CRYONICS UK

act

Irish Independent Weekend

Saturday November 24, 2001

An Ice Way to Go

by Tomas Farrell

In a hospital room you are lying on your deathbed. Tearful relatives are ranged around to bid farewell. A nurse comes to make routine checks on your pulse and temperature. Your vision begins to blur, the light in your eyes fading as your body surrenders to the inevitable.

Memories of people and places long gone flash through your brain. Images and sounds, locked away for decades, resurface one last time, as if you are travelling backwards in time at high speeds.

Then the electric and chemical pulses between your brain cells cease and the vista of Infinity awaits.

The next thing you know an oxygen mask is being pulled from your mouth. Light floods back into your eyes and everything is a blur. You are still lying in bed and as your focus returns, you see white-coated doctors leaning over you, watching cautiously. Some people are standing nearby but these are strangers. However, they are also your relatives. Waiting near your bedside are your great-great-great-grandchildren . . .

For a long time "cryonics" (shortened form of cryogenics) has been a science fiction standard. The recent Spielberg movie Artificial Intelligence (AI) depicted a mortally ill child being revived from suspended animation after several years.

The idea that the recently deceased, frozen at minus 196 degrees Centigrade in liquid nitrogen, might be one day brought back effectively began with Robert C Ettinger's book, The Prospect of Immortality (1964).

Bob Ettinger, now 83, is currently President of the Detroit-based Cryonics Institute (CI), one of several companies offering the service.

The minimum fee for `suspension' is $28,000; usually the CI member has a life insurance policy, made payable to the CI upon death. People who have publicly expressed interest in cryonics include Muhammad Ali, Larry King and science fiction author, Arthur C Clarke. But with regard to a widespread rumour that Walt Disney is currently frozen, the CI website is succinct: "The names of patients and members (at CI anyway) are considered confidential unless they tell us otherwise. So we couldn't tell you even if we knew."

Located just south of the River Thames, RA. Albins have been funeral agents for over 200 years. The director is Barry Albin Dyer, who agreed to `prepare' the Cryonics Institute's European members after a chance meeting with Bob Ettinger in Chicago over a decade ago. He says that the members he has encountered constitute a very varied spectrum of people.

In the softly-lit mortuary room, bodies are prepared for `suspension.' Albins will not prepare anyone for cryonic suspension unless all legal documents are in place, the person is legally dead and registered with the CI. "It would be for me to get to that person as soon as possible and literally cool the deceased down, not to freeze them," says Albin Dyer.

"All I want to do is to stop the brain cells deteriorating. Then I want to undertake a perfusion, which is done with natural fluids, with anti-freeze agent. At minus 196 degrees, if you flicked an artery, it would shatter into a million pieces which would defeat the whole purpose. I want the effect of the cold without rigidity of it."

Bodies (the Cryonicists would say `patients') are not stored in Britain; their eventual destination is the CI Facility in Clinton Township, northeast of Detroit. As of January 2001, 37 `whole body' subjects are stored there.

Says Barry Albin-Dyer: "At that point they (CI) would have the opportunity of cooling down further. If that happens what they do is to put them into a sarcophagus and they'll put dry ice on top and the dry ice temperature drops down further.

"You've got the deceased in a kind of sleeping bag, you've got the dry ice effect going downwards with the temperature gauge. And over two weeks, they would take the temperature of the body down to 80 degrees below. They're taken out into a second sarcophagus which would then use liquid nitrogen and that would take it down to -196 degrees. Once you've reached -196 degrees, you then go into a cryostat and the cryostat would be constantly loaded with liquid nitrogen."

The oldest subject currently in suspension is a Dr James Bedford, frozen in 1967. The CI is a non-profit corporation, which claims to have $2 million in cash, stocks and bonds. Aside from one full time and two part-time paid staff, all of its workers are volunteers.

Numerous groups of this kind started up soon after Ettinger's book touted the concept. `The Immortalist Society' was begun in 1969 for education and research purposes. The CI itself was set up seven years later. Ettinger's own mother, Rhea Ettinger was suspended in 1977, as was his first wife in 1987.

John de Rivaz (57) is webmaster of Cryonics Europe. He says that cryonicists have great difficulty rescuing the concept from the popular caricature. Namely, that cryonics is a ghoulish high-tech scam, employing pseudo-science and preying upon people's most primal fear, of their own mortality.

