CRYONICS UK

act

by David Jones

To his friends, Mark Walker is an ordinary, down-to-earth sort of man. He lives with his girlfriend, a nurse, in a comfortable Staffordshire home, enjoys the occasional drink and is never happier than when fiddling about with computers a skill which earns him £80,000-a-year as a freelance contractor.

However, he is regarded as a bit of a crank by some who have read the message embossed on the stainless steel bracelet strapped to his wrist and also on a metal disc dangling from his neck.

`Reward. Whole Body Donor,' the strange tags read arrestingly. `If dead, push 40,000 IU heparin IV (an anti-blood clotting agent) & do CPR while cooling with ice. Do not freeze, autopsy or embalm. Contact numbers on the back.'

Although Mr Walker is only 40 and apparently in good health, he wears the tags in case he dies suddenly and they give people advice on what to do - immediately dial one of the listed emergency phone numbers.

For they are his passport to immortality.

The numbers are connected to a mobile `body salvaging' team trained in cryonics - the deeply controversial (some would say crackpot) procedure by which a corpse is deep-frozen and preserved in the hope that it might be revived and restored to good health, if and when scientific knowledge is sufficiently advanced.

Mr Walker became a devout believer in cryonics (the word derives from cryogenics, meaning the physics of extremely cold temperatures) five years ago after it was featured on a TV chat-show. He quickly signed up and now pays a £36 monthly insurance premium for the chance of eternal life.

He is convinced it is money well spent. `It's not that I'm frightened of dying,' he says in a lilting Midlands accent, `it's just that I enjoy life and there are a lot of things I want to do that I haven't got time for, such as learning a language and playing a musical instrument. Plus, I really think that this will work, and I don't want to miss out.'

However, if his plans for a Frankenstein- style laboratory resurrection incite playful sniggers - and he admits that even his own family think he is `totally barmy'- it is hardly surprising.

Four decades have passed since, inspired by early science fiction writers, an unknown American physics teacher named Robert Ettinger began the cryonics movement by writing a highly controversial book, The Prospect Of Immortality, which predicted that death might one day be reversible.

Published in 1964, Ettinger's thesis sparked acclaim and outrage in equal measures, and interest was such that the US authorities feared thousands of people might opt to be frozen in time rather than buried or cremated, in the hope that they could be reborn to some future generation.

But despite the fast-growing Western obsession with eternal youth, which was then manifesting itself through plastic surgery and rejuvenation therapies, the prospect of being left in limbo for an indeterminate period, with no certain outcome, never did capture the mass imagination.

All it did was inspire a wave of evermore fanciful TV series and films, such as episodes of Star Trek, the movie Forever Young, and Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus.

Even today, when meddling with nature has become the norm and scientists are on the brink of producing human clones, there are just three cryonics centres. All situated in America, they store only 90 or so `patients': the touchingly euphemistic term used to describe the deep-frozen bodies. Of these, one is known to be British - an elderly man who died three years ago and whose family insist on anonymity.

And throughout the world, fewer than 1,000 people have expressed a wish to be suspended indefinitely in capsules filled with liquid nitrogen (often head-down, for reasons which will be explained later) in the hope of somehow cheating the grave.

Some 60 of them are British, and they hail from all walks of life. There are academics, a writer, an interpreter, and even a vicar from the shires. Soon, however, their ranks may be swelled, for cryonics is suddenly back in the news.

Interest has been re-awakened by the respected New Scientist magazine, which has launched a competition in which the winner has a choice of prize: either a trip to Hawaii to view the stars through the world's highest telescope or a free place in a cryostat, which would normally cost £21,000.

Accompanied by a slick advertising campaign, the quirky promotion has provoked widespread debate, with the BBC and CNN even conducting opinion polls to gauge the most popular option. Unsurprisingly, the Pacific holiday emerged favourite by four votes to one; yet the fact that a quarter of people would willingly trade a week in paradise for the slim chance that they might one day live there permanently, suggests that Ettinger's vision of the future is still seductive.

If this is true, of course, it raises countless questions, some practical, others profoundly ethical and scientific.

Then there are the practical problems. Can it ever be possible to resuscitate a dead human being, given the damage caused to cells, not only by death itself but by the ice crystals that form during the freezing process?

Even if it does become achievable, will we retain our memory, much less our identity? Will our worn-out or diseased body parts be `renewable', enabling us to be fully active, mentally and physically?

Do we have any right to be reawakened in our descendants' world, for example, and if so, what will they make of their primitive forebears? If people can live for ever, how will we cope with massive over-population?

More perplexing, how does cryonics square with religious doctrine? If, as Christianity holds, the soul departs the body at, or soon after, the moment of clinical death, what would this mean for a person who returned to life centuries on?

Would he or she come back as some sort of living-dead zombie?

These are conundrums to test the most agile theological and philosophical minds.

But before we address them, let's start with some relatively simple and uncontentious facts. Assuming our New Scientist prizewinner choose: immortality; what then will happen tc them?

First they must sign a complicated contract which will give the Cryonics Institute of Michigan permission to store their body until it can be revived, regardless of their surviving relatives' wishes.

Ideally, they would also make a will indicating their preferred method of interment - freezing - and request that no post mortem be carried out unless absolutely essential.

`Having your brain sliced up before being placed into the cryostat (storage chamber) is not a good idea, explains Robert Ettinger, now 82 and still president of the Institute.

