Freezing People is (Not) Easy (28 page)

Since the first cryonic suspension forty-five years ago, roughly 2.3 billion people worldwide have died. During that time about two hundred people have been placed into cryonic suspension. Even now, only about a dozen cryonics perfusions are performed each year.

The cryonics movement has gone on for twenty-five years now without my participation and has produced two state-of-the-art cryopreservation centers. There are perhaps a thousand more like me who have made all the arrangements, legal and financial, to be cryonically suspended at clinical death. I bow to everyone who will come after me, carrying the torch to a new generation. The times they are a-changing.

What might the future hold for cryonics? My hope is that by using the methods available today we can sufficiently preserve human patients so that one day technology can return them to a new life. I understand that most people will reject this option whether revival is guaranteed or not. But those few who would choose life over death should not be dismayed if some experts are not yet on our side.

The Society for Cryobiology has been hostile to cryonics since the 1960s and remains almost as hostile today. In 1965 they rejected human cryonic suspension because they could see no way to ever revive a frozen human body; at that time, not a single organ—human or animal—had ever been frozen and revived. Professor Ettinger countered them: “Of course no one today knows how a frozen patient could be resuscitated. We are not suggesting that. We are banking on future technology, and you cannot know what will be possible in the future! The future is unknown.”

Throughout my cryonics experience, I have often said that we were counting on future generations to develop the necessary technology to revive frozen patients. I never imagined that I would be relying on
today's
generation!

Dr. Mark Roth, a reduced metabolism scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, might have just struck gold. I first learned of his work in Dr. Gupta's book
Cheating Death.
Dr. Roth is using, of all things, hydrogen sulfide to reduce the body's need for oxygen. The “rotten egg” smell of hydrogen sulfide gas is instantly recognizable, and the gas can be harmful to humans at high doses. Nevertheless, Dr. Roth has found a method of creating a liquid form of hydrogen sulfide that can be injected into patients by medics on the battlefield or by EMS paramedics at an accident scene. He has discovered that when administered to a rat, the substance will induce a suspended animation–like state. The doctor's ability to take an inauspicious, potentially harmful compound like this and transform it into an agent that saves lives seems like modern-day alchemy!

His method can be practically described as a “pause switch” for death. For six hours the rat was hovering between life and death with metabolism at 10 percent of normal. When returned to an oxygenated environment, the rat made a full recovery. This procedure bought the rat six hours of time. If mortally wounded, this additional time would have allowed the rat to reach a hospital and receive lifesaving treatment.

The potential of this amazing research has caused the US Government Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund Dr. Roth's research in suspended animation in hopes of saving the lives of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Perfected, this science could provide hospitals with a revolutionary tool to prevent impending death. Several other researchers have also committed their resources to perfecting therapeutic human suspended animation.

In order to gain FDA approval of clinical trials, Dr. Roth had to demonstrate that 75 percent of animals recovered after losing 60 percent of their blood and being left untouched for six hours. Dr. Roth's lab accomplished this amazing feat with his pause button for death. The so-called golden hour, the time after an injury to perform lifesaving treatment, is growing by hours and days or perhaps even months. Indeed, such a pause switch for death will surely count as one of the great accomplishments of human history.

Because of his remarkable success, Dr. Roth's lab has won approval to begin human suspended animation clinical trials. The second and third phases of this research will take up to five more years to complete. The amazing reality is that reduced metabolism research on human hibernation and suspended animation is actually occurring at this very moment.

Philosophical Ramifications

In the late 1960s, while president of the CSC, I commissioned a poll of random passersby at the corner of Beverly and Wilshire Boulevards in Beverly Hills, California. Although the poll was nonscientific, I wanted to gauge the reactions of Americans to cryonics. Seven CSC members spent five hours speaking with approximately four hundred people about their familiarity with cryonics and what they might feel regarding their own cryonic suspension.

The results were tabulated—and I was stunned. Eighty percent of those polled said they had heard of cryonics, and 75 percent of them, more than two hundred, thought it was already possible to freeze and revive a human being. Of the four hundred people we queried, only eighteen (less than 5 percent) responded somewhat positively to cryonic suspension; all the rest wanted no part of extended life through cryonics or any other medical treatment. I doubt those results have changed significantly in the intervening years.

