long been used during certain cardiac and neurosurgical procedures involving circulatory arrest, where blood flow to the brain and body must be temporarily stopped. Lowering body temperature dramatically reduces metabolic demand and slows the cascade of ischemic injury.

At normal body temperature, irreversible brain injury can begin within only a few minutes without circulation. But as temperature declines, cellular metabolism falls steeply, extending the period during which tissues can survive inadequate oxygen delivery. Clinical experience with deep hypothermic circulatory arrest suggests that temperatures around 18–20°C can permit substantially longer interruption of circulation—sometimes approaching an hour under carefully controlled conditions—while still allowing meaningful neurological recovery.

From the perspective of biostasis, this matters because ischemic injury is cumulative and temperature-dependent. The closer a patient can be brought to deep hypothermic conditions soon after cardiac arrest, the more slowly damaging biochemical processes proceed. Achieving 20°C therefore represents an important physiological threshold: not because injury ceases below that point, but because the rate of deterioration becomes dramatically slower than at normal temperatures. Even if complete vitrification or long-term preservation cannot be initiated immediately, rapidly reducing temperature toward this range may buy valuable time, preserving cellular structure and brain information more effectively until advanced stabilization procedures can begin.

The Role of CPS in Cryonics

Let us take a step back and look at the goals of CPS. First, to avoid misunderstanding, note that we are talking about CPS, not CPR. We are not trying to revive the patient, so it is not “resuscitation.” The goal is not revival, but preservation—maintaining circulation while slowing metabolism.

An effective cryopreservation requires three conditions:

1. A standby team deployed to the member’s location when risk of legal death is imminent.

2. Prompt pronouncement of legal death ideally within minutes of cardiac arrest by an independent medical professional. This is typically only possible with in-facility hospice or hospital care.

3. Restoration of oxygenated blood circulation by high quality mechanical CPS, stabilization medication administration, and commencement of surface cooling no more than ten minutes after cardiac arrest.

If prompt restoration of blood circulation after the heart stops is not possible, cryonics stabilization may consist only of administration of basic medications to inhibit blood clotting followed by several minutes of chest compressions to circulate the medications. This is because restoration of blood circulation after long periods of stopped circulation can do more harm than good.

The goal of stabilization is to maintain viability of the brain by contemporary biological criteria after legal pronouncement of death. To achieve this, four procedures are ideally employed:

1. Cardiopulmonary Support (CPS). Circulation is restored to provide oxygenated blood to the brain, to circulate medications, and to accelerate cooling. Depending on specific circumstances, the lungs may be ventilated.

2. Induction of Hypothermia. The temperature of the patient is lowered to just above 0 degrees Celsius to depress metabolism.

3. Administration of Medications. Drugs are administered to improve circulation, inhibit blood clotting, and to protect the brain.

4. Blood substitution. If the patient is distant from Alcor’s facilities, and if it is logistically possible to do so, the blood of the patient is substituted with an organ preservation solution to enhance cooling, prevent blood clotting, and protect against cold ischemia.

With current methods, all cryonics patients will suffer some cerebral ischemic injury. The goal is to limit this to no more than the equivalent of a few minutes of ischemia at normal body temperature.

If the top priority is to minimize ischemic injury by restarting circulation and respiration, what is the best way to provide CPS? In terms of effectiveness, the ideal method would be extracorporeal bypass to ensure adequate blood flow. This method suffers from a practical problem, however. It requires invasive surgery to directly access the circulatory system and this takes time, making it typically not a good option for immediate intervention.

The Importance of the Cooling Rate

Historically, at least at Alcor, CPS was terminated when the patient reached a core temperature of 20 degrees Celsius. Above that temperature, CPS was continued to prevent ischemic injury during preparation for blood substitution or cryoprotective perfusion.

Around 2013, Dr. Steven Harris, at the time Alcor’s medical director, suggested modifying the 20 °C cutoff by making it dependent on the rate of cooling. This change acknowledges that a fixed rule is not optimal. A patient who is larger – especially if this is due to adipose tissue – or who has poor circulation will cool more slowly. Since surgery for perfusion will take time during which there is no circulation, the patient should be cool enough to substantially slow metabolism. On the other hand, once surgery is completed, cooling can be greatly accelerated. If a patient is cooling rapidly, they may be taken down to 20 °C or even 15 °C. If they are cooling slowly, CPS may be terminated at a higher temperature.

We can estimate metabolic rate by means of the Q10 rule (metabolism slows by about 50% for each 10 °C drop in temperature) and the Arrhenius equation. This led to Dr. Harris’s recommendation: a simple rule for determining when to continue cooling: Determine the patient’s temperature, divide by 300 (minutes), and the result is the cutoff cooling rate. Examples:

For 30 C, the cutoff is 30/300 = 0.10 °C/min

For 25 C, cutoff is 25/300 = 0.083 °C/min

For 20 C, cutoff is 20/300 = 0.067 °C/min

For 15 C, cutoff is 15/300 = 0.05 °C/min

Some people reflexively push back against this rule – especially those new to the field – because they believe their surgeons can complete surgery in just a few minutes. Such beliefs have typically not been substantiated. As a result the patient is exposed to prolonged ischemic arrest during surgery.

Measuring Ischemic Damage: e-HIT and S-MIX

Using a cooling-rate adjustment to the 20° C rule is one way to reduce ischemic damage.

How can ischemic damage be quantified? One minute or one hour of damage at close to normal body temperature will be much worse than the damage during the same time at 5 °C. Steve Harris developed a time-equivalent index number, or “E-HIT.” Aschwin de Wolf and Michael Perry refined this idea into the S-MIX score: a Standardized Measure of Ischemic eXposure. I will not go into the details here but you can find more information here and here.

Practical Challenges

Two practical challenges present themselves. The first is one I experienced firsthand in Alcor’s operating room. Those involved in the procedure knew of Dr. Harris’s equation but tended to default to the simple 20 °C criterion for stopping CPS. Several times, I had to remind them to use the equation. Since I was overseeing procedures and did not have to focus on a specific task, I would also compute the cooling rate and call out when we were getting close to the CPS stopping point. Although I printed out the equation and related information and put it in the OR, I am not sure that it is being used. This underscores the value of having a dedicated protocol overseer.

The other challenge relates to surgical capabilities. Ideally, surgery would be performed without interrupting circulation. This removes the trade-off between continued cooling and early cessation of CPS and initiation of perfusion and accelerated cooling. Doing this requires a surgeon who can perform surgery with minimal interruption of circulation. At Alcor, that turned out to be difficult to achieve in practice. I do not know whether Alcor has mastered that practice.

