Would you put your family on ice?
This family have signed up to be frozen when they die, so they can come ‘ back to life’ in the future…
It’s possibly one of the most ‘out there’ ideas ever, but to father-of-four Dennis Kowalski, and others like him, cryopreservation – being frozen when you die and brought back to life in the future – makes perfect sense. So much so that ex-paramedic Dennis has signed up his wife Maria and their three sons – Jacob, 19, Danny, 17, and James, 16 – to be preserved in a vat of liquid nitrogen when they pass away, at a cost of £100,000 ($140,000).
The process, known as cryonics, preserves the human body at extremely low temperatures after death, until medical science has advanced enough in the future
to bring the person back for ‘a second chance’.
Introduced in 1962 by the father of cryonics, Robert Ettinger, cryopreservation has five main stages. Once a person is legally dead, the freezing process must begin no more than 15 minutes after the heart stops to prevent brain damage. The body is then packed in ice and taken to a cryonics facility, where it’s cooled to just over freezing point (0˚C) and blood is replaced with an antifreeze solution, which preserves organs.
The third stage involves cooling the body to -130ºC and injecting another solution into the body to stop ice crystals forming in organs and tissue. At the fourth stage, the body is placed in a special storage container and lowered into a tank of liquid nitrogen at -196ºC.
Finally, the person is stored at this ultra-low temperature until medical breakthroughs occur and they can be woken up. The goal of storing the body in liquid nitrogen is to preserve tissues, organs and especially the brain with its associated memories and personality as perfectly as possible.
At the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, USA, the cost of this process starts at around £28,000 ($35,000) for cryopreservation of the brain – left in the head for protection only, but then put in another body. Facilities are also available from Alcor in Arizona, USA, KrioRus in Russia and from Alcor’s European laboratory in Portugal.
Believers in cryonics say they are buying time until technology is able to fully repair and restore the human body. Dennis, 49, who is president of the Cryonics Institute, goes as far as to claim that scientists could reanimate a frozen corpse within the next 10 years.
‘Cryonically bringing someone back to life should definitely be doable in 100 years, but it could be as soon as 10,’ he said. ‘ When the first patients are brought back to life depends on the rate at which modern medicine improves; it depends on how much technology, like stem cells, advances.’
Dennis’s Cryonics Institute, which is member-owned and non-profit, has almost 2,000 people signed up to be frozen after they die. It already has 160 human bodies and around 100 pets frozen in vats of liquid nitrogen at its headquarters.
But the Institute, and companies like it, remain at the centre of controversy about the ethics of cryopreservation. There’s no proof that the process works, and many experts say there is no hope of being brought back to life, much less of memories and personality being preserved through freezing and thawing.
The father of a 14-yearold British schoolgirl who won the right to be cryogenically frozen believes his daughter was sold ‘false hope’. The cancer victim, known only as JS, went to court in her final days to ensure her body would be preserved at the Cryonics Institute in the hope that she could resume life in the future when medicine can cure cancer. She was cryogenically frozen after her death in October 2016 at a cost of £37,000, and is now lying in a storage tank.
Her father, who was against the idea from the start, says companies such as the Cryonics Institute are taking advantage of vulnerable people who are frightened of dying.
‘ When I asked if there was even a one in a million chance of my daughter being brought back to life, they could not say there was,’ he said. ‘I think it would be doubly impossible to both bring her back from the dead and cure her cancer.’
But Dennis, who lives with his family in Wisconsin, denies the Institute is taking advantage of anyone or profiting from people’s fears, and believes those who take part have ‘ little to lose and virtually everything to gain’.
He said the Institute was ‘a non-profit organisation’ and the process costs the same as it did when the company started in 1976.
‘Most people use their life insurance,’ he says. ‘ We think of it as an ambulance ride to the hospital of the future. I believe that hospital will exist.’
He also maintains that the company gives ‘no guarantees’ the process will ever work, but even the smallest chance of returning to life is better than the alternative, ‘which is zero’.
Ralph Merkle, a board member at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation cryonics facility in Arizona, also denies that current freezing technologies can’t preserve memory, claiming that ‘vitrification is providing excellent preservation of synaptic structure’.
As for criticisms that Dennis and companies such as his are ‘playing God’, Dennis disagrees. ‘People said organ transplants were playing God. Now they are accepted and people are encouraged to sign up to be organ donors when they die.
‘Things that were impossible in the past are possible now. We have decided to take action in the present for the chance of a renewed life in the future.’
Ralph adds that critics of cryonics are like those in the early 1900s who believed mankind could never reach the moon. ‘If you can say that technology 100 or 200 years from now will be incapable of reviving someone who is cryopreserved, then you’re making [unknowable] statements about what future technology cannot do.’
X Factor creator Simon Cowell is also rumoured to have said that he was going to have his body frozen so he could be brought back to life.
So, would you have your family frozen? Or should the end of your natural life be just that – the end of your life?
In 10 years, will it be possible to bring a frozen corpse back to life?