August 30, 2011 • 42 mins
In 1964 The Prospect of Immortality laid out a plan for placing humans in suspended animation. The first person was placed in cryonic suspension three years later. But how does it actually work? Learn more about cryonics in this chilly episode of SYSK.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
and that makes this stuff you should know that free podcast.
(00:23):
It comes out twice a week, faithfully, and um, you
don't pay a time for it, do you? Do you?
I don't. I certainly do not. No one does talk.
It's right, um, but we're still glad that you listened
to it, even though it is free. Hi Frozen Body. Yeah,
that was your idea, wasn't. It seemed like a no
(00:44):
brainer for our Simpsons fans to call this cryonics episode
high Frozen Body. Dr Nick That Um, that episode has
one of my favorite Simpsons lines of all time. Uh,
where the old guy Jasper a sidekick, he the frozen body.
He comes out and he thaws out, and he goes
(01:05):
over and picks up a moonpie and he goes moon pie.
What a time to be alive. I love that. He's great. Yes. So, um,
if you haven't seen that episode of the Simpsons, we
strongly recommend you do. Right. Yeah, he just gets stuck
in the freezer right and freezes by accident or something
in the who starts charging admission to see him? Or
(01:29):
guess what the withsin the can that lost its label
a long time ago. So, Um, the concept that you
can freeze body and reanimate it is not just you
know Simpsons lore No, it's not just cartoon TV. Lore No.
Actually there's a guy who um kind of came up
(01:51):
with this. Uh, I guess in the nineteen four It's
a guy named Robert Inger, and he just died a
week or so ago. Chuck, that's right, like ten days ago.
The man died, um, which is really weird that he did,
because we had no idea that he was. That didn't
(02:11):
spur the idea for the podcast. Yeah, you picked this one.
And then it turns out the guy who created the
field of cryonics, who coined the word cryonics, died a
week before. Yeah. I felt kind of bad because I
picked this out last week, or maybe it was earlier
this weekend. Maybe he tapped you on the shower. It's like.
And then I always look at the news just to see, hey,
(02:34):
if there's anything relevant, and I saw that he died. Hey,
when you do. And I saw that he died today,
and my first instant was oh, awesome, how relevant, And
then I thought, well, that's kind of sad. Yeah, actually
that was very nice of you to share his oh
bit with me, though. Is in intro? Yeah, he ninety
two years old and he is now frozen per his
(02:56):
wishes in Michigan. Yeah, so he Um. He not only
established the field of cryonics, which is the UM basically
the attempt to store human bodies at very low temperatures
in order to eventually revive them. Yeah, they're technically not frozen, right, Yes,
you're absolutely right. UM. To store human bodies at extremely
(03:19):
low temperatures without freezing, that's called vitrification. Get into that.
But he came up with this whole prospect, this whole
idea UM in a book called The Prospect of Immortality,
which is why I just used the word prospect twice. UM,
and he wrote it in and it had a pretty
(03:40):
sweeping effect. In three years. Three years later, the first
person UM entered cryogenic suspension. Yeah. That was pretty forward thinking,
I would say back then, because this sounds like something
from the future now. And imagine in the sixth early sixties,
I thought he's nuts, right, But within three years of
him writing this book, there are they already started carrying
(04:02):
out his procedures that he kind of came up with
and described. He's a physics professor, UM. And he founded
the Cryonics Institute, I believe is what it is called.
And UM he joined two wives and his mother in
suspended animation in a nondescript building outside of Detroit. UM.
(04:24):
And the other the guy, the first guy they froze.
I keep I'm gonna say freeze this whole podcast. James Bedford.
He was a seventy three year old psychologist and he
is supposedly still frozen in good shape in Arizona. UM. Yeah,
and we should probably listen to a disclaimer here, like
when we say frozen or freeze or frozen, when we
(04:46):
really screw up. UM, what we're we're not talking about freezing.
We're talking about, like we said, vitrification, which is a
process of cooling the body down to extremely low temperatures
without freezing. Freezing is the forming of um ice crystals, right,
is good for the cells of your body. Know. But
(05:07):
what they've found, supposedly, says groups like alk Core Life
Extension UM. They they say that if you vitrify a
cell or a group of cells, a k a tissue
or a body or whatever, UM, you can preserve it.
(05:27):
Not indefinitely. There's actually a length of time. Do you
know that the time link that they say you can
preserve a body cry genically, I'm going to guess one
thousand years. Do you know why they say that? Uh? No,
Actually because just being on Earth for ten thousand years,
the body is exposed to too much cosmic rays and
it just destroys the cells on its own death literal
(05:51):
death bite cosmic ray. Yeah, but it takes ten thousand years.
So they're hoping that UM, and this is the whole
point of cryonics is is that the people that we
freeze or vitrify now will be able to be reanimated
and UM cured of any disease, whether it be age
(06:13):
or heart attack or whatever whatever killed them UM in
the future. So there's a lot of um stuff floating
around about cryonics, cryogenics. Walt Disney was not frozen. He
actually died a year before the first guy was. UM
was frozen vitrified. Okay, UM, So that's a complete and
(06:34):
total rumor. But let's get to the let's let's let's
talk about this, Chuck. There's a lot of people who
are skeptics of this, you realize, but there's a lot
of um rationality to it as well. Sure, okay, so
go well, I think dead is where we should start off.
Oddly enough, at the end is actually the beginning when
you're talking about cryonics. Um, it's thank you. I just
(06:56):
made that up. Al core Is is one of the
big companies in Arizon, and they have a quote dying
as a process, not an event, and that I don't
know if that's like they're huge terminator style quote when
you walk in the lobby, but it should be because no,
they don't have it like on a on a sign
or anything. Some guy comes up to you wearing like
nothing but a lab coat and cowboy boots and shakes
(07:19):
you while he says it and then runs off. That's
how you're greeted. That's good. He should get a job
at Walmart. Um. But that is the who. Their whole
point in that is that when your heart stops speeding,
you were legally dead, but there is still some cellular
and brain function for a short time, and their goal
is to nab you in that instant and get the
(07:40):
process started in that instant and preserve what minimal function
you still have left in your brain in that instant.
And that's that's based on good science. UM science is
starting to realize that death is a gradual process. It's
not like they said, an event. It's not just like
one moment you're living, next man and you're dead. It's
the whole thing. Remember we talked lot about organ donation,
(08:01):
about UM brain death and UM cardiac death. And legally,
in the United States, if your heart stop speeding, UM,
you can you can be declared dead. But as far
as al Core is concerned, your brain is still functioning UM.
So therefore, if you can be preserved, you can be
eventually reanimated. Like I said, this is sound science. Hypothermia
(08:26):
research has led to a new understanding of heart attacks, right,
So a new technique of reviving a patient with a
heart attack is to lower their body temperature to like
ninety one degrees very gradually, and then UM revived them
by letting the body warm back up. And they've also
found from this research that you can't just inundate it
with oxygen because oxygen goes in and just kills all
(08:49):
the cells, because there's this horrible caveat to resuscitating a
heart attack victim is that when you resuscitate them successfully,
you give them oxygen. It's just stay inter procedure at
hospital and they're alive and happy and everything is good,
and then two days later they die. And so they
started to look at why people died, and they found
out that it was because they were their cells were
(09:11):
perfused with too much oxygen too quickly. So they found
that if you lower body temperature and then gradually reintroduce
oxygen in its own you can bring a person back
effectively from death. Well, it happens all the time, and
I imagine, I mean that makes sense. It's probably a
traumatic event to be brought back to life on your
body itself physiologically, So sure that makes sense. But like
(09:33):
I just said, it happens all the time. People's hearts stop,
people are trapped under ice and quote unquote dead and
they're brought back to life and function normally. Sometimes they
don't function normally. But this isn't so much different than that, No,
it's not. It's and it's based on that, it's based
on the concept. It is um so Chuck you're saying
that if you, let's say you are a member of
(09:55):
al Core Life Extension Foundation, right, which apparently is not
that expensive. They liken it to um a lifetime of
smoking cigarettes or having cable TV or the like, which
is pretty expensive. It is, but still, I mean it's
not as much as you would think. I think I
got the fees right here in front of me. Uh,
if your first family member is you gotta see here's
(10:17):
the deal. You gotta sign up, and you gotta pay
for life, and then you gotta pay I believe, for
the process on top of that, right, because it's a
membership club. And then yeah, you're you're there's going to
be a spike and pay when you die. So a
first family member is six hundred and twenty bucks a year.
Each additional family member if you want them on your
(10:39):
cell phone plan, is three hundred and ten dollars a year.
