A common misconception is that cryonics freezes the dead. As the definition of "death" is "a permanent cessation of all vital functions" the future ability to revive a patient frozen with today's technology implies the patient wasn't dead. Cryonics is actually based on the more plausible idea that present medical practice has perhaps erred in declaring a patient "dead." A second opinion from a future physician -- one with access to a fundamentally better medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology -- lets us avoid the unpleasant risk that we might bury someone alive.
In keeping with this tradition, we would like to conduct clinical trials of the effectiveness of cryonic suspension to determine whether it does (or does not) work. The appropriate trials can be easily described. Cryonics proposes to freeze people with today's technology in the expectation that medical technology of (say) the year 2100 will be able to cure them. Thus, the appropriate clinical trials would be to:
While this problem is not entirely unique to cryonics (the plight of a dying patient who wishes to know whether or not to take a new experimental treatment is well known), cryonics poses it in a qualitatively more severe fashion: we must wait longer to determine the outcome and we have no preliminary results to provide a clue about what that outcome might be. If a new treatment is being tested we normally have the results of animal trials and perhaps some preliminary results from human patients. Further, we expect to get reliable results within a small number of years. In the case of cryonics, we are quite literally awaiting the development of an entirely new medical technology. Preliminary results, even on experimental animals, are simply not available; and the final results won't be available for at least several decades.
Thus, while we can begin the clinical trials required to evaluate cryonics today, clinical trials cannot provide a timely answer about the effectiveness of cryonics. It is not possible (utilizing the paradigm of clinical trials) to draw conclusions today about whether physicians tomorrow will (or will not) be able to revive someone who was cryonically suspended using today's technology.
In order to show that cryonics will not work (or even to show that it's unlikely to work) it is necessary to show that no future technology, no matter how advanced, will ever be able to revive the suspended patient. When we consider what is routine today and how it might have been viewed in (say) the 1700's, we can begin to see how difficult it is to make a well founded argument that future medical technology will never be able to reverse the injuries that occur during cryonic suspension.
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While different people will answer these questions in different ways, this provides a useful framework in which to consider the problem.
It is worth pointing out that a fairly wide range of simple
tissue types have been successfully frozen and thawed, including
very early human embryos, sperm, skin, bone, red and white blood cells, bone
marrow, and others. The use of glycerol (anti-freeze, see
molecular structure at left) greatly reduces freezing damage.
If we wish to gain some insight today about the chance that cryonics will or will not work we must consider (a) the kinds of damage that are likely to occur during suspension and (b) the kinds of damage that future medical technologies might reasonably be able to repair. Those interested in pursuing this subject can read The Molecular Repair of the Brain.
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The cryonet home page has links to other information.
Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation discusses biostasis and cryonics.
The molecular repair of the brain discusses the technical issues surrounding the feasibility of cryonics.
The Prospect of Immortality (1965) by Robert C. W. Ettinger, is now available on the web. This book started the cryonics movement.
Jim Halperin's 1998 novel, The First Immortal, is a well researched and entertaining introduction to the subject.
Cryonics, cryptography, and maximum likelihood estimation discusses the surprisingly close relationship between cryptanalysis of World War II rotor machines and the problem of inferring neuronal wiring given partial information.
A page on Nanotechnology and Medicine discusses some of the improvements in medicine that should be feasible with a mature nanotechnology.
The growing movement for increasing autonomy and control by the terminally ill patient will likely improve the conditions under which cryonic suspensions can be performed. The Oregon Death With Dignity Act is one manifestation of this movement.