 "Frozen Futures: Why are US billionaires freezing themselves?")
For some US billionaires, death is only the beginning.
The rich and powerful are signing up for cryogenic freezing – having their bodies preserved at an extremely low temperature in the hopes that they can one day be revived by science.
The latest to join the ranks of the hopeful is billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Thiel, interviewed by Bari Weiss on her podcast last week, said “I think of it more as an ideological statement.”
“I’m not convinced it works. It’s more, I think we need to be trying these things. It’s not there yet,” he added.
But what do we know about it? And how are they going about it?
Let’s take a closer look:
First, let’s briefly examine cryogenic freezing.
Cryonics is practice of freezing a person who has died.
It is aimed at bringing the person back to life at some unspecified time in the future.
The world itself, cryonics, comes from the Greek krýos – which means “icy cold.”
As per BBC, science cryogenics was invented by French biologist Jean Rostand during the 1940s.
The concept of cryogenic freezing was first proposed by Robert Ettinger in 1962 in a work called The Prospect Of Immortality.
Ettinger, a physics teacher and war vet, was inspired by Rostand as well as science fiction.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIn 1967, professor James Hiram Bedford became the first person to be frozen.
As per QZ, Bedford was an ex-psychology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
Bedford had died of renal cancer in January 1967.
As per Science Focus, in the 1980s, company began freezing people’s heads.
The idea was that the deceased’s brains could be hooked up to computers and thus “brought back to life” in the distant future.
As per BBC, in 1991, Bedford’s body was taken out of storage.
Though the evaluation found the body to be preserved, the skin was discoloured.
“Frozen blood” was coming out of its mouth and nose.
Scientists made steady progress over the next few decades.
The first baby from frozen eggs was born in 1999 and the first complete organ was frozen, thawed and then reinserted into a rabbit, as per Science Focus.
According to the National Post, scientists even managed to revive 46,000-year-old roundworms from the Siberian permafrost.
How does it work?
Freezing is technically a misnomer.
As per QZ, back in the 1970s, Bedford’s body was first injected with solvent dimethyl sulfoxide. It was then placed in a Styrofoam box of dry ice.
Finally, it was placed in liquid nitrogen. But that’s very different from what happens now.
These days, bodies are ‘vitrified.’
The process begins after a person is declared legally dead.
As per Britannica, the body is first packed in ice and then sent to a cryonics facility.
Now, the body is drained of its blood.
Then, antifreeze and chemicals that protect the vital organs and which are designed to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals are pumped into the body.
The body is then placed into a liquid nitrogen-filled chamber – at a temperature of -196 degrees Celsius.
The institute also has the option to preserve just the brain – at a far cheaper $80,000.
What are billionaires doing?
As per Bloomberg, around 500 people have already been cryogenically preserved.
Another 5,500 people are making plans to do so.
For billionaires and even regular millionaires, the cost is less than a drop in the bucket.
As per The National, the Cryonics Institute near Detroit charges $28,000 for the procedure – the same as it did in 1976.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation charges around $200,000 for full body cryopreservation.
It defines its work as the “practice of preserving life by temporarily halting the dying process through the use of subfreezing temperatures, with the intention of restoring good health with advanced medical technology in the future.”
They are also creating what is known as ‘revival trusts’ – a version of perpetual trusts – which keeps a lumpsum on hand to pay for the person who was ‘revived.’
Steve LeBel, a retired hospital executive in Michigan, told Bloomberg he will put $100,000 into a revival trust.
“I really want to figure out a solution, otherwise I’ll be in there with my fingers crossed, hoping there’s money left over, 200 years from now, to pay for the resurrection process,” LeBel said.
But George Bearup, a senior legal trust adviser at Greenleaf Trust, said revival trusts don’t seem to make sense.
“I would probably run the other direction,” Bearup said. “How do you draft for something that could take place in 1,000 years from now? Who knows what the rules will be?”
There is also debate about what constitutes a revival.
As Peggy Hoyt, a Florida-based estate planner, told Bloomberg, “Some people will say they consider revival only if they’re the same person they are today with all their memory intact.”
“Some people are content to say that a human clone would be equivalent of revival. Others said they don’t care if they have a body if their brain is uploaded to a computer,” she added.
‘False hope’
But some scientists are openly sceptical about the promises made by the industry.
McGill University neuroscientist Michael Hendricks wrote in MIT Technology Review. “[R]eanimation…is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the ‘cryonics’ industry.”
Bioethicist Arthur Caplan told the National Post it is “next to impossible to believe that anybody, no matter how advanced the science, could create much out of a bunch of — and I’m sorry to put it this way — damaged mush.”
“Any damage to a brain from freezing and defrosting is going to create something horrible for the person that experiences that.”
“The outcomes for adverse events are just huge,” Caplan added.
But others remain true believers.
Lebel told Bloomberg, “I believe the aging process is going to be cured.”
“It’s a disease. The technology isn’t there yet, but I can bridge that time gap with cryonics.”
With inputs from agencies
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
