Timeline of brain preservation

This is a timeline of brain preservation.

Brain preservation is the attempt to preserve a human or non-human animal with the hope that partial or complete resuscitation may be possible in the future.

is the most popular method of brain preservation, and preserves individuals using low-temperature. But other methods are being used and developed as well, notably fixation, and a combination of both called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation.

Alternative names for brain preservation include biostasis and neural archiving.

Often confused with cryonics, suspended animation (or anabiosis) is a distinct practice where a patient body would remain biologically intact, and could be reanimated without the need to deeply repair the brain, or transfer its information to another substrate. However, improvements in suspended animation would also improve the quality of cryopreservations given a patient could be maintained alive at lower temperature before undergoing the damaging cryonics procedure. So this timeline also includes some important milestones with regards to suspended animation.

Interests
The following graph shows the relative popularity of web searches on the topic of cryonics on Google. For the latest version, check out Google Trends.



The following graph shows the number of views the Wikipedia page "Cryonics" had every day since July 2015. Note that the y-axis is logarithmic, with 5 main peaks. For the latest version, check out WMF Labs. There were 433,734 views in 2019, 367,632 views in 2018, 352,831 views in 2017, and 544,065 views in 2016.



Patients
The first people to start advocating for cryonics emerged in 1962, and the first preservation happened 4 years later. From 1966 until 1973, of the 17 attempts at freezing, only one person remained cryopreserved (hence the bumps at the beginning of the curve in the graph below). Consequently, the "pay-as-you-go" funding model was abandoned by the cryonics community as relatives had shown to generally eventually lose interest in paying maintenance fees. From then onward, the number of cryopreservations would grow exponentially, but to this day still represent a trivial amount in comparison to the number of burials and cremations. Since cryonics was first publicized, an estimated 2.9 billion people have died, which could represent about 2.7% of humans to have ever lived. As of January 2019, 416 people are known to be cryopreserved.

The following graph shows a history of the number of bodies preserved (complete or neuro-only). Given that the quality of preservations varies a lot, and it can often take many hours or even days before someone gets preserved from the time of their clinical death, the graph below represents an upper bound of the number of people that are preserved: some have probably been irreversibly lost, and some might only have been partially preserved. Given that we don't currently know how effective current preservation methods are, the lower bound for the number of people that have been preserved remains 0.



The following graph shows the number of patients over time for many organizations.



Members
Memberships statistics can be tricky to track for a couple of reasons:
 * Lack of present data: some organizations don't publicize their membership statistics
 * Lack of historical data: some organizations only started tracking their membership statistics later in their history
 * Lack of cryonics membership data: the Cryonics Institute stopped publicizing the number of their members that are fully-funded since 2015, and now only reports the number of members they have; some are also members only for other of their services, such as DNA preservation
 * Dual memberships: some cryonicists are members of more than one organization, often to support several organizations, or as a fall-back for themselves if one organization was to fail in some ways.

Alcor is the only large cryonics organization that has tracked the number of fully-funded members it has had since its beginnings. All Alcor members are subscribed to standby services. The Cryonics Institute has tracked the number of members it has signed up with standby services since it started offering it in 2006. It also has a lot of members that are signed up but plan to use the services of a funeral director for transport – this number is however unknown to the public. The graph below tracks those two numbers. The recent growth has been pretty linear. However, given that there are more and more cryonics organizations, worldwide cryonics memberships is likely growing exponentially.



Cost
Alcor and the Cryonics Institute are the main cryonics providers that have existed for decades. Alcor has been adjusting its prices according to the Consumer Price Index (which has been lower than medical inflation), while the Cryonics Institute has maintained its initial price. The first graph below shows the nominal cost charged by the organization, while the second graph shows the real cost (that is inflation adjusted) of various cryonics services.

While the graphs start in 1976, it is worth noting that before 1982, Alcor was contracting Trans Time for its storage services, and the Institute for Advanced Biological Studies for its stabilization services. Also, besides Ettinger's mother and wife, the first patient of the Cryonics Institute was preserved in 1991.

A direct comparison between the prices of different organizations is difficult because of the different services provided, and different types of payments. For example, Alcor has an annual membership fee and has surcharges for late-minute cases. Some of the reason for Alcor's higher price than the Cryonics Institute includes the cost of stabilization and transport, as well as being more financially conservative by putting more money aside in a patient care trust.

The graphs below show the price of cryonics for whole-body and / or neuro-only as offered by Alcor, the Cryonics Institute , OregonCryo , KrioRus. The second graph has prices inflation adjusted in 2018 USD.





Full timeline
The events in the timeline are sometimes classified in the following categories, types and sub-types.

