AI Summary
5 min readIn 2018, Ashley Vance visited a cryonics facility outside Moscow. It was a shed. Inside were two giant cylinders that looked like they could have come from a farming supply store, holding human heads and a menagerie of pets—dogs, cats, parakeets. The liquid nitrogen arrived, and the team poured it in while smoking cigarettes and taking vodka shots. That garage operation is the low-end extreme of a field that is now being rebuilt from the ground up by a new generation of founders who want to distance themselves from the past as much as from the shed.
From Anti-Freeze to Applied Biostasis
The core problem with freezing a body is ice. When water in cells crystallizes, it shreds them—the same reason a thawed strawberry turns to mush. The technical solution is called vitrification, which turns tissue into a glass-like state without ice formation. This is done by replacing all blood and water in the body with a cryoprotective agent (CPA), a medical-grade anti-freeze cocktail typically containing DMSO, formamide, and ethylene glycol. The body is then cooled to cryogenic temperatures—negative 196 degrees Celsius (negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit)—where molecular activity effectively stops.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction: The Promise and Problem of Cryonics** - Ashley Vance introduces the concept of cryonics, the history of Alcor, and frames the conversation with Dr. Emil Kendziorra of Tomorrow Bio.
- 2 (05:08) **Defining the Field: Why "Biostasis" and Not "Cryonics"** - Emil explains the terminology and the core problem with freezing.
- 3 (08:45) **A Tale of Two Cryonics: The Russian Garage vs. Tomorrow Bio** - Vance recounts his 2018 visit to a low-budget Russian cryonics operation, contrasting it with Emil's modern, medicalized approach.
- 4 (12:36) **Emil's Origin Story: From Existential Angst to Building a Bridge** - Emil explains his personal motivation and why he chose cryopreservation over traditional longevity research.
- 5 (17:41) **How It Works: The Logistics of the "Harvest"** - Emil explains the process from signing up to the moment of death.
- 6 (22:52) **The Procedure: From Pronouncement to Liquid Nitrogen** - A detailed, chronological walkthrough of the preservation steps.
- 7 (28:56) **The Price and the Financial Structure** - Emil breaks down the costs and the long-term financial safety of the operation.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
A few years ago, some people put me in a van and drove me to the edge of Moscow. And by “the edge of Moscow,” I mean where things started to get a bit rural. We turned off a road and went toward what looked like a modest farmhouse with a shed. After exiting the van, we entered said shed and found two large metal containers that were full of human bodies and heads along with the bodies of many animals, including dogs, cats, and a hummingbird. Have a look.
These bodies were being cryopreserved with liquid nitrogen in the hope that they could be reanimated at some point in the future when science has advanced and more illnesses can be cured.
Cryopreservation/reanimation is not a new idea. It’s been contemplated in literature for hundreds of years. Alcor, perhaps the most well-known cryopreservation company, was founded way back in 1972. The field, though, has suffered from questionable science and been seen as a scientific backwater.
Our guest this week wants to add scientific, intellectual, and pragmatic rigor to the cryopreservation field or what he calls the biostasis field. He’s Dr. Emil Kendziorra, the founder and CEO of Tomorrow Bio.
Tomorrow Bio has a team that will show up at the end of life and prepare someone’s body for preservation and then store their body in a Swiss vault.
In this episode, we get into the mechanics behind Tomorrow Bio and the pros and cons of biostasis. Kendziorra is a sober, deep thinker on this topic and a great listen.
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TIMESTAMPS (they link out to YouTube)
CHAPTERS0:00 Intro5:08 Cryonics Without the Ice8:45 Heads in a Russian Shed12:26 Longevity's Backup Plan19:39 The First Hours After Death30:11 Funding a Second Life37:15 Does Cryonics Actually Work?43:40 Preserving Brains Wit
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