Tomorrow Biostasis recognizes this issue and is changing its protocol to incorporate cooling rates. They have been using the same default cut-off of 20°C but the team leader can decide to start higher or lower based on two factors: cooling rate and estimated time for surgery. According to CEO Emil Kendziorra, Tomorrow’s standard procedure going forward “is to start with femoral cannulation and perfusion via the femoral artery during CPS. And then add aortic cannulation a bit later at lower temperatures. This combines the best of both worlds and has the added benefit of a better flow gradient across the brachiocephalic trunk and left subclavian.”

Conclusion

The question of when to terminate CPS is not a minor technical detail—it is a central optimization problem in biostasis. Every decision in this narrow window trades off ischemic injury against the opportunity for faster cooling and more effective perfusion.

What emerges from this analysis is a broader lesson: fixed rules are rarely optimal in a system as dynamic and variable as human physiology under emergency conditions. The traditional 20 °C cutoff is simple, but simplicity comes at a cost. By contrast, incorporating cooling rate, surgical timing, and metabolic modeling allows for decisions that are responsive to the actual condition of the patient.

Metrics such as S-MIX push this further, offering a way to quantify what was previously intuitive: total ischemic burden. With better measurement comes better optimization—and, ultimately, better preservation.

One way in which Biostasis Technologies is working to reduce the gap between stabilization and washout cooling rates is through liquid ventilation (LV). LV has been a work in progress for years, even decades. Recent BT work lead by Charles Platt looks close to being a deployable new procedures that can reduce S-MIX scores.

As cryonics advances from a largely procedural discipline toward a data-driven one, these kinds of refinements will matter. Small improvements in the transition from support to stasis may translate into large differences in the recoverability of the brain.

In a field where success depends on preserving information over decades or centuries, optimizing these minutes may be among the most important work we do.

In December of 2014, I worked with Dr. Fahy to cryopreserve Dr. Stephen Coles under special conditions, with his permission to extract brain samples and test them for preservation quality. We did not know what the results would be. If bad, that would be discouraging for cryonics. In fact, the results were excellent, as Dr. Fahy details.

We discuss the Coles case and the results of the cerebral cortical biopsy. The paper includes results from rabbit brains. We also discuss the relative resilience of the brain compared to other organs when it comes to fracturing; how cryoprotectants prevent ice formation even when the blood-brain barrier remains closed; whether biostasis organizations should be using blood-brain barrier opening agents; Dr. Fahy’s thoughts about chemical preservation and the role of a combination of cryo and chemo, known as aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), and more.

Have you ever wondered what really happens during a cryonics case? When does a team deploy? What do stabilization procedures involve—and how is a patient transported to a cryonics facility?

​Join Biostasis Pacific Northwest and Biostasis Technologies in Portland for an engaging introduction to standby, stabilization, and transport (SST). This session will cover the essential concepts behind a cryonics case, show how local members and volunteers can get involved, and offer hands-on exercises to bring these procedures to life.

This event is especially suited to those of you wanting to learn enough to help in a cryonics case local to you. Staff from New York, Florida, and elsewhere will be present to explain and demonstrate. You will learn about patient loading, temperature measurement, ice bath usage, collect and administer ice, use basic equipment, act as scribe, help move a patient, drive, and more!

​Whether you’re a member, a curious observer, or a medical professional interested in the field, this is a unique opportunity to gain practical insight and connect with the local community.

​We warmly encourage you to attend—and to invite others who may be interested. After the event, we’ll continue the conversation over a group dinner.

​Location of the event (in Old Town) will be communicated to approved attendees.

Register here:

Have you ever wondered what really happens during a cryonics case? When does a team deploy? What do stabilization procedures involve—and how is a patient transported to a cryonics facility?

​Join Biostasis Pacific Northwest and Biostasis Technologies in Portland for an engaging introduction to standby, stabilization, and transport (SST). This session will cover the essential concepts behind a cryonics case, show how local members and volunteers can get involved, and offer hands-on exercises to bring these procedures to life.

This event is especially suited to those of you wanting to learn enough to help in a cryonics case local to you. Staff from New York, Florida, and elsewhere will be present to explain and demonstrate. You will learn about patient loading, temperature measurement, ice bath usage, collect and administer ice, use basic equipment, act as scribe, help move a patient, drive, and more!

​Whether you’re a member, a curious observer, or a medical professional interested in the field, this is a unique opportunity to gain practical insight and connect with the local community.

​We warmly encourage you to attend—and to invite others who may be interested. After the event, we’ll continue the conversation over a group dinner.

​Location of the event will be communicated to approved attendees.

Register here:

Imagine waking in the future after decades in biostasis. Your body is restored, your brain is functioning—but something is wrong. You cannot remember your past. Your relationships, your experiences, your achievements—gone. The question you face is not merely “Have I survived?” but something more unsettling: “Is this still me?”

This is the central philosophical challenge of biostasis. Survival in the biological sense—restoring metabolism, repairing tissues, restarting neural activity—is not enough. What we care about is personal survival: that the individual who wakes is meaningfully continuous with the person who entered biostasis.

The right way to frame the issue, then, is not simply whether revival is possible, but what must persist—or be recoverable—for that revival to count as survival. Following the approach developed by Derek Parfit and extended in my own work on the diachronic self, the answer lies in psychological continuity and connectedness. But this immediately raises a further question: what, exactly, constitutes that continuity?

Memory has traditionally received most of the attention.

Why Memory Seems to Matter Most

Since John Locke, personal identity has often been tied to memory. On this view, I am the same person insofar as I can remember my past experiences. Memory links me to my earlier actions, grounds responsibility, and anchors my sense of self over time. The appeal of this idea is obvious. Memory situates us within a narrative. It tells us who we are, where we came from, and how our lives have unfolded. Without memory, we lose not only information but our orientation in the world. We become, in a deep sense, unmoored.

Yet this memory-centered view is too simple. As Parfit argued, what matters is not memory alone but a broader pattern of overlapping psychological connections—beliefs, intentions, dispositions, and other mental features that link earlier and later stages of a person. Memory is one strand in a larger web. I examined this issue in detail in my doctoral dissertation. To understand what must survive through biostasis, we need to look more closely at what memory actually is—and what it is not.

Memory Is Not One Thing

In everyday thinking, “memory” is treated as a single faculty. Neuroscience tells a different story.

A basic distinction is between declarative memory—our ability to recall facts and events—and procedural memory, which underlies skills and habits. Declarative memory includes both episodic memory (personal experiences) and semantic memory (general knowledge). Procedural memory, by contrast, allows you to ride a bicycle, type on a keyboard, or play a musical instrument.

