This is 1. fascinating, but 2. not entirely useful. I'm upvoting it anyway because it's something I hadn't heard of and may want to do if it's as helpful and inexpensive as you suggest. To answer that, I'd need to know:

1. Who to go to to get cells frozen.
2. What the procedure entails.
3. How much #2 costs.
4. What's required to get the cells off ice and appropriate tissues or organs grown in the event that I need them.
5. Probability of success for #4. (or even just: How often has this been done, and what proportion of attempts have been successful)
6. Cost of #4.
7. Common death-causes for which this entire exercise is useful.

...and probably a few other things I haven't thought of. The post answers none of these, although I'm glad you brought it up anyway because at least now I know the possibility exists.

Also of note: it sounds like this is used for things like replacing failed organs with own-grown ones. Which, okay, that will buy you longer life, and that's a good thing, and I'm sure organs grown from younger cells work better. But it doesn't sound like it will buy you longer youth, which is what anti-aging is all about. I think your complaint might be misdirected. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

So, you've noticed you are confused, and concluded that the false belief must be "the anti-aging community contains a non-negligible number of rational munchkin types", rather than "storing tissue samples is cheap, flawless, reliable, and useful"?

You say you've asked loads of people. What did they say? "No, I didn't do that. I dunno why."? Did no one have an explanation like "I hadn't thought of it" / "I never heard of it" / "It's poorly advertised and I don't know who to call" / "It's too expensive for too little pay off; let's fund cryonics / rejuvination therapy instead" / "It doesn't actually work the way you think" / anything at all? It sounds like that's what you're saying, but did no one at least try to rationalize it? Even with "That sounds dumb" or just laughing it off?

Not even one rationalization, even a feeble one?

That seems unlikely.

Not just "I'd expect people to be smarter than that", but "I'd expect people to make at least a tiny effort to justify their preference when it is called into question, even if by just saying 'that is my preference'". Maybe your responses were mostly noise, but what sort of noise?

If it's just that people haven't even heard of it, then clearly the solution is to raise awareness. If it's that people aren't getting sufficiently excited, then the solution is to do our own cost/benefit analysis, and if it still works out in favor of tissue-freezing, raise awareness of that.

Here is a rough cost-benefit analysis. I found all the numbers before doing any maths and tried to be as optimistic as possible towards your theory to account for people more intelligent than me coming up with better ways to do it if it became standardised.

The cost of freezing a cell is proxied as the cost of freezing your eggs, which is already commercially available. It is £2900 for the initial harvest and £275 for a subsequent year of freezing. This £275 is not discounted because you pay it every year. Source. Let's assume that the clinic are nice and let you freeze as many different organ-cells as you want for the same £275 / year fee.

There are 56,000 people in the EU who are on the organ donor waiting list, suggesting there are around 56,000 people who have a sufficiently chronic failure of an organ that it didn't kill them outright but will kill them if they don't get a transplant. Many of these 56,000 people will get an organ through conventional means, but let's say none of them do to account for the fact that as medicine advances we will probably be able to transfer more people off the 'going to die' list onto the 'might be able to survive if given a transplant' list. Let's also assume that this represents 56,000 new people on the organ transplant list each year, even though the average wait on the list is around three years. Source (also I found a dodgy-looking source suggesting that 50,000 people die of organ failure each year, so the figure for the number who could benefit is probably not out by more than an order of magnitude). There are 500m people in the EU, so your chance of being on the organ transplant list in any given year is about 0.01%.

Same source as above suggests the average QALY gain for an organ transplant is 11.5 for a liver transplant, 6.8 for a heart transplant and 5.2 for a lung transplant. Let's assume all transplants give you the full 11.5 QALYs because medicine improves.

Finally let's assume you freeze your cells now at 25 with the expectation that they will be used in 40 years at 65. You only get one shot at doing this; you may never freeze your cells again because they degrade too much on your 26th birthday.

This means in total you pay £13900 for a 0.01% chance at 11.5 additional QALYs, for an expectated value of £10.8m / QALY. That is to say, if you would pay £10.8m for an additional year of life at the margin, this is probably worthwhile (given some very optimistic assumptions). However, this is only true if you get one shot to freeze your cells at 25. If instead you can wait until you need them and freeze them then, you'd only be paying something like £250 / QALY. You can see from these two numbers that even if cells degrade in quality to the extent that they are a thousand times harder to successfully transplant you are still better to wait until you are pretty sure you are a high-risk group for organ failure. Anyone who believes £10.8m / QALY is a good deal should also be prepared to accept a salary cut of around £115,000 / year in order to avoid a 20 mile commute since road vehicles have a fatality rate of something like 1.5 per billion miles travelled.

Do you have any papers or other resources on why freezing one's cells would be a good idea for transhumanists? I think that we'd be interested in hearing you elaborate on why you think any given method of freezing cells would be worthwhile, which isn't something that you've discussed in the above post.

To be fair, your readers can Google things, too-- but in general, it is really nice when people who make posts give readers a bit of background knowledge on the topic the post is about, especially when the topic (freezing cells) is something that isn't commonly discussed on LW.

Two responses:

First, if this is a useful thing that we should be doing, good on you for making the case for it.

Second, it's not at all clear to me that this is a useful thing that we should be doing. What is the use case where I say "I'm glad I have those frozen cells from young me"? Egg freezing has obvious benefits given declining fertility with age, and unsurprisingly I see a significant infrastructure in place for freezing eggs. But for those of us that aren't women, that doesn't seem tremendously useful.