From that survey and a lifetime of anecdotal evidence, I believe children between the ages of five and seven learn that death is a routine part of life and that sooner or later everyone dies. Most simply accept death as the natural order of life.

People typically deal with death by embracing a perceived higher power. Primitive cultures had beliefs in a spirit world that ruled the forces of nature and had powers over life and death. Other civilizations embraced religious or supernatural ideas such as resurrection, reincarnation, mummification, angels, zombies, ghosts, and many others. Many such beliefs continue today.

For me the difference between the faith-based religions and science is that science is verifiable and therefore, I believe, the central author of creation. That is not to say I do not believe in God, because I do. I give all the credit and credibility of science to the power I call God. I believe that all science delivered to man over these past few centuries has been freely given by our Creator. Man cannot out-slick the Creator, by whatever name he is known. Thus I believe that science provides the gateway to new discovery. The path to future enlightenment means probing all possibilities, including what is unknown, strange, and alien.

I have learned over the past five decades since first reading
The Prospect of Immortality
that the chains of tradition are nearly impossible to break; consequently, change happens very slowly and at its own pace. Extended life via cryonics is truly only available to those rare individuals who can embrace this newly evolved possibility. Such thinkers are not conditioned to expect death at the young age of eighty when they can live as long as Methuselah. The rest of the world's billions of people will simply experience an early death and be consumed by worms or flames—which is very much their right, if not what the more-hopeful minority of us would choose. For centuries life expectancy was far lower than it is today, but medicine and technological advancements have allowed people to add decades to life. Cryonics is a natural extension of that medical and technological evolution.

There always will be reactionaries at the other end of consciousness who distrust the evolving knowledge of the human mind. However, we should not dampen our optimism about the great benefits that future discoveries can deliver.

Two hundred years ago, flying among the clouds would have been miraculous, an astonishing gift of the gods. Now it is ordinary, even boring. With each new invention and discovery, our perceptions shift. If you could talk to a caveman today, do you think he would be convinced that airplanes, skydiving parachutes, and submarines are now commonplace?

For now there are questions to consider: Why should we hope that a future generation will revive frozen human beings of our time? What has the cryonics movement accomplished or discovered over these past fifty years? How might those accomplishments support the enormous effort to greatly extend the human life span?

To witness your own proof of principle and perhaps re-create some of the magic I felt when I first observed the sea monkeys, I propose that you supercool some ordinary houseflies in your home refrigerator for a few days and then bring them back to life.

First catch a few healthy flies. I usually just place something like a banana peel on an outside table, and while the flies are busy chomping away, I trap them with a clear glass. This method works well for me, although I needed some practice and had to move fast.

When I've captured a half dozen, I place them in a covered clear glass and put them in the refrigerator. Within a few minutes they appear dead, lying on their backs, feet straight up. They have, by all appearances, gone to the happy buzzing grounds. What is going on here? Are these flies dead? Are they alive even though they appear to be dead? The flies are in a “pause mode,” what Dr. Sanjay Gupta suggests would be the greatest medical discovery in the history of medicine if it can be applied to humans.

Sometime within the next three days, assemble an audience to witness your amazing live-giving powers. Take the glass out of the refrigerator, head outside, and drop the flies onto your palm. After about three minutes, the warmth of your palm will reinvigorate the flies; as if by magic, they will suddenly stand up, shake a little, and shortly thereafter fly off. While this is a cute parlor trick, it does illustrate in a small way the slowing down of biological life.

I suggest searching for
cryonics
on the Internet and learning more about its current status from enlightening presentations by the Cryonics Institute and Alcor Foundation on their websites. You might be impressed to learn about the number and caliber of the scientists and professionals who have joined this young science.

Cryonics information and discussions are easily found. Two popular online forums are Cryonet and The Cold Filter. I also suggest reading
Cheating Death,
mentioned earlier, and
Engines of Creation
by Eric Drexler, a cryonics suspension member. His book portrays the revolution of new medicine including cryonics, stem cell research, and cloning.

We must use our own imagination to decide whether we want to participate in extending our lives into the near and distant future. There is a suicide somewhere in the world every twenty seconds—a statistic proving that life is often very tenuous, depending on a person's circumstances.