These forms of memory rely on different neural systems. The hippocampus and related medial temporal structures are critical for forming and retrieving episodic memories. Procedural learning depends more on systems involving the basal ganglia and cerebellum. As a result, they can come apart. Patients with severe amnesia may lose the ability to recall recent events while retaining the capacity to acquire new skills.

There is also an important distinction between short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory depends on ongoing patterns of neural activity and fades quickly—on the order of minutes. Long-term memory, by contrast, is encoded in relatively durable structural changes in the brain. From the perspective of biostasis, this matters: only consolidated, long-term memory is likely to be preserved.

The key implication is that memory is not a single, unified storehouse but a set of interacting systems. If survival depends on memory, we must ask: which memory? But even that question may be too narrow.

Beyond Memory: Traits, Values, and Dispositions

A person is more than what they can recall. Equally central are their dispositions, values, habits, and personality traits—the relatively stable patterns that shape how they think, feel, and act. These elements are not stored in the brain in the same way as discrete memories. They are not individual “records” that can be retrieved. Rather, they are patterns distributed across neural systems: tendencies in emotional response, motivational priorities, cognitive style, and behavioral habits.

Personality neuroscience does not point to a single “location” where character is stored. Instead, traits emerge from the interaction of multiple systems—emotional, cognitive, and regulatory. This distributed nature mirrors the philosophical point: psychological continuity is not a single thread but a tapestry.

This has an important implication. It may be possible to lose a substantial portion of one’s autobiographical memory while retaining much of one’s characteristic way of being in the world. Conversely, one might retain many factual memories yet undergo profound changes in values, emotional responses, and motivations. Which of these represents a greater loss of self?

Intuitively, many of us would say that a person who forgets much of their past but remains recognizably “the same kind of person” has survived more fully than one who remembers their past but has become, in character and outlook, a different person. If that intuition is correct, memory—though important—is not uniquely decisive.

Memory Is Fallible—But Still Matters

A natural but misleading way to think about memory is as a kind of internal photograph—a stored image that can be inspected at will. Classic experiments in cognitive psychology challenge this picture. In the memory-scanning studies conducted by Saul Sternberg, participants were asked to remember short lists of items and then determine whether a probe item had been present. Reaction time increased linearly with the number of items held in memory, indicating that retrieval proceeds by a serial search rather than direct access. If memory were truly photographic, one would expect immediate access to any part of the stored image. Instead, the mind appears to traverse stored information step by step. Memory is not a picture we inspect, but a process we perform.

The very fact that retrieval time depends on the number of stored items suggests that what persists in the brain is not a set of intact experiential records, but a structured system that must be actively traversed. This reinforces the idea that continuity of self cannot depend on the preservation of memory “records” alone, but on the persistence of the underlying cognitive architecture that makes reconstruction possible.

The fallibility of memory becomes clear once you understand that a memory is not a literal recording of the past but a reconstructive process. We reinterpret, distort, and sometimes confabulate our memories. Over time, they are reshaped by new experiences, emotions, and narratives. Even apparently clear visual memories can be artificially induced. Psychologists who elicit supposed memories are now known, in some cases, to be creating or shaping those memories.

If memory is so fallible, why should it play a central role in personal survival? The answer is that memory does not need to be perfectly accurate to sustain continuity. What matters is not exact fidelity but continuity of perspective—a sense that one’s present self is connected to one’s past experiences as one’s own. Memory provides a framework for narrative identity, allowing us to locate ourselves within an ongoing story.

Even when memories are imperfect, they preserve something essential: a sense of ownership, a linkage between earlier and later stages of the self. Survival does not require a perfect archive. It requires enough continuity to sustain a first-person connection across time.

The Limiting Case: Awakening Without a Past

Consider a more extreme scenario. You are revived from biostasis with no declarative memory at all. You cannot recall your past, your relationships, or your experiences. What remains?

Quite possibly, a great deal remains. You may retain procedural skills—how to speak, how to navigate the world, and how to perform complex tasks. You may retain emotional tendencies, preferences, and aversions. Your personality traits—your characteristic patterns of reaction, your sense of humor, your temperament—may still be largely intact. You would not be a blank slate.

Would this still be you?

The answer is not straightforward. On the one hand, the loss of autobiographical memory would be a profound and tragic impairment. Much of what we ordinarily take to constitute a life would be missing. On the other hand, if enough of your dispositions, values, and patterns of thought remained, there would still be a meaningful sense in which the person who wakes is continuous with the person who entered biostasis.

This suggests that survival is not all-or-nothing. It comes in degrees. One can survive more or less fully, depending on how much of the relevant psychological structure is preserved.

Why We Care About Memory

Why, then, does memory matter so much? Part of the answer is practical. Memory allows us to function in the world, maintain relationships, and pursue long-term goals. But its importance runs deeper.

Memory underpins what we might call narrative identity. We understand ourselves as beings extended through time, with a past, a present, and a future. Memory provides the raw material for that narrative. It allows us to see our lives as coherent trajectories rather than disconnected moments. It also grounds a sense of ownership. Through memory, we experience past events as ours. We do not merely know that something happened; we know that it happened to us.

Without memory, this narrative and this sense of ownership are weakened. But they may not be entirely lost—and they may, to some extent, be reconstructed.

Reconstructing the Self

In cases of memory loss, people often rely on external supports: photographs, videos, diaries, letters, and digital records. These do not simply restore memory as if retrieving a backup file. Rather, they provide cues that help reconstruct a sense of the past.

In a future where biostasis and revival are possible, such external traces may play an even greater role. A revived individual might have access to extensive records of their earlier life: writings, communications, quantified-self data, and more. These could help rebuild a narrative identity, even in the face of significant internal memory loss.

But reconstruction is not the same as restoration. External records can shape and sometimes distort how the past is understood. They may fill in gaps, but they may also introduce new interpretations.

This raises a subtle question: to what extent can externally reconstructed memory contribute to genuine personal continuity? It seems plausible that such reconstruction can support and extend continuity, but not fully replace the internal psychological connections that make experiences feel like one’s own.

What Must Survive?

We can now return to the central question: what must survive through biostasis for survival to be meaningful?

The answer is not any single element. Memory alone is not sufficient. Nor are personality traits alone. What matters is a bundle of psychological continuities: memory, dispositions, values, habits, and personality structure.

These elements are not independent; they interact and reinforce one another. Together, they form the web of connections that links a person across time.

There is no sharp threshold at which survival abruptly ceases. Instead, survival admits of degrees rather than being an all-or-nothing matter. The more of this network that is preserved—or can be recovered—the stronger the case that the revived individual is the same person in a meaningful sense.

