Anyone know much of anything? I'm very VERY interested in this topic and the future it will play in our lives, anyone else have anything to contribute about it?

http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/index.html

I found that page that has quite a bit of info about it...

I was looking more of a discussion type reply :-\ Anyone think this will be the next big boom? Forbes seems to think so.

Use some very interesting things happening with computer chip manufacturers and nanotechnoloy.

I was watching a special the other night on the Discovery Channel or something like that and they were talking about cryogenics and whether it may be possible to revive someone after 400 years of being "iced".

Once someone has passed, they will need to have much of their body fluids removed because the freezing process causes tissues to expand, thus causing major damage to the body. What those who are hoping that one day deep freezing will work to bring someone back to life is that nanotechnology will be able to insert tiny machines into the body to repair the damaged tissue from the freezing process.

They showed a fan-like device that was created within IBM that is currently the world's smallest machine, but it was still much too large and not complex enough to work with these types of applications.

I think it definitely has a future and the possibilities are endless.

The thing that's always confused me about the cryogenics idea is that science tends to look upon our consciousness as just a series of electrical impulses (though admittedly the idea of the brain working on a quantum level is emerging now aswell).

Either way, when the body dies and you freeze it, as the electrical signals in the brain are gone, what are you left with if you find some way to revive the body at a later date?

Assuming that you can repair the damage your talking about and could reanimate it physically and get the brain going again (as opposed to just being left with a lump of meat) then it still wouldn't really be 'you' would it (as in the person you were when you died, with your individual consciousness and memories etc.).

Or am I missing something ? It seems quite odd to me that this doesn't cross people's minds who go in for this sort of stuff, or the people who are selling these services (some of them presumably scientists).

EthicalEpi is right..the brain cells dont regenerate and repair itself and that is the main reason why alchoholism and drug abuse is considered more dangerous medically than a social problem. Head protection in motor car racing, motorcycle riding, in dangerous construction sites and mines etc are a must because repairing the brain damage is extremely difficult and the percentage of recovery is very marginal.

Even in medical operations and treatments even a small reduction in oxygen intake into the brain will damage its functioning permanently. You all have heard of Zombification. They use some poison to make the person's vital functions like heart beat, blood pressure and the brain come to an almost dead like stage. Even doctors will not be able to make out the faint heartbeat keeping person alive after the poison is administrered. Later on the zombie witch will revive the body with some other kind of medicines and food. Even though the zombie is physically revived the brain will be dead without any normal functioning.

Freezing dead persons and hoping to be revived in the future is just another scam game to make money. Except the brain and personality and its functioning physically the person can be cloned at a future time with the tissue of the person. For this there is no need to freeze and preserve the entire body.

I could be wrong, but I think brain cells do rejuvinate naturally (not if you're dead obviously), though you're right that alcohol and (some) drugs do kill them to a greater or lesser extent.

The drug that causes zombification - I think people do recover from it (they don't remain a zombie for ever). It exists as a defence mechanism in the puffer fish which is a delicacy in japan apparently and there have been a few cases of people having eaten it because of badly prepared food. The people who don't actually die outright recovered their brain function I believe. It's the same drug that the witchdoctors in haiti use to create zombies in their potions

I think you're probably right about it being a con. Bearing in mind the improbability of being able reanimate a whole frozen body anyway, it does make sense as you say to just freeze a small genetic sample rather than the whole person, then just clone from that DNA later. I guess the profit margin for that wouldn't be so good for the cryogenic companies. LOL!

EDIT: Corrected a mistake!

The common myth is that brain and nerve cells do not regenerate. There is little nerve and brain cell growth after infancy, however there have been medical breakthroughs within the last decade that have been able to stimulate new growth.

So basically, all that science has to do is find out what stimulates nerve and brain tissue growth after conception and during infancy and then what triggers the stoppage of that growth and how to reverse it. I'm sure that will be done eventually.

So say that cryogenic preservation is possible in the future... My thoughts are the same as yours on that. I do not believe that a regenerated person would be the same person any more than a clone would have your personality.

However the counter to this is that you have to remember that when people die, the brain is the last to go. Your heart has to stop and with the lack of bloodflow to your brain, that is what leads to you being brain dead. The cells are still alive for a period of time after that, they have just ceased to function because of lack of oxygen. The hope is that if the deceased is put into a cryogenic chamber in a short enough period of time that those brain cells for the most part will be preserved.

to the best of my knowledge permanent damage to brain can never be healed and brain diseases are the most difficult to treat.....even today the brain is the least researched or studied organ in the human being. There is very little the doctors and scientists know about the brain in comparison to other organs of the human being.

and about zombies they are not the same after they are revived. not to confuse it with zombification in almost dead like stage. Even after they are revived from this stage the brain functioning is never the same but they will continue to live like vegetables. I know friends who have suffered brain injury in accidents and they have permanently lost some functioning of the brain. My own brother had a problem with some blood clotting in the brain and his speech is slurred and some hand movements are also permanently disfuntional. He can never write with his right hand again in his life....he can barely manage to eat with a spoon and his walking is also disoriented. He cant seem to decide which way his legs should move.

I think we should all register nanotech domains before a possiable boom in nanotechnology. UH-Matt disagrees, I think he thinks I'm thinking(lots of thinks)of another internet boom.

The reason that the zombies aren't the same after they recover from the initial dose of puffer fish poison is that they're then while in the care of the witchdoctor, subsequently dosed with scapolamine repeatedly throughout their enslavement (a disorienting hallucinogen that's extracted from certain plants that's mixed into the witchdoctor potions that makes them hyper suggestible so they will basically walk around in a daze and do whatever they're told.

I read of a case in haiti where some guy who had been pronounced dead many years earlier walked into a hospital, stated his name and told them that he'd been a zombie slave under the control of some voodoo master for years. The hospital didn't realise initially that he was being serious until they looked at his medical records, then realised he was actually telling the truth. Though he still recovered (probably still effected him to some degree though I'd imagine).

Brain injuries are different to impairment caused through drugs, although the apparent end results can probably be pretty similar. There are ofcourse some very strange cases that make you wonder a bit: http://web.syr.edu/~sndrake/necbrain.htm

Nerve cells can not repair themselves however in theory its possible to generate them via machines and this is where stem cell research comes in, where they can take a cell and make it do w/e''s needed.