Biostasis: an Essential Longevity Tool
Biostasis is the ultimate strategy for slowing the accumulation of damage to the body, and the only technology currently available for those who want radical life extension.
Cold temperatures slow down biological time. This works so well that human embryos that are frozen for decades can still grow into healthy babies. There have also been cases where children and adults drowned in freezing water but the cold protected them and gave emergency responders enough time to rescue and revive them. Their hearts were stopped and their brains were silent, but they could still be brought back to life.
Biostasis applies the same idea to the terminally ill. We may not have the technology to cure someone’s cancer now, but it seems probable that we will in the future. If their biological processes could be paused until then, they might be saved by future medical technology. Biostasis uses cold temperatures, chemicals, or both to put people into metabolic arrest so that their bodies will not degrade over time. This is not guaranteed to save them but, unlike burial or cremation, it gives them a chance.
Biostasis is a real service that can be purchased today. It’s a good thing, too, because the uncomfortable fact is that some of the people we care about (and maybe even all of us) are going to run out of time before aging is solved. Aging is a hard problem, and a real cure is going to take longer than many people can wait. So what do you do for someone whose clock is running out? You buy them time with biostasis.
The idea is simple. When modern medicine runs out of options, we preserve a patient’s body well enough that a future doctor, with future technology, might be able to bring them back. Cold does most of the work because, below a certain temperature, biology essentially stops. Molecules stop moving, decay stops happening, and a person can wait, unchanged, for a very long time. A hundred years in that state might age you about as much as a single minute of ordinary life.
If that sounds like science fiction, consider that a shorter version is already routine medicine. Surgeons sometimes cool a patient until the heart can be safely stopped, operate, and then rewarm them back to life. There is a saying among emergency doctors: you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. Biostasis takes that same principle and stretches it from minutes to centuries.
What actually happens today
A patient signs up in advance, usually with a cryonics organization. When the patient is nearing death, a standby team is deployed to wait at their bedside. The moment they’re declared legally dead, the team goes to work: cool the body fast, keep the blood vessels open, and pump in a protective antifreeze solution called a cryoprotectant. Later at a storage facility, the patient is cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature. Done well, the patient doesn’t freeze into ice. Instead, they enter a glass-like state called vitrification. They are then stored in an insulated container called a dewar that requires no electricity, just a little liquid nitrogen to be added occasionally to keep the patient cold.
We do not currently have the technology to reverse this process and safely warm someone back up. We can only do our best getting someone into stasis so that future revival is as easy as possible. To improve the preservation process, some biostasis organizations check their work by running CT scans of vitrified brains and taking tiny tissue samples to look at the structures under a microscope. Under good conditions, the current techniques seem to preserve all the important parts that make up who you are: nerves, axons, and even synapses.
Biostasis is something that needs to be arranged in advance, so don’t wait until someone you care about is declared dead before you contact a provider. And don’t assume you can wait until you are old to sign up, because aging isn’t the only thing that can kill you.
Improving the process
Right now, biostasis is a bet on the future. We can reliably rewarm cells, thin sections of tissue, and small organs, but nothing as large as a human brain. Work is currently ongoing to vitrify and rewarm entire small mammals and larger organs like pig kidneys.
To make progress, new technologies are needed. The major focus of research is developing improved cryoprotectants. People are working on novel chemistry, biological research, thermodynamic models, and molecular simulations to predict how best to protect people during the cryopreservation and rewarming process. A perfect cryoprotectant would not only make it easier to get people into biostasis, but make it much easier to rewarm and revive a patient. Groups advancing this technology include 21st Century Medicine, Until Labs, Vitrify.ai, and Maximize Bio.
In addition to creating better cryoprotectants, some people are looking into revival technologies. This includes direct methods of warming up a patient, such as ultrasound, and also indirect methods like perfusing nanoparticles that can be vibrated with magnetic fields. This research is still very early but, fortunately, patients in biostasis have time on their side. While some approaches require pre-conditioning the patient before biostasis, such as the perfusion of nanoparticles, others like ultrasound re-warming do not. This means that while the chances of you being revivable will increase the longer you can wait to be put in biostasis, even now there is a chance.
So while biostasis is far from a mature technology, it is still a rational approach to the problem. If you want to live, but you’re going to die, then die in the most reversible way possible.
The honest hard parts
While it seems that the technologies used for preservation today do a good job of preserving the information content of the brain so that it is theoretically possible to revive someone, the current process does not keep a brain viable by today’s standards. Overcoming the obstacles to present-day viability is a real challenge for a few reasons.
Toxicity: modern cryoprotectants are toxic. They prevent ice crystal formation, but they do some biological damage to cells in the process, for example by dehydrating tissues. Creating non-toxic cryoprotectants would make it much easier for future doctors to revive patients. Reducing the exposure to the toxic effects by faster perfusion and clearing of them, complementary approaches to protect the body from them, or enabling cells to produce and degrade them on demand would also reduce toxicity.
Fractures: cooling a patient to liquid nitrogen temperatures prevents metabolic damage, but it also puts them at risk of crack formation. Cracks could make revival difficult, especially if they occur in the brain, so techniques for avoiding fractures are needed.
Perfusability: it is sometimes difficult to get cryoprotectants to every part of the body. Making them easier to perfuse would help ensure that the patient is fully protected.
There are also operational, social and regulatory challenges. Biostasis is a type of emergency medicine, and the field is still small. This makes it difficult to provide coverage and high-quality service to everyone who might want it. Improved logistics and regulation are needed to make biostasis available, and this will grow in importance as the technology matures, especially after reversibility is demonstrated...
The bad news is that very little money and talent are directed to biostasis. The good news is that there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit. A modest amount of funding or a few good people can move this field in a big way that would be impossible in many other industries.
Where you come in
You don’t need a PhD to matter here. The to-do list is long and much of it is wide open:
If you’re technical, the highest-leverage work is creating better cryoprotectants or other pre-conditioning approaches to enhance the quality of biostasis preservation. Faster and more even re-warming technologies are important too..
If you’re an operator or entrepreneur, the industry needs better logistics, better standby coverage, and businesses that make good preservation available to more people in more places.
If you’re none of those, spread the word. Every person who signs up is a life that might be saved, and every new member makes the whole system cheaper, safer, and more socially acceptable for the next person. Advocacy and marketing can go a long way in cryonics.
Most people call biostasis “Plan B.” But for radical life extension, ask people what Plan A is and watch them realize they don’t have one. Today, biostasis is Plan A for everyone, regardless of their age. That may change in the decades to come, but for now we should all care deeply about and support advances in biostasis, since there is a good you or someone you care about will need to use it.