Minor family member is a hundred and fifty five bucks
a year. Minor family just an aunt, I guess, not
like not siblings or or nothing being a kid. Oh
really no, because it said oh no, no, wait, you're right,
says under eighteen, like an aunt, you don't that's like
(11:01):
outside the nucle your family, all right, and if you're
a student, good news. It's only three d and ten
bucks a year. But I imagine you're right jumps up
when you graduate, because you're not always screw you when
you graduate. So that's just the membership fees. The actual
body freezing is up to article says to our course
two hundred now and the in the brain is eighty.
(11:23):
And there's search charges if you're in England a fifteen grand.
Outside US, Canada and England it's grand. I wonder why.
And then you can also get if you're not a member,
you can pay for a family member. Like let's say
none of us are members, and you want to freeze
your father, the herbal Elvis upon his expiration, you would
(11:45):
have to pay fifty grand two D fifty grand because
there weren't there weren't any membership dues. Yeah, so it's
a fifty dollar surcharge if if you just want to say, hey,
I want my dad frozen, and none of us were
ever members, all right, I'll have to talk to at
about that, see what he thinks. Um. So uh, let's
say you are remembering good standing, you you've got, you know,
(12:09):
minor family members totally insured under this plan or as
members as well. And we should also say we keep
saying al Core. Al Core is the one of the
it's far and away the most widely known cryonics group.
But um, there's like at least two others, the one
(12:29):
in Michigan. Let's just go to their websites if you
want to compare them. The Alcore looks pretty, they're both legit.
But's website it looks sort of like in MySpace pace
it does. My advice to in the Michigan Institute is
to just pay some money to your website seriously if
you want to, if you want to be taken seriously.
But that's the one that was founded by um Robert Edinger. Well,
(12:50):
and I think he did the website in Yeah, I
think so too. He's like, someday there's going to be
an Internet and this is gonna be the first thing
on it and it's never gonna change. Um. So, okay,
let's say you're remembering good standing at any of the
the the cryonics UH groups or foundations or labs and
you're about to die, right yep, what happens to Chuck
(13:12):
take us through the process. Well, the first thing that
happens is they are literally at your deathbed. The team
is waiting for you to expire. I want armies. And
as soon as they do that, as soon as you die, rather,
they will, as the article says, spring into action. And also, Chuck,
we should say they have to wait until you declare
(13:33):
deatti to um to put someone into a cryonic suspension,
or as the Michigan website says, right now, it's illegal. Okay.
So I think they envision the future or where you're
if you're on life support or something you could probably
or if you're just fully healthy, they also envisioned a
future or we reanimate dead people. Yeah, that's true. Uh
(13:54):
So what they do is they spring into action. They
stabilize your body by getting blood flowing in oxygen, but
I guess not too much oxygen, and they pack you
an ice and pump in some heperin, which is an
anti coagulant so your blood doesn't clot. And then they
rush the opposite of Calf's stomach. Yeah exactly, and then
(14:14):
they rush you to the facility where the real science begins. Right,
And it's about here that things get a tad um
cutting edge, I would say, so. So Basically, what they
have to do is remove the water from your body,
right and not just like your p or your saliva.
(14:34):
They gotta literally get the water out of your cells. Yeah.
I read at least six of your cells, so it
must be all the organ cells and and and they
go after the brain in particular. Your brain is of
the utmost importance. UM. And you can actually have your
brain alone cryonically suspended for something like fifty k K
(14:56):
raised it in the past five Here is this article written.
I don't think it's that long ago, but hey, it
ain't cheap um. And they still stort in your head.
By the way, it's not like futurama. Oh cool, they
said it does too much damage and why bother. Their
head is a great bowling ball case essentially, so here
they just cut your head off and preserve the whole thing.
But it's really just your brain that's undergone the vitrification process. Yeah,
(15:20):
that is neat ted. Williams's head is floating somewhere. His
whole body wasn't. They removed the body there in two
separate chambers. Oh, that's right ahead of at um. So uh.
When you're on the table, they remove the water from
your body, and how did they do that? I didn't
understand how they remove water from your cells? You're asking me, Yeah,
(15:42):
I don't know. Is it a pressing? I don't know, man,
I've had the doctor. I tried to find out the
literal process of how they get the water from the
cells and replace it with the anti freeze. But they do.
They do replace it with anti freeze, a glycol based
um basically a human anti freeze syro protectant is what
they call it, a Cairo cry We got there eventually,
(16:08):
croct Jerry's like, this is not their best day. Yeah,
it's a cryo protective. So they pump you full of
this stuff basically like embalming fluid that will never freeze UM.
And then they lay you on a bed of um
dry ice. And here, this is astounding to me that
(16:28):
you can even get any tissue down to this this
um degree. But basically they freeze your body. They I'm sorry,
they vitrify your body down to negative a hundred and
thirty degrees celsius, which is negative two d and two
degrees fahrenheight, negative two hundred degrees fahreheight. And they're like
absolute zero. I don't know we've called on that before, right,
(16:51):
I will figure it out. No, we've been called out
on whether forty degrees is negative forties the same in
celsius or fahrenheight, which it is. Um. And then once
your body reaches that temperature, you're vitrified, you're ready to go,
You're ready to be stored for up to ten thousand years.
And what they do is they put you in a tank. Right. Yeah, Well,
(17:13):
first of all, that means that means that your molecules
have slowed down to the point where the chemistry stops. Right,
there's no metabolism going on whatsoever. Nothing. It's called the
glass transition temperature. And uh so it just everything kind
of goes. That's suspended animation. It's a perfect example of it.
(17:34):
That's great. So they stuff you in the tank, right,
that's right, called a well, if if it's just your head,
it's called a neuropod, right, and then if it's your body,
it's called a um I think a cryopod. I'd call
it a full body pod. Okay, But so and then
they put you in a container that can hold maybe
(17:56):
four or five bodies because you're not by yourself. Yeah,
that's a little a weird Yeah, I thought so too, UM,
especially if somehow you're still cognizant, Like if that was
possible and you just didn't really like the people around you,
you're stuck would stink. UM. So there's a there's a
pretty nice picture of an alk core container that holds
(18:17):
UM four whole body pods and six neuropods. Right, UM,
So it's like a freaky futuristic nursing home in there,
you know. UM. And there you go. You're you're on
ice as it were for ten thousand years, and then
every once in a while they have UM what are
(18:38):
called UM profusion thresholds I believe, and then have software
that measures that like the concentration of liquid nitrogen, because
that's what you're in. You're in a bad of liquid
nitrogen that's being cooled down ultimately, even even less than
two d and two degrees high, it's down. When you're
in cold storage as it were, UM, you are stored
(19:00):
in about negative three twenty degrees fahrenheit, and liquid nitrogen
at that temperature will eventually evaporate, so they have to
keep adding some and they have software that monitors this,
and there you go. You're officially in cryogenic suspension head
head down, upside down, yeah, which I thought was pretty
clever in fact to the podcast for me, if there's
a leak, do you want your head down because you
(19:23):
want your brain? I guess if it leaks, the bottom
obviously will be the last bit too contain any of
the liquid, so that's where they want your head. It's
very clever. But again, if you're the least bit conscious
or cognizant or anything like, you're you're dead. Yeah, but man,
can you imagine like that? That gives me a headache
just thinking about being upside down? I'm sure it's awful.
(19:43):
All the frozen blood brushes to your head, that's right,
and one giant block ice I see blood, yeah, vitrified
that's right. So, um, what's the deal with all this chuck?
I mean, as we said, it's a lot of people
who criticize this stuff, and it seems like for good measure,
(20:05):
they're saying, like, you know, you're just like this is
a nice, fancy process that you guys have come up with,
and we're sure that you know you're doing everything you're saying,
and yes, it is based on real science, but you
can base anything on real science. And it's still just
pseudo science. If it's not science, it's pseudoscience, it's trickery. Right. Well,
(20:27):
they get a lot of heat obviously, places like al
Core do, and they one of the problems, they say
is that UM, first of all, it's it's based on
three very different, uh scientific fields. So the reason why
most scientists don't come out and say this can work
is because they're scientists in a single given field and
(20:50):
they don't understand that this involves three very different disciplines
like podiatrists. So yeah, exactly. Uh. One of the other
problems is that they they one of the reasons that
uh what they call cryobiologists or yes, cryo biologists, people
who study UM low temperature biology. Yeah, they say that
(21:11):
they don't come out and say it can work because
they feel like it has been given the pseudoscience moniker
and so it will overshadow the real work they've done,
quote unquote real work that they've done with other kinds
of cryo freezing. So they're just like, I don't even
want to talk about that stuff, right, I mean, your
professional reputation is at stake. Yeah. Sure, But again that
(21:33):
doesn't necessarily mean that just because UM skeptics have labeled
this fraud that it doesn't necessarily work. The other big
point as far as um crionic groups or boards or whatever, um,
the the point that they tend to make usually is
that we have no idea how to reanimate anybody. Yeah,
(21:55):
they're upfront about that. Yeah, they're saying, like, what we're doing,
and um, this is what al core life extension is
known for. Is basically they know how to vitrify tissue
and then just keep it that way, um, indefinitely. And
so that's what they're saying they're doing. And basically they're
just the keepers of these bodies that are in suspended
(22:17):
animation or dead depending on your view, um, until we
come up with a way to revive them and repair
anything that might have been wrong with them. And the
the great white hope, apparently is among cryogenic adherents is nanotechnology,
which makes sense right, which is uh, I mean nanotechnology.
