DNA preservation
Among the services that our company provides is an option such as DNA preservation. We do, indeed, preserve DNA. Mostly, it is the DNA of people - both those who are alive now and those who have passed away. But many people also preserve the DNA of their pets.
It turns out that almost none of the existing cryobanks store the DNA of deceased people. In Russia, this is because medical banks have regulations according to which they can only store the DNA of living people, for medical purposes.
In this respect, we are unique and can take and store the DNA of people who have just died. There are generally two categories of people who order this service. The first category is those who do not realize that preserving a person's body through cryonics is much more valuable than preserving only DNA. They may be people who are not very educated, or they may have some prejudices, or they may not have the ability and desire to delve deeply into cryonics. There are such people, and there are quite a few of them.
The second category is those people who, for one reason or another, would have liked to cryonize their relatives but were unable to. There have been such cases. For example, when a person was discovered very late: he or she died alone in an apartment, had no cryocontract at the time of death, and a relatively long time had passed before he or she was discovered. If, for example, a week has already passed, then, at room temperature, not much is preserved from the tissue. But the DNA is preserved. DNA in general is preserved for quite a long time.
But what is the quality of that DNA? It varies. First of all, it depends on how the cells were stored, under what conditions. And, secondly, the quality of DNA is important in relation to what we are going to do with it. If, for example, we are talking about cloning dogs, and in the future - about human cloning, the current practice is to take cells from a dead animal, which is stored at a temperature around zero degrees for five days. During this time, cloning scientists, medics and biologists find enough surviving cells to perform the procedure. This is not even DNA, it is a collection of cells for cloning by modern rather simple methods. The DNA itself can stay in the teeth and bones of an organism for quite a long time.
You know that several groups of scientists are now trying to clone mammoths by isolating and collecting fragments of mammoth DNA. As well as other extinct animals whose DNA is defragmented. They are trying to reconstruct Neanderthal DNA, reassemble it from fragments. This shows that DNA is preserved for quite a long time, so it makes sense, even if a person died a month, six months, years ago, to preserve their DNA. DNA, some geneticists claim, contains up to 60% of our personality. DNA tells us what we look like, what nationality we are, what relatives we have. By the way, by DNA you can find relatives in specialized social networks. DNA tells us what a person's preferences were, whether there were addictions or a propensity for addictions. Tendency to diseases, selection of medications. DNA tells us a lot about a person.
And, of course, if we want a person to come back to life in the future, to live again after biological death, but, first, to be cryopreserved - DNA preservation is an absolutely necessary step. It is best, of course, to cryonize all the remains completely, there is even more information in them, even in those that have not been preserved very well.
If we preserve only DNA, this preservation must be complemented by the collection of a huge amount of information about the person. After all, if, using DNA, in the future we can grow organs, grow a person's body, or clone them, that new person will be very similar to the original, but they will not have the same memory. So how will the person be able to get their previous memory? Right now, it is hard to say whether a cybernetic or artificially grown brain can retrieve the very memory that has been stored. Right now, it's more a question of how to preserve that memory. And so DNA storage must be supplemented by collecting and digitizing archives, collecting memories, collecting all possible information about a person. It's a lot of work, but it has to be done as well.
As for the economics of cryo-companies, DNA preservation is a very small part of our revenues, no more than 5%. But the dynamics are such that more and more people turn to us for DNA preservation - not only people, but also pets. And it is quite possible that in time, the percentage of income from this service may reach ten or fifteen percent of the total income of cryo-companies. All the more so considering the fact that many people preserve the DNA of animals that their owners would like to clone, but cannot yet afford it for financial reasons.
Transhumanists believe that in the future cloning will become cheaper or available not only in the USA or South Korea, but also in other countries where many people preserve animal DNA.
Therefore, those who want to take advantage of this service can order this service at CryoRus by contacting us.
