EUCRIO is hiring.

In the following countries:

Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom

The following positions are being filled:

(Note: "the country in which operating" is assumed to be your own country. If you are prepared to travel, at the company's expense, to nearby countries if requested, then the same language requirements will apply to the country in which you are agreeing to work)

Team Leader

You will manage a private paramedical terminal care support team, which will include standing by in a hospital, and when required to provide care, ensure that the company's protocol is followed. Leadership ability is essential; a background in medical or paramedical services is ideal but not required as full training will be given. You must be able to fluently speak the language of country in which operating and English. Work will be "as required", with assignments given at short notice, and pay will be a daily rate plus travel and accommodation expenses. Ideal as supplemental work for an existing or former team manager of any field.

Team Post-Mortem Surgeon

You will work as part of a private paramedical terminal care support team, which will include standing by in a hospital, and when required to provide care, you will raise and encannulate the carotid arteries in a post-mortem patient. Other similar surgical duties may occasionally be required as the case demands, for example occasionally femoral encannulation will be requested instead of carotid. To this end, a surgical background is essential. It is essential that you have the ability to fluently speak either the language of country in which operating or English (preferably both). Work will be "as required", with assignments given at short notice, and pay will be a daily rate, open to negotiation, plus travel and accommodation expenses. Ideal as supplemental work for an existing or former surgeon, mortician, or embalmer.

Team Perfusionist

You will work as part of a private paramedical terminal care support team, which will include standing by in a hospital, and when required to provide care, you will perfuse the post-mortem patient in the manner prescribed by the company's protocol. Full training in the company's protocol, and the use of the company's equipment and perfusates, will be given, but you should have a background in perfusion, embalming, or a closely related field. It is essential that you have the ability to fluently speak either the language of country in which operating or English (preferably both). Work will be "as required", with assignments given at short notice, and pay will be a daily rate, open to negotiation, plus travel and accommodation expenses. Ideal as supplemental work for an existing or former perfusionist or embalmer.

Team Medic

You will work as part of a private paramedical terminal care support team, which will include standing by in a hospital, and when required to provide care, you will administer medications in the manner prescribed by the company's protocol (this will include IV lines, intra-osseous infusion, and oesophageal insertions). Full training in the company's protocol, and the use of the company's equipment and medications, will be given, but you should have a background in the administration of medicines. It is essential that you have the ability to fluently speak either the language of country in which operating or English (preferably both). Work will be "as required", with assignments given at short notice, and pay will be a daily rate plus travel and accommodation expenses. Ideal as supplemental work for an existing or former paramedic or nurse.

Team Recorder (Audio-Visual)

You will work as part of a private paramedical terminal care support team, which will include standing by in a hospital, and when required to provide services, you will record the proceedings by means of audio-visual recording. This will be for quality assurance purposes, and not for publication. It is essential that you have the ability to fluently speak either the language of country in which operating or English (preferably both). Work will be "as required", with assignments given at short notice, and pay will be a daily rate plus travel and accommodation expenses. Ideal as supplemental work for an existing or former documentary film-maker or camera operator.


Team Recorder (Photographer)

You will work as part of a private paramedical terminal care support team, which will include standing by in a hospital, and when required to provide services, you will record the proceedings by means of still photography. This will be for quality assurance purposes, and not for publication. It is essential that you have the ability to fluently speak either the language of country in which operating or English (preferably both). Work will be "as required", with assignments given at short notice, and pay will be a daily rate plus travel and accommodation expenses. Ideal as supplemental work for an existing or former documentary photographer.

Lawyer (Consultant)

You will be available for periodic consultations regarding the law of your country of operation and its effect on all areas of our business. You will be able to speak English and the language of the country in which you are operating. You will have a background that includes one or more of the following: international law, conflict of laws, European Union law, contract law, tort law (experience with this latter field in the context of medical and/or mortuary practice will be especially useful). Consultations will be as required, and fees will be negotiable.

To apply for any of the above, please express your interest by emailing your CV / resumé and a short covering letter to david@eucrio.eu to arrange an interview.

Cryonics UK Training with Ben Best

Time is short and this weekend had a lot of content, so rather than report at length, I'll direct you to Ben Best's account of this Cryonics UK training weekend, as published in Long Life magazine:

http://www.cryonics.org/immortalist/september10/CUK_training.pdf

Society for Cryobiology Annual Conference

This was, incidentally, the first public representation of EUCRIO by my good self.

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Time is short and this conference was long, so I'm going to talk about one particular presentation I enjoyed seeing.

Specifically, regarding cryopreparation techniques used for transmission microscopy, which include chemical fixing followed by slicing into 150+/-50nm slices.

Logically this bodes well for the plans of the Brain Preservation Society, though results have included cells horribly lysed in some samples as well as cells preserved intact, albeit in parts internally damaged. If the purpose is to create a map (as in the transmission electron microscopy, such as could be used for keeping a record of the brain) rather than restore the cell to viability (as in cryonics), this is just fine.

I would draw a parallel to someone who has suffered brain damage due to oxygen starvation; the cells aren't properly functional, but still there and in tact.

