Not to be morbid, but you have probably thought about dying before. However, it is less likely that you have considered sticking your body in a big freezer and waiting for scientific advances to offer you a second shot at life. Let us introduce you to cryogenics: the practice of freezing dead bodies at very low temperatures in the hope of bringing them back to life in the future. The president of Cryonics Institute, Dennis Kowalski, has a warehouse full of frozen bodies - including the corpse of a 14-year-old British girl.
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The process is pretty terrifying, and depends on catching the body in time right after the person has died. Minutes after death, a team stabilises circulation and keeps oxygen flowing through the blood to the brain, the body is injected with a blood-thinning injection and packed in ice. Let’s get into the way it works, and what the president has said about the project.
Cryonics
Several facilities across the world have morgues full of bodies, heads, and even animals. The idea is that you freeze the body before too much damage has taken place in the hope that the future will hold the answer to bringing that person back to life. Those with incurable diseases could hope to be ‘awoken’ when science could not only revive them but also cure them.
This system is regarded as a ‘lottery ticket to immortality’ but it is obviously controversial. More than 500 people are currently frozen inside giant thermoses of liquid nitrogen. It’s quite the thought. The head is angled downwards to keep the brain as cold and as stable as possible, and the body is wrapped in multiple layers of insulating material. The containers can take up to 6 bodies.
Dennis Kowalski
The corpses can lie like that, suspended in upside-down death, for decades or even plausibly for centuries - however long it takes for them being revived to become an option. At Cryonic Institute in Michigan, it costs £22,000 to preserve a body in this way.
President Dennis, a retired firefighter and a Nationally Registered EMT-Paramedic (NREMT-P) for the City of Milwaukee, has signed up to the plan.
He explained:
The grave is your only real alternative and that's complete oblivion. So we want to defeat man's greatest enemy - death itself.
I would give everything I had to bring back family friends and loved ones, even if the chance is small. So I think what I'm doing is fighting the good fight
He understands that people may be hesitant, but reasons that ‘if you're already dead there's not much harm in trying - and you might as well take a risk’.
He uses the example of cardiac defibrillation to illustrate the wonders of modern medicine’s progression:
Yet today we routinely use cardiac defibrillation and CPR to bring back people who have died so we've moved the goalpost. We've changed the the definition of what dead means.
Dennis is calling for more people to sign up
Dennis reckons that the 2,200 people who have signed up to take part in the scheme should just be the beginning:
I think our numbers are incredibly and woefully low as to what they should be.
I think more people join crazy cults and are signed up for the Flat Earth Society, or chasing Bigfoot in the woods.
We do like to know as much about death as possible: stories like this one about a man who fell off a cliff and survived fascinate us. However, not everyone is convinced; cosmologist and astrophysicist Professor Martin Rees said cryonic enthusiasts are ‘ridiculous and not to be taken seriously’.
He pointed out that these people are putting enormous pressure on future societies:
From an ethical point of view if people are going to be frozen and revived, even if they could survive they would be imposing a great obligation on future generations, and any revived person would be a nuisance or a misfit.
It does sound like something out of a film, but who knows? Maybe we will finally cheat death with this crazy project.
Read more:
⋙ This is everything you've always wanted to ask about cremation
⋙ Man dies and comes back to life after ambulance runs over pothole
⋙ Man dies on a ship at sea and confirms ‘there is life after death’
Sources used:
The Sun: MR ICE GUY I’ve frozen HUNDREDS of bodies in world’s biggest cryogenics lab including Brit girl, 14 – my whole family has signed up
The Daily Star: Brit girl, 14, among hundreds of frozen bodies hoping to be thawed and revived
