It is really unbelievable to say that the frozen man, which is completely within the scope of modern science, was actually implemented by someone more than 50 years ago, and according to the agreement, he should be awakened in 2017, so 55 years later, what happened to the first person to freeze?
Frozen first man James Bedford
James Bedford was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1893, and a cold at the age of 4 almost killed him, but his later development confirmed the proverb of Chinese, "Great difficulty does not die and there must be a blessing", and as an adult Bedford became a professor of psychology at the University of California.
Professor Bedford
After decades of working life, he had accumulated a great deal of wealth, but in 1963, when Bedford was 70 years old, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer and later metastasized to the lungs, a cancer that was incurable at the time and did not even have the right treatment, but in 1966 Bedford learned that Dr. Dante Brunol (physicist and biophysicist) and Robert Nelson (president of the California Cryonics Society, early electrician) were living in fact Extension Society (LES) program.
The plan was to freeze the dead bodies of terminally ill patients and wait until future patients' diseases could be cured before they could be thawed and resurrected, and LES originally provided a free chance to preserve them (the first experimental nature, a free place was open to the public), but Bedford missed this opportunity, so he left $100,000 in his will for the freezing of the remains.
Bedford dies: the first frozen man is born
On January 12, 1967, Bedford died, and the local doctor B. Dr. Renault Able immediately began artificial respiration and performed an in vitro heart massage to keep the brain alive while cooling the patient with ice cubes and injecting heparin house blood clotting.
On the afternoon of January 12, 1967, Nelson was giving Dr. Bedford an injection.
The work was taken over by Dr. Dante Brunol, scientific advisor to the California Cryonics Society, and Robert Nelson, president of the California Cryonics Society, who injected a SOLUTION of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) into Bedford to replace the blood, preventing cells from rupturing during the freezing process due to water ice expansion.
Bedford's body continued to cool with -79°C dry ice, and finally he was wrapped up and stored in liquid nitrogen at -196°C, a freezer tank provided by Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, which has since been served by Robert Nelson and is expected to be kept for 50 years, that is, thawed in 2017.
Robert Nelson was able to expand the scale of the freeze because of bedford's case, but was later sued several times by the families of the "deceased" due to suspected fraud and financial disputes, and Robert Nelson was caught in a lengthy lawsuit and finally lost, with a $800,000 award that made him nearly bankrupt.
April 1970 Cecilia Bedford (Daughter-in-law of Dr. Bedford) and Freezer Tank
In 1976, Bedford's son took his father's freezer tank and sent it to a commercial cryonics company in Emeryville, and in 1991, Alcor, which had slowly emerged from the cryonics industry in the 1980s, took over Bedford's cryogenic tank.
Dr. Liquid Nitrogen Freezer tank lies horizontally in the lower right corner
I was supposed to wake up 5 years ago, but what is going on?
ALCOR takes over, check the result: good
On 25 May 1991, Alcor's freezer experts inspected Bedford's freezer tanks:
At about 9:30, the dewar bottle was moved to a concrete table for testing;
Around 10 o'clock: the grinding wheel machine begins to cut the shell of the dewar bottle;
At 10:55, Bedford's lying stretcher slipped out, the deceased was packed in a sleeping bag, and after cutting off the lashed nylon rope, Bedford was moved to a liquid nitrogen pool to check the condition.
This is to avoid the effects of rewarming on the remains, so the entire assessment is carried out in a pool of liquid nitrogen, and data recorded by Alcor experts show that Bedford is still in better condition, with discoloration and erythema on the skin of the upper chest and neck from the mandible to about two centimeters. The two puncture holes in the neck (arteries and veins) are still very clear.
There is frozen blood flowing out of the mouth and nose, a bright red blood stain covers the skin around the nose and mouth, and during the freezing to dry ice temperature, there seems to be a large amount of dark red blood flowing out of the mouth (occurs during the freezing operation after death, not after freezing).
The eyes are partially open and the cornea is chalk white due to ice. The nostrils are flattened against the face, which is the result of a dry ice compression, and the skin on the ventral chest, abdomen and limbs appears to be undamaged and normal in color, but discoloration and erythema appear on the right forearm and hand, and the skin above the chest area has similar fracture-like features.
The results determined by ALCOR experts show that the patient has not been heated to at least 0 ° C or more, and has been kept at a relatively low temperature in long-term preservation, while the mouth and nose bleeding may come from secondary bleeding that occurs after cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which is the most common cause of pulmonary edema in frozen patients.
Overall, Bedford's cryo-assessment is still good, but this only indicates the results of the cryopreservation assessment, but does not indicate whether it will be resurrected!
