Sellers of immortality
The article was published in the 4th issue of BestLife magazine
If the Philosopher's stone were only suitable for obtaining gold, alchemists might not have struggled with its riddle with such zeal. Much more important was his ability to heal all diseases, rejuvenate the elderly and prolong life – either for a very long time, or even indefinitely.
At the beginning of the third millennium, the dream of immortality is still a dream, only immortalists and transhumanists took the place of alchemists. The former are more inclined to biological methods of prolonging life and, ideally, achieving personal immortality, while the latter are more inclined to technical methods of solving the same problem. There are no fundamental differences or clear boundaries between these currents. As, however, between biologists who study the mechanisms of aging and ways to combat it from a strictly scientific standpoint, and the heirs of medieval alchemists, whose promises seem at best to be fiction, or even outright fraud.
Frozen
The most famous product from the price list of sellers of immortality is cryopreservation. The American physicist and mathematician Robert Ettinger was the first to express this idea. His book "Prospects of Immortality", published in the USA in 1964, was published in Russia in 2003. The translator is the CEO of the first domestic company offering services for storing the bodies of the deceased in liquid nitrogen (-196 ° C) in the hope that someday our descendants will develop a technology for defrosting, reviving and treating diseases or injuries that caused death. And at the same time – rejuvenation: most of the frozen died at an advanced age, and the living clients of cryofirms who signed contracts for freezing hope for the same.
In this area, Russia is making up with leaps and bounds for forty years behind America, the first and until recently the only country in which cryopreservation is allowed. We do not have an official permit for this, but there is no law prohibiting the storage of the dead in refrigerators. Unlike, for example, France, where the state's long-term litigation with Monsieur Remy Martineau, who kept his late parents at an obviously insufficient temperature of -65 °, dragged on for many years and ended naturally: the bodies defrosted due to equipment problems.
Of the approximately twenty cryonauts frozen until 1980, only the very first one has survived – James Bedfort, a professor of psychology from Los Angeles, who died of cancer in January 1967. The rest of the pioneers will never wait for the resurrection – due to violations of storage conditions, including banal power outages and leaks of liquid nitrogen, greed of heirs who stopped paying for services, and as a result of the bankruptcy of cryofirms. Now there are only two of them left in the USA – the Cryonics Institute and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. According to the latest data, there are 167 corpses and heads in their cryocamers – storing the head costs twice as much, and descendants who have learned to revive the frozen dead will surely be able to grow a new body for it. There are still a dozen or two individual enthusiasts in the rest of the world.
In Russia, seven "storage units" have been frozen in just three years, and another cryopharm is scheduled to open in January 2009. But is it worth counting on the resurrection of the frozen? It looks like this cannon won't fire for many reasons.
With the technologies currently available, it is possible to freeze and defrost small portions of cells soaked through with cryoprotectors – substances that prevent the formation of ice crystals without irreversible damage. Samples of sperm, eggs, embryos at the earliest stages of development, small tissue samples or cultures of stem cells and a variety of other cells have been stored for decades. After thawing, they remain viable and suitable for in vitro fertilization, cloning, treatment or biological research, but not all cells come to life at the same time (for example, 60% of surviving sperm cells in sperm banks – the result is quite acceptable.) Researchers have been promising to pick up a cryoprotector capable of impregnating whole organs before decomposition processes begin in the tissues for a long time, regularly shifting the completion dates for another ten years. Moreover, the goals of cryobiologists are by no means global: vitrification technologies (the transformation of freezing water not into crystals, but into an amorphous, glassy state) are needed primarily for the storage of donor organs. Serious scientists are more than skeptical about the ideas of cryonics – it is enough that everyone who has been frozen and will be frozen without vitrification, all thawed cells, including neurons, will be guaranteed and completely unviable. And if the technology of fast and harmless freezing (and defrosting!) the whole body, or at least the brain, will be developed – what's the use of such formally living neurons?
To freeze a living person, even terminally ill and obviously dying, and even at his large and notarized request is a pure criminal offense. Freezing can be started only after one hundred percent confirmation of biological death. And from the experience of resuscitation, it is known that after the onset of clinical death (cessation of breathing and palpitation), the chances of recovery are catastrophically falling every minute and the probability of irreversible changes in the psyche due to the death of blood-deprived neurons is growing just as quickly. Without blood supply and at normal temperature, brain functions are preserved for no more than 5-7 minutes.
