A 2-Year-Old Has Become the Youngest Person Ever To Be Cryonically Frozen 313
merbs writes: After losing a long battle with brain cancer, 2-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong became the first minor ever to be cryogenically frozen. This article is the story of how a Thai girl was frozen in Bangkok and shipped to Arizona to have her brain preserved in liquid nitrogen, while medical science works on a cure. "Typically we’d move the head from the trunk of the body. We didn't know what their reaction would be from the family, the mortuary, from border officials; this has to go through a number of shipping venues, customs, the TSA and so on. To see a frozen head in a box might have raised a number of red flags. In the U.S. that’s not a big deal, but there, they may not be accustomed."
WHAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok.. I read this..
"To see a frozen head in a box might have raised a number of red flags. In the U.S. that’s not a big deal, but there, they may not be accustomed."
And I think.. what the fuck is wrong with this country???
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Whats in the box!!!! - Brad Pitt from Seven
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Re:WHAT? (Score:5, Funny)
it's probably pretty common in southern border towns.
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We saw the movie. We know what's in the box.
In Thailand, they haven't seen it yet, apparently.
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Re:WHAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying that a dead 2 year old, who had already had half her brain removed and the other half was seriously damaged, and dunking that in liquid nitrogen with the hope that someday a new body could be built for her and she'd be perfectly normal again ... is a con?
Oh ... ya ... it is ...
I don't know how the fuck anyone falls for it. Really... Why would they think that even if their bodies were preserved that long, and the technology was invented to create what's missing, and repair all the damage done by the freezing process, that anyone would spend the 14 bazillion New Earth credits (or whatever currency there is in futureland) to bring some old fucker back?
In her case, the could have just saved a DNA sample. The story is clear about the condition her brain was in. Half was gone. The other half critically damaged.
I'd have to think that it would be questionable in futureland to resurrect a 20th century person, even if they were in pristine condition. Say 21 years old with much above average intelligence, who was taught everything that there is to know, with no medical issues, no trauma. Just frozen as-is without cellular damage. Why would anyone opt to wake them up? Just to ask "Hey, so what was life like in the 20th century?"
The whole cryogenics "industry" is a huge con.
If these people are religious in the least, they'd have to believe that the soul was trapped in that frozen body until it was awakened. If it wasn't, there would be no reason to reincarnate them. What if they picked the wrong part to freeze? Like, if the soul was really in the liver, or maybe in the spinal cord between C1 and C3. Oops, sorry, we cut that part off.
And if they aren't religious in the least, why bother? So they can wake up as a curiosity in the future? "Hi Cro-Magnon. Fire hot. We have spoken languages you don't understand. And try to wrap your mind around these three seashells. No more poison ivy toilet paper for you. No, don't hit females with a club to make them your mate/slave."
Re:WHAT? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right, anyone in their right mind wouldn't fall for this scam.
But I suppose that parents who lost their 2 year old kid after a long and painful illness aren't exactly in their right mind.
Yeah, (Score:2, Funny)
Here in the US people ship frozen heads around all the time.
Re:Yeah, (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, I use it to save money on my travels.
Just ship my frozen head with UPS to nearest cryogenic lab, and get stitched up.
Luckily three are lots of labs that have perfected the technique of splicing together the nerve threads, thawing the body parts, not to mention freezing the body parts without the use of poisonous chemicals preventing the water in the body from crystallizing and ripping the human flesh to shreds during the thawing process.
Honestly, I think the whole cryogenics industry ought to be frogmarched to jail and never let out. Is it quackery, fraud, and cruel, preying on grieving relatives, selling false hopes, engaging in grotesque experiments with human remains.
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Honestly, I think the whole religious industry ought to be frogmarched to jail and never let out. Is it quackery, fraud, and cruel, preying on grieving relatives, selling false hopes, engaging in grotesque experiments with human remains.