How big is the (expected) difference in success between, say, organs rebuilt with cells from a 25 year old to organs rebuilt with cells from a 45 year old? (If we don't know that, why are we saying the case for this as a life extension technology is "certain"?)

"I've asked them all, and I have nothing to show for it." ... "Let me disclose first that I have no idea how to fix this problem."

I'm unsure what "nothing to show for it" means? I want to recommend that you have intensive (in the sense of contentful rather than combative) arguments, try to identify weakpoints in their reasoning (or excuses, as the case may be), and then write up your analysis for others to read. However you may already have tried to argue the issue, and came out the other end with nothing worth analysing. On the other hand, you may have had unintense arguments, in which case it seems like a substantive discussion is the first port of call. On second thought, a substantive discussion is called for in both cases, since if you come out with nothing worth analysing then the discussion wasn't substantive after all!

PS. This is my first comment on this site, I'm not familiar with the etiquette surrounding introductions and (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Site_Etiquette_and_Social_Norms) doesn't contain any information on that point. Let me know if there's any introductory rituals I would be remiss to ignore.

It seems like whole genome sequencing could be a lower-cost, lower-quality option? (No recurring freezing costs, just a lump sum for the sequencing? But it's less likely to be useful.)

Also, it's not clear to me that it's important than an artificial organ be produced from my cells.

Is this an idea you had yourself? Did you run it by any experts? In any case, this suggests to me that you are generalizing hastily about what you see as this implying about people.

Let me disclose first that I have no idea how to fix this problem. I don't mean the problem of getting all longevists to freeze their cells, I mean the problem of getting them to take information from the world of science and biomedicine and applying it to themselves. To become users of the technology they are boasters of. To behave rationally in a CFAR or even homo economicus sense.

Most people choose their behaviors based on the behaviors of their peers. You didn't go on Google Scholar to read about the risks of alcohol and make a rational decision before you took your first drink, you did it because your friends did it. (As an illustration, if you read the literature on TDCS (zapping your brain with electricity to cure depression and do various other stuff), you'll find that it's quite harmless, whereas if you read the literature on alcohol, you'll learn of the many ways that it can kill you. Yet many people who happily binge drink are leery about zapping their brains with electricity... until they see their friends do it, of course.) So, to spread a new behavior, you want to spread it like any other meme. Start with high status people if you can. Look how much more seriously people are taking AI risk now that an Oxford professor and Elon Musk are its public face. (I actually have no problem with this, by the way. Delegating belief formation to high status people is not a terrible idea, especially if the high status people are highly intelligent and rational and they're listened to by the general population.)

This is the first time I have encountered the idea of freezing cells. Is this a viable options for people who are not rich?

What exactly do you mean when you say "freezing some of your cells now"?

Why do you believe that it would help someone grow a bladder for me in case I need a new bladder down the road?

I had a similar thought; actually my childrens' have had cell samples frozen since I banked their cord blood.

Perhaps it's a rationalization, but my instinct is that even a 100 year old person will have plenty of functioning cells available for use in cloning or whatever and that errors in the code sequence could be corrected by comparing cells from different parts of the body.

So where exactly do I go for that? Googling "freeze your cells" gives me the information about technical details of that, rather than a company that provides such service, or completely irrelevant weight loss surgery information.

From a quality of life POV, I would think that joint replacement (knee, hip, elbow) would be a huge improvement for many people. Outside of organ growing is there any progress on growing joints?

Sounds like a service that cryonics providers might usefully diversify into.

How long a shot it is that this is a useful thing to do, compared with cryonics?

What about something like this? http://nyscf.org/images/pdf/biopsy_flyer_versionweb.pdf?study_id=17&participant_id=51644acd8255dc3ede4fa494b7def28831554d6a . I'm not sure if they'd store the samples at a timescale long enough to be relevant though (aka, 4+ decades).

How important is it, though, that the cells be your own cells? In several decades, we may have even better tools to deal with the transplant rejection that stems from regenerated organs with different genomic material.

==

FWIW here is a relevant article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10295085/Stem-cell-banks-enable-wealthy-to-free-backup-version-of-their-adult-selves.html

Interesting example, but have you actually done a cost/benefit analysis to show that it would be beneficial? If your analysis looks good, I would be more likely to take this seriously as an indictment of the rationality of the anti-aging enthusiasts. Currently, it just seems like grandstanding.

Searching for "tissue freezing service" points to http://sceil.com/ , however their site is basically useless. Has anyone looked at these guys in any detail?

This is consistent with my experience with European life-extension movements. Generally speaking we just don't have a clear idea of where we should be going. Neither do we even always agree an what research or project is even relevant. So we have a collection of people sharing a vaguely defined goal of life-extension, all pushing for their pet projects and hypotheses. No one is really willing to abandon what they came up with because no clear evidence-based project under which they could assemble exists (or is perceptible)(this therefore of course includes all such personal pet projects and ideas). Additionally, few if any really seem to believe strongly in life extension (as a way of life or something important enough to take precedence over other projects in their life), and newly interested people turnover is very high with little retention beyond a few months.

That is... pretty impressive.

First post for me here, but I've been following this technology for the last ten years. This is an interesting idea, well worth following up on. I would have to say that the best thought here is that, if others aren't doing it, to do it yourself. I'm stealing this idea for my idea for a company, if you don't move on't first. Sound good?