Cryonics returns to its New York roots on November 23 when Alcor New York organizes its first Alcor New York Symposium. Attend the most ambitious cryonics event in NYC in decades and learn about brain cryopreservation, molecular repair, and rejuvenation biotechnologies.

This symposium will feature 3 presentations by staff of Advanced Neural Biosciences about its neural cryobiology, revival, and deep learning research.

There are only a few tickets left. Register using the link below:

https://1stalcornewyorksymposium.splashthat.com/

Speakers announced so far:

Dr. Pedro Magalhaes – Will We Cure Aging in My Lifetime?

People have always sought eternal life and everlasting youth. Recent technological breakthroughs, and our growing understanding of ageing, have given strength to the idea that a cure for human ageing can eventually be developed. Hundreds of genes are now known to regulate ageing in model organisms and can increase longevity by up to 10 fold and retard the process of ageing as a whole in animals. In addition, a large number of potential longevity-extending drugs already exist. Studies of species with exceptional longevity or disease resistance, like naked mole rats that are resistant to cancer or bowhead whales that live over 200 years, may also help treat and prevent human diseases. Here, I will discuss recent advances in longevity science and human applications on the horizon. The scientific prospects of eradicating human ageing within the foreseeable future will also be discussed.

Dr. Regina R. Monaco – Low-Dose Pharmacological Interventions to Facilitate Healthy Aging – Reduction of Cancer Risk

As we grow in our understanding of aging as a series of biochemical pathways and systems undergoing programmed entropic degradations, which may be reversed, re-entrained, stabilized, minimized, maximized, turned off or on, or otherwise healthfully intervened in, we gain more and more tools to assist this process to maintain a healthful equilibrium. One important intervention to extend healthy life span is to use pharmaceuticals or neutraceuticals to reduce your probability of having cancer.

In this talk I present and discuss several low dose pharmacological interventions which have been shown to have strong ant-cancer properties, we well as some other benefits such as reduction of chronic inflammation. I will review the mechanisims and anti-cancer benefits of low-dose therapy of the pharmaceuticals metformin, naltrexone, aspirin, and for women, tamoxifen (breast cancer). I will also discuss benefits of targeting and inducing apoptosis (killing) to remove a percentage of senescent cells using rapamycin, and neutraceuticals fisetin, and quercitin, with or without dasatinab.

Ben Best – NAD+ Restoration and Senolytic Therapy

Ben Best has subjected himself to two age reversal therapies: (1) senolytic therapy (therapy to eliminate senescent cells using dasatinib and quercetin) and (2) NAD+ infusions (to restore NAD+ to youthful levels). He has also attended several conferences dealing with these subjects as well as studied and written about them, the results of which he will provide in his presentation.

Chana Phaedra – An Introduction to Brain Preservation Optimization

Vitrification has the advantage that it does not need different cryoprotectant protocols for different cell- and tissue types. Vitrification of the brain does presents two distinct challenges: low tolerance to ischemia and poor blood-brain barrier permeability of cryoprotectants. In this presentation I will review the history of brain cryopreservation, the status of brain cryopreservation research, and future directions.

Aschwin de Wolf – Revival of “Straight Frozen” Patients

Freezing of the brain without cryoprotectant (a “straight freeze”) is considered the worst cryopreservation scenario but there is a paucity of ultrastructural evidence how the straight frozen brain actually looks like. Aschwin de Wolf will review electron micrographs of the straight frozen brain (under a variety of conditions) and will discuss how “medical cryobots” will prepare the brain for molecular repair and infer the original non-frozen state from the damaged state.

Michael Benjamin – Alcor Meta-Analysis

Several attempts have been made to create quantitative case outcome methodologies in cryonics. Advanced Neural Biosciences has embarked on a comprehensive meta-analysis of all Alcor patient cases, an endeavor whose goal is to develop, experimentally validate, and refine a quantitative cryopreservation evaluation methodology. Michael will be presenting some preliminary statistics gathered during Phase 1 of the study so far.

Dr. Ralf Spindler – Functional evaluation of brain preservation protocols

Currently, reversible vitrification of whole brains is limited by neurotoxicity of the very concentrated vitrification solutions involved. Here, an automated assay is described which has proven to quantify synaptic connections in live-cell neuronal networks by a high-content confocal imaging method. Since it is known that synaptodentritic damage, especially the decrease in number of synaptic connections, correlates with cognitive decline the assay could be used to evaluate brain preservation protocols.

Dr. Roman Bauer – Computational Biology Methods for Tissue Cryopreservation

In contrast to most other biomedical fields, tissue cryopreservation has remained relatively untouched by computational techniques. State-of-the-art cryopreservation still predominantly relies on trial-and-error and large numbers of experiments for the determination of protocol parameters. Roman Bauer will review milestones in computational and mathematical work towards better cryopreservation protocols, and will discuss how he sees future automated cryopreservation technologies maximize post-thaw tissue quality.

Dr. Emil Kendziorra – Professionalization and Scaling of Medical Biostasis

With only a few thousand members world-wide, medical biostasis has stayed a very small field, albeit being around for decades. In Europe the topic has been even more niche. The EBF (European Biostasis Foundation) based in Switzerland, has recently set out to fundamentally change this situation with four main areas of activity – sign up / stand-by, storage, research and long-term asset management. Emil Kendziorra will present the core activities to professionalize medical biostasis and scale the field.

Dr. Robin Hanson – Hidden Motives Help Explain Why Cryonics Isn’t Popular

The usual pro-cryonics argument frames it as medicine, to be evaluated in terms of its technical ability to prolong life. However, though they are unaware of it, for most people medicine is more about showing that they care than about prolonging life. Robin Hanson reviews the evidence that many big areas of life are driven by hidden motives quite different from what people usually say, and then tries to apply this insight to help us understand why so few people actually choose cryonics.