A small number of people around the world have chosen to have their body preserved at a very low temperature when they die, in the hope that future medical advances will one day enable them to be brought back to life.
This option is known as “cryo-preservation”, or just cryonics for short (from the Greek kryos, meaning “icy-cold”), a branch of the broader science of cryogenics. Although it unlikely to become a mainstream option in the near future, cryonics raises a set of fascinating medical, technological, economic and moral questions.
How does cryonics work?
The technology behind cryonics is actually relatively straightforward. Quite a wide range of small pieces of organic material are already routinely preserved at low temperatures and then revived for future use, such as egg and sperm cells for artificial insemination, samples of deadly viruses including smallpox, and plant seeds.
The problem which scientists who work in cryonics are currently grappling with is how to bring larger, more complex organic structures back to room temperature once they’ve been frozen without causing irreparable damage, with the human body presenting the biggest challenge of all.
Bodies are preserved by cooling them to minus-196 degrees Celsius using liquid nitrogen as soon as possible following the official confirmation of death, as at this temperature it is too cold for any of the chemical reactions that would cause cell death to occur. However, the cooling process itself may cause damage to the body, which would need to be reversed before someone could be successfully revived; this is one of the reasons why many people within the medical establishment remain sceptical of cryonics.
Why do people think cryonics could work?
The theory underpinning cryonics is that the elements which give us our identity, such as our memories and intelligence, reside within physical cell structures inside the brain which can survive without continuous brain activity. It is argued that freezing the brain following death enables these structures to be preserved, and that it could one day be possible to revive them using future technologies which have not yet been invented.
Why would people want to be cryonically preserved?
In many ways, this is the most interesting question. The BBC radio programme Saturday Live recently interviewed a man named Garret Smyth who’s been planning since the 1980s to have his brain cryonically preserved after his death.
He explained that, being an atheist, he had no belief in an afterlife and thought that death would simply be an ending. Compared to accepting this fate, he thought using cryonics to try and extend his time on earth was a perfectly rational response. Those with a fear of dying, or who just want another “bite at the cherry” with life, probably account for a majority of the people who’ve opted for cryonics.
Is cryonics likely to be successful?
The short answer is, we don’t know. The best reason to suggest that it might one day deliver what it promises is that the advances in medicine over even medium-term timescales have been nothing short of miraculous.
It doesn’t seem too unreasonable to argue that medicine is likely to advance to the point where we can resurrect cryonically frozen people over the next 1000 years if we look back at what it has been accomplished during just the last couple of centuries. Progress has been astonishing; contemplating where medicine stood in the year 1800, would anyone who was around then have thought we would one day be able to look inside our brains with MRI scans, or have found ways of treating so many common infectious diseases?
However, given that we cannot realistically predict when sufficient advances will have been made to conduct resurrections, several strong arguments against cryonics remain:
- Cost – Cryonic storage is expensive, with high ongoing costs for maintenance. Garret Smyth suggested using a trust fund which could invest in highly-secure government bonds to fund the process in perpetuity, but over such long timescales even this would have its problems. Will the US government still be issuing bonds in the way it does now a thousand years down the line? It seems improbable that any financial product could remain solvent for such a long period of time.
- Impracticality – Even if the medical advances that cryonics relies on do occur, they are so far ahead of what’s possible now that many experts think they aren’t worth the gamble. Devoting present-day resources to placing a large bet on future technology does seem inefficient, even if the technology is theoretically possible.
- Morality – Are the people who want to be revived in the future actually being selfish? Given the worries about overpopulation that grip the present-day world, it seems unlikely that people in the future would welcome interlopers from the past.