People who drowned in icy water sometimes managed to revive after half an hour of clinical death. But the best of the existing (and not yet clinically tested) medical refrigerants is "Ice Slurry" ("Ice slurry") – a mixture of saline solution and rounded ice particles less than 0.1 mm in size. The maximum that can be achieved with its help (2-4 liters of suspension into the lungs plus artificial respiration and blood circulation) is the cooling of the brain by six degrees in ten minutes. This will allow surgeons to carry out longer and more complex operations that require turning off the blood supply to organs, including the brain, and cryonauts are unlikely to increase the chances of recovery: if a team of freezers starts working immediately after the doctor signs a death certificate (biological death is pronounced with complete cessation of brain activity), cooling is already the dead brain will take at least a few more hours to reach 0 °C. Moreover, freezing a client, even with future technologies as close to ideal as possible, is not half or even a quarter of the case.
The current clients of cryofirms are one hundred percent dead, whose soul flew far beyond the bright end of the tunnel and is not subject to return. And if one day it is allowed to freeze living people with a normally functioning brain, and a method of non–destructive freezing is developed in a matter of minutes - will the memory and at least a grain of reason remain in the unfrozen? Will the functions of higher nervous activity be restored after the termination of the electrical activity of neurons, or will the connections between them be completely destroyed? Unfortunately, the second option seems more likely. The fact that in rats and dogs, briefly cooled to temperatures just above zero, when the functional activity of the brain almost completely stops, conditioned reflexes were preserved in some experiments, is comforting, but not too much. The distance between the dog's reflexes and the human personality and between the "almost complete" and absolute cessation of nervous activity is too great.
Sellers of liquid nitrogen also leave the solution of many other problems to distant descendants. For example, the defrosting method is fast enough and at the same time allows avoiding elementary cracking of the body and even more so cell damage. Much more complex issues of restoring health and rejuvenation of the body and brain are also left for later. With the help of nanorobots? But now they are nothing more than a fantastic dream and, perhaps, they will remain so.
However, even the most frostbitten supporters of freezing do not promise their customers anything for their money beyond what is stipulated in the contract: freezing according to the existing (whatever it is) technology and storage on demand (if nothing force majeure happens during storage). What it will cost to defrost, revive, heal and rejuvenate (if it will ever be possible at all) and who will pay for it is also a matter of the future. However, Ettinger himself, according to rumors, answered such questions clearly and concretely: "I just built a lighthouse of hope, and whether to swim to it or not is up to you."
Anyone can buy an even more shaky surrogate of immortality, and not for tens of thousands of dollars, but for absolutely ridiculous money.
Sleight of hand
If the Israeli entrepreneur Agmon David is not lying about the contract with Roscosmos, then in the spring of 2009 a Russian rocket will launch a satellite into Earth orbit with capsules containing DNA samples of people who will not spare $87 for it. For another two dollars, you can launch a whole megabyte of accompanying information into space. At the beginning of January 2009 on the website of the author of this strange idea (beinspace.com ) there were almost 500 customers. According to one of them, "It's like winning the lottery. Who knows, maybe the aliens will find my DNA and make me anew."
About "me" – isn't it too optimistic? Not "you", but your newborn twin – what is the use and pleasure for you from this? And these aliens don't really need DNA samples. For example, Richard Garriott, space tourist No. 6, developer of the computer game Tabula Rasa and the Ultima series, returning in October 2008 from a ten–day trip to the ISS, left there a program "driver of immortality" written by himself - an illustrated encyclopedia of human achievements, including a digital record of the structure of human DNA. If a hypothetical super-duper civilization gets to this DVDAND will be able to read the program, synthesize DNA and clone its owner, it will be able to use this information. If he wants to. And the fact that neither the satellite with capsules nor the ISS will live so long is the second question.
Be born a baobab?
In my opinion, the most rotten of the products on the immortality market is the proposal to store the human genome for future cloning... in tree cells. In the summer of 2008, Vesti showed the first Russian pope Carlo in the story "A St. Petersburg scientist crossed a man with a tree." An employee of the laboratory, the footage from which the TV crews, without the knowledge of the participants, were used to shoot apple trees with tombstones, wrote on the Vesti website: "If my head in Photoshop was attached to a naked aunt in an indecent pose and printed in the yellow press, then I could sue. And what to do in a situation when the footage shot in our laboratory is mounted with this nonsense, and our scientific reputation is lowered below the baseboard? Everyone has already called us who could, everyone is having a lot of fun."