For biostasis, the practical implication is clear. The success of biostasis will depend not merely to preserve isolated memories or brain structure in a gross anatomical sense, but on preserving the fine-grained organization that underlies these connected psychological systems.

Survival Worth Wanting

We can now answer the question with which we began. If you are revived in the future, will it still be you?

The answer is simple: it depends on what survives.

Perfect continuity is not required. Our identities are not static, and even in ordinary life they evolve over time. But for survival to be worth wanting, enough of the right structures must persist—enough memory, enough disposition, enough character—to sustain a meaningful connection between your present and future self.

Biostasis, at its best, is not about preserving a frozen snapshot of the mind. It is about preserving the capacity for a life to continue as one’s own.

The goal is not to preserve every memory, but to preserve enough of the person that the life that follows is still, recognizably and meaningfully, yours.

The better we preserve the connectome, the more likely we preserve all the things that matter as discussed here. Aschwin de Wolf recently republished his review of Sebastian Seung’s book, Connectome, which delves into the physical structures essential to personal identity and continuity.

In this discussion, Max More asks Diego how he become interested in cryonics, what his organization does, where Criogenia Avanzada is located in the city and how it will reach patients quickly, and how his experience in the music industry prepared him for the difficult work of making biostasis work in practice.

(Much) longer lives, not immortality

It may be tempting to think that once we conquer aging, we will live forever. But this is merely a seduction. The truth is more modest. Aging and age-related diseases are the biggest killers but they are not the only ones.

Even if we stopped aging completely, we would continue to die from accidents, homicides, wars, fatal diseases, suicides, and other non-longevity causes of death.

How long might we live if or when aging is abolished? The answer clearly depends on the assumptions we make. A straightforward approach is to start with current rates of accidents, homicides, fatal diseases, and other non-longevity causes of death. Then we can make projections based on extrapolating changes in these fatality rates, informed by historical trends along with plausible technological developments.

Current life expectancy

How long can we expect to live on average? More than one answer exists because more than one methodology can be used. Most calculations use period life expectancy. This summarizes death rates across all age groups in one particular year. This represents the average lifespan for a group of people if they die at the same age-specific death rates throughout their whole lives as the age-specific death rates seen in that particular year. This popular measure therefore underestimates life expectancy when it is rising over time.

Globally, (period) life expectancy was 73.8 in 2024 -- up from 32 years in 1900 and 46.4 in 1950.

In the U.S., (period) life expectancy is 79.6 years (CDC). The Social Security Administration instead uses the slightly more subjective but more accurate cohort life expectancy together with period life expectancy. This is 82.2 for men and 86.5 for women. If we are extending life expectancy, then cohort life expectancy will be higher than period life expectancy.

Progress has been impressive. In 1800, no region had a life expectancy higher than 40 years.

Both approaches to life expectancy are statistical measures and do not tell you much about your own life expectancy. These measures do not take into account your personal genetics, your exercise habits, your dietary habits, and so on.

Life expectancy without aging

What happens if we were to suddenly abolish aging? Immortality may be a theoretical ideal but not practically possible, but could we live for millennia? For millions of years?

A good place to start is by calculating life expectancy using current death rates from external causes (injury/violence/accidents). We can express the annual risk of death as: r deaths per 100,000 people per year. This is the standard “constant hazard” approximation (exponential survival).

According to CDC/NCHS, the age-adjusted total injury death rate in the U.S. is 85.3 per 100,000 in 2023. This “all injury” category includes unintentional injury, suicide, homicide, plus small categories like legal intervention/operations of war and undetermined intent). That death rate implies an average life span of about 1,200 years. Some people would be lucky (or careful) and would live multiples longer while others would meet with their end much sooner.

Looking at the European Union, Eurostat gives (EU, 2022) standardized death rates of: accidents, 35.6 per 100,000, intentional self-harm of 10.6 per 100,000, and assault of 0.7 per 100,000. This leaves out some factors and so is not directly comparable to the U.S. numbers. Summing up these facts, we get a death rate of 46.9 per 100,000 per year. That implies an average life expectancy of 2,100 years.

Extrapolating falling mortality

Under the same constant-hazard approximation, lifespan is inversely proportional to the external-cause death rate: If the external-cause death rate drops by 50%, mean life doubles. If it drops by 75%, mean life increases 4×.

If external-cause death rates fall by…

What is a plausible century-ahead reduction? We should not especially expect to see similar changes in rates for different non-longevity-related factors such as homicides, suicides, accidents, disease and infections and wars.

Over the past century death rates from motor vehicle and airplane accidents have dropped dramatically.

In the U.S., the motor-vehicle death rate per 100 million miles driven has fallen about 93% since 1923. In 2023, there were 40,901 deaths from motor vehicle crashes, equating to 12.2 (12.06%) deaths per 100,000 people and 1.26 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (down from 26.42 in 1969). That 1.26 fell further to an estimated 1.14 in 2025.

Despite this reduction, motor vehicle fatalities remain the third largest cause of accidental deaths in the U.S., after poisoning and falls. They are the leading cause of preventable death for people aged 5–22 and the second most common cause for ages 23–67

The number of people dying in aviation accidents has fallen greatly since the 1930s to 1950s despite a vast increase in the number of people traveling and miles traveled. Today there are typically a few hundred deaths worldwide in a typical year, despite billions of passengers flying. For example, 2024 had about 296 fatalities globally across commercial flights. Because global air traffic grew from ~310 million passengers in 1970 to more than 3–5 billion annually today, absolute deaths have not fallen nearly as dramatically as the underlying risk.

Looking at the U.S., commercial aviation typically has fewer than ~20 passenger deaths per year in many years. With a population exceeding 330 million, that is roughly 0.006 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Aviation deaths are over 10,000× smaller than total injury mortality in modern developed countries.

In the late 1920s, the accident rate from flying was about 1 accident per 1 million miles flown. Today it is about 0.003 deaths per 100 million passenger miles in the U.S. Even with more miles traveled, airline passengers are about 100 times safer than in the early decades of flight.

Aviation illustrates how dramatically safety can improve over time. Flights are now so safe that there is relatively little room for improvement. However, it shows how much improvement we might achieve in the rates of other causes of death.

While the accident rate for cars and planes has been declining it has increased for falls in the elderly. Since this results primarily from frailty, with the abolition of biological aging, this factor would likely decline dramatically. This means the real “external-only lifespan” could be longer than the simple calculation.

Technologies and improved practices that can drive further reductions include:

• autonomous transportation

• safer infrastructure and urban design

• advanced monitoring and early-warning systems

• robotics replacing humans in hazardous work

• improved emergency medicine and trauma care

A caveat: War, terrorist attacks, and other catastrophes are fat-tail risks. They account for few deaths in most years (in most places) but occasionally account for much larger numbers. I am not going to attempt to estimate precisely how these risks may change in the future. It is worth noting that – according to detailed research by Stephen Pinker and others – risks from these causes have been falling for many decades. However, over millennia, rare catastrophes matter.

