Girl wins right to return from the dead

Judge rules after reading dying cancer victim’s moving letter Body of 14-year-old is frozen for keeping in US ‘until cure is found’

A 14-YEAR-OLD girl who died of cancer has been cryogenically frozen in the hope that she can be “woken up” and cured in the future after winning a landmark court case in her final days.

The girl’s divorced parents had disagreed over whether her wish to be frozen should be followed, so the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, asked a High Court judge to intervene. In a letter to the court, she said: “I don’t want to die but I know I am going to ... I want to live longer ... I want to have this chance.”

The girl, known as JS, asked Mr Justice Peter Jackson to rule that her mother, who supported her desire to be cryogenically preserved, should be the only person allowed to make decisions about the disposal of her body.

Shortly before her death in a London hospital on Oct 17, in what is believed to be a unique case, the judge granted JS her wish.

Her body was frozen and taken to a storage facility in the United States. She is one of only 10 Britons to have been frozen, and the only British child.

She told a relation: “I’m dying, but I’m going to come back again in 200 years.”

But after a decision that raises profound moral and ethical questions, the judge and the girl’s doctors expressed serious misgivings about the process, which did not go entirely to plan. Her mother spent the last hours of her daughter’s life fretting about details of the freezing process, which was “disorganised” and caused “real concern” to hospital staff.

The judge suggested that “proper regulation” of cryonic preservation – which is legal but unregulated – should now be considered.

Cryogenic preservation of bodies does not fall under the remit of the Human Tissue Authority, which regulates the freezing of sperm and embryos, because it was “not contemplated” when the Human Tissue Act 2004 was passed.

Cryonics UK, the non-profit organisation that prepared the girl’s body for transport to the US, agreed with the judge.

A spokesman for the firm said: “We expect that future regulation will help hospitals to know where they stand legally and procedurally. The opportunity to utilise professional medical assistance may increase as we become a recognised and regulated field.”

The case can only now be reported because Mr Justice Jackson ruled that nothing could be published until one month after JS’s death. He also ruled that her parents’ names and other specific details should stay secret. JS, who

lived with her mother in London, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer last year and by August this year she had been told her illness was terminal and active treatment came to an end.

She had begun researching cryonics online – a controversial and costly process that involves the freezing of a dead body in the hope that resuscitation and a cure may one day be possible – and decided she wanted to be frozen after her death.

Because she was too young to make a legally recognised will, she had to have the permission of both of her parents to sign up for the process.

When she contacted her father, whom she had not seen since 2008 and who himself has cancer, he said that he was opposed to the idea, so JS decided to begin legal proceedings through a solicitor to ensure her wishes were followed.

She was too ill to attend court, but wrote: “I think being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time. I don’t want to be buried underground.

“I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up.”

On Oct 6, the judge ordered that JS’s mother should have the sole right to decide what happened to her daughter’s body, while stressing that he was not making any ruling about the proposed cryonic preservation.

He also granted an injunction preventing the father from attempting to make any arrangements for the disposal of his daughter’s body.

He said that he had been convinced JS was a “bright, intelligent young person” with the capacity to bring the application.

JS’s parents could not afford to pay for the cryonic process, which costs at least £37,000, but her maternal grand- parents raised the money needed for her body to be frozen and taken to a storage facility in the United States, which is one of only two countries, along with Russia, that has facilities for storing frozen bodies.

Expressing sympathy with the girl’s father, Mr Justice Jackson said: “No other parent has ever been put in his position.

“It is no surprise that this application is the only one of its kind to have come before the courts in this country – and probably anywhere else.”

He added: “It may be thought that the events in this case suggest the need for proper regulation of cryonic preservation in this country if it is to happen in the future.”

About 350 people worldwide have been cryogenically frozen since the process was invented in the Sixties, though there is no proof that it would be possible to bring any of them back to life.