Assuming the New Scientist competition prizewinner is British, they will be given a bracelet similar to the one the Institute has given to Mark Walker. They will also carry a card giving slightly more detailed instruction, for their preparation.

Cryonics Europe has a team of volunteers trained to carry out the first stages of the preservation process.

First they will cool the body in a portable bath filled with dry ice and attach it to a machine designed to maintain circulation. This helps to stop deterioration of the dead cells. Next, the blood will be drained off through a major vein in the thigh and replaced with a `cryoprotectant' fluid called glycerol - which works like anti-freeze in a car engine.

Then the corpse will be wrapped in polythene, submerged in alcohol, placed with 120kg of ice in an insulated fibreglass box and airlifted to Michigan ready for long-term storage.

Since this whole airlift process has been tried just once before in Britain, it is hard to guess how successful the operation might be. Indeed, the very nature of cryonics means that success and failure will not be measurable for generations - if ever.

But according to Alan Sinclair, a 65year-old retired businessman who helps run the call-out team, it should be a relatively simple procedure. `We've just done a test run using a 6ft, 14-stone mannequin called Randy, and it went like clockwork,' says Mr Sinclair, who two years ago closed Britain's only cryonics centre, in Eastbourne, after a row with a US firm lost him a £60,000 investment.

Once the body arrives in Michigan, it is put in the warehouse-size ErfurtRunkel Building (named after two long-time `patients') where technicians place it in a nylon sleeping-bag, immerse it in liquid nitrogen which sends its temperature plunging to -196C, and seal it into a cryostat.

Currently there are 41 bodies on ice. Some are stored horizontally in older, rectangular cryostats which hold up to 16 people. But the latest model is cylindrical and six corpses can float in the nitrogen. They are placed upside down because it is thought safer. Should the gas escape, the top of the container would warm up first, damaging the patient's feet rather than the brain.

Rigorous checks are made daily, since the last thing the cryonics industry needs is a repeat of the infamous scandal in 1978 when an institute in Chatsworth, California, run by Robert Nelson-who cryopreserved the first man 11 years earlier - went bankrupt because bereaved relatives failed to pay their fees.

As a result there was no money for gas and their loved ones quickly thawed. The cryonics teams insist the industry is now governed by high ethical standards. The long-term maintenance of the patients is ensured by insurance policies such as the one taken out by Mark Walker.

So much for the theory, but will it work? Down the years, a number of celebrities - including Peter Sellers and Walt Disney - have considered cryonics, but none had sufficient faith to be frozen themselves.

Art Caplan, director of the Minnesota University Centre for Biomedical Ethics, has described cryonics as `goofy beyond amusement' and claims it `combines screwy science and a lust for reincarnation with large-scale refrigeration technology'.

Oxford University physiology professor Colin Blakemore also dismisses the New Scientist prize as `a bit of a dud'. He said: `The alternative (Hawaii) is enormously more attractive. At the moment there's no technology capable of reviving a dead body in this way, and it's highly questionable whether there ever will be.

`The consequences of death begin to affect the body extremely quickly, especially in the brain, where you get neuronal death within minutes. It certainly wouldn't appeal to me.'

However, cryonics guru Robert Ettinger, who will one day join his two late wives on ice (causing something of a dilemma, one might think), is undaunted.

He claims no major scientist has yet published a paper on why the freeze-thaw technique might not work and he points out that scientists are now routinely freezing embryos and other cellular material- a technique thought impossible when he originally published his ground-breaking book. He is intrigued by a new freezing technique called vitrification which cools the body to a glass-like state which prevents the formation of cell-damaging ice-crystals. He also believes that, in time, even long-dead human tissue will be easily reparable using the new nanotechnology, which allows the manipulation of individual atoms.

When these techniques are possible, Ettinger predicts that man will be able to return to life not as decrepit and diseased old people, but youthful again, and mentally and physically revitalised. 'Man may awaken young and virile with the physique of Charles Atlas,' he muses dreamily in his book. 'His weary and faded wife, if she chooses, may rival Miss Universe.'

Ettinger also predicted a more moral society in the cryonic age. Gifted with immortality, he reasoned, humans would inevitably become more respectful and honourable towards each other because they would keep meeting again and would not be able to avoid those with whom they had fallen out. Since his thoughts were first published in the early Sixties, we can perhaps forgive him for his breathtaking naivety.

More seriously, though, what does the Church have to say on the matter? A Nottinghamshire clergyman (who asked not to be named for fear of ridicule) is known to have signed up for refrigeration; and in America, cryostats have even been consecrated by priests prior to bodies being chilled.

But Bishop Stephen Sykes, chairman of the Church of England's Doctrine Commission, will certainly not be advocating such ceremonies here.

While he sees no problem with the departure of a frozen person's soul - `it's not a bit of the body, so it cannot be affected by age or death' - he attacks the indefinite postponement of death as `bizarre and inhuman'. `It's a very good thing that the old die, and that the world is regenerated by the death and birth,' he said. `Cluttering up the world with corpses is appalling In Gulliver's Travels, there is a place where the old can't die, and they go on and on. I just think the idea of not giving way to the rising generations, but returning, is nightmarish.'

Many will agree. But a few miles away in Staffordshire, Mark Walker is still imagining a brave new future - one where he can twiddle with the most incredibly powerful computers and where he and his girlfriend (who is altogether more sceptical) are inseparable by death.

`It'll be absolutely mind blowing,' he marvels. It's true what they say about one man's nightmare being another man's dream.
 

Sources: DAILY MAIL 28/09/2002 P48