Johnny Boston: What do you see as the biggest challenges, obstacles to
not just the work you do here, but your philosphy?
Max More: The biggest challange I think is, well first of all, ignorance.
People just don't understand these ideas. They don't understand cryonics.
They think it's some strange thing you do to dead people.
Rather than understanding it really as an extension of emergency medicine, which is the way it should be observed.
And I think the other problem, even if they know about it,
the problem is fear.
So, it's very frequent for me to, you know, people will come on our tour of ALCOR
and we explain how it works and they'll say,
"You know, that kind of makes sense. I can see how that might actually work but
I hope it doesn't work because I'll be so afraid of coming back into a world that's so alien and foreign
and i'll be out of date and my schools will be out of date."
So, many people would rather die than learn to get used to a different future.
Which I find very strange.
Our memebers probably are a little different from a lot of the population.
They're more adventurous and spirited.
They say, "Yeah, things will be drastically different. Fine."
The Aboriginal Australians have gone to New York City.
Well, it's hard to imagine that this change is going to be much bigger than that one.
That's a pretty drastic change of things to get used to.
It's an interesting coiencidece that we're filming this today because just today
the press release came out from The Brain Preservation Foundation.
And what they've been running is a contest for different groups to use either
chemical fixation or cryopreservation methods.
And, the prize will go to the first group to demonstrate the absolute preservation of ultrastructure.
The fine structure of the brain.
And that prize was won
by the cryonics side essentially.
Although, what they actually used was a bit of a mixture.
They used some chemical fixation, aldehyde fixation
to keep things in place.
To stop the dehydration of the brain material.
And then they cryopreserved it all.
Vitrified it.
And they demonstrated very excellent preservation
under electron microscope of neural tissue.
This is an unsual job; to be working at a cryonics organization.
People often say, "How'd you end up here?"
So, it's actually quite hard to explain.
By the time I was 16 or 17, I was really interested in life extension.
Not just health but actually life extension.
So, it's probably unusual before I even started growing
I was interested in extending the maximum life span.
If we have some warning, if we know
that someone is terminal,
we will send a team, a stand by team. That's what we'll do.
Literally, we'll stand by in the hospital with our equipment.
These days hospitals tend to be pretty cooperative.
So they usually let us keep this either in the room
or maybe in the room next to them.
Currently, given the law, we have to wait until the doctor says, "I declare you to be legally dead."
At that point, what we do is
we remove the patient from the bed into the ice bath.
We're going to cover them with ice.
So, this initial cooling is very important.
The warmer you are the faster things are going to fall apart.
So, we want to get you cool as quickly as we can.
The goal really is to protect the cells
just as you would do if you were harvesting
a heart or kidneys or other organs
and try to get them across the country.
So, people understand it this part of it in hospitals.
They understand what we're doing.
We're trying to maintain biological viability for as long as possible.
It's impossible to give a date.
To say, you know, in 2087-
It'd be nice to be able to do that, to say, you know, in February 2nd, 2087, we will be able to revive people.
Because people would love that. They would sign up in much larger numbers
because we'd give them a nice clear answer and certainty and that's what people like.
Unfortunately, we're much too honest and we say, "Really, we have no idea."
It's going to be decades at least. It could be a century. We don't know.
It depends on so many developments that you can't really foresee.
We're kind of a little bit like Leonardo DaVinci
who could design wings and helicopters.
which would actually work but he didn't have the tools to build them back then.
But, he could show in principle that these would work.
So, what we're doing is a little bit like that.
Of course, we are developing the technology to
reduce the damage done to our patients to get them cryopreserved.
But we don't know exactly how we will reverse that proccess right now.
We know we can reverse it with certain very small creatures.
We've cryopreserved this tiny microscopic worm called, "C. elegans".
which is being very well studied by scientists.
We've actually been able to teach that certain tasks.
What direction to go to find food for instance.
Then cryopreserve it, re warm it, and we have been able to prove that it remembers what it learned.
Now going from that to a whole organ is difficult. That's kind of the cutting edge right now.
