Health Issue: Afterlife ? Freeze brain

Afterlife ? Freeze brain tillit finds a new body Moscow: "I don't ever want to die...it wouldn't suit me," said Innokenty Osadchy. Fortunately, the 35-yearold investment banker is certain he has found as loophole out of death.        Osadchy is ready to pay a small fortune to freeze his brain until future technology allows him to continue his life - after being transplanted into a new body and resuscitated. "Why do I have to die in a couple decades? I don't see any logic in this," Osadchy said. "It won't be another life, it'll be the continuation of my life. I don't ever want to die ever. Not in a year, not in a million years," he added.        Osadchy and other clients of Russian cryonics company KrioRus believe the brain operates like a computer hard-drive and its contents can be frozen and stored for the future. "We know tht the personality is stored in the brain. So when a person's  body is old, there's no reason to keep it," said Danila Medvedev, who runs KrioRus, the first cryonics outfit outside the US.        Cryonics - or the freezing of humans in the hope of future resuscitation - is illegal in france and much of the world, but KrioRus has stored four full bodies and eight people's heads in liquid nitrotgen-filled metal vats. While a few are kept at home by their client's relatives, most are lumped together in contaners at the firm's rusting warehouse, where an ole desk now serves as a step to allow visitors to peer into the icy-mist where the bodies are stored.         "You would just need to launch their bearts... then you have a person who is living again, " Medvedev said, counting on the swift progress of nanotechnology and medicine to help reverse the initial cause of death. "Once you can do that kind of nano-surgery at the cellular level... you can take a person from cryo-stasis; warm him up gradually and then he will be alive."           Since its 2005 launch, KrioRus bas been building new vats, in anticipation of the 30 clients, like Osadchy, with whom it already has contracts. The fee is $10,000 for brain freeze and $30,000 for the full body.           But scientists at the Soviet Union's former premier cryo-biology institute, now in Ukraine, are full of disdain for the idea. "They are cheating people, taking a lot of money: It's fraud," said Valentin Grishendo, director of the Ukraine-based institute. "If you freeze a body today - even one alive and healthy - after it is defrosted, it won't be alive and whole. We can't even freeze and preserve organs today.-only cells.