It’s a weIrd world
Cryopreservation
Time and death are “on pause” for some people in Scottsdale, Arizona in the United States.
Inside tanks filled with liquid nitrogen are the bodies and heads of 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved in hopes of being revived in the future when science has advanced beyond what it is capable of today. Many of the “patients”, as Alcor Life Extension Foundation calls them, were terminally ill with cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or other diseases with no present-day cure.
Matheryn Naovaratpong, a Thai girl with brain cancer, is the youngest person to be cryopreserved, at the age of two in 2015.
“Both her parents were doctors and she had multiple brain surgeries and nothing worked, unfortunately. So they contacted us,” said Max More, chief executive of Alcor, a non-profit which claims to be the world leader in cryonics.
Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, another Alcor patient, had his body cryopreserved after death from ALS in 2014.
The cryopreservation process begins after a person is declared legally dead. Blood and other fluids are removed from the patient’s body and replaced with chemicals designed to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals. Vitrified at extremely cold temperatures, Alcor patients are then placed in tanks at the Arizona facility “for as long as it takes for technology to catch up”, More said.
The minimum cost is US$200 000 for a body and US$80 000 for the brain alone. Most of Alcor’s almost 1 400 living “members” pay by making the company the beneficiary of life insurance policies equal to the cost, More said.
More’s wife Natasha Vita-More likens the process to taking a trip to the future.
“The disease or injury cured or fixed, and the person has a new body cloned or a whole body prosthetic or their body reanimated and (can) meet up with their friends again,” she said.
Many medical professionals disagree, said Arthur Caplan, who heads the medical ethics division at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
“This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science fiction and it’s naive,” he said. “The only group ... getting excited about the possibility are people who specialise in studying the distant future or people who have a stake in wanting you to pay the money to do it.” — Reuters.
Dream job
Shoji Morimoto has what some would see as a dream job: he gets paid to do pretty much nothing.
The 38-year-old Tokyo resident charges 10 000 yen (US$71) per booking to accompany clients and simply exist as a companion.
“Basically, I rent myself out. My job is to be wherever my clients want me to be and to do nothing in particular,” Morimoto said, adding that he had handled some 4 000 sessions in the past four years.
With a lanky build and average looks, Morimoto now boasts nearly a quarter of a million followers on Twitter, where he finds most of his clients. Roughly, a quarter of them are repeat customers, including one who has hired him 270 times.
His job has taken him to a park with a person who wanted to play on a see-saw. He has also beamed and waved through a train window at a complete stranger who wanted a send-off.
Doing nothing doesn’t mean Morimoto will do anything. He has turned down offers to move a fridge and go to Cambodia, and doesn’t take any requests of a sexual nature.
Recently, Morimoto sat opposite Aruna Chida, a 27-year-old data analyst clad in a sari, having a sparse conversation over tea and cakes.
Chida wanted to wear the Indian garment out in public, but was worried it might embarrass her friends. So she turned to Morimoto for companionship.
Before Morimoto found his true calling, he worked at a publishing company and was often chided for “doing nothing”.
The companionship business is now Morimoto’s sole source of income, with which he supports his wife and child. Although he declined to disclose how much he makes, he said he sees about one or two clients a day. — Reuters.