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| Cryogenics, would you do it? |
| Yeah! Freeze me |
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32% |
[ 10 ] |
| Just my head please |
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3% |
[ 1 ] |
| No way, just let me die |
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51% |
[ 16 ] |
| oh I dunno |
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12% |
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| Total Votes : 31 |
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Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19860 Location: Mongo Age: 38 Gender: Male |
 Posted: 16-05-2004 22:03 Post subject: |
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| Emperor wrote: |
| Quote: | | And the Ted Williams saga rumbles on. |
and on........ |
and on:
| Quote: | May 14, 2004. 01:00 AM
Williams family saga grows more bizarre
Baseball legend's estate sues daughter
Criticism of father's freezing at issue
ORLANDO, Fla.—The executor of Ted Williams' estate has sued the late hall of famer's oldest daughter and her husband, alleging they violated an agreement by repeatedly voicing their opposition to the placement of his body in deep freeze at an Arizona lab.
The lawsuit said Bobby Jo and Mark Ferrell have continued to publicize objections, despite the daughter's agreeing in late 2002 to drop her opposition to the decision by her siblings John Henry Williams and Claudia Williams to send the body to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
The lawsuit filed Monday by executor Albert Cassidy in Citrus County state court, near Orlando, seeks an injunction stopping Bobby Jo Ferrell from publicizing her objections, dismissal of a lawsuit she filed against Alcor and unspecified damages.
"Bobby Jo Ferrell's actions are wrongful, in bad faith ...," the lawsuit said. It also seeks to have Mark Ferrell stop speaking on his wife's behalf against keeping her father's body frozen.
"She signed a settlement agreement and we're seeking enforcement of that agreement," said Peter Sutton, a Boston lawyer and a trustee for one of John Henry Williams' trusts.
Mark Ferrell didn't want to comment on the lawsuit yesterday but he called the agreement "a sham from the beginning." He added he wasn't bound to the agreement since he didn't sign it. "I have a First Amendment right under the U.S. Constitution," he said.
His wife is prohibited from talking to reporters about her father's body under the agreement. Bobby Jo Ferrell sued to have her father's will followed after Ted Williams died in July 2002. She dropped the legal challenge several months later after the agreement was signed.
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Last edited by Mighty_Emperor on 28-06-2005 04:19; edited 1 time in total |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19860 Location: Mongo Age: 38 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-06-2004 15:12 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Daughter Ends Fight to Thaw Ted Williams
Wed Jun 16,11:18 AM ET
INVERNESS, Fla. - The daughter and son-in-law of the late Ted Williams have ended their two-year fight to have the baseball great's remains removed from an Arizona cryonics lab.
Bobby-Jo and Mark Ferrell spent close to 0,000 battling Williams' estate and his son, John Henry Williams. But when the money ran out, so did their will to keep trying, and a settlement was signed Tuesday.
"It's over," their attorney, John Heer said Wednesday. "There's just no way they could've afforded to litigate this thing."
Heer said the end was apparent last month after Mike Piazza of the New York Mets (news) offered to help the Ferrells get Williams' remains removed from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz. When the attorney for Williams' estate warned that intervention could result in legal action, Piazza quickly backed away.
"That was a crushing blow for us," Heer said.
When Williams died in Inverness, Fla., on July 5, 2002, a dispute over his body immediately broke out between Bobby-Jo Ferrell and her half brother.
She said her father's last will detailed his request to be cremated and his ashes scattered in his favorite fishing waters off the Florida coast. But John Henry Williams later produced a scrawled note, allegedly written by his father from a hospital bed, in which the Hall of Famer agreed to cryonics preservation.
Alcor stores human bodies and severed heads in vats of liquid nitrogen in the hope that someday science will be able to bring the dead to life.
John Henry Williams died of leukemia in March and his body reportedly is also being stored at Alcor's facility.
The settlement also ends a lawsuit against the Ferrells. Williams' estate sued in May after they sued Alcor, demanding the company produce paperwork showing that Williams wanted his remains stored at the facility.
Heer said two nephews of Williams are continuing the suit against Alcor. |
Source
Last edited by Mighty_Emperor on 28-06-2005 04:19; edited 1 time in total |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 26-07-2004 10:50 Post subject: Cryogenics- Where is it now? |
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What ever happened to the cryogenic business. Are people still being frozen in hope of a future cure for snap freezing or did it fade away like a fad.
What will happen to the people who are frozen, when the business lease runs out and they have no where to relocate the refrigerators?
Does scsience take this seriously these days? And If you were trying to beat death, would you really want to come back in 50 or 100 years with no friends and no money.
Would you recoup your death tax
Is science any closer to being able to bring a frozen mammal back to normal life again. |
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| Anome_ Faceless Man
Great Old One Joined: 23 May 2002 Total posts: 3933 Location: Left, and to the back. Age: 41 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 26-07-2004 11:53 Post subject: |
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In order:
- It's still around.
- Yes.
- Not really.
- For some of us, it makes no difference. (And who knows, if you're money's still in the bank you could be rich.)
