Frequently Asked Questions

Page 1 - Basic Questions

• What is Cryonics?
• Has anyone ever been revived?
• Aren't cryonics patients dead?
• How soon after the heart stops must cryonics begin?
• Isn't the preservation process fatal?
• When will patients be revived?
• Who will revive the patients?
• What about aging and disease?
• If cryonics works for me, won't all my friends and relatives be dead?
• What is the evidence?
• Is cryonics guaranteed to work?
• How might cryonics fail?
• What do experts say?
• How much does cryonics cost?
• How many members are currently signed up with Alcor?
• How many people are cryopreserved at Alcor?
• Under what laws does Alcor operate?
• Can I be cryopreserved before I legally die?
• Why did you choose the name Alcor?

Q: What is cryonics?

A: Cryonics is the practice of using very cold temperatures to stop the dying process when ordinary medicine can no longer sustain life. This is done with the intention of saving a patient's life until a cure for their illness can be found, and means developed to reverse the cryonics process. The technology to reverse cryonics is still theoretical. See About Cryonics.

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Q: Has anyone ever been revived?

A: No adult human has ever been revived from temperatures far below freezing. Cryonics patients are cared for in the expectation that future technology, especially molecular nanotechnology, will be available to reverse damage associated with the cryonics process.

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Q: Aren't cryonics patients dead?

A: Law requires cryonics patients to be legally dead, but this does not mean they are biologically dead. Under ideal conditions, cryonics can begin moments after the heart stops beating. Blood circulation and breathing are then artificially restored, keeping cells of the brain and the rest of the body biologically alive during the early stages of the procedure. The blood chemistry and blood gases (oxygen, carbon dioxide, pH) of a cryonics patient receiving good cardiopulmonary support are similar to those of a legally living person. Cryonics patients are therefore legally dead, but biologically alive, depending on how rapidly procedures are begun after the heart stops. For further clarification of this often confusing issue, please read Cardiopulmonary Support in Cryonics in the Alcor online Library.

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Q: How soon after the heart stops must cryonics begin?

A: Cryonics procedures should ideally begin within the first one or two minutes after the heart stops, and preferably within 15 minutes. Longer delays place a greater burden on future technology to reverse injury and restore the brain to a healthy state, and make it less likely that the correct original state can be determined. Exactly when such restoration is no longer feasible is a matter of some debate and could be many hours. The greatest impact of delay is that it prevents treatment by chemicals that reduce freezing injury. For further information, see the FAQ question "Doesn't the brain die after 4 to 6 minutes without oxygen?," the article "Cardiopulmonary Support in Cryonics," and the "Cases without Cardiopulmonary Support" section of Alcor Procedures.

The most effective way of reducing delays and getting the highest quality cryopreservation is to relocate to cooperative hospice care near Alcor (see the FAQ question "What can I do to optimize my chances of being cryopreserved under good conditions?").

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Q: Isn't the preservation process fatal?

A: Cold preservation (cryopreservation) is not yet reversible with present technology, but this says nothing about the abilities of future technology. What is "fatal" varies from place to place and time to time depending on available medical technology. Future medical capabilities should be able to heal and cure in cases that today would be considered hopeless, just as today's medicine would be viewed as miraculous in past centuries.

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Q: When will patients be revived?

A: That depends on when they are cryopreserved, the specific details of how well they are cryopreserved, and how rapidly future medical technologies, particularly molecular nanotechnology, are developed. Cryonics technology is always improving; it is better now than it was in 2000, which was better than it was in 1990, which in turn was much better than the crude methods used on the first cryonics patients in the late 1960s. Eventually a time will come when human suspended animation will be perfected. In other words, it will be possible to routinely turn people "off" and "on" for medical time travel, space travel and other purposes. As progress continues, it will then become possible to recover people preserved at earlier times, with less perfect methods and greater degrees of injury.

Some think it will take centuries before patients can be revived, while others think the accelerating pace of technological change might so rapidly transform our world that decades would suffice. Alcor is planning for however long it might take.

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Q: Who will revive the patients?

A: The short answer is "Alcor will revive them."

The third item in Alcor's mission statement is: "Eventually restore to health all patients in Alcor's care."

Reviving the patients is also required by Alcor's contracts with members: "When, in Alcor's best good faith judgement, it is determined that attempting revival is in the best interests of the Member in cryopreservation, Alcor shall attempt to revive and rehabilitate the Member."