There, fixed that for you. The major point of most religions is to comfort people from their fear of death. All the religions I can think of prey of grieving relatives, sell them false hopes of an afterlife, and perform some grotesque ritual with human remains.
The difference is that unlike religions, cryonics is actually based in reality. Everything else is guaranteed to not work; but according to our current knowledge, cryonics is the best shot we have to actually cure death.
Of course it is highly unlikely
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Of course: the second amendment protects our right to be able to acquire those heads.
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Lettuce genocide.
Right under our noses, folks. Never again.
Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can remember reading several articles which stated that cryonics doesn't work because the freezing process is not perfect - it does not stop decomposition, which older frozen specimens were starting to show. Why do people still spend money on this?
Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The original word for the final evil in the box, elpis, has roughly the same range of meaning as the Spanish esperanza. Linguistically it's as likely that the thing which remained trapped in the box was expectation of evil as that it was hope, and if that's understood as foreknowledge of the evil that will befall you then it's both easy to see why Zeus (or Hesiod) would consider it worse than those which escaped and to hold the aetiology as consistent with the state of things which it's supposed to be expla
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What does Phil have to do with all this?
Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score:5, Insightful)
If "enlightenment" means believing that the world cannot be anything other than it, in its present state, currently is, then I do not want to be enlightened, because my enlightenment would be invalidated one nanosecond later, since even in that time the world would have done that which I had assumed to be impossible, and changed.
Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score:4, Interesting)
Beautifully refuted. Thank you.
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And "foolishness" is believing that, because MUCH is possible, then it follows that EVERYTHING must be possible.
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There's, "Maybe we'll someday be able to do this, and that would be really cool," there's, "This is currently in development and should soon be widely available," and then there's, "This is fundamentally impossible and there is no conceivable way it would ever work."
Cryogenics falls into the last category. This will become especially clear if you read up on what they actually did to the girl's dead body. There's more than enough amazing stuff in the first two categories to retain wonder for the future. W
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You're a word-smith. Beautifully written.
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I reject your reality and substitute my own.
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To hope is to long for circumstances to change. That is to say, one rejects what is real and wishes instead for a fantasy.
Fundamentally, hope is a rejection of truth, and hence the antithesis of enlightenment.
I completely disagree. When I proposed to my wife, I hoped she would say yes. Hope was the desire for a specific outcome without knowing that outcome in advance. Since she is now my wife, my hope was not a rejection of what is real.
Now, hope without action is pretty stupid. Hoping that she would be my wife without actually taking the steps to court her and eventually pop the question would be rather foolish.
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The odds are not irrelevant at all. In fact they are essential when it comes to separating from false hope and real hope and wishful dreaming.
When the odds are impossible, with chance of a positive outcome at exactly zero, the hope is irrational, at least if you know or should know that it is 0.
When the odds are possible, such as a one billionth chance of winning the lottery, the hope is slim, although rational. If your estimation of the probability is far removed from reality, then also this hope would be
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Hope is our understanding of quantum mechanics. The cat should be dead, but it doesn't actually have to be until we open that box. And sometimes it isn't.
It's an essential part of the human condition because it represents a useful, if frequently futile, understanding that unexpected things actually do happen to our benefit. Occasionally.
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True.
And another inevitable part of the human condition, is that there will be plenty of individuals grasping on such false hopes, and just as many individuals ready to take advantage of the suckers.
Not fully junk (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people still spend money on this?
It gives them hope. Does it harm you for them to spend their money this way? Sure there are other things they could do that would likely be more beneficial for mankind as a whole, but there are worse things, too.
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It is junk science, some creatures can indeed be frozen and revived because of unique properties of their physiology. Humans cannot.
In fact, by decapitating this girl and digging her brain out of her skull, they've guaranteed she is forever dead.
Re:Not fully junk (Score:5, Insightful)
...no?
There's no way to make any sense out of a fully decomposed corpse. There's understood ways to make some sense out of frozen cells.