War (what is it good for? Absolutely nothing)

In tribal societies, around 10-20% of people died violently from wars and raids. In the 20^th century, despite two world wars, the share killed in war was far lower than in tribal societies. Global war deaths during WWII were around 300 per 100,000 people. Today, the rate has fallen to about 1 per 100,000. That is a decline of >99% in per-capita war deaths from peak periods.

As Stephen Pinker has shown, the decline in deaths from violence is a broad one and does not just reflect lower war deaths. If we look at homicide in Europe, death rates are down by 10x to 50x since the Middle Ages. We also see a considerable fall in deaths from civil war, genocides, and large-scale atrocities. A resurgence of socialism, communism, and fascism could change the trajectory but the trend has persisted for decades despite horrible reversals.

Over the long run, the risk of dying in war has fallen from something like one in five in early human societies to well under one in a hundred today.

The risk of dying in war has fallen dramatically over time, and today it contributes only a tiny fraction of overall mortality in developed societies—typically well under one death per 100,000 people per year, and often effectively zero. Even substantial future reductions in war risk would have little impact on overall life expectancy, because the baseline is already so low.

This highlights an important asymmetry: while war and large-scale conflict loom large in our imagination, they are already statistically minor compared to everyday risks such as accidents. If current long-term trends continue, war may become an even smaller component of mortality over the next century—approaching the level of rare, background hazards rather than a major determinant of how long people live.

What happens to pandemic risk without aging?

Not all pandemics pose the same level of risk. COVID-19, for example, disproportionately affected older individuals and those with compromised immune systems—vulnerabilities that are largely consequences of biological aging. In a world where aging is eliminated, such frailty-driven pandemics would likely have far milder effects. The more relevant comparison is with rarer events like the 1918 influenza pandemic, which affected healthy individuals across age groups. Even these, however, are infrequent, and their impact may be mitigated by continued advances in surveillance, vaccines, and treatments. As a result, while pandemic risk would not disappear, it would likely become both less frequent and less severe on average.

Aging does not just shorten life directly; it amplifies vulnerability to external threats. Remove aging, and even many of the dangers we fear—such as pandemics—become substantially less lethal.

Self-termination

Many life-endangering risks are largely beyond our control. (You cannot control wars but you might be able to move away from them.) One exception is self-termination. I use this term instead of “suicide” because I believe in self-ownership, and ending one’s own life should not be considered a crime. For some religious people, God owns you and so ending your life could be considered a crime against God. For non-religious people (as well as many believers), there is no victim and so no crime. “Suicide” makes the choice to end one’s life sound like homicide, genocide, and so on.

As other mortality factors shrink, self-termination has and will become increasingly common relative to other causes. If fatalities from other non-aging causes continue to drop, self-termination could become the leading cause of death.

While some of us find it hard to imagine deciding to die, the choice to exit existence will presumably persist. Some, possibly all of us at some point, may decide that they have got all they wanted or can reasonably expect to get out of life. Today, most people passively kill themselves by rejecting the very idea of radical life extension. After the conquest of aging, many may decide to eventually terminate themselves despite physical vitality. I would go so far as to predict that self-termination will be the leading cause of death a century from now.

How far can we go?

As mathematician Michael Perry has pointed out, if we can reduce the risk of dying fast enough, theoretically you could live indefinitely. Presumably there will be limits imposed on this by the laws of physics but I doubt that we can currently form an accurate idea of those limits.

Depending on your philosophy of personal identity, eventually we may enjoy the life-saving benefits of regular mind backups and redundant storage. In practice, these depend on infrastructure which may be vulnerable. So, eliminating all risk seems unlikely but we also cannot see any obvious limit on how far fatal risk could be reduced.

Why This matters for biostasis

These simple calculations illustrate a striking fact: aging and disease account for the overwhelming majority of deaths today. When we imagine removing them—even without eliminating accidents, violence, or other external hazards—the average human lifespan jumps from roughly 80 years to thousands of years. This perspective helps explain why biostasis and cryonics focus so heavily on preserving people who would otherwise die from disease or age-related decline.

If future medicine can repair the biological damage that currently causes death, the potential payoff is enormous. The goal is not immortality in the literal sense—external risks will always remain—but rather the chance to continue living in a world where the dominant causes of death have been overcome. In that context, biostasis functions as a bridge: a way to reach a future in which death from aging and disease is no longer the norm.

In that sense, biostasis functions as a foundational life-extension strategy: a bridge that carries people past today’s overwhelming causes of death so they can reach a future where survival is limited mainly by far rarer external risks.

Conclusion: A world where death becomes rare

When we step back and look at the numbers, a striking picture emerges. The vast majority of deaths today are not caused by accidents, violence, pandemics, or even war—they are caused by aging and disease. Remove those, and the remaining risks, though real, are comparatively small.

Even if today’s levels of accidents and injuries remained unchanged, the arithmetic implies average human lifespans on the order of one to two thousand years. Improvements in safety—already dramatic over the past century—could extend that further, perhaps into the multi-millennial range. Meanwhile, long-term trends in violence suggest that deaths from war have declined sharply and may continue to do so, becoming an ever smaller component of overall risk.

Catastrophic events such as pandemics and asteroid impacts are often invoked as ultimate limits on human longevity. Yet when viewed over long time horizons, their contribution to mortality is surprisingly modest. Many modern pandemics disproportionately affect the elderly and medically vulnerable, and would likely be far less lethal in a population that does not age. More severe, broad-spectrum pandemics remain possible, but they are rare. Asteroid impacts are rarer still. These risks are not zero—but they are low-frequency events layered on top of an already small baseline of everyday hazards.

The result is a profound shift in perspective. Human life would no longer be tightly bounded by an internal biological clock. Instead, it would be limited primarily by external, probabilistic risks—the same kinds of risks we already navigate every day, but at far lower cumulative levels than the aging process imposes.

This does not imply immortality. Over long enough timeframes, even small risks accumulate. But it does imply something far more significant than a modest extension of life. It suggests a world in which death becomes infrequent rather than inevitable, and in which the expected duration of a human life expands from decades to centuries or longer.

From this perspective, biostasis takes on a clear and pragmatic role. It is not a promise of eternal life, nor a denial of risk. It is a strategy for avoiding the overwhelmingly dominant causes of death today—aging and disease—in order to reach a future where those causes have been brought under control. Once that bridge is crossed, the remaining limits on life are no longer set by biology, but by the far slower rhythms of chance and circumstance.