(22:38):
They can get down to the single atom and and
do mechanics work essentially right, repair work on the cells.
So they think that that is the future of being
able to reanimate people like this, which again it's it's um,
that's all well and good, but you can't just be like, oh, yeah,
we heard about nanotechnology and that's probably where it will be.
(22:58):
And how about this, Not only will it be the
field of nanotechnology that reanimates people, but it will be
in which is apparently the number that they throw out.
So um dubious there. But it seems like if they
stick to the fact that no, we're putting people in
suspended animation, and there's a good chance that if death
(23:18):
is a process and we're getting to this process, we're
interrupting this process, then we can reverse it. Yeah, they're
not saying we're promising eternal life. We we're promising that
we can bring you back from the dead. They're basically
pretty upfront about saying we are a high tech storage facility. Period.
So when we when we talk about reanimating people, this
(23:40):
is not new. Um. The idea of reanimating a corps
is extremely old. Um. There's a there was this cool
little movement in the nineteenth century called galvanic reanimation. What's that.
Basically it amounted to um hooking recently killed executed criminals
(24:03):
up to like huge batteries via cables and during public
display like applying the electricity and making them like twitch
and making their eyes open or making them grimace horribly.
And that was like how you reanimated a corpse, which
by definition that is reanimating it, but you're not. It's
(24:24):
the technical definition, you know. Um, it didn't imbue any
life into it, but it did give Mary Shelley a
good idea for Frankenstein. Yeah there, you know, that was
a whole idea for a very long time, that like,
if you could, under the right circumstances, introduce an electrical
current to life, you know, to a dead body, you
(24:45):
can bring it back to life, which is pretty clever
if you think about it, because this was before the
time of neuroscience, or about the time it was nascent, right,
and neuroscience, if anything, has given us the awareness that
everything is the result of like electro chemical conduction throughout
the body. So it was pretty smart to think of
(25:07):
electricity as a way to reanimate bodies, although it doesn't
do anything. Yeah. Well, and that's also the reason why
they obviously the brain is so important, and they say
you can just opt for the eighty dollar head freeze
because maybe in the future, I mean for far along,
far enough along where we can reanimate a person from
cryogenic freezing. Then we should be at the point where
(25:29):
we can clone you a body to go along with
that head. Why not a hot body too? Oh yeah, sure,
I would wear Daisy dukes all the time in my body.
You don't even wear shorts now, Well, I don't have
a hot cloned body. I've seen you in shorts once, actually,
when when you came over to my house to bar
the lot more. You hound shorts really and I saw
(25:51):
your bare leg I've seen you in boxer shorts too.
When I think in one of our trips, like you
changed clothes in front of me or something, I think
should get a little more specific for the audience. Well,
I mean we didn't have like a dress up party,
but it was like, hey, I gotta you know, we're
late for something and you were changing your clothes or something.
I don't know. I mean, I didn't market on my
(26:14):
Guatemala I'll bet in Guatemala Lake that one crazy day.
So anyway, that was just happened there. That was possibly
the wildest tangent we've ever been on. You've seen me
in my boxers and in shorts senior bare legs, and
they're fine. I don't see why you don't like shorts.
(26:35):
I'm just no, no, not for you. Um, but it
could be for a cloned body, right right, Yeah, let's
just get back to it, buddy. Um. And uh again
back to the reanimation research there. I think we've talked
about before, Max Planck Institute, back in two thousand. There's
just one thing on the web and I can't find
any follow up stuff or any lead up stuff, but
(26:57):
basically they're talking about what. Um, the arapeutic hypothermia research
has shown that if you it's not death that injures
cells and tissue and makes them unreanimateable. It's trying to
reanimate them and doing it too quickly. And um, they
were working on reanimating dead bodies. Um. And apparently since
(27:20):
then we have figured out how to reanimate some cryo
preserved tissue like a rabbit kidney. Yeah, it worked. In
two thousand five, apparently they vitrified a rabbit kidney. Um.
They took it out of a rabbit, they said you
wait here, vitrified the kidney, brought it back, put it
back in the rabbit and said go urinate, and the
(27:42):
rabbit did, and the kidney exploded. The and uh. They
have also reanimated a nematode worm. Um, big deal. But hey,
it worked, but no other mammals. Yeah, they said, dogs
and monkeys they've had their blood placed. Well remember that
that supposed to Russian research film from head God, that's awful.
(28:09):
But dogs and monkeys, they've had their blood replaced with
the anti freeze essentially cooled it to below zero degrees
and rewarmed it and revived them successfully. But that's zero
degrees is a long long way from negative three. Yes,
but but they're pointing this to this and saying, hey, look,
(28:30):
this is this could be possible. And it wasn't even vitrified.
Was that it was just brought to a low temperature. No, no, no,
it said their blood was replaced. Okay, Um, I don't
know if all the cells were, but the blood was
at least so Um. There are things to look for
in the future when you are successfully reanimated, possibly given
(28:53):
a cloned body that wears Daisy Dukes a lot um.
And there's gonna be some legal issues that people are
already starting to think of about reanimating. Yes, for example,
when you are taken off to the cryonic facility. As
far as society and the court system and Social Security
administration is you're illegally dead. You didn't think about that.
(29:15):
What happens when you come back to life. You have
to apply to be a new person again, I guess.
So they figured that probably if somebody who's presumed dead
and wasn't right, but they were declared legally dead and
they come back after that, there there nobody says well sorry,
and nobody's gonna say that somebody who's reanimated. But one
of the other propositions that they they're considering is a
(29:36):
possibility is issuing you a new birth certificate? Really yeah,
and they're cool that is, so you would be literally
reborn as far as the law is concerns. Um. And
then also what happens, chuck. Has happened in the nineties
seventies when there were I think six big cryogenic suspension
(29:58):
companies and operation and that number dropped dramatically in the
late seventies early eighty And what happened to those bodies?
You know, I do know they were left to rot?
Really yes they have. The company went bankrupt and said,
we don't have any money to keep these things going.
And um, since it was a corporation, they could say
that the person walked away, but the bodies were just
(30:20):
left to thaw and rot, and that's what happened. Um
our Core supposedly has a fund set aside to where
if anything happens to the company, it will provide a
bridge to continue care until they figure out what to
do with these That's where a lot of goes supposedly.
I think about half of that goes into that trust.
And I was researching them. Apparently they have a self
(30:42):
perpetuating board, which they're frequently criticized for because it's just
there's no new blood in there as it were. But
the board is generally or has been very transparent about
how much money is paid, like um in supposedly they
announced that they were gonna slash their staffs pay across
(31:03):
the board. By the average staff worker, they're made like
twenty grand. Board members don't get paid at all, right, right, UM,
So it's supposedly these people are just into it, like
two UM further cryonic research and and keep these bodies suspended. Right.
That's what you'll see on their website at least, right.
