Martinenaite and Tavenier on cryonics

A brief response: Yes, cryonic preservation causes all sorts of severe damage far beyond our current ability to overcome; all the damage discussed in this paper is well understood and widely discussed by cryonics practitioners. This paper doesn't seem to quite engage with the central contention of cryonics: that so long as the information that makes up memory and personality is preserved, future technology may find a way to repair the damage caused by cryopreservation. Two distinct paths to this end are widely talked about: molecular nanotechnology, and scanning/WBE. As far as I can tell, no argument is made in the paper that human cryopreservation causes information-theoretic death, and neither of these repair options are discussed at all. As a result, this paper, while it is vastly vastly ahead of the arguments made by other critics of cryonics, is some way behind the arguments already considered and answered by cryonics advocates.

The sections on the science seem pretty good, although they seem to focus too much on some basic and only tangential things where I would personally focus a lot more on cryobiology and what existing species with nervous systems can survive freezing (eg. nematodes).

Section 7, Discussion, is just terrible, though.

If cryonics is to be proven to actually work sometime in the future, then the definition of “dead” for the patient’s changes, they cannot be considered as dead since they will be revived. Therefore these people should not get money from their life insurances and most of the people who could afford cryopreservation only by using this money will not be able to pay for it anymore.

This makes zero sense to me. This is either wrong, a risible misunderstanding of free markets, or ignoring the issue of actual harms and losses.

If popularity of cryonics practice in the society will further grow, in the future, this may turn cryonics into a way to escape ones difficulties in life by choosing to temporarily stop it by cryopreservation, as is portrayed in Cameron Crowes film “Vanilla sky”.

And this would be a bad thing, why? (Also, reasoning from fictional evidence.)

"The individual who freezes himself or herself to come back in the future makes the assumption he will be a contributor to that society and that they would want him."

He makes no such thing! This is a tissue of problems, from false choices to fallacy of composition/division.

Also, by signing the UAGA the patients’ bodies become property of the companies; however, in the future (if they are revived) the patients will not have any guarantee that the companies will not use their bodies for further scientific research.

Oy gevalt. You don't have any such guarantee right now.

Another interesting point concerning those freeze tolerant animals is their size; indeed, the largest animal able to tolerate freezing is much smaller than a human body. This leads us to think that maybe a whole human body is not meant to be frozen.

Meant by whom? Obviously we aren't adapted, that's what the whole cryopreservatives thing is about! An animal as big as a human, in the evolutionary context, doesn't need to tolerate freezing.

Section 7 also entirely ignores neuropreservation and uploading (which go hand in hand, of course); page 48 is their master list, and most of the points don't apply to neuropreservation (despite their earlier including prices for it) or uploading, or are not particularly relevant (we don't need 100% thaw success rate).

I hadn't read about Isochoric preservation before:

The idea of isochoric preservation is to enclose the biological matter (cells, tissue, organ) as well as an ice crystal in a sealed container called a pressure vessel (figure 15) containing a fluid. The isochoric chamber is placed in a bath at constant temperature. The system is therefore in a thermal equilibrium. The chamber is hermetically sealed so that the volume is constant. Once the biological matter is introduced in the chamber, it is placed in the bath, and the temperature of the system decreases. The temperature of the bath is set to the phase transition temperature of the liquid in the chamber. At this temperature, the ice crystal placed in the chamber will trigger nucleation, and consequently, ice will form around the ice crystal. This crystal has to be placed strategically: far from the biological matter, so the ice formed around will not reach it (Rubinsky et al., 2005). This process is summarized in figure 16. The temperature has to be kept constant so that equilibrium is reached: the ice formed does not grow too much.

The point of this procedure is that the nucleation site present at the bottom of the vessel (in figure 16) will inhibit the formation of ice in the biological body by inducing ice formation around itself. As a result all the ice will form at this site, and none will form in or near the biological matter.

...Szobota and Rubinsky showed that when an idealized system is cooled until about - 109°C, nucleation is not observed because of the effects of pressure; this temperature would be somewhat higher in a regular biological system. Therefore, using an isochoric system could be advantageous for vitrification purposes.

I want to thank these people. Like, give them money, or send them a fruit basket. How do I do that?

I have permission to share their replies - thanks! Here's the first:

Thank you for your interest in our work! In our university, our projects have to be built around a specific problem formulation, which has to be narrow enough, so we only focus on the relevant scientific sources. The possible repair of the human body was not part of our focus, but we think that the damage caused due to death and current cryonization procedures would result in the loss of information "that makes up memory and personality". Regarding the hypothetical future repair technologies, we think that at present it's not an argument that would already provide real evidence of the success of cryonics.

Regards, Evelina and Juliette