Reviving the patients is also a duty of the Alcor Patient Care Trust: "At such time as Alcor deems that repair and revival of the Patients is feasible, the Trust shall expend whatever amounts of money are necessary to revive the Patients and reintroduce them to society, as long as on-going care of the Patients remaining in biostasis is not endangered. It is the intent of the Trust that such repair and revival proceed in such manner that ongoing Trust earnings reasonably can be predicted to provide for the eventual repair and revival of all Patients."

Financially, the Patient Care Trust should grow in real value over time — compound interest should eventually produce sufficient assets to cover the costs of revival. At the same time, as technology progresses the cost of reviving patients should decrease over time. Eventually, the ever increasing funds available in the PCT should be sufficient to pay for the ever decreasing costs of reviving the patients.

Socially, Alcor is a community. Some members of this community are alive and healthy, while others have been cryopreserved. This community forms an interconnected network of friendships and close ties. At any point in time the healthy members of this network have friends, relatives and loved ones in cryopreservation and will seek to revive them. Once revived, those members will in turn have other friends in cryopreservation, and they will in turn seek to revive them.

The plan is not for "them" to revive us. The plan is that we, the Alcor community, will revive ourselves.

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Q: What about aging and disease?

A: There is no point in prolonging life if the result will be illness and debilitation. People are now living longer, healthier lives than their grandparents, and their children will live longer still. Eventually, aging itself will be a treatable, reversible condition as medicine attains full control of the human body at the molecular level. By the time it becomes possible to revive cryonics patients, especially today's cryonics patients, biological aging as we know it today will not exist. In the 19th century, 30% of people living in Paris died of "consumption." Today almost no one in the industrialized world even knows what "consumption" is.

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Q: If cryonics works for me, won't all my friends and relatives be dead?

A: This depends on many factors, including when you are cryopreserved, how long you spend in cryopreservation, how long it takes to develop life-extending technologies, and whether your friends or family are themselves interested in being cryopreserved. It cannot be reliably predicted how many decades (or generations) it might take to develop the technologies needed to substantially lengthen lifespans or to revive patients from cryopreservation. You can increase your chances of seeing your current friends and family in the future by interesting them in cryonics or by making friends within the cryonics community. At any rate, if cryonics works it will give you the greatest opportunity of all — the ability to make new friends (including, perhaps, with your own descendants).

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Q: What is the evidence?

A: The practice of cryonics is justified by three facts:

1. Cells and organisms need not operate continuously to remain alive. Many living things, including human embryos, can be successfully cryopreserved and revived. Adult humans can survive cardiac arrest and cessation of brain activity during hypothermia for up to an hour without lasting harm. Other large animals have survived three hours of cardiac arrest near 0°C (+32°F ) (Cryobiology 23, 483-494 (1986)). There is no basic reason why such states of "suspended animation" could not be extended indefinitely at even lower temperatures (although the technical obstacles are enormous).
   
   
2. Existing cryopreservation techniques, while not yet reversible, can preserve the fine structure of the brain with remarkable fidelity. This is especially true for cryopreservation by vitrification. The observations of point (a) make clear that survival of structure, not function, determines survival of the organism.
   
   
3. It is now possible to foresee specific future technologies (see "A Cryopreservation Revival Scenario using Molecular Nanotechnology") that will one day be able to diagnose and treat injuries right down to the molecular level. Such technology could repair and/or regenerate every cell and tissue in the body if necessary. For such a technology, any patient retaining basic brain structure (the physical basis of their mind) will be viable and recoverable.

That is the argument for why cryonics should work, even though it is not reversible today.

It should also be realized based on point 3 that people in the early stages of what is considered death today will merely be in cardiac arrest to future physicians, and will be "coded" for resuscitation. Today's limit of 4 to 6 minutes for resuscitation without brain injury will likely expand to an hour or more in the future. That is why people are cryopreserved even if prompt cardiopulmonary support is not possible.

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Q: Is cryonics guaranteed to work?

A: No. Cryonics can fail in two ways. Either cryonics patients will not remain cryopreserved long enough to reach the medicine they need, or an insufficient record of their mind has been successfully cryopreserved.

The likelihood of the second failure mode has been diminishing for years as cryonics technology improves, and will continue to diminish. The risk of inadequate preservation may be ruled out completely within another decade if techniques for transplantable organ banking can be adapted to achieve reversible preservation of the brain.

At present, the greatest uncertainty seems to be whether cryonics patients will remain preserved long enough to reach the medicine they need. This includes the risk of socio-economic disruption, and the fact that the general public does not currently regard cryonics patients as people worthy of protection.

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Q: How might cryonics fail?