(31:25):
But I was reading some outside links. There's this blog
called Depressed Metabolism, which is just about all that UM
and they were going over a two thousand nine al
Core report UM. But they seem very conservative but not
good at generating their own income. They rely a lot
on donations. All the technology they use as licensed elsewhere,
(31:46):
so there's like bleeding money, but they manage to stay
aflow because of donations from like wealthy members, which is
kind of unfair. So, but they're very conservative to UM,
whereas like the Cryonics Institute was always kind of UM
criticized for being like a little reckless, a little cutting edge,
but they were looking at cryonics is not necessarily a
(32:07):
way to keep UM people in suspended animation, But how
do we apply this medically and get these people reanimated again, right,
not just indefinitely, you know, increasing animation well, and how
do you get medical mainstream medical science behind this period
is one of their big battles. Uh I. Now that
al cores in Arizona and then two thousand four there
(32:29):
was a bill passed by the House there in Arizona
that basically was going to put them under the regulation
of the State Funeral Board, which would have effectively probably
shut them down, and it was pulled from the floor,
but they said it was a really nasty debate on
the floor. And uh, because there's a lot of religious
ethical ramifications here that that I guess we could talk about,
(32:50):
but they said that we don't know. This could come
back and they could shut us down. You never know,
and in Arizona at least, but the ethical concerns is
alcor On their website again has addressed some of these
because a lot of religious folks might say, this is not,
you know, something you should be doing. You shouldn't be
(33:11):
playing God, quote unquote, and they say that patients are
theologically equivalent to unconscious patients in a hospital with an
uncertain prognosis theologically speaking. And they've had people right into
like people in the Catholic Church and Protestant churches and
even the Jesus Christ Church of Jesus Christ of the
(33:33):
Latter day Saints. They've written essays supporting it. Some people
have Yeah, it's like if you're on life support, you're
playing God or somebody's playing God with you. But other
people in religious circles have blasted it. So it's it
depends on how you want to listen to. Yes, it does.
And they said it's not just for the rich. That's
one of the myths. They say it's not an indulgence
of the rich. They say most of the membership is
(33:54):
middle class. Yeah, and paid for with insurance, Yeah, life
insurance on don't Is that true? I have I didn't
get a chance to research that one. Looking not for myself,
but Paul Rud's making a movie about this. Did you
see that? It's been done? No what Iceman? No? No, no,
no no. Um ice Man to the Return of Iceman
(34:18):
ice Man three, The Iceman Jr. What else? Well, this
one is bona fide uh Errol Morris, the awesome documentarian.
He's making his first, uh, non documentary film since the
early nineties. Fiction, I'm sure, but it's not fiction because
it's a true story. So the first first feature film.
(34:41):
Um wow, man, that's awesome. Yeah, it's because it came
out with a new documentary recently, too, didn't he Yeah,
it's uh, it's about that. It's about the tabloid scandal
when that woman kidnapped the those Mormon I don't know.
I think it's a woman kidnapped some Mormon guy and
like took her, took him away to some aven and
forced sex upon him for like months and then came
(35:04):
back and was a celebrity because of it in the seventies. Yeah,
it looks really good. So his feature film, Sorry, that's
all right, it's uh. It's based on the memoir by
Robert F. Nelson called Uh and taken from this American
Life segment and Ira Glasses producing This isn't everything taken
from any this American Life segment And the name of
This American Lives was Your as Cold at You're Cold
(35:26):
as Ice was the name of their show. Personally, I
think high frozen body a little better, way better, Chuck,
way to So Paul read one of my favorites. He's
playing this dude. Yeah, good for him. Good. Oh we
need to talk about Ted Williams real quick. Oh yeah,
good lord. That was close. Well, as you said, Walt
(35:47):
Disney was not uh suspended and liquid nitrogen, but Ted
Williams the famous hit her last hit her to hit
four hundred in baseball is yeah. He's an Alcore member.
Two thousand two, they put him on Vitrify and um,
they said it to Vitrify and he was like, whoa
(36:09):
his there's There was a legal battle over it. Um.
Apparently his daughter was accusing his son of having him
uh vitrified put in cryonics animation or suspended animation um
because he wanted to later sell his dad's d n A,
which apparently his son was like, yeah, maybe, but dad
(36:29):
still wanted to. We had a sign packed me and
our other sister, but not you and so um. He
didn't even know him till he was thirty, though he
was a half brother or half so okay. Well, Ted
was running around telling people all sorts of different stuff.
Apparently he told his daughter that he wanted to be
um scattered his He wanted to be cremated and have
(36:50):
his cremated remains scattered over the Florida Keys. The daughter
the son said no, we had a packed a signed packed,
which apparently he was a will to produce. So Judge said, okay,
Ted's again his stay frozen. You can't sell his DNA
bing bang boom by Jovi yeah and then banging a gable.
The sun got a he he was painted in an
(37:13):
unfair light because of the Sports Illustrated article by Tom
Verducci that basically slammed him as Hey, this kid didn't
even know until he's thirty, He's gonna sell his DNA
and it was apparently he got one version of the
story and that's it and stopped his fact checking there.
So I've seen follow up reports where this guy was
like that ain't what happened, and I did not want
(37:33):
to sell his DNA and like we really got to
be close after I met him later in life, and
blah blah blah blah blah blah. Well you got anything else?
Just if you want to know how popular this is
um As of June of this year, Alcor has nine
d and fifty members and a hundred and six quote
unquote patients. Yeah, that's what. And Michigan at the Cryonics
(37:57):
Institute I believe has over a hundred. So there's a
cup one hundred and change people current currently in the
United States upside down like that of liquid nitrogen with
other people, one of them my be Ted Williams. I
wonder if they're like, hey, check it out. Yeah, the
Yankee Clipper. No, that was Joe Di Maggio, Tied Williams
was the boss. That was he He was the Red Sox.
(38:20):
It was like the Monster. I always confused him with
Johnny Bench. Didn't they play at the same time or
call your stremski? Uh? Maybe it may have overlapped. It
was like the big hitter or the monster hitter. Well
he was the last player to hit four hundred, so yeah,
I can't remember. Anyway, Let you go, Ted Um. If
you want to learn more about baseball, we encourage you
(38:42):
to type that word into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com. You can also type in cryonics
C R Y O N I C s UM and
that will lead you to some cool articles. Also, uh,
if you have not gotten around to reading HP Lovecraft's
brilliant shorts story Herbert West re Animator, Oh yeah, check
(39:03):
it out. Probably his best. Um And I said re animator,
which means that it's time for a listener mail. That's right, boy,
I'm gonna get hammered by Yankee fans and Red Sox
fans for that. I'm back off of that one. Jody
Maggio's a Yankee clipper. Ted Williams is the monster, well
the green monster is? Is that what you're thinking? I mean,
(39:27):
that's influencing it. But there's something there all right. Today,
Josh I got on Facebook I don't know if he saw,
and I was like, I can't find any good listener mail,
So some help tell me some stories, and I just
got a few of those to read off. Nathan. I'm sorry.
Nathaniel jerk jeriko Witz Jerkovitz got hit by a car
while walking home from work earlier this week. As I
(39:49):
was listening to one of your episodes cool which one
I don't know? He said. He rolled off the hood
and checked to make sure nothing was broken, and then
scrolled back to what I had missed. Nice and uh,
yeah that was Nathan. Nathaniel, So I hope you're okay. Yeah,
hanging there, Nathaniel, Billina Elena said. My doctor says I
mispronounced letters when I speak, not because of a list,
(40:11):
but because I have a heart shaped uvula, to be honest,
until he pointed out, I didn't have any idea that
everyone else's uvulop did not have a split in the center.
How about that? Yeah, split uvul Yeah, I've heard of that.
And Angie Speken says, uh. When I was seven years old,
my mom spotted a wood tick in my ear while
(40:33):
eating in the subway. I screamed hysterically. My stepdad tried
to remove it with a plastic variety of plastic cutlery,
and then a seemingly toward tracked at the attention of
a cop who tried his best with keys. I started
to bleed from my ear and the subway told us
to leave the subway. Did My mom sat me on
a bench outside, continued the quest. The man sitting next
(40:55):
to it next to us asked about why I was screaming,
and once my mom told him, he asked if he
could try and produce a hook for a hand. What
is going on with this story? I'm so confused. She
had a chicken re ear and no one could get
it out. They went outside and this dude the subway
told him, dude, and then this dude with a hook
on his hand said, can I give it a shot? Okay,
(41:16):
it's got to New York. I screamed even louder as
my mother help me down, and the man plucked the
tick from my ear. So I wanted to I thank
him for saving my life. And it's still I still
smile every time I encounter a person with a hook
for a hand and they think that she's laughing at him.
I don't know. And then finally, congratulations to our buddy
Andy John Cox. Yeah with the mustache he got engaged.
(41:39):
Oh hey, congratulations and she said yes, and uh, he's
getting married and and he's one of our boys. And
way to go, dude, and it's fantastic. Way to go.
I'm sure you shaved off the mustache and it said
will you marry me underneath it? And Ben I think
they do. Uh. Yeah, that was a great idea. Chuck Stories.
You got a story you want to hear it? Wait
(42:00):
until Chuck asks not forget it. Just go ahead and
let us now go into our Facebook page. It's a
Facebook dot com slash stuff. You should know. You can
also tweet us stories if they consist of a hundred
and forty characters or less, that'd be good. Um too,
that's a great idea. You can We want your hundred
and forty character story's on Twitter? Um, good idea. Chuck
s y s K podcast is our Twitter handle, and
(42:24):
then you can also send us email to Stuff Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to you by the
(42:46):
reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
and that makes this stuff you should know that free podcast.
