In fact, Ben Best, the president of the Cryonics Institute from 2003 to 2012, has suggested immortalists reconsider the desire for eternal life. “Forever is not just a long time,” he points out quite sensibly, “it is eternity and therefore beyond realistic conception.” Rather than strive for the unrealistic goal of immortality, Best suggests aiming for one thousand years—a more reasonable and, in his view, altogether attainable ambition.
Before his deanimation in 2011, the movement’s creator, Robert Ettinger, also criticized modern campaigns for ending aging. The primary message of Aubrey de Grey’s book, Ettinger emphasized, is “send-me-money.” That didn’t necessarily bother Ettinger: “I hope the appeal is successful.” But as a more seasoned futurist (and mad scientist), he did take issue with the lack of calculations to support de Grey’s guesstimate that “there is a fifty-fifty chance of a large improvement in longevity within thirty years.”
Despite these gripes, there isn’t much of a distinction between the two denominations—at least when it comes to their abuses of verifiable science. For example, Ben Best states that reversible suspended animation of the brain “could happen in anything from ten to fifty years.” Whatever calculations one uses to arrive at that formulation, it’s still just a random, magical prediction.
There are other points of overlap. Like the 2068ers, cryonicists, too, dream of putting human brains into machine bodies. A robot twin will likely be needed in cases where a cadaver is too damaged to be reconstructed. And Ettinger, well before Kurzweil’s time, also breezily brushed aside the complications of consciousness: long-term memories, Ettinger once argued, consist merely of “changes in protein molecules in the brain cells.” But if it’s that simple, then why can’t we cure Alzheimer’s yet?
The primary goal of Ettinger’s books, like de Grey’s, is to hasten the advent of a bizarro sci-fi future. In 1962, he claimed that, by the year 2000, we’d all have Dick Tracy–style wrist radios and shuttle around the globe on transcontinental supersonic subways. Cities would be covered with retractable roofs, and most homes would have voting machine attachments built into their TV sets, doing away with the hassles of dimpled or dangling chads. The thawed supermen of the new millennium would live lives of plentiful leisure alongside their resuscitated superwomen lovers, whose updated bodies would have “cleverly designed orifices of various kinds, like a wriggly Swiss cheese, but shapelier and more fragrant.”
And just as the Singularity’s message has been disseminated through the books of Kurzweil and de Grey,1 the cryonics conception grew following the publication, in 1962, of two books: The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger, and Immortality: Scientifically, Physically, Now by Evan Cooper, using the nom de plume Nathan Duhring. (N. Duhring: say it out loud.) Cooper formed a group called the Life Extension Society (LES), but didn’t get cryopreserved as he became a sailing enthusiast and ended up lost at sea (LAS).
Ettinger is better known, largely because he went beyond ideas and opened an actual cryonics institute in Detroit in 1978. The first person he preserved was his mother. The second inductee, a full decade later, was his first wife, Elaine. Bit by bit, more bodies came on board. His second wife, Mae, joined the fray in 2000.
What will happen when he and both his wives are revived and rejuvenated? “My standard answer is a reminder about the old saying: ‘The rich have their problems and the poor have their problems, but the rich have a better class of problems,’” Ettinger explained, shortly before he, too, entered biostasis. “I would consider that a very high class problem.” Would Elaine view it the same way? Perhaps, he conceded, neither she nor Mae will want him. Perhaps being reanimated will be an excruciating ordeal and they’ll all wish they’d never been reborn. Then again, perhaps both wives will defrost into the aromatic sexual Emmentalers of his superdreams.
* * *
When Lenin died in 1924, his body was initially frozen. The Bolsheviks charged with preserving their deceased leader believed they would soon be capable of regenerating cadavers. At that point, following the revolution, anything seemed possible. If the czar himself could be deposed, then why shouldn’t we live forever? Early Soviet theorists spoke of engineering “the defeat of death.” At the very least, Lenin could repose on ice until technology revived him. Alas, in the end, their proto-cryonic attempt failed when Lenin started decomposing. He ended up embalmed and remains on public display in Moscow’s Red Square.
There are other cryo-precedents, both in history and in mythology. Dante’s Inferno portrays some of hell’s denizens as being stuck—forever—in a lake of ice. Eternal, immobile life. Francis Bacon, that pioneering longevity researcher, died of pneumonia seemingly due to complications stemming from his investigations into preserving meat in snow and ice. Unfortunately, despite his attempts to answer nature’s most “vermiculate questions,” he couldn’t preserve himself. But ice is such a good agent of conservation that explorers who’ve stumbled upon woolly mammoths locked in icebergs for millennia have actually cooked the prehistoric flesh and eaten it.