Tiny Robots That Repair the Body

"The established scientific community are often called upon to criticise cryonics, and I suspect that they are asked; `This is a load of rubbish isn't it?' rather than `What is your view on this?' In a recent television interview, a so-called expert was led into making virtually slanderous statements about cryonics. In fact the correct experts to ask are not experts in present day science, but futurologists, people who try to predict what the future will bring."

Central to `futurology' is the concept of `nano-technology', the manipulation of atoms and molecules to build and repair matter, including living tissue. The CI point out that Dr Richard Smalley, the 1996 Nobel Chemistry Prize winner, has predicted this could begin by 2010.

Decades from now, futurologists predict `nanobots', microscopic robots and computers travelling through a frozen body, repairing tissue and `re-firing' the chemical and electrical reactions of living cells.

Not surprisingly, cryonicists are enthusiastic about cloning, genemodification and cybernetics.

But despite the recent breakthroughs, even if a way of resuscitating a deepfrozen brain exists, it may take decades or even centuries for it to become available. After all, no one has so far revived a deep frozen mammal; the only breakthroughs have involved animals kept a few degrees below zero for relatively short periods.

Dropping in From 300 Years Ago

Moreover, the exponential rise of technology is a double-edged sword, perhaps making the dreams of cryonicists closer to reality and perhaps generating a world few of today would enjoy once revived.

Three centuries ago, no one had seen the crudest steam engine, travel was by horse and cart and few people lived beyond forty. But to imagine the culture shock of someone from Napoleonic times encountering today's world is to perhaps understand how one of us might feel, awakening in say, 2351 AD. As the terrorist atrocities in New York and Washington so terribly demonstrated, there is no guarantee that as we have grown more technologically advanced, we've necessarily become a more rational or moral species.

Thirty-two years ago, movie-makers like Stanley Kubrick imagined the year 2001 ushering in a Golden Age of space travel and thinking computers. But Mankind will remember 2001 not for spinning space stations, but for burning skyscrapers.

And even if the cryonicists emerge into an objectively `better' world, it will certainly he an unimaginably different one.

Would the culture shock be too much?

"No that doesn't worry me, that excites me," says Jack St Clair, a 60 year old businessman from Basingstoke, who signed up to Alcor-UK in 1997. Alcor, another company offering cryonic suspension, was set up in 1972 and is based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"I think it's going to be a new opportunity, a new challenge, a new excitement. I think people's level of happiness and contentment will be that much greater and opportunities for satisfaction will be immeasurably more than now."

Waking Up to A Vast Fortune

A revived human would have a very large family, a small army of descendents. He or she might be the heir to a fortune that had accumulated vast interest in the interim.

But it's highly unlikely that, for the foreseeable future, the legal profession will make allowances for people returning to claim estates, once their death cert is issued.

Back at F.A. Albins Funeral Home, Barry Albin Dyer, while happy to provide the freezing service, would not avail of it himself. A practicising Catholic, he is a Doubting Thomas where cryonics resurrection is concerned.

There won't come a time, he believes, when contemporary people mix with the living fossils of previous centuries. "I'm constantly criticised by the CI for saying that I don't want this but then I don't believe in cremation, but it doesn't stop me cremating people. It's about personal choice, it's about being professional," he says.

As written:

In a hospital room you are lying on your deathbed Tearful relatives are ranged around to bid farewell.

A nurse comes to make routine checks on your pulse and temperature. Your vision begins to blur, the light in your eyes fading as your body surrenders to the inevitable.

Memories of people and places long gone flash through your brain. Images and sounds, locked away for decades, resurface one last time, as if you are travelling backwards in time at high speeds. Then the electric and chemical pulses between your brain cells cease and the vista of infinity awaits.

The next thing you know an oxygen mask is being pulled from your mouth. Light floods back into your eyes and everything is a blur.

You are still lying in bed and as your focus returns, you see white-coated doctors leaning over you, watching cautiously.

Some people are standing nearby but these are strangers. However, they are also your relatives. Waiting near your bedside, are your great-great great-grandchildren.

For a long time `cryonics' (shortened form of cryogenics) has been a science fiction standard. The recent Spielberg movie Artificial Intelligence (AI) depicts a mortally ill child being revived from suspended animation after several years. The idea that the recently deceased, frozen at -196 ° C in liquid nitrogen, might be one day brought back effectively began with Robert C Ettinger's book, The Prospect of Inmortality (1964).