(00:23):
It comes out twice a week, faithfully, and um, you
don't pay a time for it, do you? Do you?
I don't. I certainly do not. No one does talk.
It's right, um, but we're still glad that you listened
to it, even though it is free. Hi Frozen Body. Yeah,
that was your idea, wasn't. It seemed like a no
(00:44):
brainer for our Simpsons fans to call this cryonics episode
high Frozen Body. Dr Nick That Um, that episode has
one of my favorite Simpsons lines of all time. Uh,
where the old guy Jasper a sidekick, he the frozen body.
He comes out and he thaws out, and he goes
(01:05):
over and picks up a moonpie and he goes moon pie.
What a time to be alive. I love that. He's great. Yes. So, um,
if you haven't seen that episode of the Simpsons, we
strongly recommend you do. Right. Yeah, he just gets stuck
in the freezer right and freezes by accident or something
in the who starts charging admission to see him? Or
(01:29):
guess what the withsin the can that lost its label
a long time ago. So, Um, the concept that you
can freeze body and reanimate it is not just you
know Simpsons lore No, it's not just cartoon TV. Lore No.
Actually there's a guy who um kind of came up
(01:51):
with this. Uh, I guess in the nineteen four It's
a guy named Robert Inger, and he just died a
week or so ago. Chuck, that's right, like ten days ago.
The man died, um, which is really weird that he did,
because we had no idea that he was. That didn't
(02:11):
spur the idea for the podcast. Yeah, you picked this one.
And then it turns out the guy who created the
field of cryonics, who coined the word cryonics, died a
week before. Yeah. I felt kind of bad because I
picked this out last week, or maybe it was earlier
this weekend. Maybe he tapped you on the shower. It's like.
And then I always look at the news just to see, hey,
(02:34):
if there's anything relevant, and I saw that he died. Hey,
when you do. And I saw that he died today,
and my first instant was oh, awesome, how relevant, And
then I thought, well, that's kind of sad. Yeah, actually
that was very nice of you to share his oh
bit with me, though. Is in intro? Yeah, he ninety
two years old and he is now frozen per his
(02:56):
wishes in Michigan. Yeah, so he Um. He not only
established the field of cryonics, which is the UM basically
the attempt to store human bodies at very low temperatures
in order to eventually revive them. Yeah, they're technically not frozen, right, Yes,
you're absolutely right. UM. To store human bodies at extremely
(03:19):
low temperatures without freezing, that's called vitrification. Get into that.
But he came up with this whole prospect, this whole
idea UM in a book called The Prospect of Immortality,
which is why I just used the word prospect twice. UM,
and he wrote it in and it had a pretty
(03:40):
sweeping effect. In three years. Three years later, the first
person UM entered cryogenic suspension. Yeah. That was pretty forward thinking,
I would say back then, because this sounds like something
from the future now. And imagine in the sixth early sixties,
I thought he's nuts, right, But within three years of
him writing this book, there are they already started carrying
(04:02):
out his procedures that he kind of came up with
and described. He's a physics professor, UM. And he founded
the Cryonics Institute, I believe is what it is called.
And UM he joined two wives and his mother in
suspended animation in a nondescript building outside of Detroit. UM.
(04:24):
And the other the guy, the first guy they froze.
I keep I'm gonna say freeze this whole podcast. James Bedford.
He was a seventy three year old psychologist and he
is supposedly still frozen in good shape in Arizona. UM. Yeah,
and we should probably listen to a disclaimer here, like
when we say frozen or freeze or frozen, when we
(04:46):
really screw up. UM, what we're we're not talking about freezing.
We're talking about, like we said, vitrification, which is a
process of cooling the body down to extremely low temperatures
without freezing. Freezing is the forming of um ice crystals, right,
is good for the cells of your body. Know. But
(05:07):
what they've found, supposedly, says groups like alk Core Life
Extension UM. They they say that if you vitrify a
cell or a group of cells, a k a tissue
or a body or whatever, UM, you can preserve it.
(05:27):
Not indefinitely. There's actually a length of time. Do you
know that the time link that they say you can
preserve a body cry genically, I'm going to guess one
thousand years. Do you know why they say that? Uh? No,
Actually because just being on Earth for ten thousand years,
the body is exposed to too much cosmic rays and
it just destroys the cells on its own death literal
(05:51):
death bite cosmic ray. Yeah, but it takes ten thousand years.
So they're hoping that UM, and this is the whole
point of cryonics is is that the people that we
freeze or vitrify now will be able to be reanimated
and UM cured of any disease, whether it be age
(06:13):
or heart attack or whatever whatever killed them UM in
the future. So there's a lot of um stuff floating
around about cryonics, cryogenics. Walt Disney was not frozen. He
actually died a year before the first guy was. UM
was frozen vitrified. Okay, UM, So that's a complete and
(06:34):
total rumor. But let's get to the let's let's let's
talk about this, Chuck. There's a lot of people who
are skeptics of this, you realize, but there's a lot
of um rationality to it as well. Sure, okay, so
go well, I think dead is where we should start off.
Oddly enough, at the end is actually the beginning when
you're talking about cryonics. Um, it's thank you. I just
(06:56):
made that up. Al core Is is one of the
big companies in Arizon, and they have a quote dying
as a process, not an event, and that I don't
know if that's like they're huge terminator style quote when
you walk in the lobby, but it should be because no,
they don't have it like on a on a sign
or anything. Some guy comes up to you wearing like
nothing but a lab coat and cowboy boots and shakes
(07:19):
you while he says it and then runs off. That's
how you're greeted. That's good. He should get a job
at Walmart. Um. But that is the who. Their whole
point in that is that when your heart stops speeding,
you were legally dead, but there is still some cellular
and brain function for a short time, and their goal
is to nab you in that instant and get the
(07:40):
process started in that instant and preserve what minimal function
you still have left in your brain in that instant.
And that's that's based on good science. UM science is
starting to realize that death is a gradual process. It's
not like they said, an event. It's not just like
one moment you're living, next man and you're dead. It's
the whole thing. Remember we talked lot about organ donation,
(08:01):
about UM brain death and UM cardiac death. And legally,
in the United States, if your heart stop speeding, UM,
you can you can be declared dead. But as far
as al Core is concerned, your brain is still functioning UM.
So therefore, if you can be preserved, you can be
eventually reanimated. Like I said, this is sound science. Hypothermia
(08:26):
research has led to a new understanding of heart attacks, right,
So a new technique of reviving a patient with a
heart attack is to lower their body temperature to like
ninety one degrees very gradually, and then UM revived them
by letting the body warm back up. And they've also
found from this research that you can't just inundate it
with oxygen because oxygen goes in and just kills all
(08:49):
the cells, because there's this horrible caveat to resuscitating a
heart attack victim is that when you resuscitate them successfully,
you give them oxygen. It's just stay inter procedure at
hospital and they're alive and happy and everything is good,
and then two days later they die. And so they
started to look at why people died, and they found
out that it was because they were their cells were
(09:11):
perfused with too much oxygen too quickly. So they found
that if you lower body temperature and then gradually reintroduce
oxygen in its own you can bring a person back
effectively from death. Well, it happens all the time, and
I imagine, I mean that makes sense. It's probably a
traumatic event to be brought back to life on your
body itself physiologically, So sure that makes sense. But like
(09:33):
I just said, it happens all the time. People's hearts stop,
people are trapped under ice and quote unquote dead and
they're brought back to life and function normally. Sometimes they
don't function normally. But this isn't so much different than that, No,
it's not. It's and it's based on that, it's based
on the concept. It is um so Chuck you're saying
that if you, let's say you are a member of
(09:55):
al Core Life Extension Foundation, right, which apparently is not
that expensive. They liken it to um a lifetime of
smoking cigarettes or having cable TV or the like, which
is pretty expensive. It is, but still, I mean it's
not as much as you would think. I think I
got the fees right here in front of me. Uh,
if your first family member is you gotta see here's
(10:17):
the deal. You gotta sign up, and you gotta pay
for life, and then you gotta pay I believe, for
the process on top of that, right, because it's a
membership club. And then yeah, you're you're there's going to
be a spike and pay when you die. So a
first family member is six hundred and twenty bucks a year.
Each additional family member if you want them on your
(10:39):
cell phone plan, is three hundred and ten dollars a year.
