Life After Death: Rising From The Dead

When famous baseball legend Ted Williams died at the age of 83, he did not have a ceremonial burial like other mortals. He opted to freeze his body, believing he would awake some day in the future, alive and kicking.

Right now, over 160 ‘dead’ bodies rest under bone-chilling temperatures – the idea being that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found.

According to David Pascal, Secretary, The Cryonics Society, the controversial field called cryonics was first conceived by Michigan mathematics and physics professor Robert Ettinger.

"The Cryonics Society of California [CSC] was the first to actually cryopreserve Dr James Bedford, a 73-year-old psychology professor on January 12, 1967," Pascal said.

According to him there are two major organisations – Alcor (www.alcor.org) and the Cryonics Institute (www.cryonics.org) dealing in Cryonics. Costs range from $35,000 (Dh128,537) at the Cryonics Institute to $150,000 (Dh550,875) at Alcor.

Suspended animation cryopreserves individuals but does not maintain the patients.

"There are 167 patients now in cryosuspension," Pascal said.

But isn’t cryonics playing God with human life?

"All medicine could be described as ‘playing god with human life’," argues Ben Best, a well-known activist in cryonics and President/CEO of the Cryonics Institute.

"Heart transplantation and antibiotics were once considered ways of ‘playing God’, but these are now just seen to be medical tools. Cryonics is an even more extreme example of pushing the limits of science to save human life," he said.

Cryonics is heroic medicine, not "raising the dead".

And what about the soul?

"Where does the soul go when you sleep at night or become unconscious?" asks Best. "If a cryonics patient is not ‘dead’ there is no reason for the soul to go anywhere. Where does the soul go during the anaesthesia of a heart operation?

"Whether there is a possibility of revival is a matter of opinion. But I believe that the chances are good, or else I wouldn’t be doing this," Best concluded.

The Method

When someone is pronounced dead, the blood is removed from their body and replaced with a cryoprotectant fluid that minimises freezing damage. Once the patient is prepared with cryoprotectant, he or she is cooled to -196C, the temperature at which time and molecular decay essentially stop, and then stored upside down in liquid nitrogen, which maintains that temperature.