In the moments just before Kim Suozzi died of cancer at age 23, it fell to
her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to follow through with the plan to freeze her
brain.
As her pulse monitor sounded its alarm and her breath grew ragged, he
fumbled for his phone. Fighting the emotion that threatened to paralyze him, he
alerted the cryonics team waiting nearby and called the hospice nurses to come
pronounce her dead. Any delay would jeopardize the chance to maybe, someday,
resurrect her mind.
It was impossible to know on that cloudless Arizona morning in January 2013
which fragments of Kim's identity might survive, if any. Would she remember
their first, fumbling kiss in his dorm room five years earlier? Their private
jokes and dumb arguments? The seizure, the surgery, the fancy neuroscience
fellowship she had to turn down?
More than memories, Josh, then 24, wished for the crude procedure to salvage
whatever synapses gave rise to her dry, generous humor, compelled her to greet
every cat she saw with a high-pitched "helllooo," and inspired her to write him
poems.
They knew how strange it sounded, the hope that Kim's brain could be
preserved in subzero storage so that decades or centuries from now, if science
advanced, her billions of interconnected neurons could be scanned, analyzed and
converted into computer code that mimicked how they once worked.
But Kim's terminal prognosis came at the start of a global push to
understand the brain. And some of the tools and techniques emerging from
neuroscience laboratories were beginning to bear some resemblance to those long
envisioned in futurist fantasies.
For one thing, neuroscientists were starting to map the connections between
individual neurons believed to encode many aspects of memory and identity.
The research, limited so far to small bits of dead animal brain, had the
usual goals of advancing knowledge and improving human health. Still, it was
driving interest in what would be a critical first step to create any simulation
of an individual mind: preserving that pattern of connections in an entire brain
after death.
"I can see within, say, 40 years that we would have a method to generate a
digital replica of a person's mind," said Winfried Denk, a director at the Max
Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who has invented one of several
mapping techniques. "It's not my primary motivation, but it is a logical
outgrowth of our work."
Josh, a political science major, fell in love with Kim, an agnostic science
geek, shortly after encountering her freshman year at Truman State University at
a meeting of the College Libertarians. There, in the fall of 2007, they bonded
over a dislike for the USA Patriot Act.
At the start of their final semester, Kim applied to a summer neuroscience
fellowship as a steppingstone to graduate school. Josh was lining up a job as a
legislative assistant to a Missouri state representative, but promised to get a
job in politics wherever she landed.
The headaches started that winter. Then came the seizure. She went to the
hospital and she and Josh spent the better part of the following weeks at
Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.
In mid-March 2011, Kim announced on Facebook that a series of MRI scans
revealed a tumor her doctors believed would be benign. "Bad news: a tumor got
into my BRAIN."
They learned a few weeks later that the tumor was glioblastoma, a virulent
and incurable form of the disease.
In the spring of 2011, as Kim began chemotherapy, an unusual letter appeared
in Cryonics magazine. Titled "The Brain Preservation Technology Prize: A
challenge to cryonicists, a challenge to scientists," it argued that if a brain
was properly preserved time would not be an issue.
The magazine is published by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the larger
of two United States cryonics organizations. Founded in the 1970s, Alcor is best
known for storing the frozen head of the baseball great Ted Williams, along with
some 140 others who hoped to one day be revived. The foundation, a nonprofit,
has about 1,000 members who have made financial arrangements to undergo its
preservation procedure upon death.
Hayworth, then a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, had written the letter
to introduce the Brain Preservation Technology Prize. Perhaps the only
mainstream neuroscientist to openly acknowledge that he would like to upload his
brain to a computer someday - and to argue that there would be broader social
merits to the practice - he counted himself a "skeptical member" of Alcor at the
time.
In an indication of the prevailing skepticism, Hayworth had been unable to
garner a substantial purse for his prize.
But an anonymous donor offered $100,000 after hearing Hayworth's pitch in a
2010 speech at a conference in Cambridge. Now Hayworth had enough to award a
$25,000 prize for a small mammal brain - a rabbit or mouse - and reserve
$100,000 for a larger one, likely a pig. And he already had one competitor,
Shawn Mikula, then a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
The entries were to be judged by other neuroscientists who would examine
portions of the preserved brains with an electron microscope. To win, a
description of the technique would also need to be accepted for publication in a
peer-reviewed scientific journal.
The challenge for the competitors was how to preserve a brain for scanning -
by chemicals or cold.
The decades-old practice of cryonics, in which human brains and bodies are
stored at somewhere below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, has since the late 1990s
employed a thick, viscous antifreeze to replace the blood and water in the brain
in an effort to preserve it before storing it. This procedure is known as
cryopreservation.
Kim had had an interest in cryonics, but she knew that it was expensive and
that the most common way to pay for it, taking out a life insurance policy for
the amount of the fee, was not an option for a previously uninsured 22-year-old
with terminal brain cancer.
She had hesitated to raise the prospect of paying for it with her father,
Rick Suozzi, a medical device sales representative. Even some of her supportive
circle of friends had seemed unsure of what to say when she sounded them out
about it.
"It freaks people out," she told Josh.
And when she finally did talk to her father, his refusal came as a rude
awakening. "I can't help you with this," he said. "We don't live forever, Kim."
If the $80,000 fee for neuropreservation seemed steep, they learned that
about a third of it pays for medical personnel to be on call for death, while
another third is placed in a trust for future revival. The investment income
from the trust also pays for storage in liquid nitrogen, which is so cold that
it can prevent decay in biological tissue for millenniums.
When an August MRI showed that a long-shot experimental drug had failed to
halt the growth of Kim's tumor, she and Josh shot and edited a short video for
her blog and used the online forum Reddit to request donations for cryonics.
A group of longtime cryonics supporters, the Society for Venturism, pitched
in, as did Kim's mother, Jane Suozzi, who signed over a $10,000 life insurance
policy she held in Kim's name.
As donations continued to come in and their contacts at Alcor indicated that
Kim would almost certainly be fully funded, Josh sat her down to shoot a
thank-you video.
In early November 2012, Kim assigned her power of attorney to Josh. She
understood, Josh later realized, better than he had, how little time she had
left.
Kim decided to refuse food and water to hasten her death before the tumor
consumed more of her brain. Alcor's emergency medicine technician was prohibited
from touching Kim before her death was officially pronounced by a medical
professional.
When Josh called to say she was dying, the procedure itself went mostly as
planned. With the help of two nurses employed by Alcor, the company's emergency
medical technician, Aaron Drake, performed a series of steps designed to keep
the blood vessels in Kim's brain from collapsing.
She was given medications to prevent the brain from swelling and to break up
blood clots. Then she was lowered into an ice bath and carried to the van for
the short drive to Alcor's facility.
When all that remained was to continue the cooling with liquid nitrogen gas,
Josh looked into her face for the last time. They had done, he thought, the best
they could.
--- SBBSecho 2.27-Win32
* Origin: (57:231/1)
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