Cryonics: robbing death of its dignity?

Fifty years ago the idea of resurrecting frozen humans after death was pure science fiction, said The Times. But that was before a US physics teacher, Robert Ettinger, launched the “immortalist” movement – cryonics – in 1964. The theory behind it is simple: pack the body in ice immediately after death; replace the water in the body’s cells with a type of human antifreeze; then store it head down in a tank full of liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196°C. Eventually, when the cure for whatever caused the death has been found, the person can be defrosted and bought back to life. Since Ettinger formulated his theory, some 2,000 people (including Ettinger, his mother and his two wives) have paid to be stored, post-death, in one of four cryonics facilities (three in the US; one in Russia). Some have their whole body frozen; others, such as US baseball star Ted Williams, take the cheaper option of preserving just their head. Some “cryopreserve” their pets. Several celebrities, including impresario Simon Cowell, Paypal founder Peter Thiel and TV host Larry King, are also keen to get frozen at death.

And last month a London teenager with terminal cancer became the first British child to be cryopreserved, after her grandparents stumped up £37,000 to have her body flown to the US and stored in one of its two cryonics institutes. It’s a heart-rending story, said The Mail on Sunday. The girl’s estranged father had tried to prevent her doing so, but the mother backed her wish. “I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die,” the girl had written to the family court judge. “I don’t want to be buried underground. I want to live.” The judge granted her wish, but suggested the field as a whole should be subjected to “proper regulation”.

But to do so would give it too much legitimacy, said Deborah Orr in The Guardian. No reputable scientist thinks a brain can be revived; no one has a clue how to bring a body back to life. The “ghastly people” offering this sci-fi service are exploiting “the human fear of death”: they don’t need regulating, they “need exposing as morbid confidence tricksters”. And by promising immortality, they rob death of its dignity, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times. In this tragic case, the mother, rather than being at her daughter’s side, was fretting about arrangements. Hospital staff had to stand back as a bunch of volunteers from a cryonics charity fussed around the dying girl. And rather than waking up years from now, the overwhelming likelihood is that “she will be defrosted in a crummy warehouse when the money has run out”.

Statistics of the week Not a single child on free school meals in the Northeast of England went to Oxford or Cambridge after leaving school in 2010. FT

Each British child aged 11-18 drinks, on average, 234 cans of fizzy drink every year – enough to fill a bathtub. The Independent