By Marta Sandberg

I presume I don't have to state the bleeding obvious - cryonics gives you a better chance of living again than either burial or cremation. Even 'straight freeze' after a long period of warm ischemia (however you spell that word) is better than nothing. On the other hand that doesn't explain why I think cryonics has a reasonable good chance to work. This is more a ‘concept’ letter, than a detailed scientific analysis.

I’ll point you to all the right peer-reviewed scientific literature to back me up if you want. To begin with you should read ALL the references in Alcor’s "Cryonics - Reaching for Tomorrow" book and then I can inundate you with a whole bunch of additional reading. But I don’t think you are ready for that yet, so I’ll keep this light . . .and probably lengthy.

Here I go. Pour yourself a cup of fresh coffee and be prepared for a long letter. I have a deep respect for the durability of the brain.

Every day our brain takes a beating. Apart from our immune system, no other organ is required to absorb so much during a lifetime whilst still retaining its basic character. Year after year, decade after decade. To add insult to injury we actually seek out mind-altering drugs, like alcohol, to pickle and poison the poor brain. We suffer voluntary sleep depravation for all sorts of reason. Barrage the head with numerous small and large accidental blows... The list goes on. All the time we expect the brain to absorb more and more knowledge and remain plastic and adaptable. And it delivers.

That's only half the story. We expect a lot from our brain - we expect it because it usually delivers. If I were to ask you what type of shoes you wore to school as a child; a mental image would flash into your mind. This is something you haven't thought about for decades. Yet the memory is preserved in your mind. And your brain knows where it is stored and how to recall it. It might seem a trivial achievement, until you really think about it. If you played sports in school you wouldn't expect those muscles or coordination remain intact into middle age. But you expect your memories to do just that. Stay intact without constant maintenance.

The same goes for personality and other mental capabilities. We expect an incredible amount of constancy and performance from the brain. We take it for granted that our basic ‘personality’ stays the same throughput our lives, even under stress, and we feel at a loss when it doesn’t. If we don't notice when our mental processes change, then our friends and family certainly will. The reason why people don't go to a psychologist is shame at admitting that 'their minds are sick' and they need help. The reason why people don't go to a medical doctor before it is too late is because they don't notice their bodies are failing. Another lesson from psychology is how hard it is to correct destructive thinking - our brain protects its function, even when those thought habits are bad.

Its a wonderful durable organ this brain of yours.

I hadn't really thought about it, just accepted it as an everyday miracle, until I became interested in cryonics and started to study cognitive neuroscience. It is a very confusing subject at first, with an overabundance of terminology, but the more I studied it the more I realised just how hardy our brains are. I started to understand the physical and biochemical reasons why our brain can do what it does.

I'll be very brief here, because you may already have investigated the subject and I don't want to repeat what we both know. Every line of inquiry I examined reached to the same conclusion. When you look at the biology of the brain it becomes obvious that the brain is designed to last a lifetime. It does it by being very tough, one of the hardiest organs we have.

It is designed with the capability to rebound form injury and it stores its 'knowledge' in redundant and scattered locations. When one part is damaged beyond hope, other parts have the same information and can take up the slack (there are some exceptions, but they mainly concerns replaceable housekeeping functions, not the vital 'who we are' functions). They can even re-train the injured part to do its former role.

Within a single neuron, or a complex of connected neurones, the same information is kept in many different forms - physical growth of synapses, chemical changes within the neuron, activation of the DNA in the neurones nucleus, changes to the 'servant' glial cells etc. Redundancy and toughness is the norm.

The mind is a lot like language - redundant and embedded. We can hold a conversation over crackling, static filled telephone lines because we only need to hear part of a speech to fill in the gaps. Language is structured in such a way that the information is repeated over and over again in different forms. That is why grammar gets so complicated. Every word in a sentence must agree with all other words. Past tense, plural etc. The mind is the same - embedded and redundant and tough.

In cryonics, there will be damage that must be repaired. It'll take clever detective work to reconstruct each individual brain to its original state. IMHO it is possible because so much redundant information is encoded in the neurones. Each neuron has its own chemical signature and two matched synapses (on different neurones) share the same characteristics. Add to this all the other clues, physical and chemical, that leaves traces of the original architecture and state of our brains before freezing and the outlook is positive. Thomas Donaldson coined the term 'neural archaeology'. It is an apt and descriptive word.