It's quite plausible within the next five or ten years,
we'll be able to take kidneys and hearts and cryopreserve them
and put them in a cryobank at the hospital.
So if you need an organ transplant, rather than
hoping to get a tissue match across the country and rush it on ice,
you just pull it out of the bank and it will be ready.
So, that is actually quite near future.
So, you've just told us what happened there, so what happens now?
What happens once you come into this room?
So, there's different stages to the process and what we just saw
is the stand by stabilization and transport.
So, we're stabilizing the patient, getting them here to ALCOR.
We'll then bring them in through the back doors here
and put them on the operating table.
The cover will be off.
This goes on later on so that we can cool the patient with liquid nitrogen vapor.
But this would be off normally for the procedure.
We have several surgeons on call.
We don't have enough cases to have a full time suregon.
They all come in and they all do what essentially
is like a median sternotomy.
They're going to open up the chest, access the major blood vessels of the heart, cannulate those.
And then we're going to run that through our heat exchanger.
Gradually, remove the blood and body fluids.
Also, the fliuds within the cells
and gradually replace that with a cryo-protectant solution.
Our process itself, we introduce these cryo-protectant;
essentially a medical grade anti-freeze, that has a certain level of chemical toxicity
Now that's a good tradeoff because it eliminates ice formation.
And, so, you've massively reduced the amount of damage to the body's cells.
So, you have that technology that can reverse that damage and the aging process itself.
Because there's not much point in bringing back a 95 year old that can be 95 years old.
So, the idea is to bring them back in a fresh, healthy, rejuvanated body.
Now furthermore, some of us including myself, have chosen just to preserve this part.
Because all the rest of this is replaceable.
In terms of current members signed up, it's a little over half of the neuro patients.
Some people call it decapitation because that's wrong.
We're not taking the head off, we're taking the body off.
The brain is the part that we want.
We'll then take it over here and put it in the neuro ring.
Upside down.
The cephalon, which is the brain plus the skull.
We don't try to remove the brain from the skull because that's actually quite difficult to do
and is likely to damage it.
And this is a pretty useful bit of protective packaging anyway.
There's a lot of lines of evidence coming together now.
There's a hospital in Pittsburgh working with a
researcher from The University of Arizona in Tucson.
They're actually taking people all the way down to about 10 degrees,
which is very cold for human surgery.
And, what that does is, of course it slows everything down.
It's the same principles as in cryonics.
And so, that allows them to operate on people like gun shot wound victims.
who would otherwise be inoperable. They would just be bleeding out too fast.
But, it gives them about four times as long to do the sugrery.
The lead researcher, Peter Rhee, Dr. Peter Rhee
from the University of Arizona,
actually came to ALCOR and did the tour
and we talked to him.
In the past, you know 20 years ago, we would have expected him to say,
"Oh, these crazy cryonics people. My work's got nothing to do with that."
He didn't say that.
Both to us and actually in the press, he said, I think this is quite a reasonable thing to do.
It's a lot more radical than what I'm proposing
but it's the same essential principle and kind of makes sense.
So that's a bit of a sea change, that we're seeing there.
So, I really do think this will become a normal practice at some point.
Some point in the future, people will look back on the present and really scratch their heads
and wonder why do we throw our loved ones in the ground or into these big ovens to incinerate them
when they could've been cryopreserved?
At some point, I think this kind of social pressure against the idea is going to go away.
It could even be 10, 20 years from now.
A lot of hospitals will have cryonics units
that start the processes and probably pass you off to a cryonics organization for long term care.
Oh, you did tell me that only one of the families have ever watched the thing
which seems completely, does seem gruesome.
I've had a couple of families that have watched.
Oh, a couple of families have watched it?
Well, in one case it was the son, who is actually now a friend of mine.
He's very familiar with the proccess and he was going to have it done himself.
And, he actually stood behind the glass and watched the whole thing.
In the case of our Thailand patient from last year, the whole family watched apparently.
But it's pretty unusual. Most people don't really want to observe the procedure.
You wouldn't want to see surgery in the hospital either.
It's not for me.
