When someone is declared legally dead today or clinically dead,
what that really means is doctors can't help the person anymore.
But they are not truly dead
almost everything is still alive, which is why we can donate organs.
So what we're saying is, 'Don't give up on the person. Turn them over to us,
we're going to protect the cells and we're going to store the patient
at extremely cold temperatures where they can have a chance
of being revived in the future with more advanced technology.
I think it's kind of like asking someone in the 1900s,
will it be possible to put someone on the moon?
A lot of people would say: No, that's just science fiction.
If you think about it, about 50 or 60 years ago, if you had a heart attack,
you'd stop breathing, people would check your vitals and say: Oh, you're dead.
That was it. We gave up on you. Today, we don't do that.
We'll jump on you and do CPR, defibrillation
and usually resuscitate the person.
Cryonics is really an extension of emergency medicine.
Ideally we want to have advance warning and have a team
at the bedside so we can begin with no delay whatsoever.
Once the doctors declare legal death,
we have to wait for that point currently,
we can begin the procedure by lifting the patient
from the bed into an ice bath.
We're going to cover them with ice and add water
and circulate the icy water around the patient to accelerate the cooling.
We're also going to restart respiration and circulation.
The reason is we have to get a number of different medications
into the patient to protect the cells.
This point is very much like donating organs.
We're trying to keep the tissues viable for as long as possible
until we can begin the next part of the procedure.
They're going to open up the chest,
access the major blood vessels of the heart
and then connect them to our pump and chiller system here.
The cryoprotectant is basically a medical-grade anti-freeze, if you like.
As we go below freezing, instead of ice crystal forming
the fluid we use will just become thicker and thicker
and basically just hold all the cells in place without any damage.
About half our members choose not to preserve the whole body,
myself included. We're just going to preserve our brain.
Unless I die early in an accident,
by the time I need this,
my body is going to be in a pretty bad shape anyway
and the whole thing is going to have to be regenerated.
The process is very much the same as for a whole body patient
except that instead of the whole body we're going to do a separation
of a few vertebras down the neck.
And then we re going to take the cephalon, the brain plus the skull,
put it upside down in the neural ring
and we're going to use the carotid blood vessels here instead.
And if we do a good job, we hope to see something like this.
What you can see here is that the brain has actually shrunk
because we've taken a lot of water out of it
and there's no ice inside the brain at all.
So this one is a very good brain. But they don't all look that good.
This one for instance is not so good.
The brain has not contracted. So we can't guarantee
that everybody is going to have a perfect cryopreservation.
Many of our members will say: Just do the best you can
with whatever you'll find.
The worst cases really are the cases where we're not notified until
a long time after legal death or cases where an autopsy is required.
A full autopsy where the brain is actually removed from the head
and is sliced into pieces. If necessary we'll do what we call
a 'straight-freeze' where there will be no protection of the cells.
But even so, it may not be impossible to fix that in the future.
If you think about it, there are actually millions of people walking
around the world today who were cryopreserved.
They were just embryos at the time.
We can do skin, we can do corneas,
we can do heart valves, we can do eggs and sperm,
there are many tissues we can cryopreserve reversibly.
But going from that to a whole organ is right on the edge of possibility today.
So it's really a matter of extending those achievements over time.
Once we finish in the operating room,
we wrap the patients in a sleeping bag.
Then secure them inside these aluminium pods
so they are protected against any kind of motion.
So, there is four whole body patients, plus we can also get
up to five 'neuro patients' in the centre column there.
These vessels they are basically very large, expensive thermos flasks.
A lot of people say: What happens if the power goes out?
The answer is absolutely nothing.
Because no energy is needed to maintain the temperature.
We just refill with liquid nitrogen once a week.
And so really just by refilling the liquid we keep the temperature low.
You might say: That's a lot of money but in fact
most of our members, over 90%, pay using life insurance.
Our membership is pretty varied.
But there are a few things that they tend to have in common.
First of all, they tend to be pretty highly-educated.
That's because it takes a bit of knowledge to understand the process.
But I think actually more important than that is a sense of adventure.
Because what we're asking people basically is a gigantic experiment, right?
If it works, you're going to come back in the future, decades from now,
maybe a century from now, and things will be very different.
And most people when they think of that go:
'My goodness, that's terrifying! I don't want to do that!'
I think really it's a bet on advancing technology.
We are actually funding some research into nano-medicine,
which is certainly is going to be very relevant to bringing people back.
And then of course there is the whole area of tissue regeneration.
We are starting to grow organs in the lab
for people who can't get a good organ match.
We live longer than people in previous generations,
but why should we give up just because our body quits at some point?
Why don't we get to choose that?
I absolutely do believe that we're going to beat death.