Part of my optimism comes from seeing this type of salvage-and-save job being done on a different scale. My favourite story dates from my childhood and involves a monstrosity my grandparents owned. It was a large papier-mache sculpture they had acquired on their honeymoon and, with a great deal of difficulty, managed to bring back intact to their bridal home. I admired the tenacity and ingenuity needed to transport the thing home in one piece, but I didn't feel so complementary about their taste in kitsch. It dominated their entry hall for years, until one day a heavy and shortsighted uncle mistook it for a chair and sat on it (although it is possible that his eyesight was better than suspected and so was his sense of taste).

Either way, they collected up the sad pieces in a box and brought it to the local fix-it man. He looked at the flat fragments and asked what it had been. Nobody remembered. It had just been there and after a while you stopped noticing it, except as a garish, bulking presence. Grandad said it depicted the battle of Aqincourt, grandma said it was a harbour scene from Teneriffe and I thought it had something to do with a dancing hippopotamus in a pink tutu. (I don't know where that idea came from, unless it was an expression of my dislike for that thing.)

Undaunted the fix-it man started with his reconstruction. By looking cute, polite and guileless I got permission to stay and watch him work. In case you suspect me of ulterior motives I can assure you that I was only interested in seeing what he would do, I wasn't looking for an opportunity to sabotage his work. He seemed so quietly confident that I was resigned to having the thing back.

It was fascinating. He started by walking around the box, studying the contents whilst making low noises in the back of his throat. Then he picked up one of the larger pieces with long-handled tweezers and placed it on a cleared area of his workbench. With several long, thin crochet hooks he lifted here and there (I held some of hooks when he ran out of hands) until he had "puffed" a satisfactory shape into the fragment. Then he secured the needles to a vice and started with the next piece.

You could see how it grew before your eyes. He did a lot of adjustments. Occasionally he changed his mind and removed some hooks to let a piece sink back into flatness before he tried again on a new tack. Sometimes he would find two pieces that fitted together. When he wasn't sure how the fragments should fit, he examined the edges with a loupe to try to match thickness, colour and even brush strokes. If things didn't go well he would stalk out of the room, sip mud-black coffee from a battered tin cup, light his pipe and stare out the window whilst he ruminated. Then he would charge back into the workroom with renewed enthusiasm. And a little bit more of the puzzle would grow.

It took almost two days before he was satisfied with the result. Very suddenly he stepped back, gave a sharp nod and a horse grunt, and started spraying the figure with a fixing varnish.

It turned out to be a nativity scene! Every December it took pride of place in the living room where it dominated my grandparents Christmas decorations. But that was all right as it was safely packed away in the attic for the next eleven months. The fix-it man had faithfully restored the sculpture. Regrettably.

I'm sorry to have gone on for so long about a childhood memory. It was fun reliving it (and it's late at night when my mind tends to wander a bit). What was it I said about how wonderfully tenacious our memory is? But to refresh your medium-term memory you may want to go back a page to pick up the thread of my conversation. I was talking about neural archaeology and why I have a quiet conviction that a frozen brain can be repaired and pieced back together.

A brain isn't a papier-mache sculpture, but I think the same techniques will be used. Not in detail. I'm quite sure long thin crochet hooks won't feature in neural archaeology, but the methodology will be the same.

Start with what is intact, more or less. The bits you can easily see what they must be. Sometimes it will be large pieces, sometimes small. It doesn't matter. Fix them one by one and there are less left. As the restored pieces add up the areas of uncertainty will be reduced to smaller and smaller isolated pockets. The number of possible ways in which these can be reconstructed will quickly diminish. Sometimes it might be necessary to go back and try another configuration, but the 'clear' areas will constantly grow. There may be little bits that cannot be determined with exactitude, and then you have to rely on the brains ability to sort out small glitches by itself. Or accept that not everything will be perfect. The fix-it man had problems with one of the sheep’s head. It had been reduced to fine dust so he had to model a new head by looking at the surrounding sheep heads. This didn't affect the totality of the nativity scene; it didn't make it any less hideous.

If you want to have this stated in a more scientific manner, then I suggest you read an article by Gregory Fayh Ph.D called 'A "Realistic" Scenario for Nanotechnological Repair of the Frozen Human Brain' in Alcor's booklet 'Cryonics - Reaching for tomorrow' (Appendix B, pages A-10 to A-26). It gives you seventeen pages of details and references. Very exact and thorough.

The article was written about a decade ago and things have moved on since then. The current favourite theory is that our mind is determined by the connections between synapses. (Personally, I'm not too sure that is the whole story, but I think it is a large part of the answer.) That is excellent news for cryonics, as this reduces the problem of repairs to a three dimensional jigsaw. Once you have connected up the right synapses, sketching in the neurones between them is automatic with few options. And synapses will survive even a straight freeze. They are remarkably hard to destroy.

