http://www.sundayherald.com/49468
Heaven can wait
Michael Park
There was nothing out of the ordinary about the life of Doctor James Bedford, but his death was quite a different matter. The 73-year-old American was a former psychology professor who lived modestly in Southern California, but when he died from cancer in 1967, what happened next has secured him a place in history – and possibly eternity.
Instead of being buried, his body was covered in ice on the very hospital bed in which his heart had finally stopped and a ‘cryo-transport team’ was called by his doctor. After being injected with various liquids, he was lifted into a foam-lined box which was filled with dry ice. Two days later, the following statement was given to the media: “The first reported freezing of a human at death, under controlled conditions, occurred on Thursday, January 12, 1967, in Los Angeles. A patient was frozen immediately after his death from cancer in the hope of eventual revival and rejuvenation by future techniques.”
Dr James Bedford had become the world’s first cryonics patient.
Now, 35 years later, in a grey, one-storey building in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, I find myself standing less than six feet from his frozen body. We are not alone. In this high-ceilinged, air-conditioned, dull, rectangular room, filled with what look like giant, steel, tea urns, Tanya Jones, the chief operating officer of the largest cryonics company in the world, Alcor, is giving me the details.
“Our 67 patients, including Dr Bedford, are stored here and 26 pets too,” she says, matter-of-factly. The dead are stored in liquid nitrogen inside six urns, called ‘dewars’ after Scotsman Sir James Dewar, the 19th-Century scientist who pioneered methods of cooling gases to the point of liquefaction. There are two much smaller dewars, only three feet tall, in the middle of one wall. “Those are mostly the pets: dogs, cats, and I think we have a monkey,” Jones says.
The fact that someone who chose to be preserved, suspended, frozen (take your pick) after they died had also chosen to have their pet monkey preserved, suspended, or frozen along with them, was only one of the strange things I was learning on my tour of one of only two cryonic storage facilities in America.
Since a man named Robert Ettinger dreamt up cryonics in 1962, and since the white-haired Doctor Bedford became his first patient, the practice of freezing people so that one day they may be brought back to life, has divided scientists, theologians and the public alike.
Some people think the idea of reanimation is sinful, against God’s wishes; others, with more scientific beliefs, think it’s just plain stupid; while people like Tanya Jones are convinced that the fact that it hasn’t worked yet doesn’t mean it won’t in the future.
“Cryonics, ultimately, if proven to work, is going to become an adjunct to emergency medicine,” she tells me. “If someone can’t be treated, they will be preserved until such time when they can be treated. And it’s not going to be the decades-long experiment that it is now; it could be just for a day, a week, a month or a year.”
TO DEMONSTRATE that cryonics should be taken seriously, and that it can potentially offer those who decide to be frozen, life after death, Alcor has started to offer members of the public (prospective clients all) guided tours to show there is nothing sinister going on in this controversial business: an open-door policy.
It’s surprising then that their glass front door is locked when I arrive. Or maybe not. With 67 patients padlocked in steel tanks, all of whom have paid up to $150,000 to be suspended for as long as it takes to develop the technology to bring them back to life, security is of prime concern.
The photographer and I are soon let into the small reception area dominated by two brown leather chairs and a wall covered in photos of some of the more public members of Alcor: people who don’t mind the world knowing that they are currently suspended. Beneath each picture is a small plaque listing their name and the dates of their “first life cycle”.
I’ve been invited to meet with Jones and Joseph Waynick, Alcor’s president and chief executive officer. This is no fly-by-night operation. Although Alcor is a non-profit company with no shareholders, it has a multi-million dollar investment fund which it uses to pay its handful of full-time staff and ensure everlasting patient care. In the very early days of cryonics, two companies went out of business and their patients were thawed out and buried.
Today there are several, very solvent, cryonics companies operating around the world. Alcor is the largest in terms of membership and the only one to have a UK branch. It is also the only company to offer neuro preservation: your head is severed after you die and stored here at a cheaper price than if you want your whole body preserved.
When Tanya Jones comes out of her office to show us around, she is dressed in sensible clothes and sensible shoes. A petite 36-year-old, she has a very chirpy demeanour.
Standing in reception as we begin our tour, Jones tells me the ages of the members: “Our youngest patient is 21 … and our oldest is 99 and a half,” and some of their occupations, “TV repairman, students, librarian, engineers, science fiction writers”. She says not all of them are rich, “Most of our people are middle class, they use life insurance policies to fund this”, and that Alcor has “730 people signed up, and about 100 people in the sign-up process”.
When an Alcor member passes away, in an ideal situation, a cryo-transport team is nearby waiting to perform a host of procedures when death is finally pronounced, before escorting the body as quickly as possible back to this location where the full cryo-preservation protocols can be initiated in a well-equipped operating theatre.