Kronos

From its name alone, you might expect an organization called “Alcor Life Extension Foundation” to offer life extending services. Of course it does, but only in one very specific and unusual way. Recently, Tomorrow Biostasis announced that they would be offering life extension information to its members. They appear to be limiting themselves to information rather than any clinical services. For this reason, it seems a poor fit to describe it as a “longevity clinic.”

Both longevity information and longevity clinics should be of interest to anyone with biostasis arrangements. Improving longevity serves two purposes: it reduces the likelihood that we will need biostasis at all, and it buys time for biostasis organizations to improve technically and logistically.

What are longevity clinics and where did they come from? While answering these questions briefly, I want to focus on my experience at an early example: the Kronos Clinic in September 2000.

The business of longevity clinics

We cannot draw a sharp line separating upscale, more traditional clinics with individualized offerings from longevity clinics. The latter are often characterized by four main factors:

Comprehensive health assessments: These clinics conduct thorough evaluations, including medical history, lifestyle assessments, and advanced diagnostic tests to understand a patient’s overall health and biological age.

Personalized treatment plans: Based on the assessments, longevity clinics develop customized plans that may include lifestyle modifications, nutritional guidance, exercise programs, and medical interventions aimed at preventing age-related diseases.

Cutting-edge therapies: Many longevity clinics offer innovative treatments such as hormone replacement therapy, stem cell therapy, and other regenerative medicine approaches, although the scientific backing for some of these therapies can vary.

Ongoing monitoring and support: Patients often receive continuous care and support, including regular follow-ups and adjustments to their health plans as needed.

Current examples include Peter Attia’s Early Medical, with a strong emphasis on cardiovascular risk, metabolic optimization, imaging, and lab-based preventive medicine. This is a high-cost, membership-based model. Another is Human Longevity, Inc. founded by J. Craig Venter. HLI combines whole-genome sequencing, full-body MRI, and deep phenotyping and is positioned at the intersection of executive health and advanced biotech. This is more technology-heavy than many clinics and closer to a genomics-driven health platform.

There is also Cenegenic, founded in 1997, and prominent in the “age management” movement. Cenegenic was significant in the U.S. commercialization of anti-aging clinical services. Fountain Life, founded by Bill Kapp, markets expertise in early disease detection and uses full-body imaging and AI analysis. With an Asian focus, Hooke Longevity Center is a biomarker-driven, data-heavy model.

There is also the Longevity Center, launched in Warsaw, Poland at the end of 2019, followed by Germany and Zurich, Switzerland. The medical centers integrate age science with hands-on preventive and personalized medicine, focusing on predictive health maintenance, disease prevention and slowing biological age. The company is now expanding in a network of closely linked European centers. Longevity Center experts are focusing on developing diagnostics protocols, programs, treatments, nutritional and training plans that support vitality and healthy longevity of their clients.

Many assume life extension emerged only in the past 20 years. In fact, both the movement and the clinic model go back much further. As I will relate, I went through testing at a life extension clinic over a quarter-century ago but related endeavors go back much further.

The roots of longevity clinics go back more than a century

At the start of the 20th Century, there was nothing that could be done to extend maximum life span. Improving health could, however, extend an individual’s life expectancy. Longevity clinics have distinguished themselves by a focus on longevity with a personalized approach. Typically, they do not distinguish between individual life expectancy and extending maximum lifespan. They can do something about the former but may implicitly suggest they can do the latter.

The roots go back more than a century to the rise of preventive medicine and the “executive physical.” In the early 20th century, annual health examinations were promoted as a way to detect disease before symptoms appeared. By the mid-century, hospitals were offering intensive one- or two-day workups for business executives—comprehensive lab panels, imaging, stress testing, lifestyle consultation. The basic structure was already in place: concentrate diagnostic power into a short, immersive experience and produce a personalized prevention plan.

The Life Extension Institute was formed in 1913. No, not 2013. Look it up and you may be absorbed for some time in the details. The Institute was founded by Progressive Era reformer Irving Fisher and operated until 1931, promoting its health maintenance program of annual physical examinations and health literature. The LEI aimed to extend life without old age. Unlike today’s clinics, it also wanted to “improve masculinity and good business practices through adherence to health principles.” A major product of LEI’s activity was the book How to Live, Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science.

Europe developed its own parallel tradition in medical rejuvenation clinics—most famously Clinique La Prairie in Switzerland, founded in 1931. These institutions blended medical oversight with lifestyle and longevity aspirations. They were explicitly about extending vitality, even if the science of aging was still primitive. This clinic was founded by Dr. Paul Niehans, positioning itself around prevention, rejuvenation, and later “longevity” programming.

The mid-20^th century saw the emergence of executive health programs. Hospitals offered intensive one-day diagnostic workups for business leaders. Age-management and concierge medicine became more prominent in the 1990s. One of the main movers in this area was MD² starting in 1996. Another early pioneer was the Mayo Clinic Executive Health Program. For a retainer, these services provided hormone and biomarker optimization. Longevity clinics are often concierge medicine plus additional testing and interventions.

The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M), founded in 1992, became a major training/continuing-ed hub for clinicians working under “longevity/anti-aging” banners.

From the late 1990s into the 2000s, branded age-management clinics grew. This period saw the opening of the Kronos Clinic – part of the broader Kronos Group, a company focused on longevity and age management. This anticipated the flowering of “healthspan” and longevity clinics from the 2010s. Added to the existing mix were genomics, wearables, full-body MRI, and AI-driven analytics.

The Kronos experience

Against this longer historical backdrop, Kronos comes into focus.

When my wife and I traveled to Scottsdale in September 2000 for two days of testing at the Kronos Clinic, longevity was not yet fashionable. We went through the program early on when the cost was relatively low (something like $1,600 to $2,000).

It was also our first time in the area since Alcor Life Extension Foundation had relocated from California. In a sense, we were visiting two different approaches to time: one focused on extending health within the present century, the other on preserving life across centuries.

Kronos did not feel like a spa. It felt clinical. Serious. Experimental in the best sense. Founded by entrepreneur John Sperling, with research led by my friend Christopher Heward, it was an early example of what we would now call a “longevity clinic.” But at the time, that phrase barely existed.

During my two days there, I underwent extensive testing. One of those tests was a digital prostate exam — interestingly, the only one I have ever had. No physician has suggested repeating it in the 25 years since. That alone illustrates how medical practice evolves, sometimes rapidly.

Another lesson came from a mistake. My VO₂max test was intended to measure cardiovascular capacity, but the treadmill was set at an incline. My thigh muscles fatigued before my heart approached its limit. It was a small but telling reminder that measurement is only as good as protocol. Longevity medicine depends on precision — and precision is hard.

