[ExI] The Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize Has Been Won

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco
Subject: [ExI] The Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize Has Been Won

 

>…The Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize Has Been Won


http://turingchurch.com/2016/02/09/the-small-mammal-brain-preservation-prize-has-been-won/

 

 

The part that caught my attention is the vitrified brain is in some kind of medium that could separate the tissue from the cryonic medium.  That would allow us to use liquid air rather than LN2, which I think is cheaper and safer (Max do feel free to rescue me from error.)

 

The comment about storing at -135C suggests they are mixing something with the liquid air (or whatever the medium) to raise the boiling point, which would save perhaps a third of the cost of vaporized and loss of the cryonic medium (Max, heeeelllllp!)  

 

If there is some kind of solid medium around the brain tissue, it might really make a lot of things easier and cheaper in the handling and storage of the preserved tissue.  We could study mixtures such as liquid air/ethanol for instance, see how low that goes before the ethanol starts freezing out of the mixture.  

 

We could even do some fun stuff like get high school science fair projects trying different mixtures of liquid air/ethanol to find… uh… never mind.  High school kids, ethanol, bad idea.  The evaporation losses alone would be enormous.

 

Methanol freezing point is higher, so that is going off in the wrong direction, even if we don’t know what happens if we try to mix it with liquid air.

 

This seems like a fun chemical engineering project: get a bunch of yahoos independently trying mixtures of stuff which were not available to us before for this application, when the cryonic medium needed to be in physical contact with the preserved tissue.

 

I can imagine a hundred new ideas for what to try.  We should set up a Google Page spreadsheet to write them in and make educated guesses on the properties of the eutectic mixture, ja?  Have we Google Page hipsters who know how to set up such a trick?  We want open access to those who would donate ideas into the public domain, to organize the thoughts of our local volunteer chemistry hipsters.  

 

The goal: assume some kind of tissue to be preserved, already inside some kind of impermeable solid (as the article shows) and assume -135C.  What is the mixture which maintains that temperature (or lower) at 1 atmosphere pressure for the lowest cost?  Ethanol/air?  

 

spike

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