CAN DEATH BE AVOIDED??

‘Frozen to death’ is a phrase well heard of but ‘frozen to live’ still appears strange to the ears. Humans have advanced rapidly in science and technology and finally have attained some grounds on dealing with the major obstacle to human immortality that is DEATH! Success of scientists in this field is still unknown yet they are hopeful.

Many people have been dead for years and their bodies frozen. They choose a method called cryonics in the hope that when medical science has advanced they will be thawed from their frozen state and cured for the diseases that killed them.

    

Cryonics (from Greek kryos- meaning icy cold) is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals who can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Cryopreservation of people or large animals is not reversible with current technology. The stated logic for cryonics is that people who are considered dead by current legal or medical definitions may not necessarily be accepted as dead by all future technologies. It is proposed that cryopreserved people might someday be recovered by using highly advanced future technology!

Most physicians and scientists view cryonics with skepticism because cryonics is so dependent upon the future and because it is impossible to prove what future technology will be capable of doing. Nonetheless, a very high percentage of those who are involved in cryonics are scientists!

A central premise of cryonics is that long-term memory, personality, and identity are stored in durable cell structures and patterns within the brain that do not require continuous brain activity to survive. This premise is generally accepted in medicine; it is known that under certain conditions the brain can stop functioning and still later recover with retention of long-term memory. Additional scientific premises of cryonics are that brain structures encoding personality and long-term memory persist for some time after clinical death, these structures are preserved by cryopreservation, which as is expected would be restored to function later on with the help of advanced future technology.

Long-term cryopreservation can be achieved by cooling to near 77.15 Kelvin, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. It is a common mistaken belief that cells will burst due to the formation of ice crystals within the cell, but this only occurs if the freezing rate exceeds the osmotic loss of water to the extra cellular space. However, damage from freezing can still be serious; ice may still form between cells, causing mechanical and chemical damage. Cryonics organizations use cryoprotectants to reduce this damage. Cryoprotectant solutions are circulated through blood vessels to remove and replace water inside cells with chemicals that prevent freezing. This can reduce damage greatly, but freezing of whole people still causes injuries that are not reversible today.

As of 2010, only around 200 people have undergone the procedure since it was first proposed in 1962. In the United States, cryonics can only be legally performed on humans after they have been pronounced legally dead.

People get themselves frozen via cryogenics to wake up at a later time. This is done sometimes because they have incurable diseases and sometimes because they think humans will figure out at some point how to live forever. So, they want to be frozen till that point comes in human technology.

God states that each human being shall taste death at one point. To someone religious this is an undeniable truth, as is evidenced by people dying throughout time.

If one is not religious, when do you think the time will come when human technology will be able to grant humans immortality? Is it even possible?

By

Sana Abdullah. As Pre-Medical