The idea of suspended animation has been around for decades and has been a mainstay of science fiction. One version of it, called cryonics, is seen by many as a means of literally cheating death, preserving a human body at the point of death and then, in some future time, reviving it when whatever killed it can be cured.
People die of diseases and other conditions that sometime in the future
might be easily curable. For most people that fact is of little comfort, as,
say, cancer ravages their bodies and robs them of life. All there is to do is
to make ones death as comfortable and as dignified as possible. Afterwards,
ones relatives and loved ones will mourn.
But for some people, unwilling to go quietly into that good night no matter
what the state of medical science is, there may be an option, albeit a controversial
one. That option is to place ones body into a kind of suspended animation,
right at the point of clinical death, in the hopes of being revived at some
point when medical science can cure whatever condition has killed one. The
option in question is called cryonics.
The theory behind cryonics stem from cases of people who have fallen into an
icy lake and have been submerged for up to an hour in the frigid water before
being rescued. The people who managed to survive did so because the icy water
put their body into a sort of suspended animation, slowing down their
metabolism and brain function to the point where they needed almost no oxygen.
Cryonics is a little different than that, however.
The History of Cryonics
The idea of suspended animation has been a mainstay of science fiction for
decades. It has been featured in numerous stories and such movies as 2001: A
Space Odyssey and Demolition Man.
A book entitled The Prospect of Immortality was published in 1964 by a
physics professor named Robert Ettinger that was the first widely read work to
popularize the concept of cryonics. Cryonics, derived from the Greek word
meaning “cold”, is a very apt description for the process of preserving human
bodies for future revival.
The first person to be preserved with cryonics technology was a 73-year-old
psychologist, Dr. James Bedford in 1967. By the 1970s there were a number of
companies that offered cryonics services, though some of them went out of
business due to the great expense of maintaining the bodies of their clients
indefinitely.
Today the largest cryonics companies are Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona
and the Cryonics Institute in Michigan.
By early 2004, Alcor had 650 members still alive but waiting to be preserved
and 59 people in cryopreservation.
How Cryonics Works
It is against the law to place a living person under cryonic suspension. So
in order to take advantage of this service, one has to die first. Death, in
this case, is defined as when ones heart stops beating, though certain brain
function still exists.
The moment ones heart stops beating and one is pronounced dead, an emergency
team from a facility like Alcor goes into action. They stabilize the body,
supplying the brain with enough oxygen and blood to maintain minimal function
until it can be transported to a cryonics facility. The body is packed in ice
and injected with heparin, an anticoagulant, to prevent the blood from clotting
during the trip.
Once the body is at the cryonics facility, the actual process of preservation
begins. One does not just freeze a body by, say, immersing it in a vat of
liquid nitrogen. This would cause the water in the body’s cells to freeze,
causing the cells in turn to shatter. First, the water is removed from the
body’s cells and is replaced with a glycerol-based chemical mixture called a
cryoprotectant, a kind of human antifreeze. The purpose is to protect the
organs and tissues from forming damaging ice crystals. It facilitates cooling
down the human body without actually freezing it.
Then the body is placed in dry ice until it reaches a temperature of about
minus 202 degrees Fahrenheit. Then the body is placed head down in an
individual container of liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus 320 degrees
Fahrenheit. And there the body stays until such time as it can be revived, in
theory.
The Drawbacks of Cryonics
There are, of course, several downsides. For one thing, cryonics is very
expensive. To become a member of a cryonics facility, one needs to pay an
annual fee in the area of $400 a year. To preserve ones body in cryonic
suspension, one will have to pay up to $150,000. For those wanting cryonic
suspension on a budget, one can have one’s head preserved for just $50,000.
Presumably people choosing this option will wait until the technology exists to
regenerate or in some way construct a new body.
Then there is the fact that so far no one who has undergone cryonic
suspension has ever been revived. There is no guarantee that revival will even
be possible or that, having been accomplished, the person being revived will be
healthy; future cures of the disease that killed them notwithstanding.
Supporters of cryonics point to the new science of nanotechnology as a
possible means to revive human beings in cryonic suspension. Nanotechnology
concerns the use of microscopic machines to perform various tasks. In the case
of reviving people from cryonic suspension, these nanites, as they are called,
would repair any cellular damage that has occurred due to the cryonic process
and even reverse the effects of disease and aging on the molecular level.
There is finally the idea of culture shock, of people from the past suddenly
revived in some distant future time that will seem to them to be at once
wonderful and strange. To get an idea, imagine a person from—say—the 19th
Century, in some kind of suspended animation, suddenly revived in our time.
That person might be fascinated and even awed at the technological wonders that
have been developed since his time. However, he also might be disturbed and
alienated by changes in culture and mores that have occurred in the last
hundred and fifty years or so. If the past is a different country, then surely
the future is even more so. In any case, everyone a person being revived from
cryonic suspension (unless they use the service themselves) will likely be
dead. Such a person will be very alone.
Still, for people with money, a desire to live longer, and an adventurous
spirit, cryonic suspension may be a viable option. For such people the option
of avoiding permanent death in the present and instead living in some unknown
future may be too irresistible not to choose.