- This might cause some violation of the "Death and Taxes" symmetry.
- Not to the best of my knowledge.
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| ramonmercado AKA Dora Kaplan Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 7414 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 21-03-2005 16:30 Post subject: Corpses Frozen for Future Rebirth by Arizona Company |
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| Quote: | Corpses Frozen for Future Rebirth by Arizona Company
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
March 18, 2005
In a nondescript office building near the airport in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is selling a shot at immortality.
Inside, 67 bodies—mostly just severed heads—lay cryogenically preserved in steel tanks filled with liquid nitrogen, waiting for the day when science can figure out a way to reanimate them.
But is deathlessness really a scientific possibility?
Joseph Waynick, Alcor's president and chief executive, certainly thinks so. "When physicians first wanted to transplant a heart from one person to another, they were laughed at and told it was impossible," he said. "I have no doubt the technology [to revive life] will become available."
Many cryobiologists, however, scoff at the idea, contending that the practice is little more than a pipe dream and that current "patients" will never be successfully revived.
"Even if, in our wildest dreams, this proved possible in the future, the end result would be the preservation of a dead body, not the suspended animation of a person," said Michael Taylor, a Charleston, South Carolina-based cryobiologist with Organ Recovery Systems, a company specializing in transplant medicine.
Ice Crystallization
The prospect of cheating death raises a host of philosophical, moral, and religious questions. But let's consider only the scientific aspects.
Even proponents of cryonics, the practice of storing entire organisms (or at least their brains) for future revival, admit there is no scientific evidence that a cryopreserved human will ever be revived. No one even knows what technology would have to be developed to reverse the preservation.
Many questions surround the cryopreservation process itself. In cryopreservation, cells and tissues are stored at frigid, cryogenic temperatures—where metabolism and decay are almost stopped—for future revival at normal temperatures.
But scientists have long known that the freezing process creates ice crystals, which destroy cells and cellular structures.
A few years ago, cryobiologists discovered a new preservation process, called vitrification, which virtually eliminates ice-crystal formation. Rather than freezing the tissue, vitrification suspends it in a highly viscous glassy state. In this mode, molecules remain in a disordered state, as in a fluid, rather than forming a crystalline structure.
Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, calls vitrification the greatest advancement in the field of cryonics.
"The preservation that we're able to do today is adequate to preserve the critical information that we believe is important to the human personality and human memory," said Merkle, who is an Alcor board member.
Alcor, which is one of only two cryonics firms in the United States, now uses vitrification to cryopreserve human brains. Skeptics, however, say there is no evidence that such large structures can be successfully vitrified.
About 80 percent of Alcor's "patients" have had only their heads cryopreserved. (The company's most famous patient, Baseball Hall of Fame slugger Ted Williams, has had his head and torso cryopreserved.)
"The brain is what houses your identity. It has your memories, all your stored experiences," Waynick said. "Without the brain, you might as well clone an individual, because you have a completely new person."
Alcor continues to use glycerol-based freezing for patients who have their whole bodies preserved, since vitrification of an entire body is beyond current technical capabilities.
Fracturing
While vitrification circumvents some of the problems associated with freezing, it raises other issues. Scientists must impregnate tissues with high concentrations of cryoprotective chemicals that promote the vitreous state, but these are potentially toxic.
Another concern is the cooling rate needed to vitrify large organs. Some scientists say vitrification requires high cooling rates that are typically not achievable at the center of large objects.
"If you talk about the brain, we can achieve very high cooling rates at the outer surface of the brain, but the cooling rate at the center will be lower than the critical one required for vitrification," said Yoed Rabin, a cryopreservation specialist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
That view is "not strictly correct," contends Brian Wowk, an Alcor advisor and senior scientist at 21st Century Medicine, a California-based company specializing in medical cryopreservation applications. In an e-mail, Wowk said vitrification via very low cooling rates can be achieved, provided the right cryoprotectant solution in sufficient concentration is used.
A third issue with vitrification is that it may lead to fracturing of the brain.
"One major fracture may prevent recovery of the brain as an organ," Rabin said. "We know that vitrification of large objects very frequently involves a huge number of micro-fractures as well."
The chances of cracking and fractures increase with the size of the specimen.
Taylor, the Charleston cryobiologist, contends that vitrification is currently only successful for small tissue samples.
"We are still unable to cryopreserve an intact organ such as a kidney or heart by either a freezing or vitrification approach," he said. "It is inconceivable, therefore, that these techniques will ever permit the long-term preservation of a whole body, especially a dead body."
Repairing Damage
But cryonics advocates believe that advancements in nanotechnology will ultimately make it possible for scientists to repair any freezing or fracturing damage.
"Being able to manipulate matter at the cellular level will enable us to repair a lot of the damage that occurs to an individual during the cryopreservation process today," Waynick said, "especially those patients that were cryopreserved in the earlier years, where there was a significant amount of ice damage during the freezing process."
In the future, breakthroughs in stem cell research and cellular regeneration may enable scientists to regenerate a new body from a person's existing DNA and attach it to the person's cryopreserved brain, Waynick speculates.
"A cure also has to be found for whatever caused your death in the first place," he said. "If you die of lung cancer or kidney failure, those diseases would need to be conquered, or it wouldn't do much good to revive you."
But Rabin, the Carnegie Mellon professor, said there is another problem with restoring a brain to its original state.
"Even if, by some miracle, all brain cells can be revived, the idea that memories and personality could also be revived is completely not clear," he said.
He uses an analogy from the computer world to describe how the loss of communication between the brain cells affects the memory of the brain.
"Information is lost when the power of a computer is turned off, even if it's only an instantaneous event and even if no harm is done to the memory chips," Rabin said.
"On the other hand we know that harm is done to the memory cells in cryopreservation of biological materials, and we know that the lines of communication between memory cells are devastated and lost," he said.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0318_050318_cryonics.html |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19860 Location: Mongo Age: 38 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 28-06-2005 04:18 Post subject: |
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Like Resident Evil all over again!!
| Quote: | Boffins create zombie dogs
By Nick Buchan of NEWS.com.au
June 27, 2005
From:
SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.
US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.
The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.
But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.
Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.
However rather than sending people to sleep for years, then bringing them back to life to benefit from medical advances, the boffins would be happy to keep people in this state for just a few hours,
But even this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.
During the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs' body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.
Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved.
Damaged blood vessels and tissues can then be repaired via surgery. The dogs are brought back to life by returning the blood to their bodies,giving them 100 per cent oxygen and applying electric shocks to restart their hearts.
Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.
"The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology," said one US battlefield doctor. |
www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 3896 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 23-02-2009 12:38 Post subject: |
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Long article here (useful intro if you've never heard of cryogenics before), begins:
The X-tra Life Factor: Simon Cowell wants his body frozen when he dies so he can be brought back to life in the future. Fantasy - or chilling possibility?
By Michael Hanlon
Last updated at 2:06 AM on 23rd February 2009
Cash, we may safely assume, is not an issue. But even so, the news that one of entertainment's biggest earners plans to shell out up to £120,000 to have his body frozen after he dies is sure to have his critics quoting the old adage that involves fools, money and the easy parting thereof.
Simon Cowell, the pop impresario, apparently announced at a private dinner with Gordon Brown that he intends to have his body placed in a deep freeze after he dies.
'Medical science,' he says, 'is bound to work out a way of bringing us back to life in the next century or so, and I want to be available when they do. I'd be doing the nation an invaluable service.'
Quite apart from whether our great-great-great-grandchildren will want to watch Mr Cowell abuse contestants on some futuristic talent show, he is not alone in planning to cheat death by using the 'science' of freezing the dead.
Already, hundreds of people have been frozen in vats across the world and a further 1,000 have signed up to have their body frozen when they die, including a few dozen in Britain.
Most people fund their planned immortality through an insurance premium of between £20 and £100 a month, and the total cost can vary from £20,000 to £120,000. The money is used to keep the 'death support' mechanism going for the decades (or centuries) needed while science catches up with their aspirations to live again.
etc...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1152483/MICHAEL-HANLON-Simon-Cowell-wants-body-frozen-dies-brought-life-Fantasy--chilling-possibility.html
I think to give Cowell the best possible chance of ultimate survival, he should be frozen right now...  |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 6498 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 23-02-2009 12:48 Post subject: |
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Fine by me, as long as it's just the body and they leave his head out of it.  |
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| BlackRiverFalls Sketchy arm
Joined: 04 Aug 2003 Total posts: 5237 Location: Too confused to know! Age: 40 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 24-02-2009 04:49 Post subject: |
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| my crystal ball is showing me a sudden rise in the sale of ice picks |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 3896 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 07-11-2009 15:01 Post subject: |
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Very long article here:
The Dad's Army of British cryonics
In sleepy Sussex is a group of dedicated cryonicists who believe they hold the secret to eternal life. Simon Hattenstone joins them for a demonstration – but first they need to make sure the hosepipe isn't too leaky
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/07/cryonics-british-dads-army
One interesting snippet:
Tim says a strange thing happened to him recently – he suffered a crisis of cryonics conscience. "I knew it was going to happen and I was a bit annoyed when it did. But once you have a family you think, 'I'm supposed to die. That's the way it works.' When you're a single person you're self-obsessed, you want to live for ever, and that's as simple as it is. I had a daughter and I did think, 'This is all wrong, I am actually supposed to die, it's just an inevitable process and I need to pull myself together', and I nearly packed up."
Why didn't he? "That's a good question." |
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| gncxx King-Size Canary
Great Old One Joined: 25 Aug 2001 Total posts: 7263 Location: Eh? Gender: Male |
| Posted: 07-11-2009 21:55 Post subject: |
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| What I want to know is, if you're defrosted and revived, what are the chances of you becoming a flesh-eating zombie? I've read World War Z, I know how this could play out... |
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