Bob Ettinger, now 83, is currently President of the Detroit-based Cryonics Institute (CI), one of several companies offering the service. Having fought in World War II, Ettinger became interested in the work of French biologist Dr Jean Rostand, who had frozen and revived frog sperm; he also studied physics at Wayne State University Detroit in the 1950s. "I have on religious beliefs, but our understanding of the universe is still very limited," he says. "But I would not place any bets on our chances without cryonics."

The minimum fee for `suspension' is $28,000; usually the CI member has a life insurance policy, made payable to the CI upon death. People who have publicly expressed interest in cryonics include Muhammad Ali, Larry King and science fiction author, Arthur C Clarke. But with regard to a widespread rumour that Walt Disney is currently frozen, the CI website is succinct: "The names of patients and members (at CI anyway) are considered confidential unless they tell us otherwise. So we couldn't tell you even if we knew."

Located just south of the River Thames, F.A. Albins have been funeral agents for over 200 years. The director is Barry Albin Dyer, who agreed to `prepare' the Cryonics Institute's European members after a chance meeting with Bob Ettinger in Chicago over a decade ago. He says that the members he has encountered constitute a very varied spectrum of people. In the softly lit mortuary room, bodies are prepared for `suspension.' Albins will not prepare anyone for cryonic suspension unless all legal documents are in place, the person is legally dead and registered with the CI. "It would be for me to get to that person as soon as possible and literally cool the deceased down, not to freeze them," says Albin Dyer. "All I want to do is to stop the brain cells deteriorating. Then I want to undertake a perfusion, which is done with natural fluids, with anti-freeze agent. At -I96 °C, if you flicked an artery, it would shatter into a million pieces which would defeat the whole purpose. `I want the effect of the cold without rigidity of it, so basically, I would open up an artery, maybe several arteries, depending on the condition of the person. And I'd start with almost pure saline (saltwater) and just wash and rewash the deceased so it cleans out any oxygenated blood. `And until I had clear saline coming through and then I'd build it up by 10 per cent all the time, to become pure glycerine. `You've got somebody who totally dehydrated but totally perfused. Then that person would go to Detroit as soon as possible, into something like an Australian cooler box. The deceased goes in, they're packed with ice, they are hermetically sealed..." Bodies (the Cryonicists would say `patients') are not stored in Britain; their eventual destination is the CI Facility in Clinton Township, northeast of Detroit.

As of January 2001, 37 `whole body' subjects are stored there. Says Barry Albin-Dyer: "At that point they (CI) would have the opportunity of cooling down further. If that happens what they do is to put them into a sarcophagus and they'll put dry ice on top and the dry ice temperature drops down further. `You've got the deceased in a kind of sleeping bag, you've got the dry ice effect going downwards with the temperature gauge. And over two weeks, they would take the temperature of the body down to 80 degrees below. `They're taken out into a second sarcophagus which would then use liquid nitrogen and that would take it down to -196 degrees. Once you've reached 196 degrees, you then go into a cryostat and the cryostat would be constantly loaded with liquid nitrogen..."

The oldest subject currently in suspension is a Dr James Bedford, frozen in 1967. The CI is a non-profit corporation, which claims to have $2 million in cash, stocks and bonds. Aside from one full time and two part-time paid staff all of its workers are volunteers. Numerous groups of this kind started up soon after Ettinger's book touted the concept. The Immortalist Society (IS) was begun in 1969 for education and research purposes. The CI itself was set up seven years later. Ettinger's own mother, Rhea Ettinger was suspended in 1977, as was his first wife in 1987.

John de Rivaz (57) is webmaster of Cryonics Europe. He says that cryonicists have great difficulty rescuing the concept from the popular caricature. Namely, that cryonics is a ghoulish high-tech scam, employing pseudo-science and preying upon people's most primal fear, of their own mortality. "The established scientific community are often called upon to criticize cryonics, and I suspect that they are asked; "This is a load of rubbish isn't it?" rather than "What is your view on this?" `In a recent television interview, a so-called expert was lead into making virtually slanderous statements about cryonics.

In fact the correct experts to ask are not experts in present day science, but futurologists, people who try to predict what the future will bring." Central to `futurology' is the concept of 'nano-technology', the manipulation of atoms and molecules to build and repair matter, including living tissue. The CI points out that Dr Richard Smalley, the 1996 Nobel Chemistry Prize winner, has predicted this could begin by 2010. Decades from now, futurologists predict `nanobots', microscopic robots and computers travelling through a frozen body, repairing tissue and `re-firing' the chemical and electrical reactions of living cells. Not surprisingly, cryonicists are enthusiastic about cloning, genemodification and cybernetics. Some companies offer `neuro-suspension' at reduced rates. Neurosuspension involves cutting off the deceased's head and freezing it in the belief that once the technology to revive it becomes available, there will also exist the means to clone a new body. However, neuro-suspension is eschewed by the CI as it attracts bad publicity, being seen by relatives and the media as freakish and undignified.