Minor family member is a hundred and fifty five bucks
a year. Minor family just an aunt, I guess, not
like not siblings or or nothing being a kid. Oh
really no, because it said oh no, no, wait, you're right,
says under eighteen, like an aunt, you don't that's like
(11:01):
outside the nucle your family, all right, and if you're
a student, good news. It's only three d and ten
bucks a year. But I imagine you're right jumps up
when you graduate, because you're not always screw you when
you graduate. So that's just the membership fees. The actual
body freezing is up to article says to our course
two hundred now and the in the brain is eighty.
(11:23):
And there's search charges if you're in England a fifteen grand.
Outside US, Canada and England it's grand. I wonder why.
And then you can also get if you're not a member,
you can pay for a family member. Like let's say
none of us are members, and you want to freeze
your father, the herbal Elvis upon his expiration, you would
(11:45):
have to pay fifty grand two D fifty grand because
there weren't there weren't any membership dues. Yeah, so it's
a fifty dollar surcharge if if you just want to say, hey,
I want my dad frozen, and none of us were
ever members, all right, I'll have to talk to at
about that, see what he thinks. Um. So uh, let's
say you are remembering good standing, you you've got, you know,
(12:09):
minor family members totally insured under this plan or as
members as well. And we should also say we keep
saying al Core. Al Core is the one of the
it's far and away the most widely known cryonics group.
But um, there's like at least two others, the one
(12:29):
in Michigan. Let's just go to their websites if you
want to compare them. The Alcore looks pretty, they're both legit.
But's website it looks sort of like in MySpace pace
it does. My advice to in the Michigan Institute is
to just pay some money to your website seriously if
you want to, if you want to be taken seriously.
But that's the one that was founded by um Robert Edinger. Well,
(12:50):
and I think he did the website in Yeah, I
think so too. He's like, someday there's going to be
an Internet and this is gonna be the first thing
on it and it's never gonna change. Um. So, okay,
let's say you're remembering good standing at any of the
the the cryonics UH groups or foundations or labs and
you're about to die, right yep, what happens to Chuck
(13:12):
take us through the process. Well, the first thing that
happens is they are literally at your deathbed. The team
is waiting for you to expire. I want armies. And
as soon as they do that, as soon as you die, rather,
they will, as the article says, spring into action. And also, Chuck,
we should say they have to wait until you declare
(13:33):
deatti to um to put someone into a cryonic suspension,
or as the Michigan website says, right now, it's illegal. Okay.
So I think they envision the future or where you're
if you're on life support or something you could probably
or if you're just fully healthy, they also envisioned a
future or we reanimate dead people. Yeah, that's true. Uh
(13:54):
So what they do is they spring into action. They
stabilize your body by getting blood flowing in oxygen, but
I guess not too much oxygen, and they pack you
an ice and pump in some heperin, which is an
anti coagulant so your blood doesn't clot. And then they
rush the opposite of Calf's stomach. Yeah exactly, and then
(14:14):
they rush you to the facility where the real science begins. Right,
And it's about here that things get a tad um
cutting edge, I would say, so. So Basically, what they
have to do is remove the water from your body,
right and not just like your p or your saliva.
(14:34):
They gotta literally get the water out of your cells. Yeah.
I read at least six of your cells, so it
must be all the organ cells and and and they
go after the brain in particular. Your brain is of
the utmost importance. UM. And you can actually have your
brain alone cryonically suspended for something like fifty k K
(14:56):
raised it in the past five Here is this article written.
I don't think it's that long ago, but hey, it
ain't cheap um. And they still stort in your head.
By the way, it's not like futurama. Oh cool, they
said it does too much damage and why bother. Their
head is a great bowling ball case essentially, so here
they just cut your head off and preserve the whole thing.
But it's really just your brain that's undergone the vitrification process. Yeah,
(15:20):
that is neat ted. Williams's head is floating somewhere. His
whole body wasn't. They removed the body there in two
separate chambers. Oh, that's right ahead of at um. So uh.
When you're on the table, they remove the water from
your body, and how did they do that? I didn't
understand how they remove water from your cells? You're asking me, Yeah,
(15:42):
I don't know. Is it a pressing? I don't know, man,
I've had the doctor. I tried to find out the
literal process of how they get the water from the
cells and replace it with the anti freeze. But they do.
They do replace it with anti freeze, a glycol based
um basically a human anti freeze syro protectant is what
they call it, a Cairo cry We got there eventually,
(16:08):
croct Jerry's like, this is not their best day. Yeah,
it's a cryo protective. So they pump you full of
this stuff basically like embalming fluid that will never freeze UM.
And then they lay you on a bed of um
dry ice. And here, this is astounding to me that
(16:28):
you can even get any tissue down to this this
um degree. But basically they freeze your body. They I'm sorry,
they vitrify your body down to negative a hundred and
thirty degrees celsius, which is negative two d and two
degrees fahrenheight, negative two hundred degrees fahreheight. And they're like
absolute zero. I don't know we've called on that before, right,
(16:51):
I will figure it out. No, we've been called out
on whether forty degrees is negative forties the same in
celsius or fahrenheight, which it is. Um. And then once
your body reaches that temperature, you're vitrified, you're ready to go,
You're ready to be stored for up to ten thousand years.
And what they do is they put you in a tank. Right. Yeah, Well,
(17:13):
first of all, that means that means that your molecules
have slowed down to the point where the chemistry stops. Right,
there's no metabolism going on whatsoever. Nothing. It's called the
glass transition temperature. And uh so it just everything kind
of goes. That's suspended animation. It's a perfect example of it.
(17:34):
That's great. So they stuff you in the tank, right,
that's right, called a well, if if it's just your head,
it's called a neuropod, right, and then if it's your body,
it's called a um I think a cryopod. I'd call
it a full body pod. Okay, But so and then
they put you in a container that can hold maybe
(17:56):
four or five bodies because you're not by yourself. Yeah,
that's a little a weird Yeah, I thought so too, UM,
especially if somehow you're still cognizant, Like if that was
possible and you just didn't really like the people around you,
you're stuck would stink. UM. So there's a there's a
pretty nice picture of an alk core container that holds
(18:17):
UM four whole body pods and six neuropods. Right, UM,
So it's like a freaky futuristic nursing home in there,
you know. UM. And there you go. You're you're on
ice as it were for ten thousand years, and then
every once in a while they have UM what are
(18:38):
called UM profusion thresholds I believe, and then have software
that measures that like the concentration of liquid nitrogen, because
that's what you're in. You're in a bad of liquid
nitrogen that's being cooled down ultimately, even even less than
two d and two degrees high, it's down. When you're
in cold storage as it were, UM, you are stored
(19:00):
in about negative three twenty degrees fahrenheit, and liquid nitrogen
at that temperature will eventually evaporate, so they have to
keep adding some and they have software that monitors this,
and there you go. You're officially in cryogenic suspension head
head down, upside down, yeah, which I thought was pretty
clever in fact to the podcast for me, if there's
a leak, do you want your head down because you
(19:23):
want your brain? I guess if it leaks, the bottom
obviously will be the last bit too contain any of
the liquid, so that's where they want your head. It's
very clever. But again, if you're the least bit conscious
or cognizant or anything like, you're you're dead. Yeah, but man,
can you imagine like that? That gives me a headache
just thinking about being upside down? I'm sure it's awful.
(19:43):
All the frozen blood brushes to your head, that's right,
and one giant block ice I see blood, yeah, vitrified
that's right. So, um, what's the deal with all this chuck?
I mean, as we said, it's a lot of people
who criticize this stuff, and it seems like for good measure,
(20:05):
they're saying, like, you know, you're just like this is
a nice, fancy process that you guys have come up with,
and we're sure that you know you're doing everything you're saying,
and yes, it is based on real science, but you
can base anything on real science. And it's still just
pseudo science. If it's not science, it's pseudoscience, it's trickery. Right. Well,
(20:27):
they get a lot of heat obviously, places like al
Core do, and they one of the problems, they say
is that UM, first of all, it's it's based on
three very different, uh scientific fields. So the reason why
most scientists don't come out and say this can work
is because they're scientists in a single given field and
(20:50):
they don't understand that this involves three very different disciplines
like podiatrists. So yeah, exactly. Uh. One of the other
problems is that they they one of the reasons that
uh what they call cryobiologists or yes, cryo biologists, people
who study UM low temperature biology. Yeah, they say that
(21:11):
they don't come out and say it can work because
they feel like it has been given the pseudoscience moniker
and so it will overshadow the real work they've done,
quote unquote real work that they've done with other kinds
of cryo freezing. So they're just like, I don't even
want to talk about that stuff, right, I mean, your
professional reputation is at stake. Yeah. Sure, But again that
(21:33):
doesn't necessarily mean that just because UM skeptics have labeled
this fraud that it doesn't necessarily work. The other big
point as far as um crionic groups or boards or whatever, um,
the the point that they tend to make usually is
that we have no idea how to reanimate anybody. Yeah,
(21:55):
they're upfront about that. Yeah, they're saying, like, what we're doing,
and um, this is what al core life extension is
known for. Is basically they know how to vitrify tissue
and then just keep it that way, um, indefinitely. And
so that's what they're saying they're doing. And basically they're
just the keepers of these bodies that are in suspended
(22:17):
animation or dead depending on your view, um, until we
come up with a way to revive them and repair
anything that might have been wrong with them. And the
the great white hope, apparently is among cryogenic adherents is nanotechnology,
which makes sense right, which is uh, I mean nanotechnology.
