Shattering my naive view of science
Cryonics shows how the scientific community has its blindspots
Cryonics has utterly shattered my perception of the scientific community. Like most other science-minded people, I grew up admiring scientists for seeking truth and standing up to authority when authority denied reality. Learning that prominent, well-respected scientists will lie and misrepresent basic facts in order to smear people they don’t like as con men certainly made the whole enterprise look less like the childhood version of science I admired.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the situation we're in with cryonics. I'll provide a few examples.
Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, wrote a 2001 piece in Scientific American dismissing cryonics as a field of serious inquiry. His article starts with “Cryonicists believe that people can be frozen immediately after death and reanimated later when the cure for what ailed them is found. To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.”
When Alcor representative Ralph Merkle informed him that modern cryopreservation uses vitrification rather than straight freezing, Shermer replied that he was “well aware of the vitrification process but dropped that discussion for space limitations.” In other words, he lied, under the pretense that telling the truth would bump his word limit too high.
Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology, wrote an article in the MIT Technology Review titled "The False Science of Cryonics." In it, he boldly concludes that “reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the ‘cryonics’ industry. Those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt.” Hendricks was apparently unaware that both major US-based cryonics organizations are non-profit, and salaries are hardly exorbitant.
Robert Todd Carroll mirrors this sentiment in his book The Skeptic's Dictionary, saying, “A business based on little more than hope for developments that can be imagined by science is quackery.” Carroll also repeats the false claim from Shermer about ice damage.
It's clear that Hendricks and Carroll did little research about the topic. So why did they write a whole article about a field they knew so little about? Because it's socially safe for them. None of their colleagues will give them a weird look for being unfair to the wrong people. This way they can get brownie points for “debunking” the silly people who freeze bodies. After all, who would ever come to the defense of cryonicists, besides other cryonicists?
Overwhelmingly, the most common attitude experts have towards cryonics is utter contempt, while simultaneously knowing nothing about it. Cryobiologist Arthur Rowe has been widely quoted saying, “Believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow.” Cryobiologist Kenneth B. Storey went as far as saying that cryonics proponents are attempting to “over-turn the laws of physics, chemistry, and molecular science.”
Cryonics was so stigmatized that for decades, the Society for Cryobiology even barred its members from practicing cryonics, effectively shunning some of the best researchers in the field, like Greg Fahy and Brian Wowk.
As of 2021, Wikipedia states that cryonics is pseudoscience and quackery. Since it's Wikipedia's policy to represent mainstream sources, I can't say that the editors are doing their job poorly. They're accurately representing mainstream sources.
But let me be clear: the mainstream is wrong.
What I used to believe about the scientific mainstream is now just part of my past. Part of my intellectual development was realizing how truly broken things in the world are.
(If you find my claim overconfident, so be it. Read some actual arguments for cryonics. For a more scientific article demonstrating the feasibility of current preservation techniques, read this article, or this one. Also see my reply to someone in the comments below.)
I'm a biomedical scientist with expertise in preservation and storage of neural tissue. Have you considered that maybe it is you who is wrong and not the scientists? Look scientists can and have been wrong. It's a tradition in science! And maybe us scientists are wrong in this case, again, wouldn't be the first time! But I have not seen compelling evidence. The one actual peer-reviewed study you linked was just combining fixation with cryopreservation, nothing particularly interesting or novel. It preserves the microstructure pretty well, as one would expect. But there is no evidence that preserving a snapshot of the structure of a dying brain will actually be able to be recreated in any capacity. When sceptics of cryonics call it pseudoscience, this is what they mean. Where is the evidence for this?
I mean really it all comes down to this question: How can the dynamic system of the brain can be recreated from a static image of a dying brain? I mean let's assume that the best current techniques perfectly preserve the brain at some state. And let's assume that this was done while the individual was still alive, so it's a live brain at the time of fixation. This is a best case scenario. How does one take this static image of the brain and use it to recreate the actual dynamic system?
It's like trying to recreate an entire 2 hour video from a single frame, except, ya know, many MANY orders of magnitude more complex and with preservation techniques that are definitely imperfect (at least a still frame from a video can be easily preserved 1:1 from the source material).
Does it bother you at all that this particular line of reasoning would fit 1:1 on a site like NaturalNews if you replaced "Cryonics" with... basically any alternative medicine treatment?