Categories:
 * Brain preservation
 * Reanimation
 * Reanimation
 * Reanimation
 * Reanimation
 * Reanimation

Types:
 * General Progress:
 * Futurism, fiction
 * Science
 * Technological development (ie. engineering, research and development)
 * Technological adoption (ie. commercialization)
 * Quality assessment
 * Societal context:
 * Social
 * Legal
 * Risk management
 * Organization Progress

Sub-Types:
 * Science, technological development, technological assessment: nature, theory, cold, cryonics, cryoprotection, vitrification, toxicity, vitrifixation, field cryoprotection, fixation, intermediate storage temperature, fracturing
 * Social:
 * Event: festival, meeting, conference
 * Writing: newsletter, communication, textbook, journal, paper, open letter, email list, fiction, blog
 * Other: groups, bylaws
 * Legal: cryopreservation, life insurance, right-to-die, classification
 * Organization: founding, milestone, status
 * Risk management: natural catastrophes, economic stability

You can click on the header to sort the events by categories, types or subtypes.

More information
Some events that weren't important enough to make it into this timeline are noted on the Discussion page (as well as on the Google Sheet Timeline of cryonics - extended timeline).

An exhaustive list of publicly known preserved patients (including a yet incomplete evaluation of the quality of their preservation) can be found in the Google Sheet List of cryonics patients.

A detailed account of membership statistics of cryonics organizations has been compiled in the Google Sheet Cryonic members statistics (although not all organizations share all or any of their membership statistics). A detailed account of patient statistics has been compiled in the Google Sheet Cryonic patients statistics. The membership and patient statistics should be updated at the beginning of every year, after the publication of the statistics from last year.

Timeline update strategy
As of 2020, Mati Roy is currently roughly staying up-to-date with new major cryonics events, and should, therefore, update the timeline roughly continuously, at least in the near future. If you're interested in helping in any way, feel free to take the initiative. If you have any questions, want guidance or feedback, want to discuss ways to improve this timeline, or have a suggestion for an addition to this timeline, let Mati know on the TimelinesWiki Subreddit or TimelinesWiki Facebook Group (and link me the post) or contact me directly at contact@matiroy.com.

Also see the section "More information" for other related information that can be updated or otherwise improved. All those external lists are editable, and everyone is encouraged to contribute to them. They are all available in the Google Folder Cryonics Statistics. The graphs from the Trends section can be updated whenever the relevant external lists are.

An older version of the timeline is available on Google Sheet: Timeline of brain preservation.

To update the graph of cryonics patients and the graph of cryonics patients per organization, consult:


 * Alcor's cases
 * CI's cases
 * OregonCryo's cases
 * KrioRus' cases

To update the cryonics membership graph:


 * Alcor's membership stats
 * OregonCryo's membership stats
 * CI's membership stats (see latest magazine)
 * Osiris' membership stats

To do

 * Make a graph of historical money spent on cryonics by members, philanthropists and other interest groups.
 * Read Emergency preservation and resuscitation for cardiac arrest from trauma to add the major milestones of the used of hypothermia.
 * Read CRYOGÉNISATION DES CORPS OU “CRYONIE” and add missing relevant events

Terminology
By default, Mati Roy suggests using the terminology proposed by OregonCryo.

Tracking preservation quality
An interesting addition that could be done to this page is to measure the progress of the quality of cryonics cases. If you're interested in contributing to this project, you can fill the columns related to the quality of the cryopreservation in the Google Sheet List of cryonics patients by going through some of the cases published by the cryonics organizations; see: Alcor (human cases), the Cryonics Institute (human cases), OregonCryo (human cases), OregonCryo (non-human cases), KrioRus (human cases), KrioRus (non-human cases).

While ways to quantify the quality of preservations have been proposed, notably by OregonCryo, there are currently no systematic analyses done about the quality of current preservations by any of the cryonics providers.

As for the improvements done in laboratory conditions, progress is better tracked by noting various discrete technological development as done in the full timeline above.

While having a graph tracking the "biggest mass of a successfully cryopreserved tissue/organ/organism by year, kg" is appealing, it doesn't meaningfully track progress done on brain preservations which pose a series of challenges not present in smaller volumes of tissue as noted by Mike Darwin. This can still be found on the Discussion page.

Acknowledgement
Mati Roy created the first version of the timeline of brain preservation published here with payment from Vipul. Mati Roy also created and is maintaining, with the help of other volunteers, all of the Google Sheets mentioned in the section. Most of the membership statistics were entered by Marta Sandberg. contributed a lot of information on notable technological progress on Reddit. and Issa Rice provided a lot of useful feedback. Alexey Potapov, Marta Sandberg, as well as others contributed ideas for events to add. The graph and table tracking Scientific progress towards cryonics was created by Roman.

In January 2020, Mati Roy updated the timeline, and Jim Yount, CEO of the American Cryonics Society, provided a lot of useful feedback.