The first American to be cryonically preserved, a Californian named James Bedford, died of kidney cancer on January 12, 1967. (Cryonicists celebrate the anniversary of his passing each year on “Bedford Day.”) Although the precise details of his preservation aren’t clear, he appears to have been injected with a dimethyl sulfoxide solution, then frozen with dry ice, packed into a minus-196-degree-centigrade capsule, and transported to Arizona, where he ended up in a makeshift subzero crypt facility.
Over the next two years, nine other cryonauts took the icy plunge. Until the 1980s most cryonic activity took place in California and Arizona. Throughout those years, an advertisement trumpeted “Life Extension Through Cryonic Suspension” on Spruce Street, in Berkeley. A wigmaker named Ed Hope set up Cryo-Care Capsules in Phoenix, where he concocted Bedford’s liquid-nitrogen storage chamber. And the Cryonics Society of California, which worked with Hope to preserve Bedford, rose to national prominence following a glowing report in Life magazine.
The society’s president, a Santa Monica television repairman calling himself Robert F. Nelson, published a tell-all memoir of the Bedford case, We Froze the First Man (“the startling true story of the first great step toward human immortality”). Others allege that much of the book is fabricated. His cryo-methods were suspicious at best.
Convinced by Ettinger’s book that cryonics would change the world, Nelson became a vocal crusader for the movement. In 1969, he told Cryonics Reports magazine that he’d opened the “world’s first cryotorium,” a temperature-controlled warehouse where bodies were stored in individual pods with viewing windows. Up to twenty pods fit into large containers retrievable by stainless steel cables. The article depicted lab-coat-wearing technicians overseeing panels of gauges and dials.
In reality, Nelson surreptitiously preserved his first four patients in a cryo-tank designed to contain a single body. “We put this one in headfirst, that one in feetfirst,” recalled a mortuary technician enlisted to help. “It didn’t look like there was room, but they fit.” The metal cylinder was stored in the mortician’s garage, until Nelson built a concrete vault underneath a cemetery in Chatsworth, just north of Los Angeles.
Each week, he’d haul hundreds of pounds of dry ice out to the storage facility in his Porsche. (“It really ruined the upholstery.”) Soon he had four more corpses, again packed into a single canister. Fresh though the cryonics concept seemed, its realization couldn’t have been messier. Nelson shipped one body across the country without informing the moving company that they were transporting a cadaver. In the summer of 1979, the entire scheme fell apart when some relatives checked in on their investment. The bodies were disinterred and found to be decomposed. Investigative journalists broke into the mausoleum. “The stench near the crypt is disarming, strips away all defenses, spins the stomach into a thousand dizzying somersaults,” wrote one reporter. Another witness observed that the bodies had “sludged down into what I can best describe as a kind o
f a black goo.”
The deterioration wasn’t his responsibility, Nelson protested. He hadn’t promised anyone anything. “They were told they would be frozen for a period of time,” he pleaded. “Five minutes is a period of time.”
* * *
Today, America has two main cryonic facilities. One is the Cryonics Institute (CI), in Detroit, founded by Robert Ettinger. The other is Alcor, based in Scottsdale, Arizona.2 Each has slightly over one hundred cryopatients, as well as dozens of frozen pets. Alcor is the more expensive of the two, with preservation there costing more than double CI’s approximately $30,000. Most people who complete cryonics paperwork are encouraged to take out life insurance policies with the facility of their choice as the beneficiary.
There’s one main difference between the two businesses. The CI places whole bodies in cryonic suspension, whereas more than three-quarters of Alcor’s clients are neuropatients—just heads. These are known colloquially as neuros or discorps. While the popular myth that Walt Disney’s head is frozen isn’t true, baseball star Ted Williams’s head (and, separately, his body) did in fact enter Alcor’s containers in 2002.3
The distinction is more nuanced than just severed heads versus whole bodies. The CI, too, only cryoprotects patients’ heads, and not their entire bodies. In other words, they store the whole body, but they only take measures to prevent damage to the head. As Alcor’s directors often point out, you can’t just freeze a dead body without ramifications—when the liquid in human tissue dips into subzero temperatures, it expands. Spiky ice crystals form. Cell membranes decimate. Organs rupture.
