THIS I SN’T A FAIRY STORY – ONLY FAITH PROVIDES A HAPPY ENDING
The story is out of a young adult fantasy novel: a teenage girl with cancer chooses to be cryogenically frozen so that she can be “woken up” and cured in the future.
She is one of only 10 Britons, and the only British child, to have been frozen by Cryonics UK, a non-profit organisation.
Once again, scientific advances leap ahead of us. I am still struggling with women freezing their eggs so that they can wait for Mr Right without losing out on having a baby (why not adopt, rather than go through this scifi scenario?); and now here is a procedure that would freeze our body for 200 years, in the hope of being resuscitated and cured in a bright future when everything is possible. Science is pulling me right out of my comfort zone.
Even though there have been misgivings about the process – the judge and the girl’s doctors felt that the surreal procedure had been carried out in a “disorganised” fashion, that gave rise to “real concern” – part of me thinks it monstrous not to put every scientific and medical advance to the use of a child. My father invented Lorenzo’s Oil when his son, my half-brother was struck with Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), and funded research, through his charity, the Myelin Project, that pioneered medical treatments for afflicted children.
Pushing the boundaries of knowledge runs in my blood, then. In the case of the frozen teenager, however, science seems to be verging on blasphemy: trying to mimic the resurrection of the body, to a Christian, sounds hubristic if not wicked. Immortality is for God to bestow, not Cryonics UK.
And yet science and religion need not be enemies: hope is their currency, and what greater hope than a young person coming back to life?
This is the theme of the fairy tales we tell children, from Snow White to Sleeping Beauty. The Brothers
Grimm and Walt Disney knew how to use our deepest fear – of death – for their storytelling: the reader recoils before the dreadful prospect of a girl’s death (or, in Sleeping
Beauty, frozen sleep), but is hooked until the resolution, hoping for the “miracle” of a happy ending.
Cryonics UK promise a happy ending, too – minus Prince Charming. The worry, for those clients who have invested so much hope (and as much as £37,000) in the procedure, is that science may not succeed in granting eternal life. The body may not thaw correctly, or completely; it may be revived – but when there is still no cure for cancer. Our girl, then, risks being condemned to a second death. Science may not deliver.
Religion, however, does. For people of faith, who believe in life after death, that girl is going to live forever, without having to submit her body to freezing or any other scifi manipulation. Giving a young person faith may be more helpful than giving them an option to freeze their body.