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July
9, 2002, 10:20 a.m.
Frozen
Future
Eternity
on ice.
By Andrew Stuttaford
EDITOR’S
NOTE: Members
of Ted Williams's family are currently debating
his — or at least his DNA's — future. This weekend his
remains were flown to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, to be
frozen. Andrew Stuttaford visited the cryogenics facility in 1996
and wrote this piece, "Frozen Future," for the September
2, 1996 issue of National Review.
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  he
stroke of death," claimed Cleopatra, "is as a lover's pinch."
Well, perhaps: if you are about to be deposed and taken captive. But for
most people the arrival of the grim reaper is a tragedy, a disaster, and,
in this most advanced of countries, something of an insult. We eat broccoli,
we transplant hearts, but in the end people just keep on dying —
more than two million of them each year. Other civilizations have claimed
that nothing can be done, but for us to accept this seems, well, un-American.
Each death (other than those of the executed, of course) represents a
technological failure, a rebuke to Uncle Sam.
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But it ain't over
till it's over and, some say, an answer is at hand. Yankee ingenuity has
done it again and come up with cryonics. Put simply, this involves deep-freezing
the recently deceased in the hope that some cure for what killed them
will be found in the future. The idea is not new. Benjamin Franklin wanted
to be "immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till
that time [when he could] be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my
dear country." It was not to be, but Franklin's dream, at least,
lived on, to be revived as "cryonics" in the early 1960s.
Cryonics: It's a
goofy name and a wildly optimistic idea, but one suited to its era. It
was the age of the Jetsons and the transistor, a time when science seemed
to be sweeping all before it. Freeze people? Why not? James Bedford agreed,
and on January 12, 1967 this 73-year-old psychology professor was frozen
("suspended") shortly after his death. Cryonics had found its
Henry Hudson, perhaps even its Columbus. Doctor Bedford is, after all,
still with us and "apparently" in good shape, ending up with
the cryonicists of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation after many years
in a miniwarehouse. This is only appropriate. Alcor is the industry leader.
Its Scottsdale, Arizona, facility is home to 32 "patients,"
almost as many, it estimates, as are held by its three competitors combined.
These numbers exclude the occasional freelancer as well as the two Canadians
interred in the permafrost, but that, says Steve Bridge, Alcor's likable
president, "is just cold burial." Cryonics is much more than
that. To start with, it's a lot less sedate. There is no time to linger
weeping around the deathbed. Instead, an Alcor Emergency Response Team
will spring into action with CPR support to maintain blood flow to your
brain in an attempt to reduce ischemic damage. Your body is rapidly cooled
down and unless you have chosen to die in Scottsdale (which is best) you
will be put into a special traveling pack (make sure it doesn't leak —
this can cause trouble with the authorities) after a procedure involving
preservatives, ice, and Maalox. On arrival, a glycerol-based solution
will be pumped through your system to reduce the tissue damage caused
by freezing. Once you are thoroughly perfused you are ready to be cooled
down to -1960 C. Oh, there's just one other thing. If you have elected
for "neurosuspension" only, this is the moment that they cut
off your head. "Deep cooling" then follows, at the end of which
you are lowered head first, or head only, into a large stainless steel
cylinder. There, in a quiet back room in Alcor's suburban office block,
you await your destiny, a cryonaut in an unmarked metal can, kept cold
by occasionally replenished liquid nitrogen. PereLachaise it is not, but
then it is not meant to be. Scottsdale is no final resting place, but
a way station on the return to life. Or at least that is the idea.
But how good an idea
is it? Conventional cryobiologists, the people who freeze sperm or the
odd body part, are skeptical. They point to the extensive cell damage
associated both with death and the degree of cooling required for a whole
body or even a head. As their Darth Vader, Arthur Rowe of NYU's School
of Medicine, has explained, "believing cryonics could reanimate somebody
who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into
a cow." In addition, even if enough cells can be revived, it is also
far from clear, to say the least, that the patient's mind would have been
preserved.
Well, if cryonics
is another junk science, its practitioners differ from the parapsychology
crowd in one crucial respect: the claims they make are fairly modest.
As one Alcor leaflet is careful to say, "we don't know if what we
are doing will work." They can, and they do, point to signs of real
progress in cryopreservation, while touting a future nanotechnology as
the key to repairing damaged cells in, say, the next "5 to 150 years."
Even today, they note, we regularly "revive" people who previous
generations would have abandoned. Meanwhile, James Bedford sleeps on,
and no frozen dogs have yet come back from the dead (that's an urban legend,
as is, while we are on the subject, the freezing of Walt Disney). Will
Alcor succeed in the end? Talking binarily, Steve Bridge reckons that
the odds are "either one or nothing," which sounds better than
the New York State Lottery. The trouble is that betting on cryonics is
rather more expensive. There are annual dues to pay and when the, ahem,
moment comes, a neurosuspension will set you back $50,000; "whole
body" will cost $120,000. Alcor's 390 living members don't seem to
mind. Much of the money goes into a patient-care fund, which is essential.
Illiquid cryonicists can, as history shows, lead to liquid patients. Alcor
itself is not-for-profit and looks it. The facility is spartan, the decor
basic (framed pictures of the suspended), the staff underpaid. To understand
what motivates them look no further than the USS Enterprise proudly displayed
in one office. These people are science's samurai, gung-ho garage tinkerers
in the Orville and Wilbur tradition. The only doctor on the premises is
dead, although they do have a veterinary surgeon and a nurse or two to
help out. Steve Bridge himself is a librarian by profession. "I know
where to look things up," he says brightly. Rationalists by inclination,
most cryonicists are not religious. Their faith is the future, an Asimovian
dream of scientific progress, often accompanied (this may ring a bell
with Newt watchers) by a strong libertarian streak, a blend, in short,
of Ayn Rand and Captain Kirk. Ayn Rand herself "knew about"
cryonics (but, no, she's not frozen either). As she would have predicted,
officialdom has done its best to be difficult, notably in Riverside, California,
where a series of absurd events led to Dora Kent (or at least her head)
becoming the movement's Rosa Parks. Meanwhile, right-to-die issues bubble
ominously below the surface. The final stages of a disease can destroy
the very cells that Alcor is trying to preserve. So, argued one cancer
patient, why not end things more quickly and allow the cryonicists to
get to work? He lost his case, which reached a California Appellate Court
and, fictionalized, an episode of LA Law, but, happily, survived.
So, doubtless, will
cryonics. And so it should. Its devotees may seem a little nutty, and
so pro-life that they want another, but that's their call, even at $120,000
a throw. It will probably never work, but, as cryonicists see it, what
is the alternative? As Steve Bridge puts it, "The nice thing about
life is that you never know what is going to happen next. The problem
with death is that you do know what is going to happen next. Nothing."
And then he smiles.
Confidently.
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