What a head case...
Writer says: ‘Chop my head off and freeze it, so I can live centuries from now’
DJ Maclennan is hoping for a good death. When the time comes, the Isle of Skye writer wants to be surrounded not just by his family, but by the emergency volunteer stand-by team from Cryonics UK.
Since 2007, he has been paying £50 a month to the Alcor Institute in the town of Scottsdale, Arizona. For that they will “cryopreserve” his head (it costs significantly more to keep the whole body) in a tank of liquid nitrogen, keeping it there, the company promises on their website, “for decades or centuries until a future medical technology can restore that person to full health”.
All going well, within ten minutes of MacLennan breathing his last, that team, made up of enthusiastic amateurs, none of whom have professional medical training, will take control of his body. They’ll start by giving the cadaver oxygen, and chest compressions before placing it in an ice bath.
Then they administer drugs to “stabilise biological systems” and prevent clotting and brain damage through cell destruction. Once that’s done they remove the corpse to their mortuary, cut open the carotid arteries and jugular veins and replace the blood with an an antifreeze solution. Within 24 hours of death, the body must have been cooled to at least - 20C. Then, and only then is it ready to transport over to America’s west coast, where the head will be removed.
The problem for MacLennan is he needs the NHS and the procurator fiscal to let this happen, and right now that looks unlikely. Bodies in Scotland cannot be released to family until there’s a death certificate, and every death certificate needs a cause of death.
If that death is unexplained or sudden, then it gets reported to the procurator fiscal who takes over legal responsibility for the body until a cause can identified.
That often requires time or even a post-mortem examination, both of which make cryopreservation impossible, and the £40,000 or so MacLennan will have paid to Alcor over his lifetime would be for nothing.
“Unfortunately, while we will always be sympathetic to requests by members of a family, this has to be balanced with the need for an independent and thorough investigation and a post-mortem examination will sometimes still be required,” the procurator fiscal tells the Sunday Herald.
None of Scotland’s 14 health boards, or the NHS National Services Scotland, have any policy or guidelines on cryonics. Some of them are even openly hostile to the idea. NHS Western Isles said they “would not facilitate volunteer medics, who may have no medical experience to operate on a dead person, regardless if this was the wish of the dead person”.
The Scottish Government also has no policy, and say they’re waiting on the results of an information gathering exercise undertaken by the Human Tissue Authority, who were mobilised into action in the wake of last year’s high-profile legal row between the parents of JS, the 14-year-old dying of cancer who wanted her body to be cryopreserved.
Mr Justice Peter Jackson, who sat on that case, suggested there needed to be “proper regulation of cryonic preservation in this country if it is to happen in future.”
That was in part a response to fears expressed by JS’s doctors over the Cryonics UK standby team. The medical staff said the volunteers were “under-equipped and disorganised”. The group’s ambulance had broken down, and was replaced by a van.
The Human Tissue Authority will in the next few months produce two pieces of guidance, one for medical professionals and one for members of the public. Though they weren’t willing to tell the Sunday Herald what was in those guidelines.
“Given this is a procedure that’s been going on for 30 years it’s surprising that there is no policy for it in the UK,” MacLennan says.
He is happy to talk about cryonics, and has written books on the process, as part of an attempt to “normalise it a little bit” and “take the Frankenstein factor out if it”.
“Cryonics is potentially exponential technology,” he argues. “When people see the price coming down there’ll come a point when they see a benefit. The cost will be finite and the benefit will potentially be infinite, because if it works the benefits are potentially infinite.”
But this is currently a niche issue. No one is sure, but it seems there are around 100 people in the UK who have opted for cryopreservation. In Scotland, the NHS and the procurator fiscal have yet to deal with any cases of cryonics.
Professor Clive Coen, from King’s College London, believes there should be a ban on the marketing of cryonics, saying the idea of preserving a whole body was “ridiculous” and a whole brain “only slightly less ridiculous”.