I also had a lot of fun – especially when I read a retelling (including long quotes) of fictions from my own April Fool's article written three years before in an article in The Week devoted to this delusional idea. Type the word “Bioabsence" in any search engine – most of those who reprinted this joke in Runet also have a bad education and a sense of humor. But neither I nor the founders of the English firm Biopresence had enough imagination to insert a complete human genome suitable for cloning into plant cells. Which in fact did not go further than the declaration of the idea and did not grow a single "tombstone tree". And in the articles that flew around the Russian media after the transfer of "Vesti", the opportunity to reincarnate the dead was presented in all seriousness and with a hint that customers were breaking down to the St. Petersburg representative of the British fox Alice and the cat Basilio: "Tempting? That's not the word. After all, those who dream of having cloned toddlers in diapers stomping around their apartment – deceased grandparents and other ancestors and friends – are more than enough. And even more of those who are ready to implant their own DNA into a green friend – for the sake of finding a new life in the future."
We will leave behind the scenes both the ethical side of the issue and the legal one. Although the temporary moratorium on human cloning in Russia has ceased to operate since the spring of 2007, and theoretically it is not prohibited – so anyone can try. Just to begin with, you will have to find about five hundred natural donor eggs and three hundred surrogate mothers in the hope of getting at least one genetic copy of your beloved grandfather: when cloning mammals, the probability of successful childbirth is less than a percent, and with primates it is even more difficult… The rest (technical!) the obstacles to human cloning are solvable or, most likely, will be solved in the near future, but not by the efforts of a single enthusiast. And certainly not from the genetic material stored in the apple tree (oak, baobab ...): if you add 46 human chromosomes to the 34th chromosomes of the apple tree, complete anarchy will occur in the cells, absolutely excluding the viability of such a monster. So clones in diapers grown from chromosomes stored in apple trees are either fictions of journalists, or deliberate deception.
And those who want to grow a drevodushka, at best, will get what, apparently, the founders of the Biopresence company came up with:
a) a tree with some grandfather's gene inserted into one of its chromosomes - perhaps it will even work if you take for this not just any one, but one of thousands of genes identical in humans and plants;
b) or the same thing, only not with a gene, but with a non-coding, "junk" sequence of nucleotides from some grandfather's chromosome;
c) or just an ordinary seedling without any extra genes, but with a certificate on glossy paper with a seal and a hologram.
In my opinion, there is no difference between these three options. And why such difficulties? It is much easier to grow a genetically exact copy of the customer from the nucleus of his skin cell frozen for a rainy day and a donor egg. Although, if we are talking about personal immortality, the clone itself is only a blank…
But we will not discuss the prospects of cloning a new body with the transplantation of an old brain into it or rewriting the customer's personality into empty convolutions. Even if it is technically feasible, such cannibalistic methods of prolonging life are unlikely to ever be implemented. Moreover, immortalists and transhumanists have no more fantastic, but much more ethical ideas.
Dreams, dreams…
Consciousness can be transferred to an electronic medium, and it can be connected to the Internet and (or) screwed to an android robot. The idea of universal and complete cyborgization of mankind is supported by the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil (among other things, also known for the fact that his predictions tend to come true). The appearance of the first cybernetic immortals, in his opinion, can be expected in twenty years. True, to read information from the brain, all the same nanorobots that remain fantastic will be required, but no futurological forecast can do without them now. And hardware and software for processing and reproducing information about a particular person will surely come up with during this time. Or they will postpone the terms of implementation, and then either the khan will die, or the donkey, or Nasreddin…
The second main direction in the pursuit of immortality is biological. The most famous of its representatives, Aubrey de Grey, himself threatens to live forever, and claims that in 20 years people can stop dying a natural death. The main thing that is missing for this is sufficient funding for the programs of the SENS – Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence project, created by him at the University of Cambridge, "Strategies for Projected Negligible aging". But the achievements and prospects of developing methods of prolonging life (even if not up to the "modest" figure of 5000 promised by de Gray, but only up to the species duration of 120-150 years released by nature) is a topic for a separate article.
Alexander Chubenko,
portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru11.03.2009