Wendy Grossman: The conference room window overlooks a line of floor-to-ceiling, gleaming steel flasks. The steel feels chilly but not cold; the warehouse-like space they inhabit is unheated in the Arizona "winter". But don't lift the inner styrofoam lid and stick your hand in: they are filled with liquid nitrogen, which boils at 77 degrees Kelvin (-196C). From a nitrogen storage tank, a pipeline snakes along the ceiling sending a runner to each flask - more correctly, "dewar" - to top it up.Most of the dewars are occupied. This is a little eerie. We are at Alcor, the cryonics organisation. The dewars' 79 occupants were - possibly will have been - people with a dream: that given enough time, medical science will advance enough to cure them of whatever killed them. To pay for their decades - centuries, possibly - at temperatures cold enough to prevent decomposition, they bought life insurance policies of between $75,000 (£38,500) and $100,000. Legally, they are dead. To Alcor's staff, they are "patients". Cryonics is a small community. The two largest cryonics organisations, Alcor and Michigan-based Cryonics Institute, together poll about 1,600 members. Alcor has 79 patients and 33 pets in cryopreservation; CI has 85 patients and 50 pets. Grand dream: Science was always going to be slow to fulfill a dream as grand as this. First, cryopreservation techniques need to improve so patients' bodies - and especially their brains, the repositories of memory and personality - suffer minimal damage. Second, the medical techniques for revival, such as cures for Aids, cancer and heart disease, must be developed.Many cryonicists opt to preserve only their heads, hoping for revival technology good enough to give them new, younger bodies. However, there are not even animal experiments to bolster the idea. Nobody has yet frozen and revived any mammal.But the dream no longer seems quite as lunatic as it did in 1962, when Robert Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality launched the modern cryonics movement.
View: Full Article | Source: The Guardian
