A scientist freezes his diseased parents brain in a hope that it will bring them alive from the death.
Former biomedical researcher Philip Rhoades put his parents on ice when they passed away within 10 days of each other.
He now operates the Neural Archives Foundation – an Australian company that freezes people after they die with the plan to bring them back to life once the technology is sufficiently advanced that scientists are able to reanimate the brain, decoded and placed into an artificial body.
The major stumbling block right now is that the brain is still largely a mystery to scientists, who are unable fully figure out what consciousness is.
In spite of this, Mr Rhoades remains optimistic.
The Australian scientist said: “With all the effort that’s going into decoding the human connectome ... there’s lots of work happening in that area so it’s fairly likely, I would expect in the next decade or so, there will be a much better understanding about how memories and all those things are stored and we’ll be able to be decode them to some extent.”
He also moved to hush the doubters who said that reviving cryogenic participants is and always will be impossible.
Mr Rhoades said: “The cryobiologists have been whingeing for decades that you can’t freeze cells because you get ice formation and it destroys the cells, but there’s ways of dealing with that.
“They’re the same people that said heart transplants weren’t possible.
“If things keep going the way they have been in the last couple hundred years, talking about modern medicine, it is inevitable that we’ll be able to revive people ... sooner or later you can solve all these problems.”
However, Mr Rhoades feels that it is worth a try. He told News.com.au: “If the option is getting buried and letting the worms eat you or getting cremated, there’s absolutely zero chance of physical revival from those options.
“But if you get frozen it’s greater than zero. We don’t know if it’s one or 99 per cent chance, but it’s greater than zero.”
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