Issue 13
Cryonics
By Heather MurphyIllustration By Tim Gough
If you pay about the price of a three series BMW—$35,000—the Cryonics Institute (C.I.) will cool you down as soon as your heart stops beating, replace your blood with special chemicals and store you in a thermos full of -196°C liquid nitrogen until technology has advanced to a point where doctors can bring you back to life.
That is, if you see cryogenics as science rather than science fiction. Most people don’t—but an increasing number of people do. More than half of the 1,200 or so members of cryonics organizations signed up in the last five years. According to the log on C.I.’s website, when patient number 80 died at age 67 from cancer, her final wish was to be cryopreserved. Her son was determined to make this happen. He sold his property in Europe to raise the funds and called C.I. and asked if he could pay in installments. They said no. (Already, they offer a complex payment procedure for one-fifth the amount charged by their competitor, Alcor Life Extension.) He shipped her anyways. She arrived at C.I. headquarters in Michigan only to be turned away. So, he paid to have a funeral director keep her on dry ice while he raised more money. It took half a decade. He gets an F for scientific perfection (if you freeze a body without replacing the blood with special protector chemicals, the cells are bound to be irreversibly damaged) but an A for effort.
This May, C.I. took her in. Now she spends her days suspended in a vat full of liquid nitrogen not too far from 79 other patients—some entire bodies, others simply heads—in the organization’s facility in Clinton Township, Michigan. A couple thousand miles away at Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona, 76 more patients, including baseball hero Ted Williams and excluding Walt Disney (that was just a myth), coolly resist the concreteness of death.
If any of these people ever make it into the future, they will have physicist Robert C. Ettinger to thank. In 1962, Ettinger published a book called The Prospect of Immortality outlining the idea of cryonics. The book became a bestseller and immortalist organizations formed soon after. In 1976, in an attempt to turn theory into practice, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute. That same year his mother became the first C.I. patient to be cryopreserved. In 1986, his first wife joined her in the deep freeze, as did his second in 2000.
When Mr. Ettinger was reached by phone—answering in a friendly southern twang after three rings—his response to my question, “Are you at all concerned that if you are brought back 500 years from now, you might feel out of place?” was, “That doesn’t worry me. I was surprised when I was born and I got used to it and I’ll be surprised then.” But why aren’t there more cryonicists? “It’s easier and more comfortable to say, OK I’ll croak and that’s it,” he said and chuckled. “That attitude will change of course. When people stop dying of old age, who’ll want to be the last dinosaur then?”
Ettinger was amused by my skepticism, as if the joke (death) was on me. He did take issue with my estimate of 500 years, however. “The usual guesses are anywhere from 50 to 200,” he explained.
Ben Best is the President of the Cryonics Institute. His website mentions that he attended something called the High Rollers’ Conference back in 1999. He describes this event as “an elite conference for very rich cryonicists” attended by 12 special people including “the screenwriter for Demolition Man.” But, Best says that there hasn’t been a High Rollers’ Conference for many years. Sensing my disappointment, he then goes off on how fed up he is with sensation-hungry journalists who delight in making fun of cryonicists, falsely claim they are a bunch of crazy rich people and ignore the concept’s scientific foundation.
“Cryonicists tend to be people who have trust in technical solutions to life’s problems as opposed to people who think technology is screwing up the world,” he explains, adding that most are “computer people,” scientists, doctors or science-fiction writers. “Just because we can’t do it now, doesn’t mean we won’t ever be able to do it. There is such a thing as planning for the future, believing that future technology will have capabilities that present technologies don’t have.”
Since Ettinger first wrote his cryonics bible, science is still many steps away from reviving a dead mouse—let alone a dead human. Yet, over the past decade, fertility planning has come to rely on sperm and embryos suspended at low temperatures and revived. In 2005, a cryopreserved rabbit kidney was successfully revived and transplanted, becoming the most complex organism brought back to life. Last May, Newsweek published an article that explored how the science of resuscitation is changing medicine and acknowledging that legally dead is different than biologically dead.