Another company offering cryonic suspension is Alcor, set up in 1972 and based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcor produces a booklet, Cryonics and Christianity, arguing that cryonics does not conflict with ideas of spirituality and the afterlife. Indeed, Alcor-UK's members have included a Church of England vicar. While someone is `potentially' alive in deep suspension, says Alcor, their `soul' does not leave this earth while their brain cells remain intact. "If people are religious and rational about it, they can see life as a precious gift, and what better way to show gratitude for a gift than to look after it?" says John de Rivaz who believes that cryonics implies `life extension' rather than `raising the dead.'

But despite the recent breakthroughs, even if a way of resuscitating a deep frozen brain exists, it may take decades or even centuries for it to become available. After all, no one has so far revived a deep frozen mammal; the only breakthroughs have involved animals kept a few degrees below zero for relatively short periods. Moreover, the exponential rise of technology is a double-edged sword, perhaps making the dreams of cryonicists closer to reality and perhaps generating a world few of today would enjoy once revived. Three centuries ago, no one had seen the crudest steam engine, travel was by horse and cart and few people lived beyond forty. But to imagine the culture shock of someone from Napoleonic times encountering today's world is to perhaps understand how one of us might feel, awakening in say, 2351 AD.

As the terrorist atrocities in New York and Washington so terribly demonstrated, there is no guarantee that as we have grown more technologically advanced, we've necessarily become a more rational or moral species. Thirty-two years ago, movie-makers like Stanley Kubrick imagined the year 2001 ushering in a Golden Age of space travel and thinking computers. But Mankind will remember 2001 not for spinning space stations, but for burning sky scrapers.

And even if the cryonicists emerge into an objectively `better' world, it will certainly be an unimaginably different one. Would the culture shock be too much? "No that doesn't worry me, that excites me," says Jack St Clair, a 60 year old businessman from Basingstoke, who signed up to Alcor-UK in 1997. "I think it's going to be a new opportunity, a new challenge, a new excitement. I think people's level of happiness and contentment will be that much greater and opportunities for satisfaction will be immeasurably more than now." A revived human would have a very large family, a small army of descendants. He or she might be the heir to a fortune that had accumulated vast interest in the interim. But it's highly unlikely that, for the foreseeable future, the legal profession will make allowances for people returning to claim estates, once their death cent is issued.

Back at F.A. Albins Funeral Home, Barry Albin Dyer, while happy to provide the freezing service, would not avail of it himself. A practicing Catholic, he is a Doubting Thomas where cryonics resurrection is concerned. There won't come a time, he believes, when contemporary people mix with the living fossils of previous centuries. "I'm constantly criticised by the CI for saying that I don't want this but then I don't believe in cremation, but it doesn't stop me cremating people. It's about personal choice, it's about being professional," he says. "You'd have to say I was a skeptic, but I believe these people are thoroughly sincere. I believe that the way things are done is very professional and I have to say this: when I started doing it ten years ago or so, I could see no way back for these people and that duration, they've actually bred kidneys from pigs, what about open heart surgery? `The heart is stopped for up to two hours and people come back and you can clone embryos now. And I have to look and say now, will the technology be available?"

However, even the `father' of modern cryonics admits it will be a long time before that question is answered. "That usual guess ranges are from 50 to 200 years for patients frozen by current methods," says Bob Ettinger of the time it may take. But ultimately, cryonicists are motivated by supreme optimism in technology. Some of them have to be. Although no living person could legally be frozen, one of Ettinger's original suggestions was that the incurably ill might be frozen until such time as a cure was available. "One particular fellow, a young man who has an eventual terminal disease, sat down and said `I want to do this' and I said `you have to be very sure, really sure before we would take it on," says Barry Albin Dyer.

"So then this young guy said to me: `Well, I'm only 19, I might live to be 27 at the most. I want the life I'm not going to get. `And I know that if I die without doing this, that's the end. If I die doing it, maybe I've got the tiniest chance of coming back and having a life..."

Length: 2,050 words approx.