George Sanders was a favorite silver screen idol of mine during the 1960s; his charming manner coupled with good looks and a rich voice gifted him with an Academy Award, fame, fortune, and talent—everything I thought a reasonable person would prize.

In 1971, just prior to committing suicide, George Sanders wrote this note:

 

Dear friends, I am leaving this world because I am bored. I have lived long enough. I am leaving you, with all your worries, in this sweet cesspool of life. Good luck!

 

The prospect of cryonics, if successful, would challenge our belief systems and traditions. It would change the way we view and deal with death. Our world is inhabited by billions of dissimilar people who tend to not recognize or embrace change—especially change that radically transforms life as we have lived it for eons.

I once heard a story about President Theodore Roosevelt's reaction when his secretary of state told him that the Wright brothers had just achieved the first human flight at Kitty Hawk. While he was stunned and amazed, he commented that he could see no practical application for it!

If that story was retold correctly, then for me it exemplifies what I call “looking versus seeing.” Even this great president could not see the potential for human flight to change the world. In 1967, when the first heart transplant took place, a majority of people were shocked and even appalled. Yet today heart transplants are a commonly practiced and accepted form of life extension.

Today only a handful of people
look
at cryonics and the science of reduced metabolism and
see
its world-changing potential. I saw its potential. I imagined a world where dying was simply an option. It's what drove me to act with passion and persistence, sacrificing everything I had for an idea that would usher the evolution of man to superman.

I leave you now by reiterating the assessment of CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta of suspended animation: “This could be the biggest medical breakthrough ever—a way to stop death in its tracks.”

The day we humans are able to defeat death may soon be at hand. Think about it!

Afterword

Status & Prospects

R. C. W. Ettinger
3
*

 

Bob Nelson's story speaks for itself.
No need to gild the lily, so I'll just add a few notes from my perspective.

Life is stranger than art, but not as neat. Good guys usually have a few warts, and bad guys are sometimes kind to their dogs. Smart people can do dumb things, and banal people occasionally show common sense. But both brilliance and common sense will have a struggle against habits ingrained over thousands of generations.

How to cut the chains of tradition? It can be done in minutes, acetylene torch style, by the white-hot passion of a Bob Nelson, but this is rare indeed. It can also be done file-style, sawing away patiently. Or if we change the metaphor to that of a dungeon prisoner, he might dig his way out with a spoon, working year after year—in other words, you can slowly build your information and determination.

In 1962 I published the first version of
The Prospect of Immortality;
the first commercial edition was published in 1964. Since then, no one has managed to live forever.

In 1972 the first edition of my
Man into Superman
was published
.
Since then, no one has leaped any tall buildings.

Still, there has been progress. It has been much less rapid than I originally hoped, and the cryonics movement remains very small, with only around a thousand people actively involved and only around 170 patients in frozen storage, or cryostasis, as of the beginning of 2008. Even the broader “immortalist” movement remains small; few acknowledge, even to themselves, that the total elimination of death might not be a bad thing and that the possibility should be investigated.

But the still broader “life extension” movement is going great guns, with many millions of people trying to improve their lifestyles and buying dietary supplements touted as life-extending. Billions of dollars are being spent on the development of nanotechnology, or molecular engineering, the potential of which includes submicroscopic robots to maintain and repair the human body from the inside. Every year, almost every day, advances in science and technology make our thesis more credible.

There are also solid indications of an acceleration of progress, one example being that the Cryonics Institute, started in 1976, froze its first patient (my mother) in 1977 but has received more than half of its current eighty-five patients in the past five years. Membership has more than tripled in the last seven years. The wind is at our backs, even if it is still just a light breeze.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised at the slow growth. After all, one could regard the cryonics/immortalist movement as the most radical revolution in human history, with a perceivable threat to many of the habits and institutions that people hold dear. Perhaps the real surprise is that it has taken root and grown, and no one has even been lynched. (Cryonics has been effectively outlawed in a few places, such as France and the Canadian province of British Columbia, but in the United States the opposition has been mostly just a few grumbles. And there are countries, such as Australia, where interest per capita is higher than in the United States.)

As for interest in trans-humanity—forget it, for now. Oh, there is plenty of intellectual interest or fantasizing, and there has been for a long time. Science fiction is around a hundred years old as a popular genre, and many of the biggest movie hits of recent decades have been of this sort. Science fiction is now a
major
part of the entertainment scene. But fictional supermen have very rarely shown any genuine superiority worth mentioning, for the simple reason that readers would not relate to them and writing about them would be too difficult, if possible at all.

In fact, very few people want radical change of any kind. They want their idealized future to be just like the present, except gold-plated or chocolate-covered. Or we could say they want the present without warts—nothing much different except more money and less suffering, along with continued life. And it's hard to quarrel with that.

The future is almost certain to be rowdier than we would like, and the surprises will not all be pleasant. Some of the heavy thinkers believe that within the next fifty years, or even sooner, accelerating scientific advances will bring the “spike” or “singularity”—a sudden surge of change (including intelligent machines and self-reproducing factories) that will compress centuries of change into years. That is downright frightening. But playing ostrich won't help, and if there is much to worry about, there is probably more to hope for.

What Kind of People Are Involved in Cryonics?

It is mildly interesting to glance at the record for clues as to what kind of people are attracted to—or repelled by—the concepts of cryonics and immortalism, or life extension. There are some surprises.

Early on, some of the professional chatterers warned that the cryonics “scam” would seduce countless of the desperate aged to throw their money at the body-freezers. That never happened, and would not have happened even if we had been ambulance chasers and even if we were in it for the money, which is verifiably not the case.

Old people naturally dominate our patient rolls, but the aged are not our best potential recruits by any means. They seldom have any strong fear of death or any strong will to live, or much ability to think outside the box or deviate from the ordinary. Typically, all they want is surcease or respite. They descend passively into oblivion.

Their children, or in some cases their spouses, may take a different view. The majority of members of the cryonics organizations are men, but the majority of patients are women. They are the mothers and wives who were held especially dear, and given their chance. Next most frequent patients are fathers and husbands.

What about occupation?

Cryonicists cover a broad spectrum, with clearly a concentration of the better educated. For example, we like to say that “doctors choose cryonics, nine to one.”

That doesn't mean 90 percent of physicians are in cryonics. The absolute numbers are small in every segment of the population. But we do have about nine times as many physicians in cryonics as you would expect on the basis of population. In other words, a doctor is about nine times as likely to be involved in cryonics as a person chosen at random from the population. If we look at PhDs, the numbers are even more striking.

Computer professionals are even more highly overrepresented, and we have a theory about that. Computer people not only depend on logic on a day-to-day basis but are also accustomed to seeing rapid advances in what is possible.

One cannot say the same thing about any other profession. Lawyers use logic, but the law changes very slowly, and judges and juries may disregard logic. Medicine involves logic, but a lot of it is guesswork, and clinical proof of effectiveness and FDA approval come very slowly. Engineers use logic, but much of what they do requires lots of capital, and again change is slow. The computer field is unique in its total reliance on logic and the ease and rapidity of improvements—and that, we think, makes computer people unusually open to our thesis.

Personality? There hasn't been any scientific survey, but we do know for example that Libertarians are overrepresented in cryonics. The main characteristic of Libertarians is independence and love of freedom, with distrust of authority. Many of them are entrepreneurs, self-employed. I don't endorse the Libertarian political party, but they are interesting people and less likely than most to be chained to old habits.

The bottom line of course is that the “typical” cryonicist profile really doesn't matter. The one thing that matters is whether you and your family will survive and thrive. At present, a majority [of people] are skeptical of cryonics—so will you let that majority vote you into the grave?

Heroes and Zeroes

Many people are people-people, responding better to human-interest stories than to dry logic. So let me relate a few of our stories, or at least their brief versions. The “zeroes” are of two sorts: those who are moldering and those who look like long shots but still have a chance. The “heroes” are also of two sorts: those who tried and failed and those who tried and have a chance. I won't specify in advance which is which.

Walt Disney

According to the gossip, Walt had heard about cryonics and expressed his desire to be frozen at death. According to the persistent rumor, he actually was frozen, privately, and is hidden away somewhere. My tentative conclusion is that he did express such a wish but took no concrete steps to assure it, and when he died, he lost a lot of influence. His family thought his wishes were less important than their business, and they buried him—a grave mistake from his point of view, and ours. At any rate, there is a grave in a California cemetery with a Walt Disney marker on it.