Do people actually have as part of their agreement, do they have this is what we want?
Tell me about that.
People can certainly make their wishes known in the paper work when they sign up for cryonics with ALCOR.
They can specify for instance and some people do that.
They say, "Don't revive me until you can revive my spouse or my parents or my children."
So, they come back as a family unit and that makes a lot of sense obviously.
It also removes that concern that you'll be all alone.
I think most people what they want is to come back pretty much as they are.
At their healthiest and then decide.
You know, look around the world and see what's possible and what people are like and what's available
and then make those decisions.
It's a little bit hard to make those decisions for 100 years from now,
not knowing exactly what that will mean or who will make those choices.
These are real gigantic thermal flasks.
So, you know, they're just kind of cool to the touch but inside they're extremely cold.
-320 farenheit.
So, like a very large, very expensive thermal flask.
And they don't use any power. That's one of the common misconceptions.
People say, "What happens if the power goes out?". Well, nothing.
Liquid nitrogen just boils off at -320 farenheit.
So, this is where they will stay for as long as it takes essentially.
Once you're in here, you don't know whether it's a day or a century and it doesn't make any difference.
There's nothing happening biochemically. There's nothing moving. There's no molecular motion.
So, it really doesn't matter how long it takes.
Of course, you want to come back sooner rather than later because other things could go wrong,
Maybe the organization could fail for some reason.
But in terms of pure physiology  it doesn't make any difference.
There are some existing laws that actually will be quite helpful when and if we revive cryonics patients.
For instance, there are already laws in place now so that if someone is declared dead because they are lost at sea or disappeared for years,
and then they suddenly reappear - soap operas used to do this all the time, when someone apparently died and then came back -
It does actually happen in real life. And there are laws in effect that allow you to get back your identity.
And it is possible to set up an asset preservation trust, so resources will be kept for you for when you come back.
So that part of the problem is already solved,
but what we really need sometimes between now and then is a change in the legal status of our patients.
Right now people are essentially donating themselves as biological material for a scientific experiment.
But we would like the law to eventually recognize that these are potentially people, they are potentially revivable,
essentially like people in a deep coma, and so they have rights. They can't just be disposed of at any time.
Obviously they don't have the rights to sign contracts and so on because they're not conscious,
but they are not disposable objects.
We do occasionally have relatives visit.
Actually every year we have our annual meeting, and one of our directors, his first wife is cryopreserved,
so he'll typically come in here and just say hello to her.
So yes, relatives do visit and say 'hi.'
It's a tricky emotion because, well, let's say you don't believe in an afterlife:
If you're saying 'goodbye' forever, you can maybe then kind of get over it.
But in this case we don't for certain we'll bring people back. We hope they will come back.
So you are sort of saying 'see you later,' but it will be a lot later that you see  them.
So it's a little bit difficult.
Sometimes what people will do, and I've suggested this to a number of people,
they might write a letter once a year,
Write a letter once a year and it keeps them alive in your mind emotionally,
and of course they will actually get to see what happened while they were cryopreserved, and catch up when they come back.
Johnny Boston: That's lovely.
Max More: I'm not sure what the effect would be of the first person coming back.
I think possibly by then we will have been able to cryopreserve so many different organs
and reverse that, that people will be expecting it to happen.
And we'll probably have done it to simple animals, and more complex animals before we do it to humans.
I'm sure we won't revive a human before we can do a dog and a cat.
So I'm not sure it will be as big an impact as we think.
We're not going to do this tomorrow and suddenly bring someone back. I can assure you that's not going to happen.
That would certainly have a drastic effect.
But I think by the time it's possible, so many things will have advanced in so many areas that it will almost be like "Of course you can do this."
We're just waiting for that to happen.
People get very used to these things.
I think a great example is in-vitro fertilization. It seemed very futuristic when it first happened,
and people were very worried about it: "Does this mean these children won't have souls? Will they be some sort of zombies?"
Now it's a very common thing. It has been done millions of times and there are people walking around who -
- actually there are people walking around who were cryopreserved. It's just that they were embryos at the time.
