- Cryonics companies cryogenically freeze people after death, hoping they will one day be revived.
- Critics say it is fantastical. Proponents say the possibility is better than accepting death.
- The idea of bringing people back to life raises a host of scientific, legal, and ethical questions.
Being cryogenically frozen after death and one day being brought back to life sounds like something out of a science fiction movie. But a handful of companies worldwide are selling people the dream that death is not final.
Max More spent 12 years working at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the oldest cryonics company in the world, first as CEO and then as ambassador and president emeritus, before leaving earlier this year.
"It was kind of just an obvious thing to me, just an extension of the idea of not wanting to die," he told BI.
Alcor has 224 patients cryopreserved in its state-of-the-art facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, and 1,418 members signed up to be preserved after they die.
While the technology to freeze, or cryopreserve, a body after death has greatly improved over decades of fine-tuning, 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 think we know what we're doing."
"I worry 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 today's techniques, nobody's going to 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 possible to land on the moon or that we could have technology like FaceTime that would allow people across the world to see and speak to one another 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 opted to be frozen after death — although there is no evidence for this.
As technology has progressed, the idea now seems less outlandish. Many tech billionaires are increasingly interested in ways to extend life, and billionaire Peter Thiel has said he's signed up to be cryogenically frozen after he dies to make an "ideological statement," even though he says he doesn't expect it to work.
A facility 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 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 preservation costs $220,000, and the option to just preserve your brain costs $80,000. Most members pay using life insurance. Some even opt to freeze their pets.
The other major company, The Cryonics Institute, has 2,180 members worldwide, and there are smaller companies in Europe, China, and Russia.
Other companies offer prices cheaper 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 medical team on standby springs into action. Alcor has affiliated hospices in Arizona where patients can move when in critical condition, but typically, the team goes into the field to wherever the member has died.
The deceased person's blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant, which reduces the risk of ice crystal formation after death, in a process known as vitrification.
The body is then cooled down gradually and stored at -196°C, or around -321°F, in specialized containers filled with liquid nitrogen, preventing the body from decaying.
The bodies will then remain preserved indefinitely until science advances to the point where they can be revived.
More said that science is progressing in the right direction, but not at the pace he would like. Earlier this year, scientists at The University of Minnesota successfully unfroze rat organs and transplanted them in a historic first.
The cryonics industry relies on the assumption that one day, death will be reversible. Not only would we need to be able to bring people back to life, but we would also have to be able to cure the cause of death — whether that was cancer, old age, or anything in between.
Critics say this feels far too fantastical. Caplan believes that even the process of freezing people is a bit of a gamble, let alone banking on the ability to one day bring them back to life.
"Speaking for myself, it's still something I want to do rather than just let myself die," More said.
'You're going to be a freak'
The concept of bringing people back to life brings up all kinds of legal, ethical, and philosophical questions.
On a practical level — when a person returns to life, would they have the same identity and Social Security number? If Queen Elizabeth II had been cryogenically preserved and had come back to life, would she have become monarch again? Would people have a claim to goods and assets that have passed on to their heirs?
Skeptics note that even if revival became 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 woke up a thousand years later, you're not going to know what is going on. You're going to be a freak," Caplan said.
More believes that this is simply another challenge to overcome. He compared the scenario to people waking up after years in a coma or moving to a different country and learning to assimilate to a new culture.
Aside from putting a lot of faith into the possibilities of science, members of cryonics companies also rely on the fact that these companies will still be around hundreds of years in the future.
Alcor protects its future through the nonprofit Patient Care Trust, which functions as a separate entity to manage and protect the funding for frozen patients, More said.
There are very strict rules on managing the money, including allowing no more than 2% to be taken out per year.
Despite the aspirations of those in the field, there are a lot of 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 non-conformists, More said.
"The unknown terrifies people, and they'd actually rather die. I find that very hard to relate to. But that's their choice," More said.
"I'd rather be there for the grand adventure and see how all this works out," he said.