Yet what struck me most was not any individual test, but the premise: measure aggressively, identify risk early, intervene systematically. In 2000, genomic sequencing was not clinically available. Continuous glucose monitors did not exist. Wearables were science fiction. But the structure of modern longevity clinics was already visible:

• Intensive biomarker assessment

• Cardiovascular and metabolic risk profiling

• Hormone replacement therapy

• Data-driven approach

• Structured prevention planning

• Ongoing monitoring

The two-day testing program was extensive. I returned with a folder packed full of personal measures of health and function.

My Kronos folder, packed with information gleaned from the two-day testing program.

Some of the sections of the Kronos results folder.

Since that visit, I have continued systematic monitoring: regular blood panels, 23andMe testing when that became available, participation in a clinical trial for thymus regeneration, whole-genome sequencing, and more. Kronos was not an isolated event; it was part of an ongoing commitment to managing aging as a biological process rather than a passive fate.

I never met John Sperling. Chris Heward, however, was there during my visit, deeply engaged in the work. Sadly, neither Sperling nor Heward were cryopreserved when they died. In Chris’s case, that was despite having friends — including me — who strongly supported cryonics. I wish he had chosen differently.

Longevity clinics represent an important advance: they push medicine upstream, toward earlier intervention and longer healthspan. But even perfect prevention cannot eliminate every cause of death. Biostasis extends the logic one step further. If preventive medicine manages risk within a lifetime, cryonics manages risk beyond it. In that sense, longevity clinics and biostasis are not competitors — they are successive layers in a comprehensive strategy against biological time. Biostasis attempts to extend the frontier of time itself.

What Do Longevity Clinics Actually Achieve?

Longevity clinics vary widely in philosophy and scientific grounding. It is helpful to distinguish three different goals that are often blended together.

1. Healthspan optimization

Most clinics primarily aim to reduce risk factors for age-related disease. This includes aggressive management of blood pressure, lipids, metabolic health, exercise capacity, sleep, and body composition. The scientific evidence supporting these interventions is strong. Large epidemiological studies and clinical trials show that controlling cardiovascular risk factors and maintaining physical fitness can significantly extend healthy life expectancy.

2. Experimental rejuvenation

Some clinics also offer therapies aimed at slowing or reversing aspects of biological aging—hormone replacement, stem-cell treatments, or various regenerative approaches. The evidence here is far more limited. A few interventions have promising early data, but many remain speculative or insufficiently tested.

3. Maximum lifespan extension

Finally, there is the more ambitious goal of extending the maximum human lifespan. At present, there is little evidence that any clinical program can achieve this. Improvements in medicine over the past century have dramatically increased average life expectancy, but the maximum human lifespan has changed much less.

Longevity clinics therefore operate mainly in the first category: improving healthspan and reducing disease risk. Their core model—comprehensive diagnostics combined with personalized prevention—can be understood as an intensified form of preventive medicine rather than a proven path to radical life extension.

For those interested in very long-term survival, this is where biostasis enters the picture. Preventive medicine may extend healthy life for decades. Cryonics attempts to preserve the possibility of life beyond the limits of current medicine.

Events

March 7 from 4–8 PM: Join Biostasis Pacific Northwest on March 7 from 4–8 PM in Seattle, WA for an evening featuring a presentation and social activities. The Cryonics Monitoring group, led by Nikki Olson, will present “Advancing Reliability in Cryonics Monitoring.” The session will include a live demonstration of their custom smart ring technology, as well as insights drawn from years of specialized research and development in cryonics monitoring systems. This is the first public update on the custom smart ring project in over 2 years.

March 13-14: Biostasis Technologies training weekend in NYC (advanced topics and new equipment demonstrations). Invitation-only for March 13 and general case work training on March 14.

April 24-25: Training and first response event in Portland, Oregon. The April 25 event is open to the general public and aims to educate local volunteers about the role they can play in case work.

Projects & activities

The Liquid Ventilation prototype (LV5B) is expected to be completed soon. Upon completion, the unit will be tested in live SST cases.

Remote telemetry system design in emergency vehicle. This system (from Florida) is to be installed in New York in March after validation. This system is portable and suited for use in emergency vehicles. It is a standardized system designed by Tomorrow Biostasis and assembled by our sister organization, RBS.

Soon we will be mixing and distributing perfusate to new staging sites including in Texas, Indianapolis, and an updated set of perfusate in Portland. Logistics being set up and access control determined.

Biostasis book: Max More finished writing his book, BIOSTASIS: How Tomorrow’s Technology Could Save Your Life last year, then created a book proposal and is currently sending out inquiries to literary agents.

Proof of human brain ultrastructure preservation in real world conditions

Demonstrable success in preservation of identity-critical fine brain structure is crucial. If we cannot show that existing methods can truly preserve brain ultrastructure, we would have to give up current efforts or try alternative approaches. (We should be trying alternative approaches anyway, in case they could be more effective in some cases.) A new paper – based on work done a decade ago – provides strongly encouraging results.

Progress in cryopreservation has continued over the last quarter century. And yet, the last truly major advance was the introduction of vitrification. Relatively few resources have been devoted to furthering the application of vitrification to human brains. Progress has been made in vitrifying mammalian organs and neural tissue from various species. But direct evidence from vitrified human brains has been sparse. Some CT scans have been done but the results show only the degree of success in perfusing the brain with cryoprotectant. They do not demonstrate preservation of brain ultrastructure.

Excellent brain ultrastructure preservation has been shown using aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation – a combination of chemical and cryopreservation – in laboratory conditions. However, this is not the currently dominant preservation method nor has it been used in real world conditions. A new paper fills this gap.

Dr. Stephen Coles, a long-time life extension advocate, made special arrangements with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation to be cryopreserved while allowing brain samples to be taken. This case was unusual in that Dr. Coles’ brain was removed from his skull and samples analyzed through tissue biopsy and examination for ice formation and cracking using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).

Dr. Stephen Coles, Alcor member A-2786, was pronounced legally dead on the morning of Wednesday December 3, 2014 in Scottsdale, AZ at the age of 73. Coles, an unusual brain-only patient, was cryopreserved the same day, becoming Alcor’s 131st patient. As Alcor’s CEO at the time, I coordinate with Dr. Gregory Fahy and others to execute this unique case involving new and unfamiliar procedures. Coles was declared legally dead at 9:50am on December 3, 2014. Stabilization and cooling was performed on-site prior to a short drive to Alcor. Perfusion was completed at 4:05 pm. At 5:32 pm, biopsy samples were extracted from three locations on each side of the midline of the brain. Cool down was initiated at 5:50 pm.

