neurons – Pain In The Bud

A man in the UK has spent a small fortune on the possibility of reviving his dead cat.

Mark McAuliffe says he was so upset when his 23-year-old cat’s health began to fail that he made arrangements with a Swiss firm to preserve her body when she passed away.

The 38-year-old adopted Bonny, a domestic shorthair, while he was a teenager, and she’s been with him for more than half his life, including his entire adulthood.

Usually when stories like this make the news, they’re about people who preserve their cat or dog’s DNA for cloning.

That’s not what’s happening here.

Bonny has been placed in a cryopreservation unit, which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her entire body. Freezing a body essentially suspends it in time. Extremely cold temperatures — as close to absolute zero as possible — suspend cellular activity, including decay.

It’s called cryopreservation, and while the concept is most frequently invoked in science fiction, putting a body into cryostasis is real and within the technological capabilities of modern science.

The company McAuliffe paid to preserve his cat is Switzerland-based Tomorrow Bio, which is affiliated with the European Biostasis Foundation. The technology is used for several other purposes in the medical field, the food industry and in certain engineering applications.

McAuliffe is gambling on the future, or a version of it in which people and animals can be revived and repaired, like Lazarus in a lab. But it wouldn’t be much of a future for Bonny if her human wasn’t with her, so McAuliffe has reserved a spot for himself as well, hoping to meet her in better times.

“This cushioned the blow about Bonny’s death,” he said, “because I have got it in the back of my mind that it is not going to be the final goodbye.”

Employees of Tomorrow Bio inspect a liquid nitrogen pod. Credit: Tomorrow Bio

The European Biostasis Foundation runs the cryovaults where clients are kept. The organization told the Daily Mail that it has five “full body patients,” 15 preserved brains, two dogs and eight cats. In addition, more than 700 people have made arrangements to have their own bodies frozen upon death.

There is, of course, a hiccup.

While freezing a body is possible, thawing is not — not without destroying the body.

That’s because ice crystals form and rupture cell walls when the body is brought out of cryopreservation, no matter how slow the process.

The workaround involves using cryoprotectants, essentially a form of anti-freeze that would prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals despite the temperature.

That, however, introduces an entirely new set of problems, including the fact that cryoprotectant is toxic at the levels required for preservation.

Preserving the brain presents an entirely different set of problems, as our neurons and neural pathways begin to decay immediately after death. Our brain topology and neural connections are part of who we are, part of what makes our minds uniquely our own. Neuroscience and cryostasis technology each have a long way to go before scientists can even attempt to thaw a brain.

So by spending almost $22,000 to preserve Bony, and buying a plan to preserve himself (at a cost of $230,000), McAuliffe is banking on major breakthroughs in biology, as well as the ability to precisely control temperatures. To successfully thaw a body without destroying it, the entire body must be warmed at the same time, including all internal organs. That’s a significant technical challenge.

It’s also a gamble on the general shape of the future, placing hope that progress will continue. It assumes we won’t lapse into another dark age, that we won’t lose technology and expertise to devastating wars, plagues or other disasters that could set humanity back decades or centuries.

Finally, there’s a major hurdle that has little to do with science behind cryopreservation. It’s the simple fact that human lives are short, companies that promise centuries of operation can’t guarantee that outcome, and a lot can happen while a person sleeps away those years.

There’s a great short story by the Welsh science fiction novelist Alastair Reynolds about a wealthy man who wakes after centuries of cryosleep to find that the company who managed his crypt went bankrupt. From there it changed hands several times until it ended up in the portfolio of a corporate raider.

So the narrator, expecting to be woken to fanfare, deferential treatment and a bright technological future instead finds himself indebted and facing a reality much different and more depressing than he ever imagined.

I sympathize with McAuliffe, who obviously loves Bonny a great deal, and I see the appeal of becoming a refugee from the past, entering into a cryovault in the hope of emerging into a better future. But man, that’s a huge gamble.

In the meantime, there are plenty of cats who need homes and have a lot of love to give. Every shelter cat is a potential Buddy!

Cats have gotten a good deal out of domestication: They’re safer, warmer and protected from almost all threats. They know where their next meal is coming from, and won’t hesitate to meow our ears off if dinner is late.

But one tradeoff doesn’t immediately appear beneficial: Domestic cats have smaller brains than the species they’ve evolved from, African and Eurasian wildcats.

“[D]omestic cats indeed, have smaller cranial volumes (implying smaller brains) relative to both European wildcats (Felis silvestris) and the wild ancestors of domestic cats, the African wildcats (Felis lybica),” the research team wrote.

Wild cats have the largest brains on average, followed by wild-domestic hybrids and domestic cats with the smallest brains of the three.

That’s another strong indicator that domestication is the determining factor in feline brain size, although the researchers point out that they are comparing domestic cats to current wildcats, and not the ancient population of wildcats from which domestic cats evolved beginning some 10,000 years ago with the dawn of agriculture and permanent human settlements.

Wildcats with friendlier and bolder dispositions were the first to approach human settlements, drawn by the rodents who were themselves feasting on human grain supplies. Humans realized that the cats were taking care of their rodent problems but weren’t interested in eating the grain, and a beautiful partnership was born.

superhandsomebuddy1 — “I have a yuge, yuge brain, the best brain. It’s tremendous.”

Smaller brains do not necessarily correlate to lower intelligence, however, and cats aren’t the only species whose brains became smaller after they were domesticated. Dog brains are about 30 percent smaller than the brains of gray wolves, but dogs have adapted spectacularly to living with humans and reading human behavioral cues.

“The dog is successful not because of the size of its whole brain per se, but because domestication has led to subtle brain changes with a stunning result: the ability to live in the world of people,” a Smithsonian Magazine article points out, noting dogs are also adept at getting people to do all sorts of things for them.

If brain size alone resulted in higher levels of intelligence, whales and elephants would rule the Earth.

Instead “the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity,” neuroscientist Kendra Lechtenberg wrote.

The researchers weren’t interested in drawing any major conclusions about feline cognition with the study. They’re more interested in the phenomena of “domestication syndrome,” which causes changes both physical (floppy ears, coat color variation, shorter muzzles) and behavioral. (Less aggression, playfulness.)

The jury’s still out on why exactly those traits emerge, but some studies have attributed it to differences in embryonic development. Unlike many other domestic animals, cats don’t look much different than their wild felis lybica and felis sylvestris counterparts.

The cat study was published on Jan. 26 to Royal Science Open Science, a peer-reviewed open-access journal. The research team was comprised of biologists from the University of Vienna and data curators from the National Museum of Scotland.