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Cryonics companies cryogenically freeze people after death in the hope that they will one day be brought back to life.
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Critics say it’s fantastic. Advocates say this option is better than accepting death.
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The idea of bringing people back to life raises a host of scientific, legal and ethical questions.
Being cryogenically frozen after death and then one day brought 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 twelve years at the 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.
“It was an obvious thing to me, just an extension of the idea of not wanting to die,” he told BI.
Alcor has cryopreserved 224 patients at its state-of-the-art facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, and 1,418 members have signed up for post-mortem preservation.
Although the technology to freeze or cryopreserve a body after death has improved greatly over decades of refinement, there is currently no way to bring people back to life.
“To me it’s an illusion. It’s a promise,” Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, told BI. “Legitimate science doesn’t think we know what we’re doing.”
“I’m afraid that while people look to the future and say, in the future they will be able to solve everything. With today’s techniques, if you create a lot of mush when you freeze, no one will be able to solve it.” even in a thousand years.”
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 would have technology like FaceTime that allowed people around the world to see and speak to each other in real time.
The first person to be cryogenically frozen was psychology professor James Bedford in 1966, and there has long been an urban legend that Walt Disney chose to be frozen after his death – although there is no evidence of this.
As technology has advanced, the idea now seems less bizarre. Many technology billionaires are increasingly interested in technology ways to prolong lifeand billionaire Peter Thiel has said it is registered to be cryogenically frozen after he dies to make an “ideological statement” even though he says he doesn’t expect it to work.
A plant in Scottsdale has 224 members preserved in liquid nitrogen
A small number of cryonics companies operate around the world, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the oldest and best known.
Survivors include a two-year-old Thai girl who died of brain cancer, the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen.
Preserving the entire body costs $220,000, and the option to preserve just your brain costs $80,000. Most members pay through life insurance. Some even choose it freeze their pets.
The other big company, The Cryonics Institute, 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 typically do not include the services of the medical standby teams that come to begin the process immediately after death.
How it works
When a member dies, a standby medical team comes into action. Alcor has affiliated hospices in Arizona where patients can move if they are in critical condition, but typically the team goes into the field to the site where the member died.
The deceased’s blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant, which reduces the risk of ice crystal formation after death, a process known as vitrification.
The body is then gradually cooled and stored at -196°C, or about -321°F, in specialized containers filled with liquid nitrogen, which prevents the body from deteriorating.
The bodies will then be preserved indefinitely until science reaches the point where they can be brought back to life.
More said 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 and transplanted rat organs, a historic first.
The cryonics industry operates on the assumption that death will one day be reversible. Not only should we be able to bring people back to life, but we should also be able to cure the cause of death – whether that’s cancer, old age or something in between.
Critics say this feels way too fantastic. Caplan believes that even the process of freezing people is a bit of a gamble, let alone trusting the possibility of ever bringing 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 becoming a freak’
The concept of bringing people back to life raises all kinds of legal, ethical and philosophical questions.
On a practical level, if someone came back to life, would they have the same identity and social security number? If Queen Elizabeth II had been cryogenically preserved and returned to life, would she have become monarch again? Would people be able to claim goods and assets that have been passed on to their heirs?
Skeptics note that even if a revival were possible, it would be extremely difficult to have people 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 wake up a thousand years later, you won’t know what’s going on. You’re going to be a freak,” Caplan said.
More believes this is just another challenge to overcome. He compared the scenario to people who wake up after years in a coma or move to another country and learn to assimilate to a new culture.
In addition to having great confidence in the possibilities of science, members of cryonics companies are also confident that these companies will still be around hundreds of years from now.
Alcor is protecting its future through the nonprofit Patient Care Trust, which functions as a separate entity to manage and protect funding for frozen patients, More said.
There are very strict rules for managing the money, including allowing no more than 2% to be withdrawn per year.
Despite the ambitions of those in the 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 profound “sense of adventure,” coupled with not being afraid to be nonconformist, More said.
“The unknown scares people, and they would actually rather die. I find that very difficult to deal with. But that is their choice,” More said.
“I’d rather be there for the big adventure and see how this all plays out,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider