Dead Cold

By aredien © 1992 Washington -- More than 40 Americans have been frozen solid, waiting for science to catch up with what killed them. Another 450 living people also have signed up for a chance at cheating death through cryonics, the process of freezing a body or brain with the intention of bringing it back to life in a better time. For members of the three American cryonics associations, death occurs only when the body is too badly damaged to be preserved. In the meantime, they are only "suspended." "Death does not happen all at once," said Avi Ben-Abraham, a doctor and the president of the American Cryonics Society. "By freezing people in liquid nitrogen, we stop death at its clinical stage." Most cryonists are highly educated, in their late 30s and usually are men, although some couples have arranged to be frozen next to each other. Believers say cryonics does not conflict with religion and their groups even include a few ministers, although most are atheists or agnostics. "Religion and cryonics are both pro-life,"Abraham said. "God gave us the intelligence and knowledge to extend life." Candidates for the big chill must take care of several legal and financial matters while still alive. First, enough money must be put aside so that interest pays eternally for preservation costs and maintenance. Legal arrangements with such group as the ACS also must be made to give full rights over the body and finances of the deceased. This ensures that a revived person won’t come back to life with empty pockets, and if If all goes well, the interest earned could bring back some suspended people as millionaires. Shortly after death, the body is prepared for suspension. The blood is drained and replaced with a substitute designed to protect organs against damage from extreme cold. Then the corpse is frozen at minus 320 degree Fahrenheit in a container of liquid nitrogen -- head first to assure that in case of disaster causing the nitrogen to evaporate the brain would be preserved the longest. ACS’s service provider, Trans Time Inc., then stores the bodies in stainless-steel containers in a warehouse in Oakland, California. The cost of ACS suspension services ranges from $75,000 to $150,000 depending on whether the brain or the entire body is suspended. ACS Vice President Jim Yount said he regrets that no cryonics organizations exist in Russia. He said he would be interested in making connections with Russians because Siberia’s permafrost could be a great help in preserving bodies. Non-believers scoff at the idea of bringing back a frozen corpse and even true believers don’t expect anyone to be revived for another 50 years. In the five past years, Paul Segall, a medical researcher in Berkeley, California, and president of Bio Time Inc., said, "Cryonics has changed from a speculative science where people were just being preserved in the best available ways to a real scientific effort where scientists are using natural and artificial techniques to chill animals to the ice point and then bring them totally back." But even if cryonists never bring a single person back to life, their work can provide valuable medical research. Segall is working on a blood substitute that he says could revolutionize low-temperature bloodless surgery and cryonics. His experiments on hamsters, dogs and baboons show that animals can be revived after about 50 minutes of clinical death near the ice point. Segall says his research will increase from one hour to three hours the operation time during low-temperature surgery. Although his work showed him the limitations of cryonics, he said, "If I die, I don’t have time to wait for research. I want to be frozen with the best techniques available." Cryonists also have to find a way to stop the aging process, said Segall, but according to Dr. Estelle Ramey, a gerontologist and professor at Georgetown University, lab experiments on mice seem to show that increasing life expectancy is possible but stopping the biological clock is not yet possible. "Mother nature is not interested in any species hanging around for a very long time," she said. "All it is interested in is: live long enough to reproduce yourself ... and then get the hell out of the way." Nevertheless, Ramey, 75, does not smile when she talks about cryonic suspension. "I have seen changes in molecular biology that were just unimaginable when I was in school," she said. "I think the field is wide open."