Years later, we finally have a published paper conveying the results of this case (along with other related vitrification results): “Ultrastructural and Histological Cryopreservation of Mammalian Brains by Vitrification” by Gregory Fahy, Ralf Spindler, Brian Wowk, et al. The authors state that: “our observation that human brain cerebral cortical histology and ultrastructure was uniformly preserved despite two days of prior agonal hypotensive hypoxia and three hours of post cardiac arrest cold preservation provides the first direct evidence that human cryopreservation for medical time travel may be feasible.” “We conclude that both animal and human brains can be cryopreserved by vitrification with predominant retention of ultrastructural integrity without the need for prior aldehyde fixation.” A brief overview:

This new study reports successful ice-free cryopreservation (vitrification) of whole brains without prior chemical fixation — a significant step forward in brain preservation science. Previously, the best whole-brain ultrastructural preservation appeared to require aldehyde fixation before cooling. While effective for structural studies, fixation prevents meaningful investigation of biological function and is less relevant to future medical applications.

In this study, researchers perfused whole rabbit brains with the vitrification solution M22, cooled them to cryogenic temperatures, rewarmed them, and then examined the tissue using electron microscopy. They found no visible ice crystal damage and largely intact cells, neuropil, and synapses. Human cortical biopsies taken after whole-brain perfusion showed similar results: no ice formation and predominantly preserved ultrastructure.

The main challenge observed was osmotic stress from dehydration and rehydration — not ice injury. Controlled dilution of cryoprotectant restored normal anatomical appearance in many cases. This work provides the strongest direct evidence to date that whole mammalian brains — including human tissue — can be vitrified with substantial retention of fine neural structure, without fixation. It marks an important milestone toward perfected brain cryopreservation.

A detailed discussion of the paper and its implications will be coming from Aschwin de Wolf.

New Substack publication by Aschwin de Wolf

Biostasis Technologies President Aschwin de Wolf has started his own Substack publication “Death Is Nothing to Us.” Read his first post / mission statement here. This publication will be a companion to the biostasis.com website and feature new and updated content about biostasis, cryonics, and adjacent topics. Recent entries include an article about Robert Ettinger and substrate-independent minds, an update on cryonics stabilization medications, and a comprehensive review of antinatalism.

Interesting publications

Physician estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

The composer still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain

The Right to Immediate Preservation: Addressing Legal Barriers Due to Death Investigation.

Brain Preservation and Cryonics Through the Lens of Moral Psychology, by Alexander German and Max Tretter.

Functional recovery of adult brain tissue arrested in time during cryopreservation by vitrification.

Cryopreservation of brain cell structure: a review.

Other news

Diego Zarco reports on biostasis capabilities in Mexico

2025 saw good progress for biostasis in Mexico, especially in the areas of logistics and physical presence. Criogenia Avanzada finished setting up the office in Mexico city and equipping it. The office is close to major hospitals in Mexico City and has quick access to the rest of the city. The office provides a place to receive prospective members and to answer their questions as well giving them a tour of the SST vehicle.

The new office serves as a central hub to deploy from. Team members can use it to work on their projects while being close to the hospitals and ready to deploy in case of an emergency. The exterior of the SST vehicle was branded with the logo of the Instituto de Criogenia Avanzada. Work on the interior has started but work remains to install equipment.

Diego reports success in importing three dewars despite tariff complications. One of these is a small unit (for sperm, eggs, and stem cell preservation) while the other two are adequate for storing small pets.

Bringing back the Wooly Mammoth

There’s a push to bring back woolly mammoths being led by Colossal Biosciences, and it may have just received a boost from the discovery of the 3D chromosomal structure preserved in some newly discovered freeze-dried mammoth skin. Tissue from the 52,000 year old woolly mammoth was frozen so quickly after death that its DNA was preserved in a glass-like state, allowing the structure to be seen. This is important because it gives insight into the mammoth epigenome, and helps identify which genes were active and inactive in the preserved skin cells. It also preserved huge segments of the genome, allowing about 1 million times more to be sequenced than previous ancient mammoth DNA. (Science Daily) (Singularity Hub) (@jrotwitguez)

Meet the man solving death

For the first time, Dr. Kendziorra shares his personal views on longevity, why he sees cryopreservation as humanity’s best shot at outliving death, and what it really means to live with the goal of not dying — “until I change my mind.”

'World's Oldest Baby' Born From 30-Year-Old Frozen Embryo.

Southern Cryonics Cryopreserved 2nd Patient

Radical economist chooses cryonics

Advocates of biostasis often talk about the potentially helpful effect on public acceptance if certain celebrities were to publicly support biostasis. While the outcome of that support is controversial – partly depending on the specifics of the celebrity – many of us have other people in mind who we would very much like to see go into biostasis when the time comes. These are the thinkers and doers who have influenced us and enlightened us. They may or may not be considered famous or celebrities but they matter to us.

Each of us can list personally important individuals who died whose end was disappointing, frustrating, and baffling. For me, three such individuals would be Robert Heinlein, Roy Walford, and Vernor Vinge. Each of these thought about greatly extended lifespans and yet did not choose to get cryopreserved. Others who I am just as sad about are not surprising, such as Milton Friedman. Happily, his son – also an excellent thinker grounded in economics – David D. Friedman, recently noted that he has made cryonics arrangements.

In David Friedman’s blog essay “Low Probability Gambles”, he examines the difficulty of thinking about low-probability, high-payoff decisions. Friedman, author of books including Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text, Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World, and, my favorite, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, also has a wide-ranging and thoughtful blog.

In his essay, Friedman notes that rational choice under uncertainty is simple in principle: just maximize expected utility. But this requires knowing “both the probability and utility of all of the outcomes you are considering. Most of the time you don’t.” Making a rational choice is especially challenging when dealing with low probability, high value outcomes. The payoff if cryonics works is very high. But no reliable method exists for accurately estimating the probability of success. Even multiplying together several conditions for success, as Friedman does, is fraught with problems. Unlike those who provide implausibly precise estimates of the probability of AI killing us (35%, 98%), Friedman says “Whether that means ten percent, one percent, or .01 percent I don’t, probably can’t, know.”

Friedman makes some further observations on “Pascal’s Mugging”, which pushes us to accept that “any cost imposed on present humans to make the catastrophe less likely is justified.” We see Pascal’s Mugging in cases such as the probability of AI doom or climate change. Friedman also points out a fatal flaw with the precautionary principle.

I am delighted that I will have a chance to enjoy David Friedman’s thoughts in the future. May his example help other Friedman enthusiastic overcome their cryocrastination.