If you had to die, how would you want it to happen?

In this conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks Rick Rosner how he would choose to die if given the option. Rosner explains why he intends to undergo cryonic preservation, a speculative procedure in which the body is cooled to liquid-nitrogen temperatures after death, replacing water with cryoprotective agents to avoid tissue-destroying ice crystals. He describes vitrification, advances in organ preservation—such as rabbit kidneys that regained function after rewarming—and the immense challenge of scaling the process to human brains. Rosner acknowledges that full revival has never been achieved but sees cryonics as the best available attempt to preserve identity for a future medicine capable of repair.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you had to die, how would you want it to happen?

Rick Rosner: I would choose cryonic preservation. I would be rendered unconscious, and my blood would be replaced with preservation fluids. Cryonic preservation is a very uncertain attempt at future revival, but if nothing better exists, I intend to pursue it. In the procedure, they cool you to very low temperatures, typically eventually to around −196 °C when you are stored in liquid nitrogen, which is about 77 degrees above absolute zero. They wash out your blood and much of the water in your body because water forms ice crystals as it freezes, and those sharp crystals can puncture cells and destroy tissue structure.

They remove as much water from the body as possible and replace it with mixtures of cryoprotective agents—chemicals such as glycerol and other polyols—that reduce ice formation and allow cooling without crystallization. As your temperature continues to fall, the aim is for these solutions to vitrify: to turn into a glass-like solid at temperatures below roughly −120 to −135 °C, instead of forming ordinary ice. Your bodily fluids are replaced in carefully controlled steps as you are lowered to the final preservation temperature. The long-term hope is that, in the future, the process could be reversed, you could be rewarmed, and advanced medicine could repair whatever originally caused your death—but that part remains speculative; no human or large mammal has ever been revived from whole-body or whole-brain cryonic preservation.

There has been real progress in organ vitrification. I have not followed the field closely in recent years, but 21st Century Medicine in Fontana, California, has pushed the boundaries of what is possible. The process they use is vitrification rather than traditional freezing. Freezing produces ice crystals; vitrification produces a glass-like solid without crystalline structures. Glass has a disordered molecular arrangement, which is what you want, because crystals create sharp structures that damage tissue. Vitrification is about lowering the temperature until the tissue becomes solid while avoiding crystallization.

That company has successfully vitrified and transplanted rabbit kidneys. In one well-known case, a rabbit kidney was perfused with a vitrification solution, cooled to around −130 to −135 °C, rewarmed, and transplanted back into a rabbit, where it provided life-supporting function as the animal’s only kidney for weeks before the animal was euthanized for study. A rabbit kidney is about two inches across. Their long-term goal is to apply similar principles to something roughly eight inches across, which is about the size of a human brain. If you can vitrify a brain without ice formation or catastrophic cracking, you have at least preserved the organ most essential to identity. A brain has roughly sixty-four times the volume of a rabbit kidney—volume scales with the cube of linear size—so the temperature has to drop evenly throughout the entire organ. If it does not, fractures form, and a cracked brain is effectively useless for any imagined revival.

They are working on larger and larger volumes that can be cooled uniformly. Volume matters. It is relatively easy to freeze two-dimensional structures without cracking them, because the cooling can reach the entire surface evenly. For example, people have been able to freeze irises for a very long time; they are small and essentially flat. The challenge with three-dimensional structures is reaching the interior and ensuring that the center cools at the same rate as the exterior.

Given no better alternative, that is how I would choose to die: by being preserved.

About ten years ago, when I last looked into this, the only celebrity who publicly supported cryonic preservation was Simon Cowell, which made sense because he did not mind being seen as unpleasant or arrogant. At the time, many people considered cryonics a strange, selfish, and unnatural decision. He reportedly said he intended to do it, then seemed to withdraw the statement, and may have later reaffirmed it—I am not certain. I do not know whether any other celebrities have openly supported cryonic preservation in the past decade.

It remains a technology with no confirmed successes at the level people hope for. It is nowhere near achieving revival of an entire human being.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Nico Meier on Unsplash

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