Cryonics research is a long and complicated subject with lots of history, made more awkward and complicated by the need for scientists sympathetic to cryonics to hide their interest to protect their careers and ability to collaborate with colleagues, engage in commercial contracts, and receive research grants from mainstream funding agencies. As a result, most of the research that currently feeds into the practice of cryonics is not being done under the label of cryonics, but rather labels such as cerebral resuscitation research, vitrification research, organ preservation research, or nanomedicine research, at a variety of institutions. Some of this research is funded by cryonics organizations, and sometimes performed by cryonics organizations, but the majority of research most relevant to cryonics is presently funded by other sources and institutions.
Some of the most historically important companies in cryonics research were CryoVita (Jerry Leaf's company), BioTime, and 21st Century Medicine, which where originally started by people with an interest in cryonics, but now have much broader foci. In the 1990s 21CM under Mike Darwin and Steve Harris purchased CryoVita, and extended Jerry Leaf's dog experiments to longer periods of hypothermia, and demonstrated recovery of dogs with no neurological deficit after 16 minutes of circulatory arrest at normal body temperature. The protocols and medications used to achieve this now motivate the core of Alcor's and Suspended Animation's initial cryonics stabilization protocol. This era also resulted in a remarkable study of the ultrastructural effects of high concentration glycerol cryopreservation on the canine brain
http://www.alcor.org...servation1.htmlThere is limited justification to do further hypothermia recovery experiments now that complete recovery after several hours of cold bloodless perfusion has been demonstrated. The reason is that these experiments were NOT intended as demonstrations of recovery from cryonic preservation, but merely development and validation of the carrier solution Alcor uses during the first few hours of a cryopreservation protocol. Recovery of whole animals after a full cryopreservation protocol is a much more difficult problem that will probably not see any progress for decades until the many problems of low-temperature preservation are first solved on a tissue and organ level by cryobiologists. Until these problems are solved, there is no point in trying to revive whole large animals from cryopreservation.
Near the turn of the century, 21CM expanded and changed from being a cerebral resuscitation research company to a cryopreservation (low temperature preservation) company. The cerebral resuscitation research group was spun off into a separate company called Critical Care Research, which has gone on to innovate and publish ideas like breathing cold fluorocarbon liquid to induce rapid post-resuscitation hypothermia, which has applications in both cryonics and mainstream medicine.
http://web.archive.o...Cool_Oxygen.htmhttp://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/11719148The head of 21CM research is now Dr. Gregory Fahy, who is the cryobiologist who invented the entire field of metastable vitrification, and who was the first to propose vitrification as a means of cryopreserving organs without ice damage while working at the American Red Cross almost 30 years ago. Within the past decade, working at 21CM, he succeeded in demonstrating reversible vitrification at -130 degC and long term survival of a vital mammalian organ (kidney) in a rabbit model.
http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC2781097/The vitrification solution used to achieve this was licensed to Alcor in 2005.
http://www.alcor.org...technology.htmlAlso around the turn of century, Dr. Yuri Pichugin, who had been doing contract research in the Ukraine for CI during 1990s relocated to the United States to do brain tissue cryopreservation research at UCLA in collaboration with 21CM and the Institute for Neural Cryobiology, the small cryonics-friendly granting agency started by Thomas Donaldson and continued by Ben Best. This resulted in a remarkable study showing survival of cryopreserved brain tissue using vitrification solutions developed by 21CM.
http://www.21cm.com/...o_published.pdfDr. Pichugin went on to become a full-time cryobiology researcher at CI, where he developed CI's vitrification solution VM-1. After his departure from CI in 2007, much of his equipment was moved to Portland, Oregon, to the cryonics research lab begun by Chana and Ashwin de Wolf where they continue research on a modest scale.
Also within the past decade, Alcor has employed two PhD scientists, one of which published an important study on the effects of warm ischemia on brain structure
http://www.ijcep.com...IJCEP707005.pdfAlcor has also funded nanomedicine research leading to numerous publications
http://www.alcor.org...ex.html#nanomedIn parallel with pursuit of many serious commercial and scientific interests unrelated to cryonics, Critical Care Research and especially 21CM continue research projects quietly collecting data relevant to cryonics on a scale that can only be called massive (compared to other epochs and institutions). At 21CM we have a staff of 20 people, including four PhD principal investigators, one of which is a neuroscientist. Aside from the publications on our website, the last public disclosure of research interests and results to a cryonics audience was this small conference
http://www.suspendedinc.com/dvd.htmlThis posting is a very superficial overview, and also neglects a large amount of cryopreservation engineering R&D relevant to cryonics that has gone on at Alcor and elsewhere.
