Cryonics is unethical

[jordansparks]

Looks like I've gone completely to the dark side. I've decided that offering cryonics is unethical, whereas offering aldehyde brain preservation is not. I did not arrive at this position quickly or carelessly. It took 30 years of very gradually changing my mind. I accepted aldehyde as reasonable about 20 years ago. I accepted ASC 9 years ago. I accepted aldehyde as a complete alternative to cryo about 2 years ago, I accepted aldehyde as superior about 6 months ago, and then yesterday I finally understood that offering cryonics is unethical. I've explained my stance on this page:
https://oregonbp.com/cryonicsVsAldehyde.html
1. Aldehyde quality is better
2. Aldehyde preservation is evidence-based
3. Cryonics is, by contrast, experimental
4. Cryonics is not research
5. Cryonics is not benign

It's not ethical to offer experimental procedures for patients. They should only be getting evidence-based care. It's really that simple. As an example, we don't really know what's causing Alzheimer's, but we do our very best to treat it with care that is based on whatever limited evidence we do have. We wouldn't treat an Alzheimer's patient with experimental procedures other than in the context of carefully controlled research. We're also picky about what evidence we allow. The evidence must support an outcome that is currently available. Cryonics doesn't meet this threshold at all. Yes, I know we want to save lives, but we can absolutely do that with evidence-based care. By using the correct framework, we actually end up dramatically improving the quality. Can we please just stop with all the freezing damage?

[PCmorphy72]

Ok, aldehyde is superior, but for how many years? Cryopreserving at -196 C we can have an inferior connectome for many hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of years: for how many hundreds of years we would have a superior connectome by keeping the lipids solid at -20 C?
It will be possible to be more precise in the future, or in your future research, since you use the word "probably" when you state that "Cooling after aldehyde preservation is recognized in mainstream science to probably result in better long-term quality"?
At least, may you be more precise about the temperature you currently refrigerate after using aldehyde? (I would like it would be "definitively" - 20C, if not even lower).

[jordansparks]

We think it remains quite stable at -20 C. We're currently storing at 0 C, which also seems to be very stable, but -20 C is easy and there are published papers that support doing that, so that's the goal. We're working on gathering more evidence so that we can quantify it and to also make sure that we're not causing harm by going to -20 C. But that doesn't undermine my argument because we could always take it down to -120 C or -196 C if that's where the evidence leads. And this could be done for any existing aldehyde preservation case. Cryonics, by contrast, would be cryopreservation without first using fixative. It's that initial fixative step that is so incredibly important because it takes the risk of ice formation down to exactly 0%.

If you think it will take hundreds and hundreds of years, you're probably going to run into some existential issues with things like organizational survival.

[PCmorphy72]

I am absolutely convinced by your argument. My hundreds of years argument was about the possible factors in favor of going down to much lower temperatures, like possible long periods of stagnation in the technological progress.

[jordansparks]

Don't forget about cracking, which can include areas of pulverization. There still isn't evidence that cooling below -20 C improves quality. Storage at -120 is possible, but hard and expensive. Incidentally, cracking might be worse if you use aldehyde prior to cryopreservation. That's one reason why Alcor does not incorporate aldehyde into their cryopreservation protocol. So we will probably always stop at -20 C. Depends on where the evidence takes us.