For your assertion to be correct, we have to assume that the damage done to cells during the vitrification process is somehow much worse and irreversible than the wholesale consumption of those cells by microorganisms and/or the complete decomposition of the majority of organic compounds, and that the structural preservation brought about by vitrification is not helpful in any way.
Granted, we don't know future tech. But it seems like a super good guess that one of these things will be true:
1)- Today's cryo patients are forever dead, AND anyone else who dies today and is not preserved is forever dea.
2)- Today's cryo patients could be revived in some fashion with some level of tech, but anyone else could not be.
3)- Anyone, living or dead, could be revived in some fashion with some level of tech.
The case where "Those who decay can be revived, but cryo patients cannot" seems EXTREMELY unlikely- less likely than (2) and (3), both of which are pinned on thin hopes to begin with.
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That is the worst super good guess I have ever seen.
Could I interest you in this bridge I have to sell?
Re:Not fully junk (Score:4, Insightful)
No thanks on the bridge, but perhaps you should consider rereading this part, and remembering how logical OR works:
" it seems like a super good guess that one of these things will be true:
1)- Today's cryo patients are forever dead, AND anyone else who dies today and is not preserved is forever dea.
2)- Today's cryo patients could be revived in some fashion with some level of tech, but anyone else could not be.
3)- Anyone, living or dead, could be revived in some fashion with some level of tech."
If you dispute that this is a super good guess, then you are claiming that the logical opposite of this is likely. The logical opposite is that "Today's cryo patients are forever dead, BUT patients who die and are incinerated or buried normally are revivable".
Is that your belief? If you believe that cryo makes someone LESS likely to be revived than turning them into dust and sprinking the dust in a forest, at least link me some good high level druid spells, k?
Note: If you merely believe that the odds of cryo patients being revived are the same as standard methods of treating the dead (burying or incineration), and that those odds are ZERO, then you are saying that my "super good guess" is without doubt true, based on the first term.
Nothing in my post claims that cryo produces revivable patients. But it does dispute the above post, that cryo makes people LESS revivable. That should be trivially bullshit.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not fully junk (Score:4, Insightful)
If the money spent on cryogenic freezing were donated to cancer research, more cancers might be treatable by now.
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Yes, and it's pretty much just a brain, because the other half was already destroyed by cancer.
That part doesn't make much sense to me at all.
Spinal Damage. Stopped Heart. Sure.
Brain injury that prevents consciousness but doesn't seem to impact primary function, maybe.
But half her brain is gone. What are they preserving, exactly?
Re:Not fully junk (Score:5, Interesting)
It is junk science, some creatures can indeed be frozen and revived because of unique properties of their physiology. Humans cannot.
In fact, by decapitating this girl and digging her brain out of her skull, they've guaranteed she is forever dead.
So we're very unlikely to be able thaw her brain and have it work again.
But that's not the only option. Even in a brain frozen and turned into mush there will still be a lot of information preserved, how do you know that preserved information is insufficient to recreate a human consciousness?
Remember we're potentially talking about hundreds of years in the future, it's entirely plausible to assume we're talking a full theory of consciousness with nanites and a brains uploaded into computers. Are you really so certain consciousness couldn't be extracted from those brains?
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> Does it harm you for them to spend their money this way? Sure there are other things they could do that would likely be more beneficial for mankind as a whole, but there are worse things, too.
Just like fake fortune tellers then?
Nukes (Score:2)
> Does it harm you for them to spend their money this way? Sure there are other things they could do that would likely be more beneficial for mankind as a whole, but there are worse things, too.
Just like fake fortune tellers then?
Or building nuclear bombs. There are worse things they could do: they could *use* them. So it's okay, right?
#reasonfail
Questionable Science (Score:3)
They are still working on better chemical cocktails for cryopreservation. We know we can do this with single-celled organisms and there is some evidence it works on organs as well. It might be questionable science, in that you might pay in and never wake up again, but it isn't really junk science.
