An Unusual Scientific Collaboration
L. Stephen Coles was an aging researcher who spent his career investigating why some people live to 110 and beyond. He was also a committed cryonicist — someone who believed that the precise preservation of a body at very low temperatures immediately after death could allow future generations, equipped with technologies not yet invented, to reverse the damage of death and restore a person to life. When Coles died in 2014, his brain was removed and transported to a storage facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it has been held ever since at approximately −146 degrees Celsius, cushioned in liquid nitrogen vapor.
About a decade after Coles's death, his colleague and friend Greg Fahy — a cryobiologist at 21st Century Medicine and one of the world's leading researchers in organ preservation — requested access to small pieces of the preserved tissue for scientific study. What Fahy found, and what he and his collaborators have now reported, illuminates both the potential and the profound limits of cryonics as a technology, while pointing toward applications in medicine that are far closer to practical reality than human revival.
What the Rewarming Revealed
The central question Fahy's team set out to answer was whether the brain tissue's physical and cellular structure had survived the freezing and storage process with enough integrity to be scientifically informative. The short answer is yes — with significant qualifications.
When pieces of the preserved tissue were carefully rewarmed using protocols developed for organ transplantation research, the cellular architecture bounced back in visible ways. Cell membranes maintained structural coherence, the arrangement of neurons and supporting cells remained recognizable, and some of the molecular machinery associated with cellular function was still present. These findings suggest that the preservation and storage protocols used by cryonics organizations do prevent at least some of the gross structural damage that would be expected from uncontrolled freezing.
What the rewarming did not reveal is any evidence that the cells could regain electrical activity or resume anything resembling a functioning metabolism. The distinction matters enormously. Structural preservation, even if perfect, is not the same as preserving the functional state that constitutes a living, thinking brain. The patterns of synaptic connections that encode memory and personality are present at the nanometer scale and would require technologies far beyond current imaging or reconstruction capabilities to read out, let alone restore to function.
The Cryopreservation Debate
Coles chose cryopreservation based on a wager that the probability of future revival, however small, was worth the cost and the logistical arrangements involved. That calculation is not obviously wrong as a matter of formal decision theory — if the benefit of revival is large enough, even a very small probability can justify the investment. But the scientific community that has examined cryonics most carefully has generally concluded that current preservation methods damage the very nanoscale structures — the synaptic weights that encode the self — that revival would need to reconstruct.
The most technically optimistic interpretation of Fahy's findings is that the gross structure of Coles's brain tissue was preserved better than worst-case models predicted. The most pessimistic interpretation is that structural preservation at the scale visible under standard microscopy tells us very little about whether the information encoded at the synaptic level survived, and that question remains unanswered by this study.
The More Practical Frontier: Organ Transplantation
While the question of brain revival remains in the realm of speculative futurism, the techniques being refined by researchers in the cryopreservation field have immediate and potentially life-saving applications in conventional medicine. Organ transplantation currently operates under severe time constraints: a donor heart must be transplanted within roughly four hours of procurement, a kidney within 24 to 36 hours. These windows are short enough that geography determines survival — patients far from major transplant centers have systematically worse outcomes, and thousands of viable organs are discarded each year because logistics cannot match donor availability to recipient need in time.
Successful cryopreservation of transplantable organs would transform this calculus. An organ that could be preserved for weeks or months rather than hours could be matched to the best-compatible recipient rather than the geographically nearest one, dramatically improving long-term outcomes. It would allow time for better immunological matching, potentially reducing the need for the lifelong immunosuppressant drugs that transplant recipients currently require — drugs that come with serious side effects and substantially increase the risk of infection and certain cancers.
Researchers working with animal models have already demonstrated proof of concept. Teams at multiple institutions have successfully removed, cryopreserved using vitrification protocols, and retransplanted kidneys and hearts in rodents and rabbits. The animals survived with preserved organ function — a result that would have seemed impossible as recently as ten years ago. Scientists in the field describe the current moment as being "at the cusp of human-scale organ cryopreservation," with the primary remaining challenges being scaling the warming protocols to larger organ sizes without introducing the damaging temperature gradients that can fracture tissue.
Vitrification: The Technology Behind the Preservation
The key advance that separates modern organ preservation research from the science-fiction version of freezing is vitrification — the use of cryoprotectant chemicals that prevent the formation of ice crystals during cooling. Ice is the enemy of tissue preservation because the expanding crystals physically puncture cell membranes and destroy the extracellular matrix. Vitrification replaces the water in tissue with a glassy, non-crystalline state that avoids this damage. The challenge is that the cryoprotectants themselves are toxic in high concentrations, requiring careful protocols to perfuse them into tissue at temperatures where the tissue is still functional but the cryoprotectants are not yet causing damage.
Fahy has been a central figure in developing vitrification protocols for decades. His earlier work on kidney vitrification established many of the principles now being applied in the current generation of organ banking research. The study of Coles's brain tissue, in this context, is not primarily a test of cryonics as a revival technology but an application of the same investigative tools to understand what a prolonged period of storage at very low temperatures does to tissue that was preserved using older protocols less sophisticated than modern vitrification.
Ethics of Researching the Preserved Dead
The study raises questions that cryobiology has rarely had to address before. Coles consented before his death to scientific study of his preserved remains, which provides clear ethical authorization for this particular research. But as cryonics organizations accumulate more preserved individuals, and as the scientific tools for studying preserved tissue become more powerful, the boundaries between medical research and something more philosophically unsettling will require careful examination. The scientific community has not yet developed consensus norms for this domain, and Fahy's work represents an early step into territory that will require ongoing ethical scrutiny as the underlying technology advances.
This article is based on reporting by MIT Technology Review. Read the original article.
