Regardless of their origin, everyone has ever heard something about an infallible technique that promises to return people from death. It is not about some sacred ritual, cult to a sect or reincarnation that pursue different creeds and philosophies, but a procedure that for its reputation as a scientist, seems closer to succeed in the human obsession to transcend time and mortality.
It is about cryonics, a process that seeks the human preservation of a recently deceased organism through freezing with liquid nitrogen. According to the theory, this technique can conserve the body - especially, the cerebral connections - through cooling, in the same way that happens with the meat that is stored in a refrigerator to be consumed days later.
Of course, a mechanism to bypass the vicissitudes of time breaking with its inexorable pace and jump the barriers that physics and biology raise for any living being, does not seem as simple as opening and closing a freezing chamber.
awakening cryogenization
Here is the turning point between science and good wishes, between reality and aspirations to do something fantastic without the proper methods and tools: cryonics hopes to reach its point of realization through the development of neuroscience in the future. The most difficult challenge is to "reanimate" a person's mind. It is a relatively new field for neuroscientists, of which there are hardly a few certainties like grains of sand between an ocean of mysteries and questions.
The main hope for enthusiasts of this practice is in the advances of connectomics, a discipline that is responsible for studying each of the connections that a brain develops between each anatomical unit, that is, its neurons. Through them you can create a map of each neural connection in the process of accurately simulating (not reanimating) an existing brain. However, it is impossible to know the functioning of the mind and the information shared in the synapse; as if it were a map of the city that shows the urban layout but does not specify what exists in each block, nor the name of each street and avenue.
Brain cryopreservation
Especially complicated is knowing the mystery that involves the cerebral synapse and the particularity that each nervous system presents between them, because a brain does not work in a way analogous to other organs, but each one is made up of own connections. In the words of Michael Hendricks, neuroscientist and professor of Biology for the MIT Technology Review:
"The characteristics of your neurons and synapses that make you" you "are not generic, the vast array of subtle chemical modifications, states of genetic regulation and subcellular distributions of molecular complexes are part of the dynamic flow of a living brain."
In this sense, it would be absurd to consider cryonics as a scientific practice, since it lacks the arguments to succeed successfully in the present. The bulk of the community, both for and against this method, coincide in the practical impossibility that this technique implies in the present.
cryogenization brains
Currently, everything points to the fact that it is more an act of science fiction and fantasy than a feasible scenario. However, different companies in the United States and Russia offer their cryogenic services to an audience capable of paying large sums of money in one of the hardest moments: the death of a loved one.
This condition of vulnerability is exploited to generate profits with hope, grief and all the feelings that cross the mind of someone who loses a loved one. It is the obligation of each person to do everything he or she always wanted and to realize that a revolutionary technique is not necessary to achieve immortality.
In the words of Carl Sagan: "If we take into account the almost infinite number of possibilities and paths that lead to the birth of a single person, you should be grateful to be yourself this precise instant. Think of the huge number of possible alternative universes in which, for example, your great-great-grandparents never met and you never came into existence. You have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water and adore the heat of the nearest star. You are connected to all the generations and living beings of this world through DNA. Also with the universe, because every cell of your body was created in the hearts of the stars. "