In the view of many scientists, cryonics remains a pseudoscience – and yet it continues to exist, and new bodies of people who believe that they can “come to life” in the future continue to be frozen. The first such case was the cryonicing of James Bedford in 1967, and since then this day has been celebrated by cryonics fans.
Life after death
The first ideas about freezing people to prolong their lives and revive them in the future appeared in the 17th century. A more serious and practical development of this concept began in the 1950s. First, experiments were carried out on cryonics on hamsters and rats – they found out what conditions must be met for proper freezing, so that the brain and other organs were not damaged. Later, methods of human cryopreservation were also developed – how to process the body before that, how to freeze and store it.
Both then and now, cryonics enthusiasts admit that there are no technologies for “reviving” people after freezing yet, but they believe that this will be possible in the future.
On January 12, 1967, the first person, James Bedford, was cryopreserved. Mr. Bedford taught psychology at the University of California, he was carried away by the ideas of cryonics, so that in 1965, when he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, he volunteered to become the first volunteer for cryonics – after his death, of course. So when Mr. Bedford died in 1967, his body was indeed frozen.
Since then, January 12 has been celebrated by cryonics fans as “Bedford Day”.
It was cryopreserved by a small group of doctors, scientists, and other enthusiasts, a rather crude procedure by today’s cryonics standards. Including because James Bedford died before the preparations for his freezing were completed.
For example, instead of releasing blood from the body and replacing it with a special non-freezing liquid that was supposed to protect tissues from damage, this liquid was simply injected into his bloodstream.
At first, the body of Mr. Bedford was stored in an isothermal container with dry ice, later he was placed in the so-called Dewar container (after its inventor, the Scottish physicist and chemist James Dewar) with liquid nitrogen. In 1991, the body of Mr. Bedford was examined by scientists – they came to the conclusion that it remained frozen and was almost not damaged. Since then, there have been no inspections.
Freeze death
Later, the body was moved several times, now it is stored in the city of Scottsdale (Arizona) – in a special repository of the non-profit organization Alcor. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation was established in 1972 by cryonics enthusiasts and holds the frozen bodies of almost two hundred people in its vaults. This is the largest such center in the world – there are only a few organizations involved in the cryonics of bodies.
Equipment for cryopreservation is available only in the USA and Russia. In Russia, the KrioRus company is engaged in this, according to its own data, it has cryopreserved 81 people. In total, more than 250 bodies have been cryopreserved in the world – and more than 1.5 thousand people have concluded agreements on freezing their bodies after death.
In the US, the minimum cost of such a procedure is $28,000, and in Russia, $15,000.
Cryonics enthusiasts are convinced that this is the technology of the future. “There is no known, credible, technical argument that a freeze under good conditions today will not work. Cryonics is the belief that no one is really dead until the information contained in their brain is lost, and that low temperatures can prevent its loss.
“A hundred years ago, if a person’s heart stopped, he was dead. We are now bringing these people back to life with a defibrillator. What changed? Science, medicine,” says Dennis Kowalski, president of the Institute of Cryonics, pointing out that science is developing very quickly and what was science fiction until recently is becoming possible.
The Institute of Cryonics admits that there is no technology yet to “revive” a frozen person: “Essentially, the concept is to ‘buy time’ until the technology develops and is able to fully restore the human body.”
If initially the whole body of a person was frozen, now only his brain is often frozen – as a carrier of that very information.
One option that is being considered in this case is some sort of future-scanning of the preserved brain and restoring its owner, at least digitally. And then it can be loaded into an anthropomorphic robot.
Although the whole body is still frozen. The cryonics technologies themselves have since developed, borrowing the latest achievements of medicine and other sciences, especially since low temperatures are quite actively used in modern medicine, including cosmetic medicine. Now, during cryonics, the blood in frozen bodies is replaced with a mixture of non-freezing liquid and special organ preservatives.
Chances of a thaw
However, outside the community of enthusiasts, the attitude towards such experiments is skeptical – most scientists consider cryonics in its current form a pseudoscience.
According to neuroscientist Michael Hendrix of Canada’s McGill University, belief in the possibility of resuscitation and revitalization of such bodies in the future is “a false hope that is beyond the prospects of technology and definitely not possible with the frozen dead tissue offered by the cryonics industry.”
Scientists believe that the technology itself may be achievable, but only in the future. According to Mr. Hendrix, the technologies needed for this “do not yet exist in principle.”
Barry Fuller, professor of low-temperature surgery and medicine at University College London, notes that even freezing individual organs so that they remain viable after thawing in the future remains a dream that is still far from being achieved.
“Research to address these scientific challenges is ongoing, and the potential demonstration of the possibility of transplantation of cryopreserved human organs in the future will be an important first step to confirm this concept. But now we cannot achieve this,” he says.
According to Mr. Fuller, this is a matter of decades – maybe it will become possible in 50-100 years.
Relatives of people who bequeathed to freeze their bodies often also oppose cryonics. There were even similar lawsuits from relatives of James Bedford. In the United States, there have already been several lawsuits in such cases: for example, in 2011, a Colorado state court upheld the will of Mary Robbins, who signed an agreement for cryonics of her body with Alcor, although her children tried to protest this.
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