A lot of interesting pieces related to cryonics have appeared over the last few months that I thought I would share:

Four professors conclude in MIT Technology Review that there is significant and growing body of evidence in support of human cryopreservation: “The Science Surrounding Cryonics” 

New York Times Cover story by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist on “A Dying 23 Year Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future”

Skeptic Michael Sherman writes a piece in Scientific American called  “Can Our Minds Live Forever?”

Here are three recent important peer reviewed papers:

Dr. Greg Fahy and Robert McIntyre of 21st Century Medicine describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. The ASC technology is now also competing against Dr Mikula at Max Planck in he brain preservation prize.

The Grand Challenges of Organ Banking and It’s Potential is described by large group of the worlds leading cryobiology scientists:  The first Organ Banking Summit was convened from Feb. 27 – March 1, 2015 in Palo Alto, CA, with events at Stanford University, NASA Research Park, and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Experts at the summit outlined the potential public health impact of organ banking, discussed the major remaining scientific challenges that need to be overcome in order to bank organs, and identified key opportunities to accelerate progress toward this goal. Many areas of public health could be revolutionized by the banking of organs and other complex tissues, including transplantation, oncofertility, tissue engineering, trauma medicine and emergency preparedness, basic biomedical research and drug discovery – and even space travel.

Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived Caenorhabditis elegans. Two scientists ask the question:  “Can memory be retained after cryopreservation?” and then demonstrate that a form of long-term memory in C. elegans is not been modified by the process of vitrification or slow freezing.