All science is questionable science. That's what makes science distinct from religion.
It might be a science experiment, but that doesn't make it *medically* sound.
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Does it harm you for them to spend their money this way?
Not directly. Not as an individual. But diverting resources to quackery is bad for society; not so bad in this case that it's high on my list as "health supplements", but not totally benign either.
Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score:4)
I don't think I would get myself frozen, but to take the opposite point of view for a second, no one has any idea what is going to be developed in the medical field. If somehow we can eventually get cells to regenerate themselves and recreate a human body, who really knows what amount we will need replace. Maybe the freezing process will slow the decomp. ENOUGH.
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And at 2 years old, the body might be able to even develop and learn from scratch again.
Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score:4, Informative)
Any sort of freezing process destroys every cell wall, basically. The ice crystals that form from the water in our cells are like little glass spikes. There is no coming back from that. You have about as much change of resurrecting a cow from ground up beef.
Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why current processes remove as much fluid from the body as possible, inject various chemicals, and freeze as quickly as possible to prevent the formation of ice crystals.
Animal tests from decades ago show that even "standard" freezing and thawing results in a living, resurrected animal for a few hours.
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Do you mean the animal lives for a few hours after being unfrozen, then dies or that it is frozen for a few hours, then unfrozen and continues to live?
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Lives for a few hours after being unfrozen.
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Insects can be, but that's because freezing during the winter and thawing during the summer is part of many insects survival system. Some larger animals can do this as well, IIRC, but they have specially developed systems for it that basically replace most of the water in their bodies with an anti-freeze solution. In theory it's possible to do something similar with humans, but we're nowhere near the technology to do so. Modern cryogenics might be good for preserving human tissue for future analysis (to obs
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How much change is that? Does it fill a pocket? Might buy myself some nice things with a pocket full of change.
(depends on the currency though)
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I mean, doesn't everyone know this? The entire idea is predicated on, not the future having good "thaw tech", but upon the entire set of techs that could be curative in some fashion, along with a desire to resurrect people to begin with. Many of those who are frozen are essentially saying "at some point you'll have some machines that can read what I am from my frozen cells and make a copy of me". I mean, most cryo patients are just a frozen head at this point, so clearly "can thaw and somehow repair cell
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there is no coming back from that today.
it is not impossible for a regenerative process to one day be capable of solving this issue. it is also not impossible that the cryo methods will improve over time to reduce the amount of damage done. in time the two points will meet along the way somewhere and we will have the first restored person.
they may have the total iq of a pile of regurgitated watermelon, but they will have functioning neurons again in a way that resembles life.
the alternative for most of th
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See, you've looked at this entirely the wrong way.
Yes, all these suckers currently having their heads frozen have basically wasted their money. But instead of pointing and laughing, look at it this way - We might someday benefit as a result of using these
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And in the future we may be able to reverse this decomposition and use all these corpsicles are slave labor for the rich and powerful.
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I'm pretty sure they have not approved of being used as guinea pigs. So those experiments would be a no-go.
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I can remember reading several articles which stated that cryonics doesn't work because the freezing process is not perfect - it does not stop decomposition, which older frozen specimens were starting to show. Why do people still spend money on this?
Disregard cost and even at the worst their outcomes won't be any worse than the control group.
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I can remember reading several articles which stated that cryonics doesn't work because the freezing process is not perfect
They get freezer burn.
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Hope, and judging that rotting over weeks or rotting over decades in the worst case will mean they will end up the same way, just slower.
The next step will be (probably destructive) high-resolution scanning of the physical brain structure and then saving the scan data in the hope that one day we will be able to "decode" that data and "run" the brain on some other hardware by emulating it's biology. At least that data will keep fresh much, much longer (potentially). Baby steps to immortality. There's nothing
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Effective immortality will be the most lucrative product ever.
Facebook?
God, I hope not.
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People are a) stupid and b) very much afraid of death. Hence they are easy marks for this scam.