Brain samples are routinely liquefied for analysis. A machine like a blender is used. An industrial strength blender. Everything is reduced to mush. Except the synapses. They clump together into globules (it has a special name that I can't remember right now) to the annoyance of the scientists - and the joy of cryonicists. The same pattern can be found when studying frozen brain slices. The synapses have survived.

It isn't all good news. Cryoprotectants tend to be hard on cell membranes. They are all toxic to some degree or another. And ice is still part of the problem, even in a ‘perfect’ suspension. Ice formation in the brain can push one synapse away from it mate on the other neuron. Then we have to use the other clues left embedded in the neurones, just as the fix-it man did. As I said before, matched synapses share the same biochemical characteristics and synapse growth leaves telltale traces in the neurones.

I don't think it will be easy, but I think it is possible. We will need to know a lot more of what goes on in the brain, how to read the clues, and we need to develop a way to manipulate and repair the inevitable damage. That is where nanotechnology comes in. And that is what sparked my interest in cryonics in the first place. Nanotechnology will be our long thin crochet hooks. I a nutshell, this is why I am so positive about cryonics.

Now for a bit more scepticism. That’s only part of the story. (Sorry to bring you down to Earth, but nobody should go into cryonics wearing rose-coloured glasses).

It’s not enough to simply repair freezing damage to revive a patient. There are actually many more biological problems that have to be solved for cryonics to work.

Before we start to thaw people we have to be able to repair or avoid;

• FREEZING DAMAGE

Current research is focused on minimising this.

• SUSPENSION DAMAGE

This isn't quite the same thing. Surgical and drug intervention will cause damage. Even worse, it may remove the clues the body has, and our future neural archaeologist will need to rebuild us to our original form. This is partially covered by current research.

• CAUSE OF DEATH

We all die from something, in my husbands case it was an inoperable brain tumour. Before we can fix that there is no point in reviving him.

• DAMAGE CAUSED BY THE DISEASE THAT KILLED YOU

This isn't quite so obvious. People tend to die slowly because their disease has worn out their bodies. There is a lot of collateral damage done before death. For example, if you die by liver failure your body will be thoroughly poisoned and destroyed before your body finally gives up. I can give you another example about a woman who had been in heart failure for so long that she regained conciseness during CPR, but that will make this letter even longer. Ask me, if you are interested.

• ISCHEMIC DAMAGE AND DAMAGE CAUSED BY THE DYING PROCESS

These two problems are not identical and they are different from the previous point (as they are done over a shorter timespan so the body hasn’t had time to adjust and change in order to cope). Quite a lot have been written about it so I won't go into details; apart from saying that starting the freezing protocol immediately after death will not eliminate the problem as a lot of the damage is done when death approaches and system after system shuts down and begins to self destruct.

• OLD AGE

Most of us will live to a ripe old age. There isn't much point in me dying of kidney failure at age 88 and be frozen only to be reawakened a century later so I can die of heart failure at (elapsed) age 91. I'm looking forward to waking up in the body I dimly remember having in my twenties.

The severity of the damage will vary from person to person. A young child who drowns in cold water will be 'easy', but if you die from AIDS related diseases after a long and hard fight it will be harder. Dementia in all its forms seems to be the worst-case scenario.

It sounds grim.

The reason I’m putting all these bleak scenarios in front of you is because I don’t want you to rush into this with naïve optimism. You have to judge the facts for yourself and then make up your mind. Cryonics isn’t a certainty.

But I still think it has a reasonable chance.

Yes, I’ve just listed a whole heap of additional problems. Now look at them closer. All of these difficulties need, more or less, the same technology to repair as the straight freezing damage I’ve gone on about for so long. Without the technology to repair freezing damage you can’t be thawed (not if you want to survive the experience). You anyway have to overhaul your body – cell by cell – to repair the freezing damage. All the rest can hitch a ride and be done at the same time.

Let me now add another set of complications. It isn’t sufficient to ‘give you a good freeze’ so the damage can be (easily?) repaired. It isn’t even sufficient to fix all the other problems I mentioned. You need more.

In my humble opinion, cryonics will work if, and only if, it can fulfil three conditions

1- Sufficient information must be stored so it can be possible to one day restore and repair you.

2- You must be kept frozen until you can be repaired.

3- Eventually the technology must be developed that can repair you.