This story sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but it is a reality. Currently there are 189 people who decided to be frozen, hoping that technology advances and they can recover their health to have a second chance at life.
These are people who benefited from the technology of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, an organization that is a leader in the world of cryogenization of people and that currently maintains the bodies of people who were frozen at their facilities at the time of death.
The organization points out that when medicine gives up, cryogenization takes over to prolong life.
189 people frozen
Alcor Life Extension Foundation is a leader in the field of cryogenization, it has been operating since 1972 in the town of Scottsdale in the state of Arizona in the United States.
The organization was founded by Fred and Linda Chamberlain and in 1976 they had their first patient cryogenized. According to what they publish on their official website, they already have 189 patients who undergo the most advanced technology in the world in this area, but there are also 1,397 Alcor members who hope to have their services one day.
But what is the cryogenization or freezing of people? Alcor points out that it consists of "preserving life by stopping the death process using subzero temperatures with the intention of restoring good health with medical technology in the future."
Although they do highlight that it is an experiment, in the most literal sense of the word, since they do not guarantee that the frozen person will be able to return to life in the future.
However, they have a whole procedure prepared to be able to reach people at the ideal time and thus cryopreserve it.
The organization stays close to the person in his last days of life, at least a week before, with the aim that they can start the process just when the legal death of this patient due to cardiac arrest is declared, in this way they know if it is feasible to access Alcor's services.
Once that happens, the patient is legally dead, however, according to the foundation, his cells and organs are still in an early stage of the death process, so it is still possible to carry out the process.
Blood circulation and respiration are restored artificially and then he is given an ice water bath and injected with a solution that preserves his organs.
Then, the body is immediately transferred to the Alcor facilities in Arizona and once there, the cryopreservation process begins, which lasts between 5 and 7 days in which the body is cooled to -196°C. In this way, the patient is protected "theoretically" and the process of his death effectively stopped, alludes to the foundation.
there is a future for them
The foundation claims that the procedure is experimental and currently no organization can revive frozen people.
They assure that their mission is to "eventually restore health and reintegrate all patients under Alcor's care into society", so they do not rule out ever being able to do so, as long as technology allows it.
It is something that even its founder, Fred Chamberlain, has bet on, who since 2012 has been cryogenized at the Alcor facilities, hoping to ever come back to life.
At the moment the frozen people are kept at the Arizona facility, where they are kept in capsules that don't even need energy to maintain.
Although these facilities are not free, since all the people who are there have coverage thanks to life insurance that they left in the name of Alcor, which finances the storage costs.
An important detail of this process is that it is not only for humans, since if these people want, they can also cryogenize their pets, a service that Alcor has for its members.
Featured people in Alcor
The first man cryogenized, James Bedford, is currently at the Alcor facility. According to Esquire, he is a university professor of psychology who died in 1967 from kidney cancer.
Bedford, before dying, expressed his desire to be frozen with the aim of reviving when medicine had advanced enough to cure his illness, something that he made explicit in his will, where he left a large sum of money (approximately 80 million pesos ) for this task.
Although his body was cryonics long before Alcor was founded, according to the magazine, James's body passed through various facilities in Phoenix, California and even in a tank that his own son kept with liquid nitrogen, until in 1982 he stayed. at the Alcor facilities.
According to El Comercio, among the frozen people are also Du Hong, a Chinese writer; Marvin Minsky, scientist, and Dick Clair Jones, film producer.
In addition, they mention that the popular DJ Steve Aoki is part of the members who hope to be cryogenized by the foundation.
Another member who has declared that he is part of Alcor is Peter Thiel, the creator of PayPal, Vanity Fair highlighted.
Controversy in the freezing of people
Being a process that occurs in the death of the patient, when he can no longer defend himself, it is his family that sees how everything unfolds and many times they do not agree with what is happening.
That was the case of Ted Williams, a renowned Boston Red Sox player in the United States, who died in 2002 at the age of 83 and had stated that he wanted to be cryogenized.
Once he died, his son John Henry Williams took him from a funeral home in Florida and Alcor sent him with the purpose of selling his DNA, reported El País, an idea that he would have proposed to the family of the. “It would be interesting if we could bring Dad back to life in 50 years. What if we could sell his DNA? There could be little Ted Williamses all over the world,” he stated at the time.
The player's eldest daughter, Bobby-Jo Ferrel, flatly refused and denounced her brother for the theft of the body and indicated: "My father is in a metal cylinder upside down, so frozen that if he could touch it it would break into pieces by the mere warmth of my hand. He makes me sick just thinking about it.”
The controversy escalated when Sports Illustrated magazine accused that Alcor decapitated Williams' body and kept his head in a different capsule, with the aim of taking a dozen DNA tests, El Comercio reported.
Although Ted had paid for this experiment, his daughter indicated that before she died she would have opted for the cremation of his body and burned the will. The organization never commented on the matter.
That silence remains to this day, when they are still adding frozen people to their capsules. It could take decades for them to ever come back to life in a very different time than the one we live in.