So Mickey Mouse is immortal, in his fashion, but his daddy is probably just dead.

Andrea Foote

Dr. Foote was a psychologist on the faculty of the University of Michigan and served on the board of directors of the Cryonics Institute for many years. When she was dying of cancer, arrangements were made to keep her at home under hospice care, with family members (who cooperated with her wishes) in attendance and Cryonics Institute equipment in place. We were prepared; she was promptly perfused and frozen and is now at the Cryonics Institute facility in Clinton Township, Michigan, northeast of Detroit. She left CI a bequest of more than one hundred thousand dollars.

Note: No director or officer of the Cryonics Institute is paid a penny or derives any financial benefit from its operations. There are no stockholders. It is a nonprofit organization run by the members for the benefit of the patients. CI received the bulk of Professor Ettinger's estate after his clinical death and he was frozen.

We have nothing against capitalism and expect and hope that the likes of General Electric, Frigidaire, etc., may eventually enter the field. But we need to squelch the suspicion that CI or its directors are in it for the money. We are in it for something more valuable—to save our lives and those of the people we love.

Richard Jones

Professional name Dick Clair, he was a TV writer and producer, especially for
The Carol Burnett Show.
He was signed up at various times with three different cryonics organizations, the last being Alcor, where he is currently safely stored. He left his estate to Alcor, but the inevitable litigation by heirs resulted in a split settlement. Alcor did, however, receive a substantial bequest, I think over a million dollars. This was Alcor's chief asset for years. Definitely a hero.

Stanley Kubrick

The famous director of
Dr. Strangelove,
2001: A Space Odyssey,
and many other films saw me on one of the TV shows—I think it was
Tonight
with Johnny Carson—bought dozens of copies of my book
The Prospect of Immortality,
and invited me to New York to meet some of his rich friends. Unfortunately, he also invited a scientist/businessman named Ben Schloss, who apparently conned him out of some money and thereby soured his interest.

Peter Sellers

The actor (
Pink Panther,
Being There,
Dr. Strangelove,
etc.) had a flash of interest and wrote me a warm letter, but he had a short attention span and of course many other interests competing for his attention. He ended in a grave or crematory, I don't know which.

Don Laughlin

Possibly the flashiest of current living cryonics members is the man with a city named for him—Laughlin, Nevada, a kind of junior Las Vegas centered around his casino resort. Laughlin is a billionaire, or half anyway, so who says rich people can't be smart? And don't say he's a gambler, because his habits couldn't be more different from those of his customers. He only places bets when the odds are in his favor. Does that tell you something?

K. Eric Drexler

Dr. Drexler is a shaker and mover in the massive scientific drive loosely called nanotechnology, or molecular engineering. Very roughly speaking, this means building things by moving individual atoms, one at a time. Drexler's first book,
Engines of Creation,
was published about the same time, 1986, that two IBM scientists built the first scanning tunneling microscope, which could “see” and even manipulate individual atoms. Drexler foresees computer-driven machines (assemblers), which will be able to build almost anything—including copies of themselves!—out of almost any raw material, such as air, water, or dirt, using any available energy, such as sunlight.

Such devices already exist in nature of course. They are called plants. But those prospectively designed and built by humans will be much more versatile. Remember the movie
Fantastic Voyage
with Raquel Welch, where a submarine carrying doctors was miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a patient to carry out repairs? That was silly—wasn't it? Yes, but it isn't silly to envision ultraminiaturized robots—nanobots—that could do the same thing. They could also repair the damage done by freezing a cryonics patient.

Yes, one of our greatest heroes, Dr. Drexler is a cryonicist.

Richard Feynman

Professor Feynman won a Nobel prize in physics for contributions to quantum theory, the forefront of physics. In 1958 he gave a lecture, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” explaining his opinion that no known law prevented our learning how to manipulate atoms individually, with the implication that we could design and build—and repair!—physical systems of any complexity (such as you). This came to the attention of a young student, K. Eric Drexler, who proceeded to do something about it, as already noted.

Dr. Feynman saw the promised land, however dimly; but, like Moses, he didn't get there. Perhaps due to cultural inertia, he did nothing about cryonics and died a few years ago. A partial hero.