While reviewing the scientific justification for storing cryonics patients at liquid nitrogen temperatures (-196 C), it occurred to me that being 73 C under the glass transition temperature of vitrification solution (-123 C) pretty much has to be sub-optimal for structural integrity.
The tighter a material’s molecules are fixed in place by lowering their temperature, the more internal stress gets stored in it. This seems like it would lead to additional fracturing and brittleness of cyronics patients without gaining any particular benefit.
At first this made me wonder: Why aren’t researcher testing liquid argon cryopreservation? Its liquid temperature is 10 C higher, liquid argon costs are surprisingly similar to those of liquid nitrogen, and the safety profile is nearly the same as well. I still don’t know why people aren’t doing this.
But even though scientists aren’t trying liquid argon cooling for cryonics, they are still researching Intermediate Temperature Storage (ITS) systems. These are essentially regular cryonics dewars but with insulated chambers that have low-power electric heaters in them to keep the internal temperature closer to -140 C. Research wise, it’s still unclear if -140 C is the optimal temperature, if adding heaters is the most robust and cost effective design solution, or how you could combine this technology with the best annealing protocol to get the lowest rate of fracturing possible.
But this still seems like a very obviously high-value line of research. Sadly, it’s a rather neglected one though. Even though mainstream material scientists could probably quickly understand this problem and engineer a working solution eventually, none of them have tried. Instead, in 2003, cryobiologists at Carnegie Melon University consumed $1.3M in funding researching this — without producting any useful prototypes. So even though this is an obvious problem, and you could probably hire experts from several different fields to solve it, only 21st century medicine appears to be doing even a small amount of work on it.
9 Responses to “Intermediate Temperature Storage for Fracture Reduction in Cryonics”
December 8
RedneckCryonicistAnd yet some wealthy cryonicists reportedly plan to come up with $100 million or so to build this ridiculous Timeship in Comfort,, Texas:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/09/cryonics-and-immortality-visionary-an-interview-with-stephen-valentine-of-timeship/
Talk about irrational priorities.
December 8
Louie HelmThat’s an interesting point. Although, to be fair, that “small amount of work” that I mentioned being done at 21st Century Medicine is also funded by the same people who are the primary funders of Timeship.
So they have slightly less perverse priorities than you might expect. I expect the picture to improve in the future as more quality researchers and more funders for this work join the fray.
December 8
RedneckCryonicistThe situation shows the problematic nature of real cryonics versus the official narrative about it. Cryonicists talk a good game about how much they believe in scientific, medical and technological progress, and many of them identify themselves as transhumanists. Yet empirical, existing cryonics shows something quite different, when solvable problems go unsolved for decades while some cryonicists’ fortunes go into side projects like the Timeship which don’t advance the state of the art. Mike Darwin, one of the pioneering cryonicists and activists who went into this field literally as a teenager in the 1960’s, even argues that the state of cryonics technology has regressed since the 1980’s. Mike has published his analysis of the failures of cryonics here:
http://www.chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.html
December 8
Paulo Roberto RibeiroWe need more people with a lot of money willing to invest and having the right counselors so that we can singlehandedly tackle these problems.
December 8
gwernIf you warm up the stored material, don’t you get more migration of molecules and atoms over the century+ they may be in storage?
December 8
Louie HelmYes molecules do move a bit over the centuries and slightly more so at -180 C vs -190 C. But below -160C there is really no actual mechanism by which biological processes should occur. And the atoms wouldn’t go very far to the extent they do move.
Seperately, Alcor wrote a tidy summary that independently explains why -160C should be fine for any realistic timeframe that -196 would be good for (but why -80 C w/ dry ice wouldn’t be).
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/HowColdIsColdEnough.html
December 8
gwernAh, OK. If Alcor thinks you can store at these relatively warmer temperatures without undoing the original point of storage, then I will defer to their expertise.
December 8
TaurusLouie,
Ironically, the use of Ar (and Xe) factors into nascent research on the use of noble gases to mitigate ischemic injury.
e.g.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17717207
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20017934
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030934
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3290848/
FWIW, MD had this to say about using noble gases for long-term storage.
(tl;dr- He’s dismissive.)
http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=1796
In my (very) non-qualified opinion…I’m inclined to agree. Despite the talk about Kent’s boondoggle, the (actually in existence) Scottsdale facility is essentially a janitor’s closet; pinching pennies is a must. Have you not seen this?
http://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/3TNSTSBTMHVYA/ref=cm_wl_rlist_go_v_C-3_d
The real on-the-ground price of liquid argon is considerably higher than LN2;
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonicsTables.txt ($0.25/L)
The price of Alcor’s LN2 is equivalent to that sold by universities (which sell LN2 at cost). See
http://www.uric.arizona.edu/cryogenics%20price%20list.htm
Brian Wowk, whose novel system amounts to the only major (cryonics-relevant) progress on this in ~40 years, is more or less the only human being on the face of the earth who actually did something…and it’s a stop-gap at best.
You are right that this is high-value research…but evidently it is inexplicably not glaringly obvious to those who control institutional purse strings that this would have immediate pay-offs (i.e. to prospective organ recipients dying on waiting lists) even without extrapolating advances in tissue engineering. Instead, the wise powers that be assume that a decision like this is more worthy of consideration:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-10-02/pdf/2013-24094.pdf
As for Kent and most of the first-gen cryonicists (with the exception, perhaps, of Darwin and a few others), they were too dazzled by the glint and gleam. When you’re among the very first to realize some amazing fact about what’s possible, you can’t help but fantasize about yourself at the spearhead of some paradigm shift that will conveniently unfold in your own lifetime.
December 8
Louie HelmWow… a post from ’93 talking about how overdo this research is *then*.
I wonder if the economics of liquid argon have changed in the past 20 years?
In 2012, Alcor claimed they paid between $0.125/liter and $0.50/liter for liquid nitrogen.
It’s hard to find publically available pricing on industrial gases, but one person posted their Praxair quote for liquid argon in 2002. Their cheapest grade was offered at $0.123/liter and their most expensive at $0.194/liter.