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Cryonics companies cryogenically freeze people after they die, in the hope that they will one day be resurrected.
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Critics say it’s fantastic. Advocates say that possibility is better than accepting death.
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The idea of bringing people back to life raises a number of scientific, legal and ethical questions.
Being cryogenically frozen after death and one day coming back to life sounds like something out of a science fiction movie. But a handful of companies around the world are selling people the dream that death is not final.
Max More spent 12 years working at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s oldest cryonics company, first as CEO and then as ambassador and president emeritus, before leaving earlier this year.
“For me it was something obvious, an extension of the idea of not wanting to die,” he told BI.
Alcor has 224 patients cryopreserved at its state-of-the-art facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, and 1,418 members have signed up to be preserved after their death.
While the technology for freezing or cryopreserving a body after death has improved greatly over decades of adjustments, there is currently no way to revive people.
“To me, it’s an illusion. It’s a promise,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, told BI. “Legit science doesn’t believe we know what we’re doing.”
“I’m concerned that while people look to the future and say, well, in the future they’ll be able to solve anything; if you create a bunch of mush when you freeze using current techniques, no one will be able to solve it, even a thousand years from now.”
More is more optimistic. He points out that a hundred years ago, people wouldn’t have believed it was possible to land on the moon or that we could have technology like FaceTime that would allow people around the world to see and talk to each other in real time.
The first person to be cryogenically frozen was psychology professor James Bedford in 1966, and an urban legend has long circulated that Walt Disney chose to be frozen after he died, although there is no evidence of this.
As technology has advanced, the idea now seems less far-fetched. Many tech billionaires are increasingly interested in ways to prolong lifeand billionaire Peter Thiel has said that it is registered to be cryogenically frozen after his death to make an “ideological statement,” though he says he doesn’t expect it to work.
Scottsdale facility has 224 limbs preserved in liquid nitrogen
A small number of cryonics companies operate around the world, with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation being the oldest and best known.
Among the survivors is a two-year-old Thai girl who died of brain cancer, the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen.
Preservation of the entire body costs $220,000 and the option to preserve just the brain costs $80,000. Most members pay through life insurance. Some even choose Freeze your pets.
The other big company, The Cryonics Institute, It has 2,180 members worldwide and there are smaller companies in Europe, China and Russia.
Other companies offer cheaper prices than Alcor, but their packages generally do not include the services of backup medical teams who come to begin the process immediately after death.
How does it work
When a member dies, a reserve medical team springs into action. Alcor has affiliated hospices in Arizona where patients can go when they are in critical condition, but typically, the team goes to the field wherever the member died.
The deceased person’s blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant, which reduces the risk of ice crystals forming after death, in a process known as vitrification.
The body is then gradually cooled and stored at -196°C, or around -321°F, in specialized containers filled with liquid nitrogen, preventing the body from decomposing.
The bodies will then remain preserved indefinitely until science advances to the point where they can be revived.
More stated that science is moving in the right direction, but not at the pace he would like. Earlier this year, scientists at the University of Minnesota successfully thawed rat organs and transplanted them in a historic first.
The cryonics industry is based on the assumption that death will one day be reversible. Not only would we have to be able to bring people back to life, but we would also have to be able to cure the cause of death, whether it be cancer, old age, or anything in between.
Critics say this seems too fantastical. Caplan believes that even the process of freezing people is a bit of a gamble, let alone trusting the ability to one day bring them back to life.
“Speaking for myself, it’s still something I want to do instead of just letting myself die,” More said.
‘You’re going to be a weirdo’
The concept of bringing people back to life raises all sorts of legal, ethical and philosophical questions.
On a practical level: When a person comes back to life, would they have the same identity and Social Security number? If Queen Elizabeth II had been cryogenically preserved and brought back to life, would she have become monarch again? Would people have rights over property and assets that have passed to their heirs?
Skeptics point out that even if revival were possible, it would be extremely difficult for people to wake up hundreds or thousands of years in the future and then try to integrate into a new world they do not understand.
“Even if it worked, if you woke up a thousand years later, you wouldn’t know what was going on. You’d be a weirdo,” Caplan said.
More believes this is just another challenge to overcome. She compared the scenario to people waking up after years in a coma or moving to a different country and learning to assimilate into a new culture.
In addition to being very confident in the possibilities of science, members of cryonics companies are also confident in the fact that these companies will still be around hundreds of years from now.
Alcor protects its future through the nonprofit Patient Care Trust, which operates as a separate entity to manage and protect funds for frozen patients, More said.
There are very strict rules about money management, including allowing no more than 2% to be withdrawn per year.
Despite the aspirations of those working in this field, there are many whens, ifs and buts when it comes to cryonics.
In his experience, the common trait among those who sign up is a deep “sense of adventure,” as well as not being afraid to be nonconformists, More said.
“The unknown terrifies people and, in fact, they would rather die. I find it very difficult to relate to that. But that is their choice,” More said.
“I’d rather be there for the big adventure and see how this all works,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
