What Sciences Support cryonics?
Cryonics is not the belief that people can be ‘frozen’ by any crude means and be assured of near-term revival by miracle technologies. Its scientific plausibility rests on the evidence that damage caused by existing cryopreservation methods can be limited to levels that may one day be repairable. The science that speaks most directly to this issue, is neural cryobiology. Can a brain be preserved well enough to retain memory and personality? Arguably it can. It is a well-established fact that long-term memories are encoded in enduring physical and chemical changes. Loss of brain activity is clearly survivable in many instances, and sometimes is even deliberately used by surgeons to prevent ischemic injury. Animals that have survived partial freezing show that brain activity can stop and later resume, though such cases have not yet involved cooling much below 0ºC. Yet even whole brains have been shown to recover normal electrical activity activity after freezing to -20ºC for five days wi
