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Inside tanks filled with liquid nitrogen are the bodies and
heads of 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved in hopes of
being revived in the future when science has advanced beyond
what it is capable of today. Many of the "patients," as Alcor
Life Extension Foundation calls them, were terminally ill with
cancer, ALS or other diseases with no present-day cure.
Matheryn Naovaratpong, a Thai girl with brain cancer, is the
youngest person to be cryopreserved, at the age of 2 in 2015.
"Both her parents were doctors and she had multiple brain
surgeries and nothing worked, unfortunately. So they contacted
us," said Max More, chief executive of Alcor, a nonprofit which
claims to be the world leader in cryonics.
Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, another Alcor patient, had his body
cryopreserved after death from ALS in 2014.
The cryopreservation process begins after a person is declared
legally dead. Blood and other fluids are removed from the
patient's body and replaced with chemicals designed to prevent
the formation of damaging ice crystals. Vitrified at extremely
cold temperatures, Alcor patients are then placed in tanks at
the Arizona facility "for as long as it takes for technology to
catch up," More said.
The minimum cost is $200,000 for a body and $80,000 for the
brain alone. Most of Alcor's almost 1,400 living "members" pay
by making the company the beneficiary of life insurance policies
equal to the cost, More said.
More's wife Natasha Vita-More likens the process to taking a
trip to the future.
"The disease or injury cured or fixed, and the person has a new
body cloned or a whole body prosthetic or their body reanimated
and (can) meet up with their friends again," she said.
Many medical professionals disagree, said Arthur Caplan, who
heads the medical ethics division at New York University's
Grossman School of Medicine.
"This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty
science fiction and it's naive," he said. "The only group...
getting excited about the possibility are people who specialize
in studying the distant future or people who have a stake in
wanting you to pay the money to do it."
(Reporting by Liliana Salgado; Editing by Richard Chang)
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