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Cryonics companies cryogenically freeze people after death in the hope that they will one day revive.
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Critics say it’s fantastic. Supporters say this possibility is better than accepting death.
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The idea of bringing people back to life raises many scientific, legal and ethical questions.
Being cryogenically frozen after death and 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 illusion that death is not final.
Before leaving earlier this year, Max More spent 12 years at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s oldest cryonics company, first as CEO, then ambassador and president emeritus.
“This was an obvious thing to me, an extension of the idea of not wanting to die,” he told BI.
Alcor’s state-of-the-art facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, has 224 patients in cryopreservation, and 1,418 members have signed up for posthumous preservation.
While the technology to freeze or cryopreserve a body after death has improved greatly through decades of fine-tuning, there is currently no way to bring people back to life.
“To me, this is an illusion. It’s a promise,” Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, told BI. “Legal science doesn’t think we know what we’re doing.”
“I worry when people look to the future and say they can solve anything in the future; if you freeze it using today’s techniques and create some mush, no one will be able to solve it.” even after a thousand years.”
More is more optimistic. He notes that a hundred years ago, people would not have believed that landing on the moon was possible or that we would 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 preferred to be frozen after death—even though there is no evidence of this.
As technology advances, this idea seems less outlandish. Many tech billionaires are increasingly interested ways to extend lifeand billionaire Peter Thiel said: signed up to be cryogenically frozen He is working to make an “ideological statement” after his death, although he says he doesn’t expect it to work.
224 members housed in liquid nitrogen at a facility in Scottsdale
A small number of cryonics companies operate worldwide, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the oldest and most well-known.
Among those preserved is a two-year-old Thai girl who died of brain cancer, the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen.
Full body protection costs $220,000, while the option to protect just your brain costs $80,000. Most members pay using life insurance. Some even prefer it freeze their pets.
Another big company is Cryonics Institute, It has 2,180 members worldwide, with smaller companies in Europe, China and Russia.
Other companies offer cheaper rates than Alcor, but their packages often do not include the services of medical support teams who arrive immediately after death to begin the process.
How does it work
When a member dies, a medical team is on standby and springs into action. Alcor has affiliated nursing homes in Arizona where patients can move when critically ill, but usually the team travels 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, through a process known as vitrification.
The body is then gradually cooled and stored at -196°C, or around -321°F, in special containers filled with liquid nitrogen, preventing the body from decomposing.
The bodies will then be preserved indefinitely until science advances to the point where they can be revived.
More said science was moving in the right direction, but not at the pace he wanted. Earlier this year, scientists at the University of Minnesota successfully thawed and transplanted frozen organs from mice, a first in history.
The cryonics industry is based on the assumption that death may one day be reversed. We’ll need to be able to not only bring people back to life, but also treat the cause of death, whether it’s cancer, old age, or anything in between.
Critics say it looks too fantastical. Caplan believes that even the process of freezing people is a bit of a gamble, let alone confident in his ability to one day bring them back to life.
“Speaking for myself, this is something I still want to do rather than just let myself die,” More said.
‘You’re going to be a freak’
The concept of resuscitating people raises all kinds of legal, ethical and philosophical questions.
On a practical level, will a person have the same ID and Social Security number when they return to life? Queen Elizabeth II If Elizabeth had been cryogenically preserved and brought back to life, would she have become ruler again? Can people have claims on the property and assets inherited from their heirs?
Skeptics note that even if revival were possible, it would be extremely difficult for humans to wake up hundreds or thousands of years in the future and try to integrate into a new world they do not understand.
“Even if it works, if you wake up in a thousand years you won’t know what happened. You’ll be a freak,” Caplan said.
More believes this is another challenge to overcome. He likened the scenario to people left in a coma years later or moving to a different country and learning to assimilate into a new culture.
Members of cryonics companies have great faith in the possibilities of science, as well as confidence in the fact that these companies will exist hundreds of years into the future.
More said Alcor is safeguarding its future through its nonprofit Patient Care Foundation, which functions as a separate entity to manage and protect the finances of frozen patients.
There are very strict rules for managing money, including not allowing more than 2% per year.
Despite the wishes of those in the field, there are a lot of “whens,” “ifs,” and “buts” when it comes to cryonics.
More said in his experience, what those who sign up have in common is a deep “sense of adventure” and a lack of fear of not following the rules.
“The unknown scares people and they actually choose to die. I think it’s very difficult to relate to that. But it’s their choice,” More said.
“I’d rather be there for this big adventure and see how this all turns out,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider