Girl’s dying wish to live again may never be realised
Judge settles family’s tragic dispute by allowing cancer patient’s body to be frozen, but there is no evidence the process works
AS 14-year-old JS lay in hospital, waiting for terminal cancer to claim her life, she found comfort, and hope, in the idea that science might help her to cheat death.
After spending months online researching the theory of cryonics, the freezing of bodies in the hope that they could one day be brought back to life, JS made up her mind.
“I’m dying, but I’m going to come back again in 200 years,” she told one relative.
Her mother agreed that being cryogenically frozen represented a chance to resume her life once science had found a cure for her cancer.
Her father, however, saw cryonics as a lose-lose proposition. The most likely outcome was that it would not work, in which case his daughter’s family would have been put through unnecessary distress and expense.
The alternative, however, was potentially worse, as he set out in a state- ment to a judge who was to decide his daughter’s posthumous fate.
“Even if the treatment is successful and she is brought back to life in, let’s say, 200 years,” he said, “she may not find any relative and she might not remember things.
“She may be left in a desperate situation – given that she is still only 14 years old – and will be in the United States of America [where her body was to be stored].”
The disagreement between mother and father forced JS, who as a minor needed the consent of both parents for the process to be carried out, to seek a court order determining her fate.
The court case that followed not only represented a human and family tragedy, but also shone a light on a littleknown and highly controversial industry that describes itself as “an ambulance to the future”.
Teetering between science fiction and science fact, cryonics is a leap of faith, relying entirely on future medical advances that may or may not happen.
Its proponents frame it as a choice between “definitely” dying and “maybe” living on.
JS, described by her teachers as caring, happy and friendly, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in August 2015, and despite inpatient treatment at a London hospital, she was told her illness was terminal and in August this year her active treatment was stopped. By then she had already spent months researching cryonics and, according to court papers, “pursued her investigations with determination, even though a number of people have tried to dissuade her”.
She chose “the most basic arrangement” offered by an American company, the Cryonics Institute, one of only three companies in the world that stores frozen bodies. In order to get her body to Michigan, where the company is based, she also contacted Cryonics UK, a non-profit volunteer organisation that offers the country’s only cryonic preparation service.
Her parents were far from wealthy, but her maternal grandparents managed to raise the £37,000 that was needed.
There was, however, a problem. JS’s father, who had not seen his daughter since 2008 (having applied unsuccessfully through the courts for contact visits), had to be told of her plans and asked to sign parental consent forms. He was reluctant to agree.
He was concerned about the moral and ethical implications of the process, and whether he could be pursued for payments at some point in the future despite living on benefits.
His daughter, with her mother’s help, hired a solicitor who applied for the disagreement to be settled by the Family Division of the High Court.
The girl’s case was argued in court by Frances Judd QC, who specialises in cases involving complex medical issues, while the mother and father each had their own barrister.
When the case came before Mr Justice Jackson last month, JS’s father changed his mind, saying: “I respect the decisions she is making. This is the last and only thing she has asked from me.” But he had one condition: that he could see his daughter’s body after she died, to say goodbye to the child he had not seen for eight years.
JS and her mother said no, forcing the judge to settle what he described as “a tragic combination of childhood illness and family conflict”.
Mr Justice Jackson said “I fully understand the father’s misgivings” and pointed out that the girl’s doctors felt “deep unease” about cryonics, making the case “an example of the new questions that science poses to the law”.
He granted JS’s wishes, having noted that “the prospect of her wishes being followed will reduce her agitation and distress about her impending death”.
Cryonics UK, otherwise known as the Human Organ Preservation Research Trust charity, was put on standby and as JS’s condition worsened, a team of four volunteers assembled at the hospital.
Meanwhile, Mr Justice Jackson vis- ited JS in hospital, at her request, and said he was “moved by the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament”.
On October 17, ten days after the judge’s visit, JS “died peacefully in the knowledge that her body would be preserved in the way she wished”.
However, the judge was sent a note by the hospital which made “unhappy reading”, he said.
On the day JS died, “her mother is said to have been preoccupied with the post-mortem arrangements at the expense of being fully available to JS,” said the judge. “The voluntary organisation is said to have been underequipped and disorganised, resulting in pressure being placed on the hospital to allow procedures that had not been agreed.”
The process involves replacing the blood with an antifreeze fluid, slowly cooling the body to -70C, and then packing it in dry ice to be transported to a storage facility. Although the preparation of JS’s body for cryogenic preservation was completed, “the way in which the process was handled caused real concern to the medical and mortuary staff ”, the judge said.
About a week after her death, JS’s body was packed into a metal crate with around 40kg of dry ice and loaded onto an aeroplane bound for Michigan, where it will be stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen by the Cryonics Institute at one of its facilities.
The company, which also stores dead pets, makes no excuse for the fact that it can only offer the “hope that future medical technology may be able to someday revive and restore them to full health”.
To date, about 350 people have been frozen since the process was invented in the Sixties. Around 20 bodies thawed out and had to be buried after a pioneer company went bust, but the Cryonics Institute and its rival, Arizona-based Alcor, have been storing bodies since the Seventies.
There is no proof that the process of cryo-preservation can be reversed.