The reality of things is that there is no suitable cryo-technology at this time that allows even reasonable-quality freezing of anything much larger than a single cell. Crystals will form, it takes far too long and storage temperatures may be far too high for long-term storage. Also, the person is dead at the time this is done which may well be to late for any recovery. The other problem is that for the foreseeab
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It is disrespectful to the child.
Instead of resting in peace in the same tradition as her forefathers, which is how most people prefer to be disposed of, she is condemned to eternal undeadness in a freezing facility like some freak. And not by her own choice. I find this whole industry grotesque and morbid.
Youngest ever? False. (Score:2)
My son was frozen through embryonic cryopreservation.
(I'm not actually equating the difficulty of resuscitation at embryonic stage with that of a live-born human. It's a complete difference in magnitude and difficulty, obviously.)
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Did this have to do with In-Vitro Fertilization?
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Yes.
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The point went whizzing over your head, apparently.
There have been legislatures that have attempted to pass bills that would have legally set the definition of pi to a set number (or at least implied it). This happened in Indiana in the late 1800s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
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Only in Euclidean geometry. In other geometries (e.g. in lp =/=2 space or in a gravity well if you want something physical) it doesn't hold.
That's what I love about maths: mathmeticians are an imaginitive bunch and capable of dreaming up truly crazy things.
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It has no scientific answer, but in red states a definition of when cells become a person is going to be shoved down our throats.
A government-based decision either way is shoving some answer down someone's throat. The best course of action is to get government out of the answer altogether and let people decide. That means, however, getting government all the way out of the answer, including not forcing people who make one decision pay for the actions of people who decide the other way.
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You are wrong, and I am not denying anything from my "victims" because I have in fact, never performed an abortion on myself, not on anyone else.
You are an abomination and will probably end up in "the other place" if it exists.
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Yes, he is 4 months old now.
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It's an interesting question, but I think you mean he was born 4 months ago. But since he was frozen as an embryo how old is he really? A couple years?
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We transferred 2 from two different IVF cycles, so around either 14 months or 17 months.
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My 2 year old was frozen and thawed. She has 5 twins still sitting in the freezer.
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But has he been unfrozen? I assume so, but only because I know what you're talking about.** A customs official in Thailand might have no clue.
** And because I presume you're not an Evangelical wacko who would refer to a frozen embryo as your son. Not that Evangelicals would actually do that, come to think of it. Which is telling, I think.
You've never known a religious nut who believed that even embryos spontaneously aborted at 4 - 6 weeks are babies. Kind of gross (and disturbing) when I opened the fridge and asked "What is that?"
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Calling a 4-week old fetus a "baby" is kind of like calling a 4-month old boy a "man". Not really right, not really wrong... but that doesn't really matter anyway, it's not what the debate is about.
What matters is legal personhood. At what point in life does a person begin to have specific rights, and at what point does a person gain legal recognition as a party of civil and criminal actions? That's what it's about... not whether people call the human a "baby".
How are you going to "cure" a ravaged brain? (Score:3)
Not to be too harsh about it, but presumably, brain cancer ravished her brain, right? Even putting aside that cryogenic freezing is bullshit pseudoscience to begin with, how exactly would finding a cure for brain cancer in the future help someone who already had their brain destroyed by it? That's like giving FDR the polio vaccine and expecting him to walk again.
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It would be no less effective and much less cruel to forgo the $50,000 cryogenic freezing and just sell the grieving parents a $100 "Time Travel Rescue Promissory Note," promising that when time travel is invented in the future, your company will come back and save their kid before her or she dies.
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You've just inspired my startup, I may owe you royalties.