(22:38):
They can get down to the single atom and and
do mechanics work essentially right, repair work on the cells.
So they think that that is the future of being
able to reanimate people like this, which again it's it's um,
that's all well and good, but you can't just be like, oh, yeah,
we heard about nanotechnology and that's probably where it will be.
(22:58):
And how about this, Not only will it be the
field of nanotechnology that reanimates people, but it will be
in which is apparently the number that they throw out.
So um dubious there. But it seems like if they
stick to the fact that no, we're putting people in
suspended animation, and there's a good chance that if death
(23:18):
is a process and we're getting to this process, we're
interrupting this process, then we can reverse it. Yeah, they're
not saying we're promising eternal life. We we're promising that
we can bring you back from the dead. They're basically
pretty upfront about saying we are a high tech storage facility. Period.
So when we when we talk about reanimating people, this
(23:40):
is not new. Um. The idea of reanimating a corps
is extremely old. Um. There's a there was this cool
little movement in the nineteenth century called galvanic reanimation. What's that.
Basically it amounted to um hooking recently killed executed criminals
(24:03):
up to like huge batteries via cables and during public
display like applying the electricity and making them like twitch
and making their eyes open or making them grimace horribly.
And that was like how you reanimated a corpse, which
by definition that is reanimating it, but you're not. It's
(24:24):
the technical definition, you know. Um, it didn't imbue any
life into it, but it did give Mary Shelley a
good idea for Frankenstein. Yeah there, you know, that was
a whole idea for a very long time, that like,
if you could, under the right circumstances, introduce an electrical
current to life, you know, to a dead body, you
(24:45):
can bring it back to life, which is pretty clever
if you think about it, because this was before the
time of neuroscience, or about the time it was nascent, right,
and neuroscience, if anything, has given us the awareness that
everything is the result of like electro chemical conduction throughout
the body. So it was pretty smart to think of
(25:07):
electricity as a way to reanimate bodies, although it doesn't
do anything. Yeah. Well, and that's also the reason why
they obviously the brain is so important, and they say
you can just opt for the eighty dollar head freeze
because maybe in the future, I mean for far along,
far enough along where we can reanimate a person from
cryogenic freezing. Then we should be at the point where
(25:29):
we can clone you a body to go along with
that head. Why not a hot body too? Oh yeah, sure,
I would wear Daisy dukes all the time in my body.
You don't even wear shorts now, Well, I don't have
a hot cloned body. I've seen you in shorts once, actually,
when when you came over to my house to bar
the lot more. You hound shorts really and I saw
(25:51):
your bare leg I've seen you in boxer shorts too.
When I think in one of our trips, like you
changed clothes in front of me or something, I think
should get a little more specific for the audience. Well,
I mean we didn't have like a dress up party,
but it was like, hey, I gotta you know, we're
late for something and you were changing your clothes or something.
I don't know. I mean, I didn't market on my
(26:14):
Guatemala I'll bet in Guatemala Lake that one crazy day.
So anyway, that was just happened there. That was possibly
the wildest tangent we've ever been on. You've seen me
in my boxers and in shorts senior bare legs, and
they're fine. I don't see why you don't like shorts.
(26:35):
I'm just no, no, not for you. Um, but it
could be for a cloned body, right right, Yeah, let's
just get back to it, buddy. Um. And uh again
back to the reanimation research there. I think we've talked
about before, Max Planck Institute, back in two thousand. There's
just one thing on the web and I can't find
any follow up stuff or any lead up stuff, but
(26:57):
basically they're talking about what. Um, the arapeutic hypothermia research
has shown that if you it's not death that injures
cells and tissue and makes them unreanimateable. It's trying to
reanimate them and doing it too quickly. And um, they
were working on reanimating dead bodies. Um. And apparently since
(27:20):
then we have figured out how to reanimate some cryo
preserved tissue like a rabbit kidney. Yeah, it worked. In
two thousand five, apparently they vitrified a rabbit kidney. Um.
They took it out of a rabbit, they said you
wait here, vitrified the kidney, brought it back, put it
back in the rabbit and said go urinate, and the
(27:42):
rabbit did, and the kidney exploded. The and uh. They
have also reanimated a nematode worm. Um, big deal. But hey,
it worked, but no other mammals. Yeah, they said, dogs
and monkeys they've had their blood placed. Well remember that
that supposed to Russian research film from head God, that's awful.
(28:09):
But dogs and monkeys, they've had their blood replaced with
the anti freeze essentially cooled it to below zero degrees
and rewarmed it and revived them successfully. But that's zero
degrees is a long long way from negative three. Yes,
but but they're pointing this to this and saying, hey, look,
(28:30):
this is this could be possible. And it wasn't even vitrified.
Was that it was just brought to a low temperature. No, no, no,
it said their blood was replaced. Okay, Um, I don't
know if all the cells were, but the blood was
at least so Um. There are things to look for
in the future when you are successfully reanimated, possibly given
(28:53):
a cloned body that wears Daisy Dukes a lot um.
And there's gonna be some legal issues that people are
already starting to think of about reanimating. Yes, for example,
when you are taken off to the cryonic facility. As
far as society and the court system and Social Security
administration is you're illegally dead. You didn't think about that.
(29:15):
What happens when you come back to life. You have
to apply to be a new person again, I guess.
So they figured that probably if somebody who's presumed dead
and wasn't right, but they were declared legally dead and
they come back after that, there there nobody says well sorry,
and nobody's gonna say that somebody who's reanimated. But one
of the other propositions that they they're considering is a
(29:36):
possibility is issuing you a new birth certificate? Really yeah,
and they're cool that is, so you would be literally
reborn as far as the law is concerns. Um. And
then also what happens, chuck. Has happened in the nineties
seventies when there were I think six big cryogenic suspension
(29:58):
companies and operation and that number dropped dramatically in the
late seventies early eighty And what happened to those bodies?
You know, I do know they were left to rot?
Really yes they have. The company went bankrupt and said,
we don't have any money to keep these things going.
And um, since it was a corporation, they could say
that the person walked away, but the bodies were just
(30:20):
left to thaw and rot, and that's what happened. Um
our Core supposedly has a fund set aside to where
if anything happens to the company, it will provide a
bridge to continue care until they figure out what to
do with these That's where a lot of goes supposedly.
I think about half of that goes into that trust.
And I was researching them. Apparently they have a self
(30:42):
perpetuating board, which they're frequently criticized for because it's just
there's no new blood in there as it were. But
the board is generally or has been very transparent about
how much money is paid, like um in supposedly they
announced that they were gonna slash their staffs pay across
(31:03):
the board. By the average staff worker, they're made like
twenty grand. Board members don't get paid at all, right, right, UM,
So it's supposedly these people are just into it, like
two UM further cryonic research and and keep these bodies suspended. Right.
That's what you'll see on their website at least, right.
(31:25):
But I was reading some outside links. There's this blog
called Depressed Metabolism, which is just about all that UM
and they were going over a two thousand nine al
Core report UM. But they seem very conservative but not
good at generating their own income. They rely a lot
on donations. All the technology they use as licensed elsewhere,
(31:46):
so there's like bleeding money, but they manage to stay
aflow because of donations from like wealthy members, which is
kind of unfair. So, but they're very conservative to UM,
whereas like the Cryonics Institute was always kind of UM
criticized for being like a little reckless, a little cutting edge,
but they were looking at cryonics is not necessarily a
(32:07):
way to keep UM people in suspended animation, But how
do we apply this medically and get these people reanimated again, right,
not just indefinitely, you know, increasing animation well, and how
do you get medical mainstream medical science behind this period
is one of their big battles. Uh I. Now that
al cores in Arizona and then two thousand four there
(32:29):
was a bill passed by the House there in Arizona
that basically was going to put them under the regulation
of the State Funeral Board, which would have effectively probably
shut them down, and it was pulled from the floor,
but they said it was a really nasty debate on
the floor. And uh, because there's a lot of religious
ethical ramifications here that that I guess we could talk about,
(32:50):
but they said that we don't know. This could come
back and they could shut us down. You never know,
and in Arizona at least, but the ethical concerns is
alcor On their website again has addressed some of these
because a lot of religious folks might say, this is not,
you know, something you should be doing. You shouldn't be
(33:11):
playing God, quote unquote, and they say that patients are
theologically equivalent to unconscious patients in a hospital with an
uncertain prognosis theologically speaking. And they've had people right into
like people in the Catholic Church and Protestant churches and
even the Jesus Christ Church of Jesus Christ of the
(33:33):
Latter day Saints. They've written essays supporting it. Some people
have Yeah, it's like if you're on life support, you're
playing God or somebody's playing God with you. But other
people in religious circles have blasted it. So it's it
depends on how you want to listen to. Yes, it does.
