Miscellaneous Technical Topics
Vitrification quality
Micrographs documenting
complete lack of ice formation and excellent preservation of fine detail (ultrastructure) after vitrification can be found
in this
talk and this published
paper. Rabbit kidneys have also been successfully cryopreserved, reimplanted, and returned
to function as published here.
Tissue Fracture
The tissue does fracture. But a simple fracture does not cause any loss of information. Consider this analogy. Let's say you have an expensive painting which needs to be restored. If someone has torn the painting in half, restoration is still possible. All the pigment is still in the correct locations on the canvas, and a very skilled person could conceivably mend the two halves together in such a way that nobody could even see the damage. So that's a 2D analogy to the 3D cracking issue. There really is no loss of information. It's simply (with very high tech) a matter of mending the crack.
This is in stark contrast to other kinds of damage which would essentially "stir" molecules in an unpredictable manner. Going back to the painting analogy, this would be like spraying a solvent across the entire surface of the painting causing the colors to mix and bleed. No matter how high the technology, there would be no way to put the colors back where they belong. With even the slightest bit of mixing, important detail is quickly and permanently lost. Intelligent extrapolation can be used to compensate for some of this data loss, but that has limits. So preventing this kind of ultrastructure damage is really the goal of cryonics. As previously explained, SEMs show that, when done well, cryopreservation using vitrification does indeed retain the ultrastructure that is so important.
Unfortunately, not all cracks are simple. Some can be more complex, pulverizing parts of the frozen matrix. This, of course, is highly undesireable. Because of this issue, we will probably move some day to intermediate temperature storage. So instead of cooling all the way to -196 C, we would store at -130 C.
Why don't you store the whole body?
It would compromise the quality of the brain preservation. It would also be prohibitively expensive and require many infrastructure improvements. We are not a cemetery. We only preserve the brain. The remainder of the body can be handled in the ordinary way through a funeral director.
Brain vasculature
http://brainwaves.corante.com/Vasculature.gif