I realise this is a somewhat tenuous analogy since the cells in a brain-damaged patient are viable whereas the fixed and sliced cells now frozen are not, this is irrelevant if the object is to record, rather than directly restore.

The upshot of all this (my conclusion, not that of the speaker) is that whole brain emulation could mean that someone's recorded brain could conceivably have its data "fed into" an artificially created brain (be it cloned, bioprinted, or even non-biological) and jump-started top effectively boot up the having-been-preserved person's mind (with the assumption of the validity of the premise of anatomical basis of mind, such that the mind is a function of the information communication in the brain).

Cryonics training in Portugal

I recently gave training to the Alcor Portugal group, who are beginning to get equipped to perform local (Portugal and Spain) Cryonics emergency standby, stabilisation, and transport.

So far, their equipment runs to a PIB, thumper, and air compressor - bare bones basic stuff, but much more is on the way.

The PIB is of the design used by the Oregon Cryonics local assistance group, built by a local fabricator following to-the-millimetre specifications from the US. Upon seeing it, I was somewhat envious of its very shiny professional appearance, compared to Cryonics UK's seasoned old wood-and-plastic PIB that has seen action in I don't know how many suspensions.

I made an observation that with the side bars in place all around the PIB, there was insufficient room to slide the thumper in and not have its operations obstructed by the horizontal bars. After some experimentations with positioning of the thumper, it was decided to take the bars out at the part where the thumper slides in, such that it has a gap in the side at that part to allow the thumper room to get in as far as the necessary part of the patient's chest, as the CUK PIB does.

Removing these bars thus went on a to-to list, and later on we tested the structural integrity of the PIB (still with all the sides in place and unaltered at this stage) by part filling it with water (part filling as naturally water without ice is slightly more dense than ice water).

The PIB failed this testing process; the central folding part of the base board folded the wrong way under the pressure, and the aluminium bars bent out of shape.

Apparently the fabricator, a hefty fellow, had tested it by jumping up and down in it, and it had been fine, but clearly the water weight proved too much for it.

To this end, the existing PIB will be fixed, reinforced, and re-tested; and also a new PIB will be constructed after CUK's design.

Everything will be tested as rigorously as needs be, before going into action with any of it.

The thumper, a Michigan Instruments 1004, can run directly from the air compressor, which itself will run from a car cigarette lighter for non-ambulance vehicle use (say for example, if a van were used in an emergency).

Given the lack of other equipment on-hand as yet, other less hands-on instruction was given in the form of a keynote presentation, some videos, and a show-and-tell slide session, to give an overview of the whole standby, stabilisation, and transport process.

This took the best part of one day, and though I stayed from Friday to Monday, the other time was taken up with various related prep-work, about which I'll not blog for now but rather update the world on that and some other work I've been doing, in a couple of months' time.

While as yet small, the local group in Portugal has a lot of commitment and for that and other reasons I see them going very far.

Zoll Autopulse purchased

http://www.zoll.com/medical-products/cardiac-support-pump/autopulse/

For any unfamiliar, this item is the Rolls-Royce of (very!) transportable and efficient automated cardiac support.

Way better than the LUCAS Chest Compression System and incomparably preferable to the Michigan Instruments Thumper.

Provides compression all around chest instead of just at one point, and automatically measures the patient's chest's resistance, so that it neither over- nor under-compresses (either could cause significant damage). No clumsy compressed air cylinders to worry about, as it's powered by batteries. No careful calibration needed, as with the Michigan Instruments thumper and friends, as it calibrates itself automatically.



The most expensive machine in the kit, but with three times the survival rate (compared to other CPR/CPS solutions) in hospital use, at what price a life?

Too long have cryonics patients (over here, away from the field of operations of Suspended Animation Inc) not had the best chances. That's all changing now.

"Cryonics: What, Why, and How" at Oxford University

I had the pleasure recently of speaking to a group of 60 or so engineers, scientists, and philosophers at Oxford University, having been invited by Alex Flint of the Oxford Transhumanists group.

I had been asked to give an overview of cryonics in general, and the situation regarding cryonics in the UK in particular. This was quite pleasing to deliver, given the various recent positive developments in our area.

I called the presentation "Cryonics: what, why, and how" and set about answering those questions;

* What cryonics is - with an emphasis on outlining the basics in fashion that makes clear the premises
* Why cryonics, despite the fact a (fully developed) human has not (yet) been brought back from cryosuspension, is a demonstrably viable medical procedure
* How cryonics is implemented - with a focus on the (now good and rapidly excelling) situation in the UK

In terms of how I went about the above, I will give only a nutshell version notes here, but:

An important part of the "what" included my adjustment to the standard definition of cryonics; I redefined cryonics thus:

"Cryonics is the science of using lowered temperatures to suspend the biochemical processes that would otherwise further harm the body of a (legally) dead person."

This is an improvement on previous definitions that have generally involved such terms as "suspending the body of a..." which is not very clear and leaves room for ambiguity. It is much clear to elucidate what exactly is being "suspended", using the word in a more meaningful fashion.