So the question arises: can Bedford be resurrected?
January 12, 2017, was originally the day Bedford woke up, but apparently there is no technology to treat cancer, let alone the technology to revive the frozen, so the question is, in theory, can Bedford still be resurrected?
The answer may not be, because Bedford's freezing technology was not good at that time, using DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) with toxic side effects of tissues, and the technology of vitrification of the remains did not mature until the 1990s, but the cryonics process was much the same, but the technology was more advanced, so the question is, if the frozen people with the latest freezing technology can still be resurrected?
The answer is still no! There is no theory that a person can be resurrected after a complete death, and the currently documented resurrection cases are the result of insufficient judgment, and there is no technology that can resurrect a patient who is completely dead.
But a recent paper in the journal Nature seems to give everyone a glimmer of hope, and in 2019, the team of professor Nenad Sestein, a neuroscientist at Yale University, released a study that shocked the academic community:
2019 Papers
Four hours after the pig died, the research team delivered "nutrients" to the pig brain through a mechanical perfusion system called BrainEx. The pig brain was "revived," and over the next 36 hours, neurons and some brain cells restarted their normal metabolic function.
2020 Papers
In the latest case announced on August 3, 2022, it was a step further than the last time, and the function of vital organs of the whole body, including heart contraction and liver and kidney activity, was restored again 1 hour after the pig died, and in one case, the head and neck of the dead pig began to move, which indicated that there may be some degree of "resurrection"
For the resurrection of higher mammals, the most critical is still the brain, Professor Sestein's team found that after 4 hours of death in the pig's head into the simulated blood nutrients, after 6 hours of continuous perfusion, the research team found that the pig brain neurons and some brain cells restarted normal metabolic functions, such as consuming sugar, producing carbon dioxide, the immune system also seems to be functioning.
In addition, the number of deaths of cerebral cortex cells was significantly lower than that of the control group. When the researchers applied an electric current to the brain's tissue samples, they found that individual neurons can still carry signals, but these functions are still low-level metabolism, rather than high-level functions, and more applications for the future may be organ transplantation rather than resurrecting frozen corpses.
Extended reading: The first person frozen in China
In December 2021, the news of Gui Junmin's "remarriage" detonated the public opinion of the whole network, although Mr. Gui Junmin is neither a business elite nor a political celebrity, but he can't stop the attention of the whole network to his "remarriage", because his legal wife Zhan Wenlian is frozen in a 2,000-liter liquid nitrogen tank of Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute!
Gui Junmin
Zhan Wenlian and Gui Junmin are a couple, in 2015, 47-year-old Zhan Wenlian was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, and when there was no hope, he learned about a technical experiment being carried out by Shandong Yinfeng Biological Engineering Group, that is, to find a volunteer for cryonics, Zhan Wenlian signed up.
On May 8, 2017, the 49-year-old Zhan Wenlian died, shandong Yinfeng chief expert Aaron Drake performed surgery on Zhan Wenlian, the entire operation took up to 55 hours, and finally Zhan Wenlian was wrapped up in a 2,000 liter liquid nitrogen canister, head down, feet up, until the future can save the "corpse" to the era.
Coincidentally, as early as Zhan Wenlian, the 61-year-old writer Du Hong underwent body cryosive surgery at the Alcor Foundation on September 17, 2015, but unlike Zhan Wenlian, she only froze her brain, because Alcor's cost of freezing the human body exceeded 2 million yuan, while the frozen brain only needed 750,000 yuan, and theoretically, the cost of Du Hong's future resurrection after thawing also needed to rebuild a human body.
There are three well-known cryonics companies in the world, namely CI, ALCOR and KrioRus, the former two are the United States, the latter is the Russian cryonics company, of which the owner of KrioRus had a divorce in 2021 and the couple robbed the frozen, because the subsequent maintenance will still bring them huge profits.
Cryonics offer, KrioRus offer for the whole body 35,000 US dollars, the current market share of the highest ALCOR offer of 200,000 US dollars, sure enough ALCOR is so expensive, and Shandong Yinfeng also has many customers, in addition to adults, the youngest freezer is only 13 years old, but can not provide the boy's information, because Yinfeng and his family signed a confidentiality agreement.
Contrary to what everyone imagines, the largest business volume of the cryonics company is still pets, which is also unexpected by the flower growers! Maybe one day technology can make a breakthrough, but the author believes that hibernation may be the best way to prolong life, and cryonics is likely to cost money unjustly. (End)
Reference:
https://www.alcor.org/library/bedford-condition/
https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/california-man-first-to-be-frozen-16770641.php