forum.oregoncryo.com

You need to live in Salem if you want our services. Transportation is handled by our local vehicles. We largely ignore remote transport issues because that approach would only result in poor quality preservation, so it's about as good as not even bothering to preserve at all. Remote standby and tran...

If we have nanorobots in 50 years, they might be in the bloodstream. That's somewhat reasonable. But they wouldn't be small enough to leave the bloodstream. That's really complicated and would take another 50 years. If those robots are just operating by feel, then they would not be able to "see...

When I say "scan" I mean slicing up the brain into millions of physical slices. Yes, chopping up the brain. I've been trained in radiology. I don't think a non-destructive scan like you envision would ever be possible. The thicker the sample, the blurrier the image. There are limits to phy...

I think molecular-level is overkill, but I'm guessing around 130 years from now, or 2150. While it wouldn't violate any laws of physics, there are a LOT of intermediate engineering stages that I can envision, each taking a number of years to develop. Since the scan would be destructive, I don't thin...

Here it is in layman's terms: ASC is pumping aldehyde through the arteries so that it reaches every single cell. This is done immediately, before the cells have time to degrade. The $1K aldehyde bath is when aldehyde is applied from the outside of the brain rather than through the arteries. In this ...

In fact, I'm not sure the paper ever got it right, even in the context of society 30 years ago. A large portion of the paper is devoted to the strategy of changing the definition of the word "death". But I think it's self-evident that introducing our own jargon would be futile. Not only wo...

Brian Wowk wrote a well-known article in 1988 called The Death of Death in Cryonics. http://alcor.org/Library/html/deathofdeath.html It's been 30 years, and I have gradually come to disagree with the conclusions. Cryonics is, by all accepted definitions of death, the freezing of dead people. We are ...

It was pointed out that I should have expressed everything as w/v instead of v/v. Yes, of course. So I just went back and revised the website to reflect w/v. And our chosen percentage is now 82% w/v. There might also be room for further improvement. For example, a higher percentage of DMSO and a low...

On the other hand, if no cryoprotectant was used, as in the case of a straight freeze, then we really are talking about an essentially solid state. In a straight freeze situation, -80C is fine for days/weeks. You know, if a quality fixation was performed on your end prior to cryoprotection, then the...

We left the vials at -80C for days, without any change. Any crystals formed either immediately or within about a day. I was really struck by how syrupy the mixtures remained. Shipping at that temperature would be a liquid state, not a solid state.

The simple experiments were done and the results are fascinating. http://www.oregoncryo.com/researchHighConcentrations.html Ethylene glycol, as used in Aledhyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation (ASC), is a poor choice of cryoprotectant because of its narrow safe concentration zone. Our EG/DMSO mixture is...

An article was posted stating that Dr. Boyden is distancing himself from Nectome. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610743/mit-severs-ties-to-company-promoting-fatal-brain-uploading/ He gave two reasons. 1. It's not known whether the biomolecules are being preserved. This is absolute rubbish. You c...

I've changed my position on this topic. A brain that's been fixed well is firm. This makes it very easy to damage with the craniotome. It also makes it difficult to access the cranial nerves and remove it from the irregular cranial cavity. So it's always a bad idea. The only time we do it now is whe...

The Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) has awarded the Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize to 21CM, Robert McIntyre, and Greg Fahy. http://www.brainpreservation.org/large-mammal-announcement/ There are also a slew of related news articles. For example: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610456/a-...

The only verification we can perform is to look at the ultrastructure under an electron microscope. We would only do this on non-patients. I would say it's fairly difficult to get good electron micrographs. So if the quality of the electron micrographs is good and is consistent across broad areas of...

It's been established for quite some time that memories are stored as changes in molecular structure of synapses. Yes, we're a bit vague on what that actually means, but it is almost certainly fundamentally correct. As we gain further understanding, we will no doubt refine and expand the model. Any ...

I've decided it's time to increase the concentration of cryoprotectant that we use. We've been using 65%, but we're going to move closer to 75% or 80%. Higher concentrations have the very important advantage completely preventing all ice formation, regardless of temperature or cooling rate. This wil...

I see the link above is broken. I've been more focused on developing protocols, and have eased up on trying to explain them to anyone. I just added a short explanation of toxicity to this page: http://www.oregoncryo.com/suspendedAnimation.html If you don't see it at first, hit refresh. Toxicity is w...

Not quite sure what you're getting at. A can of spray paint would be considered toxic, I suppose.

I'll have to make a web page to explain the cost comparisons. It's not lower cost after all. When compared to a CI Cryostat, it uses 3x as much LN2 per volume, and when compared to an Alcor Bigfoot, it uses 2x as much LN2. Those larger dewars are more efficient. But, for its size, it's probably abou...

The LN2 slowly hits a heat exchanger at the top of the space. Some gas gets vented out the top of the unit as this happens. If the heat exchanger gets too cold, it will pause for about 10 minutes to prevent liquid from coming out the heat exchanger and to prevent the exhaust gas from being too cold....

It's a short and fat dewar, unlike many of the tall dewars in use in cryonics, so the stratification is not as significant. The cooling heat exchanger is at the top of the space. The top and bottom of the space do have slightly different temperatures. Might be a 5-6 degree difference? That spread is...

It's been cooled down to -135, now. The thermostat is set so that if it warms to -131, it will start a cooling cycle with liquid nitrogen. The cooling cycle is gentler than I thought it would be, and takes well over an hour. Even more surprising to me is that it only has to cycle about once every 15...

I had to move the server that runs this forum over to a different building on the other side of town. It took a lot longer than I anticipated. I had to deal with some really complicated issues like permits, fiber, radios, new IP address blocks, etc. I didn't feel any huge urgency, because there aren...

As needed.

We don't currently accept credit cards. We do have a truck.

I tried. I really did. But every pilot I met seems to have a story of a crash. Engines fail for many different reasons. There are visibility issues. There are instrument issues. You can't just slow down and pull over if something goes wrong. The statistics are out there. The risk is acceptable if yo...

In spite of the usefulness of these tools, we are now going back to leaving the brain within the braincase, if at all possible. As I'm working on these brains, I just keep thinking, "would I want this done to me?" The answer is clearly no. There's too much human error, and just too much da...

Normally, payment plans are never allowed in cryonics because it's not ethical to remove a patient from liquid nitrogen and cause the additional inevitable severe damage. But… things might be changing. If we have strong evidence of adequate fixation and cryoprotection, and if ITS is used, then subze...

Our ITS dewar arrived last month, and we are trying to find time to test the LN2 consumption rate, etc. http://www.oregoncryo.com/intermediateTempStorage.html I'm really curious to see what the cost is to keep it running. I was really excited about it last year. But as I've thought hard about the pr...