A: The degree to which cryonics is successful for a particular patient will depend on how much of the patient's original memory and personality survives the cryopreservation and restoration process.

Assuming future medical capabilities are as effective as we expect, complete molecular repair and tissue regeneration should permit recovery of perfect health after any injury other than complete physical destruction. Unlike medicine today, which can leave a patient alive but suffering from chronic and incurable physical or neurological deficits, mature medical capabilities based on molecular repair should be able to cure almost all medical conditions -- with the notable exception of permanent memory loss. Even here, it is important to distinguish between (1) loss of memory caused by failure of the retrieval mechanisms (which could eventually be cured), and (2) loss of memory caused by obliteration of the memory trace itself (which even future medical technology would not be able to repair).

Survival of your memories and personality depend on the extent of survival of brain structures that store your memories and other identity-critical information. While cryonics under ideal conditions results in good preservation of brain structure and information, cryonics under non-ideal conditions happens all too frequently and is more problematic. It cannot be reliably known with present scientific knowledge how a given degree of preservation would translate to a given degree of memory retention after extensive repair. Cryonics adheres to the most conservative option when it seeks to cryopreserve patients even when conditions are less than ideal and the risk of amnesia might be increased by some unknown extent.

For futher discussion of the problem of identity recovery after major brain repair, see the articles Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation, Molecular Repair of the Brain, Neural Archaeology, and Prospects of a Cure for "Death".

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Q: What do experts say?

A: Cryobiologists are scientists that specialize in cold tolerance in nature and demonstrably reversible cold preservation of cells and tissues. Cryobiologists correctly point out that cryopreservation of whole humans is not demonstrably reversible.  Some cryobiologists say that this means that cryonics is not founded on science. This would be correct if cryonics were claimed to be reversible today, which it is not. The claim of cryonics is that it is possible to preserve sufficient biological information today to permit reversal in the future with foreseeable technology. Evaluation of this proposition requires knowledge of cryopreservation methods used in cryonics, knowledge of neuroscience, and knowledge of future technologies proposed to reverse the process. Very few scientists possess knowledge of all these areas.

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Q: How much does cryonics cost?

A: Most people pay for cryonics with life insurance, and since the actual cost of that depends on your age and health, to find out your specific cost you would need to shop for life insurance. Alcor offers two options: for whole body preservation you would need a minimum policy of $150,000, and for neuropreservation you would need a minimum policy of $80,000. (Neuropreservation is explained in the Technical Questions section.) Other funding options are available besides life insurance, including trusts, annuities, and prepaid cash or equivalent (for details see Funding Methods). Alcor members also pay annual dues, as explained in the Membership Questions section.

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Q: How many members are currently signed up with Alcor?

A: For the latest statistics on this, see our membership statistics page.

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Q: How many people are cryopreserved at Alcor?

A: For the latest statistics on this, see our membership statistics page.

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Q:  Under what laws does Alcor operate?

A: Alcor is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization authorized to accept anatomical donations under the provisions of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) and Arizona Anatomical Gift Act (AAGA) for research purposes. These are the same state laws that govern medical schools, neurological research banks, and other scientific uses of donated tissue. Several courts have also ruled that decedents or their relatives have the right to choose cryonics based on laws that empower people to choose the disposition of their remains. For further information, read The Legal Status of Cryonics Patients.

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Q: Can I be cryopreserved before I legally die?

A:  No. Current law does not allow freedom of choice in this matter. Since human cryopreservation is not currently reversible, it is under current law a state of legal death. Actively making a person legally dead is a crime regardless of what that person's wishes may be. For this reason, Alcor must wait until illness or injury causes the heart to stop, and for an independent authority to declare that further medical care is not appropriate and that therefore the patient is legally dead. Only after that determination is made can the cryopreservation procedures begin.

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Q: Why did you choose the name Alcor?

A: In September of 1970, Linda and Fred Chamberlain, the founders of Alcor, were asked to come up with a name for a rescue team for the now defunct Cryonics Society of California (CSC). They believed that people would someday travel to the stars, so they searched through star catalogs and astronomy books, hoping to find a star that could serve as a cryonics acronym. Alcor, 80 Ursae Majoris, was precisely what they had been looking for. It is a dim 5th magnitude star near the bright star Mizar. It roughly fit the acronym Allopathic Cryogenic Rescue. (Allopathy, as opposed to Homeopathy, is a medical perspective wherein any treatment which improves the prognosis is valid.) Alcor has been used for centuries as a test for good eyesight. If you can see Alcor, you have excellent focus and vision.

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