What guarantees do services like egg freezing provide, e.g. if the power goes out for their -80 freezer, or if they go bankrupt? What happens to your cells? What about with this service?
Some kind of “failure bond” where the company puts up a security in case of failure might be an option.
Most cryobanks don’t seem like they’d have this problem, but when you move into the decades timescale, things like catastrophic dewar failure can drain the coolant from your samples in minutes, and if it’s not staffed 24/7 with staff trained in contingencies like this (how do you safely remove samples from the dewar fast enough and how do you even know the failure occurred fast enough?) then damage can set in. There may even not be any records made or kept of the failure.
Something to think about if you want to move forward. However, if all you want is epi-DNA, I imagine corpses a few centuries old may qualify as enough. Eggs and sperm need to stay alive and viable, which is a far higher bar.
This is a good point. In general, you get redundancy by splitting samples over multiple locations and storing cells at -196 liquid nitrogen or slightly warmer vapor phase.
I also think sequencing is another form of insurance that applies to cell storage for aging, because sequencing as much of your cells as possible now is basically a digital save state of your youngest cells. A rubric for age-reversal, at least for your cells.