We wander down a narrow corridor past glass-walled offices and a small kitchen area, before making a left turn to pause outside the theatre’s big white door. Leaning against a hospital gurney to the right of the door, Jones tells me more about what happens to a patient as soon as they die, in whatever location that may be.
“The very first thing we do is surface cooling with water ice,” she says animatedly. “The second thing we do is cardiopulmonary support, not for the purposes of resuscitation but simply for circulation of the blood and oxygen support. The reason for this is we need to inject a series of self-stabilising medications – 14 – which reduce the damage that comes with a stopped heart.”
The patient is then taken to a local funeral home for a blood washout, a procedure which replaces the blood with an organ preservation solution. “It protects the organs for anywhere from 24 to 48 hours and that allows us enough time to get them here for the cryo-protection phase, which is the second most important step in the process,” says Jones.
But all this is redundant if, as many believe, cryonics is just pure bunkum and a get-rich-quick scheme for its providers. The history of cryonics is not that complicated, but the science is complex and, as everyone involved in the field admits, still totally unproven.
In 1962, American mathematician and science fiction aficionado, Robert Ettinger wrote The Prospect Of Immortality, still regarded as the bible of the cryonics movement. “We need only arrange to have our bodies, after we die, stored in freezers against the time when science may be able to help us,” he wrote in Chapter One. “No matter what kills us, whether old age or disease, and even if freezing techniques are still crude when we die, sooner or later, our friends of the future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us.”
Ettinger, now 87, is still alive and waiting to be frozen at the time of his death, but if the science does work, he won’t be lonely: he married twice and has had both his wives, who died in 1987 and 2001, suspended. That could make for some interesting future dilemmas.
Various companies sprang up throughout the Sixties and Seventies, but a split between some of Ettinger’s disciples resulted in two main companies competing for clients in America: the Cryonics Institute of which Ettinger is a board member, and Alcor, which has Doctor Eric Drexler, the godfather of nano-technology (the science which will be responsible for reviving the currently dead patients, according to cryonicists), on its scientific advisory board.
While The Cryonics Institute is a for-profit company and offers full-body cryonic suspension for a fraction of Alcor’s price ($28,000), it has fewer members and does not offer neuro preservation (for which Alcor charges $80,000). In the early days of cryonics, patients were simply injected with a glycerol-based solution and placed in a bath of liquid nitrogen and stored at minus 196 degrees Celsius – the temperature at which biological functions and cellular degradation stop completely.
However, scientists working in this field are now using different chemical solutions which prevent the ice crystal damage that the glycerol solution causes – and which many say prevents reanimation from ever occurring, the damage to cells and structure being too great.
But since the advent of the emerging, infant, yet credible science of nano-technology, cryonicists are claiming that at some point in the future ‘tiny molecular machines’ will be able to repair this damage and allow those long dead to be revived.
The ‘last in, first out’ theory holds that as science continues to evolve, the people being frozen today, tomorrow, or in the years to come will be the first to be revived, due to preservation with much more sophisticated techniques, and that people like Doctor Bedford, and those who choose to have only their heads frozen, will be in the deep freeze for much, much longer.
“We’re not going to revive neuro patients without new bodies,” Jones tells me. I think she probably wants to add, “Duh!”
“We’re going to repair and restore that damage before we bring them out,” she claims. “My expectation is that we’re going to use advance stem cell therapy to grow a new body for them. I also think the first person who is going to be restored in my lifetime won’t be anybody who is already in our care – it will be someone later.”
Does she really think that she will see the first ever patient revival in her lifetime?
“I certainly hope so. It will mean I’ve lived a long life,” she says with a small laugh. “I think I will. I do.”
When the still smiling Jones opens the door to the large, spotless operating room, I immediately notice a large Plexiglas box next to the light coloured, sloped, operating table. It contains a metal clamp that looks head sized.
If a patient chooses to have only their head preserved, the technique is very different from full body preservation. The latter requires the ribs to be cracked open and fluid pumped in through the heart to circulate through the veins right around the body. For a neuro preservation, a different type of liquid is used and after amputation, the head is placed in this box where tubes are attached to the carotid arteries and jugular veins and the ‘cryo-protectant’ forced through with mechanical pumps. Both procedures can take up to 11 hours.
Jones acknowledges that for the families of cryonics patients, knowing what is happening to them can be hard.
“You don’t get the same type of closure,” she says looking at the floor. “That’s why we encourage the families to have memorial services. It’s kind of ‘Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t.’ We don’t know for sure yet.”
If only the head is being saved, the patient will have left instructions as to what to do with the body. “Typically it’s cremated and the ashes are returned to the family,” Jones tells me.
After the injection of the solutions, the patient (or what’s left of him or her) is inverted and placed in a stainless steel can, or in a full-sized, metal, coffin-like container, and moved to the cooling room next door. It has the look of a factory’s loading bay: a roll-up steel door forms one wall, so ambulances or trucks bringing liquid nitrogen can back in, but there are two of the 10ft steel dewars in one corner.
After the cooling process, which takes up to two weeks, the patient is rather unceremoniously hoisted out of the steel dewar by a crane lowered through a skylight and dropped into their final home – a second, equal-sized dewar which contains up to three other bodies and five or ten heads.
All of Alcor’s patients, including the monkey, are kept in eight dewars in the ‘patient care room’, adjacent to the cooling room. Jones unlocks the door and ushers me inside. It’s like a regular, large storage room: the paint has faded a little, the floor is scuffed and wires stretch from monitors to tanks to wall mounted gauges. It is certainly not the hi-tech, futuristic resting place one might imagine for those seeking everlasting life.
The room feels neither cold nor creepy, but then you can’t actually see any of the bodies. Jones admits that there are “decades to be overcome” before any of these invisible patients might be able to be revived. There are countless problems to conquer: how to freeze a body, or head, without damage; how to revive a body quickly without damage; how to cure what killed the patient in the first place.
AFTER the tour, I meet Joseph Waynick in the company boardroom. He greets me so warmly and with such openness I forget for a moment he is selling dreams rather than something that is yet reality.
“This is a speculative science,”’ he tells me sitting casually in a leather chair at the long boardroom table. “It is experimental. There are no guarantees that we will ever be successful.”
So why on earth should people sign up?
“It’s a no-brainer,” the fit 46-year-old claims. “Look at your choices: burial – in which case you decay and suffer permanent death. Cremation – in which case you are incinerated and suffer permanent death. Or cryo-preservation in which case you have the potential to being restored back to good health. The bottom line is you are dead anyway – what is it going to hurt to try to participate in this experiment and potentially hit the jackpot?. It’s like playing the lottery. The pay off is really big, but you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket.”
The cost of ‘buying a ticket’ is $518 in annual membership fees and the premiums on a life insurance policy that will pay Alcor a minimum of $80,000 upon your death.
Waynick says he signed up for suspension long before he joined the company. Why?, I ask
“Cos I like breathing,” he says with a hearty laugh. He admits he had “an idealism” about wanting cryonics to work, but, after researching it, feels “the science is definitely legitimate”. He believes that you can’t truly predict what science will be able to achieve in the future.
“The only thing you can predict is that science is going to continue to advance,” he tells me, leaning forward in his chair. “We’re going to continue to do extraordinary things we can’t even imagine today and it is that faith in human ingenuity that I’m basing my optimism on.”
Faith is a large part of Waynick’s life. He has long been an open and active member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Does he think there are valid religious questions surrounding the resurrection of mere mortals?
“No I don’t. For many, many years, long before I even became a member [of Alcor], I was actively discussing the whole idea of cryonics with members of my church and my pastors, and the initial reaction has always been one of, ‘That can’t be right’. But no one could point to any passage or reference in the Bible that will prevent any life-saving medical procedure – and that is exactly what cryonics is.”
Well, only if you look at it one way. If there ever comes a point that any of the currently frozen people are revived, it will, quite literally, be raising the dead.
Alcor calls itself a “Life Extension Foundation” and given that so many people would like to extend their lives, I wonder why more people haven’t signed up for immortality. If you add all the cryonics companies’ members together it is still less than 2000 who have booked places in freezers rather than coffins.
Andrew Clifford, a 43-year-old IT consultant who works in the City in London, helps run Alcor UK and is an advisor to the board, says only 16 people in Britain are currently signed up. When I contact him a few days after my tour, I ask him why he thinks so few people have been attracted by the prospect of everlasting life.
“We just accept that evolution has given us 70 or 80 years and we better live life to the full. You have to take it on faith that future technologies will improve,” he says. He also claims that people find the significant cost and sign-up paperwork “daunting”. Or maybe they just think it’s a crazy idea.
Alcor has an Essex-based field kit in the UK which is maintained by the active volunteers (there are no paid employees outside of America). Should any UK member die, they would be stabilised by a team, including Clifford, and then transported to Arizona by co-operative morticians. So far this has only happened once, and the patient requested confidentiality, so Alcor won’t release any details.
Like everyone I talk to involved in cryonics, Clifford is passionate about the procedure (he has signed up for full-body suspension), and believes it should be receiving mainstream support.
“If we had a government and public with real vision then cryonics would be offered on the NHS for terminally ill patients,” he says.
It may be that the chances of that are further away than the moon right now, but if the science is ever proven to work, people like Clifford and Waynick and Jones will be some of the first to say, I told you so.
As I leave Alcor, I realise that no one can say for sure if the appropriate technology will ever be developed, or cures found for currently incurable diseases, or if people long dead will ever be revived, but I guess it is safe to say there are always going to be some people dying to find out.
For more information about cryonics visit www.alcor.org
01 May 2005