Slashdotters can send me $100 plus $2 shipping for my special Time Travel Genome Beacon Kit. Recovery from the future will be enabled by the rescuers locating your DNA on portions of this Kit's absorbent material from which they will clone you. Biopsies of your intestinal lining are deposited on the material while cleansing the anus after a bowel movement, simply flush the beacon strips into your city's effluent waste system. The Time Travel Gen
So in 300 years... (Score:5, Funny)
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Being a brain in a jar is so much more convenient though. No more itchy spots between the shoulder blades that you can't reach, no need to interrupt your MMO raid to go poop, no more getting kicked in the nads, no need to worry about bad hair days. Just relax in the soothing warm gel.
The whole thing is obviously stupid (Score:3)
Why did they remove the head? It seems to me the lack of a body is what's going to not get you unfrozen in the future, not the cancer. The cure for cancer is probably a whole lot morel likely lthan any time when we can sucessfully graft a head onto a whole new body, or cause the head to grow one.
Then of course there's the whole question of why anyone in the future would even want to go to the expense and effort of defrosting and curing you when there's already too many people in the world, and also a whole lot easier and more pleasurable ways of making more should you want to.
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You can't make this stuff up (Score:2)
"To see a frozen head in a box might have raised a number of red flags. In the U.S. that’s not a big deal..."
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What, you don't purchase your frozen heads on e-Bay?!
You can get 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag [amazon.com] from Amazon for $10 bucks.
Sheesh (Score:3, Funny)
These kids today, with the frozen heads and the music ...
Let it go.... (Score:2)
Let it go....
Turn away and slam the door!
I don't care...
Just like modern software (Score:2)
Kids these days can't write DNA code that won't suddenly freeze.
while medical science works on a cure. (Score:2)
Cryonic, not cryogenic, and some thoughts (Score:3)
The headline gets it right, but the summary gets it wrong. Does no-one watch QI around here?
TFS's headline is also a lot better than TFA's:
The Girl Who Would Live Forever
Ugh.
This whole thing strikes me as a little ridiculous, and the fluffy tone of the article really doesn't help.
The core of Einz’s two-year-old being now rests in cryofreeze in Arizona
40% of the "core of her being" (80% of the left hemisphere) had already been destroyed during surgery to treat the caner.
in wait of a cure, and a means to regrow her body.
By which time, unless they get themselves frozen as well, her parents will be long dead. For that matter, her country and her culture (not that she'll remember much of it, having spent most of her tragically short life in hospitals) will probably be long dead as well.
Far more likely, I suspect, is that the technology will never come into being at all, or our current procedures will turn out to be so lacking as to make the attempt impossible in her case.
As harsh as it may sound, and as a non-parent I really have no decent insight into their mindset, I think it might have been best for the parents to say their goodbyes, to grieve properly and learn to do their best to live their lives without their daughter.
And instead of being frozen in a vault somewhere to await a ressurection that may never happen, her brain could instead have been further studied to aid in the fight against this disease in those still living.
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I have 2 kids and I have some sympathy for the family and I can say that before having had my kids I wouldn't have.
According to the article both the parents are doctors so it would be fair to assume they are not stupid. They probably know that there is almost no chance of their daughter ever being restored, in fact they probably know it better than most. It would also be fair to assume that both being doctors that they are well paid, so $40,000 may not be that large an amount of money.
If one of my girls w
Death ritual (Score:5, Insightful)
Cryonics is basically like any death ritual (cremation, burring, funerals, etc), Its about the (unlikely) hope of some life after death and giving some measure of closure to the living. Sure its extremely unlikely to go anywhere, chances are some bankruptcy, economic collapse or natural disaster is going to destroy the brains/bodies long before technology advances to a point where they can be revived but who cares? If push comes to shove at a minimum we'll have some fairly well preserved bodies/brains in a few decades/centuries for future scientists to study assuming the company goes bankrupt. If we have a major economic collapse these bodies/brains can join a significant portion of humanities other "accomplishments" (fashion, popular culture, modern movies, etc) in decay. And on the long shot maybe these people will give direct witness to the time period in which they lived if it happens to succeed.
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It's Han Solo with a pseudo-StarWars font typeface.
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