It is also an improvement on definitions that just say "dead" rather than "(legally) dead". The term "dead" is remarkably nebulous if one does not include some kind of qualifier. By loose definitions, many people "come back from the dead" if they suffer clinical death that is successfully reversed by the application of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Note well: if such a person (who was clinically dead and reanimated by CPR) had enjoyed the benefit of a doctor on the scene who noted the clinical death and pronounced him dead, then he would have been not only clinically dead but also legally dead as well - so, just like a cryonics patient. And, just like the cryonics patient, he had a good chance of revival if given the necessary treatment (in his case, CPR; in the case of a cryonics patient, CPS, cooling in a PIB, administration of medications, perfusion, and further cooling).

It also is a better definition than most because it omits the common "in the hope that future medical technology will be able to restore them to health"; since this is something that comes after cryonics, and is not cryonics itself, so why has it been previously included in the definition of cryonics? It is rather unreasonable to suggest that the definition of something should include mention of in what ways it is not the panacea that it never claimed to be.

One does not define a quadruple heart bypass surgery as "the process of disconnecting the heart of a terminally ill person and plumbing it back in again, this time attached with bits of leg, in the hope that medical care afterwards will be able to restore them to health".

So why has cryonics previously suffered such shoddy defining? The answer is obvious, and is analogous to how if you had performed CPR prior to the 1950s you'd have been arrested for molesting a corpse (which would also be a poor definition of that activity, by the way).

As for why cryonics is (despite a (fully developed) human not (yet) being returned from cryopreservation) a demonstrably viable medical procedure, I point to the obvious and abundant proofs of principle; including, but not limited to:

* Cryopreservation and later rewarming of human embryos such that the survival rate of cryopreserved embryos is quite good
* Studies demonstrating that time spent in cryopreservation does not affect the viability of stored embryos
* Studies in which small mammals (eg rats) have been suspended around freezing temperatures and restored to viability
* Studies in which large mammals (eg dogs) have been suspended to close to freezing temperatures and restored to viability
* A case study in which a dog was suspended below zero degrees Celsius and restored to viability
* Case studies of comatose patients that demonstrate that brain functions can cease totally and yet still be restarted later without extensive memory loss
* The fact that it has been demonstrated by example that an organ can be vitrified, rewarmed, and transplanted with viability.

Regards to the "how" element, I focussed on my own field, that of the standby, stabilisation, and transport side of cryonics services, being less qualified to speak on the finer details of the cool-down between -96 and -196 degrees, as the last my side of the work sees of the patient is at dry ice temperatures rather than liquid nitrogen (which is performed at the facility of the patient's chosen long term storage provider).

I gave an overview of the start-to-finish of the SST process, and spoke briefly on what occurs thereafter.

As part of the explanation of the SST process, I talked the audience through the following parts:

* Cardiac arrest
* Resuscitation failure
* Continued cardiopulmonary support (Michigan Instruments / Ambu-CardioPump / Zoll AutoPulse)
* PIB and squid
* Medications (and meds support kit use; IVs, F.A.S.T intra-osseous infuser, CombiTube, etc)
* Transport in specialised ambulance
* Washout and perfusion with vitrification solution (benefits cf. other solutions such as 8M glycerol, or even simply mRPS-2, as these had been our options prior to the availability of CI VM-1 in the UK)
* Further cool-down to -96 degrees
* Transport in Sinclair dry ice shipper

With respect to the final preparations made at the other end, I skirted through these briefly, and mainly used that section to talk about the very promising likelihood of viability, citing various studies that demonstrate this.

As I had the slides to hand from a previous speaking engagement, I also made mention of some peripheral aspects of CUK's recent activities, situations in the media, etc.

I additionally touched on the progressive implementation of reliable cryonics emergency standby, stabilisation, and transport capabilities through Europe, something that has been very slow progress but is very soon about to accelerate very rapidly indeed.

Upon coming to what would be the end of my talk, it occurred to me that I had not addressed any of the philosophical considerations, and spoken only of the engineering and scientific aspects. To this end, I gave a short overview of the various common philosophical objections to cryonics, and demonstrated how each of those objections was based on bad logic - contrariwise highlighting how the logical arguments in favour of cryopreservation are pretty much unassailable.

I thereafter fielded questions on the topic I had covered, and also on a few that I hadn't, but are peripheral to cryonics (such as uploading, and suchlike).

Some very insightful questions from members of the audience, addressing sociological aspects that tend to pass most people by. As the evening's primary topic (cryonics: what, why, and how) had attracted a lot of interest, I ended up in a very productive dialogue with the audience that took me up the two hour mark, by which time I had to dash to catch a train (the perils of a busy life; no rest for the wicked), rather than stay for more questions / continue in a pub as invited.

Perhaps next time!

All in all, a great evening.

Cryonics UK: One Year On

I spoke recently to the UK Transhumanist Association in London (on the 16th of May), on the topic "Cryonics UK: One Year On - An Update from David Styles".

As the title suggested, the purpose of my talk was to inform the world regarding what progress has been made during the first year of my tenure as Organiser for Cryonics UK. I was happy to report a lot of positive developments:



Further details of Cryonics UK can be found at www.cryonics-uk.com