And they said it's not just for the rich. That's
one of the myths. They say it's not an indulgence
of the rich. They say most of the membership is
(33:54):
middle class. Yeah, and paid for with insurance, Yeah, life
insurance on don't Is that true? I have I didn't
get a chance to research that one. Looking not for myself,
but Paul Rud's making a movie about this. Did you
see that? It's been done? No what Iceman? No? No, no,
no no. Um ice Man to the Return of Iceman
(34:18):
ice Man three, The Iceman Jr. What else? Well, this
one is bona fide uh Errol Morris, the awesome documentarian.
He's making his first, uh, non documentary film since the
early nineties. Fiction, I'm sure, but it's not fiction because
it's a true story. So the first first feature film.
(34:41):
Um wow, man, that's awesome. Yeah, it's because it came
out with a new documentary recently, too, didn't he Yeah,
it's uh, it's about that. It's about the tabloid scandal
when that woman kidnapped the those Mormon I don't know.
I think it's a woman kidnapped some Mormon guy and
like took her, took him away to some aven and
forced sex upon him for like months and then came
(35:04):
back and was a celebrity because of it in the seventies. Yeah,
it looks really good. So his feature film, Sorry, that's
all right, it's uh. It's based on the memoir by
Robert F. Nelson called Uh and taken from this American
Life segment and Ira Glasses producing This isn't everything taken
from any this American Life segment And the name of
This American Lives was Your as Cold at You're Cold
(35:26):
as Ice was the name of their show. Personally, I
think high frozen body a little better, way better, Chuck,
way to So Paul read one of my favorites. He's
playing this dude. Yeah, good for him. Good. Oh we
need to talk about Ted Williams real quick. Oh yeah,
good lord. That was close. Well, as you said, Walt
(35:47):
Disney was not uh suspended and liquid nitrogen, but Ted
Williams the famous hit her last hit her to hit
four hundred in baseball is yeah. He's an Alcore member.
Two thousand two, they put him on Vitrify and um,
they said it to Vitrify and he was like, whoa
(36:09):
his there's There was a legal battle over it. Um.
Apparently his daughter was accusing his son of having him
uh vitrified put in cryonics animation or suspended animation um
because he wanted to later sell his dad's d n A,
which apparently his son was like, yeah, maybe, but dad
(36:29):
still wanted to. We had a sign packed me and
our other sister, but not you and so um. He
didn't even know him till he was thirty, though he
was a half brother or half so okay. Well, Ted
was running around telling people all sorts of different stuff.
Apparently he told his daughter that he wanted to be
um scattered his He wanted to be cremated and have
(36:50):
his cremated remains scattered over the Florida Keys. The daughter
the son said no, we had a packed a signed packed,
which apparently he was a will to produce. So Judge said, okay,
Ted's again his stay frozen. You can't sell his DNA
bing bang boom by Jovi yeah and then banging a gable.
The sun got a he he was painted in an
(37:13):
unfair light because of the Sports Illustrated article by Tom
Verducci that basically slammed him as Hey, this kid didn't
even know until he's thirty, He's gonna sell his DNA
and it was apparently he got one version of the
story and that's it and stopped his fact checking there.
So I've seen follow up reports where this guy was
like that ain't what happened, and I did not want
(37:33):
to sell his DNA and like we really got to
be close after I met him later in life, and
blah blah blah blah blah blah. Well you got anything else?
Just if you want to know how popular this is
um As of June of this year, Alcor has nine
d and fifty members and a hundred and six quote
unquote patients. Yeah, that's what. And Michigan at the Cryonics
(37:57):
Institute I believe has over a hundred. So there's a
cup one hundred and change people current currently in the
United States upside down like that of liquid nitrogen with
other people, one of them my be Ted Williams. I
wonder if they're like, hey, check it out. Yeah, the
Yankee Clipper. No, that was Joe Di Maggio, Tied Williams
was the boss. That was he He was the Red Sox.
(38:20):
It was like the Monster. I always confused him with
Johnny Bench. Didn't they play at the same time or
call your stremski? Uh? Maybe it may have overlapped. It
was like the big hitter or the monster hitter. Well
he was the last player to hit four hundred, so yeah,
I can't remember. Anyway, Let you go, Ted Um. If
you want to learn more about baseball, we encourage you
(38:42):
to type that word into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com. You can also type in cryonics
C R Y O N I C s UM and
that will lead you to some cool articles. Also, uh,
if you have not gotten around to reading HP Lovecraft's
brilliant shorts story Herbert West re Animator, Oh yeah, check
(39:03):
it out. Probably his best. Um And I said re animator,
which means that it's time for a listener mail. That's right, boy,
I'm gonna get hammered by Yankee fans and Red Sox
fans for that. I'm back off of that one. Jody
Maggio's a Yankee clipper. Ted Williams is the monster, well
the green monster is? Is that what you're thinking? I mean,
(39:27):
that's influencing it. But there's something there all right. Today,
Josh I got on Facebook I don't know if he saw,
and I was like, I can't find any good listener mail,
So some help tell me some stories, and I just
got a few of those to read off. Nathan. I'm sorry.
Nathaniel jerk jeriko Witz Jerkovitz got hit by a car
while walking home from work earlier this week. As I
(39:49):
was listening to one of your episodes cool which one
I don't know? He said. He rolled off the hood
and checked to make sure nothing was broken, and then
scrolled back to what I had missed. Nice and uh,
yeah that was Nathan. Nathaniel, So I hope you're okay. Yeah,
hanging there, Nathaniel, Billina Elena said. My doctor says I
mispronounced letters when I speak, not because of a list,
(40:11):
but because I have a heart shaped uvula, to be honest,
until he pointed out, I didn't have any idea that
everyone else's uvulop did not have a split in the center.
How about that? Yeah, split uvul Yeah, I've heard of that.
And Angie Speken says, uh. When I was seven years old,
my mom spotted a wood tick in my ear while
(40:33):
eating in the subway. I screamed hysterically. My stepdad tried
to remove it with a plastic variety of plastic cutlery,
and then a seemingly toward tracked at the attention of
a cop who tried his best with keys. I started
to bleed from my ear and the subway told us
to leave the subway. Did My mom sat me on
a bench outside, continued the quest. The man sitting next
(40:55):
to it next to us asked about why I was screaming,
and once my mom told him, he asked if he
could try and produce a hook for a hand. What
is going on with this story? I'm so confused. She
had a chicken re ear and no one could get
it out. They went outside and this dude the subway
told him, dude, and then this dude with a hook
on his hand said, can I give it a shot? Okay,
(41:16):
it's got to New York. I screamed even louder as
my mother help me down, and the man plucked the
tick from my ear. So I wanted to I thank
him for saving my life. And it's still I still
smile every time I encounter a person with a hook
for a hand and they think that she's laughing at him.
I don't know. And then finally, congratulations to our buddy
Andy John Cox. Yeah with the mustache he got engaged.
(41:39):
Oh hey, congratulations and she said yes, and uh, he's
getting married and and he's one of our boys. And
way to go, dude, and it's fantastic. Way to go.
I'm sure you shaved off the mustache and it said
will you marry me underneath it? And Ben I think
they do. Uh. Yeah, that was a great idea. Chuck Stories.
You got a story you want to hear it? Wait
(42:00):
until Chuck asks not forget it. Just go ahead and
let us now go into our Facebook page. It's a
Facebook dot com slash stuff. You should know. You can
also tweet us stories if they consist of a hundred
and forty characters or less, that'd be good. Um too,
that's a great idea. You can We want your hundred
and forty character story's on Twitter? Um, good idea. Chuck
s y s K podcast is our Twitter handle, and
(42:24):
then you can also send us email to Stuff Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to you by the
(42:46):
reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.