A possible way around full-body frostbite is a technique called vitrification, in which bodily fluids are replaced with cryoprotectants. Through perfusion, one’s blood vessels are filled with antifreeze, such as glycerin, dimethyl sulfoxide, or M22. Both main cryonics institutions perfuse the head; Alcor then (in 75 percent of cases) cremates the rest of the body; the CI keeps it attached and sinks the whole organism into liquid nitrogen. But, in Alcor’s view, it’s a “senseless waste of time to take along a hundred pounds of peripherals.”
The head is emphasized because most cryonicists assume that properly preserved brains will eventually be deposited into surrogate bodies. Even though a phalanx of uncredentialed researchers are exploring means of avoiding crystallization, there’s (obviously) no evidence suggesting that a brain shrunken down with windshield-wiper fluid will ever function again. And the idea of the brain’s being the only body part we’d need to resuscitate is cartoonishly Cartesian. What of the endocrine system? Our organs? Our other peripherals?
* * *
Badly wounded as a soldier in World War II, Ettinger spent four years convalescing in hospital, where he read about biologists freezing frog semen with glycerol and then reviving it.4 Didn’t anyone else realize that the same must apply to human bodies? If stored in liquid nitrogen, he came to believe, human bodies could be preserved for centuries. By that time, naturally, immortality would be ours for the taking.
When the cryonics hypothesis first appeared, pundits likened the feasibility of reviving a frozen person to that of reconstituting a cow from hamburger. To this day, only a tiny number of people have chosen to pursue cryonics, causing insiders to bemoan their collective failure. Most outsiders would agree with that assessment. “It would be going too far to say that stranger things have happened, because they haven’t,” writes historian Jill Lepore, deeming the hope of reanimating dead bodies to be one of the “sorriest ideas of a godforsaken and alienated modernity.”
I wouldn’t go that far. Though it’s an obvious target for ridicule, the cryonics narrative has value as an example of the ways humanity copes with death. Though its prospects may seem limited, people are still signing up. Larry King announced in 2011, “I want to be frozen on the hope that they’ll find whatever I died of and bring me back.” When The Prospect of Immortality came out, its arguments convinced a number of otherwise respectable people to do the same. Stanley Kubrick became a convert, for a spell, although he eventually opted to be buried under a tree in Hertfordshire. Such figures as Peter Sellers, Gore Vidal, and Muhammad Ali were possible cryo-candidates. Timothy Leary went so far as to sign up with an outfit called Biopreservation. (In the end, after being cremated, Leary’s remains were launched into spatial orbit. Cryonicists lamented this as a sorry “capitulation to ‘deathist’ thinking.”)
“Besides being definitely feasible, the freezer-centered society is highly desirable, and in any case nearly inevitable,” wrote Ettinger, rallying adverbs for his utopian vision. “Since there is going to be a freezer program anyway, and since the frozen will share the immortality of their descendants, the rationale of opposition, if there ever was any, evaporates.” Reading his words today, one can’t help but marvel at his untrammeled conviction. “At first a few, and then mounting numbers will choose freezing, and before long only a few eccentrics will insist on their right to rot,” he concluded triumphantly.
Ettinger felt that cryonics would bring about the end of warfare. Why would any enemy of American interests risk “a fabulous life of thousands of years (including personal wealth eventually exceeding the total assets of the world today) for a moth-eaten bag of slogans and a shabby empire?” Rather than some mere despot, he will, after being frozen and thawed, become the owner of eternal life. “Once he understands this, he dare not risk war,” Ettinger portended.
Doubleday purchased the rights to The Prospect of Immortality after Isaac Asimov told the editors he found its premise reasonable. Asimov himself, however, wasn’t a convert. He considered the concept “unnatural” and spoke out against it in later years. What’s noteworthy here is that a science-fiction writer validated the manuscript—not a scientist. As learned as Asimov may have been, there’s a difference between sci-fi and sci-ence, even though cryonicists still tout the fact that Ettinger’s manuscript “passed scientific review” with Asimov.5
The blurriness befits the entire endeavor. Ettinger began his writing career contributing sci-fi tales6 to pulpy magazines such as Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. In one autobiographical sketch, Ettinger notes that he “grew up just assuming that, in the natural course of events, we would learn how to prevent and cure senescence and all other diseases.” This assumption, he explains in the same sentence, derived from his reading of sci-fi tales in periodicals such as Amazing Stories, starting in the 1920s.
He’s not the only immortalist who came of age confusing science fiction with actual science. The New York Times Magazine recently profiled a Japanese jellyfish scientist named Shin Kubota who believes “it will be easy to solve the mystery of immortality and apply ultimate life to human beings.” That he hasn’t gotten anywhere near doing that hasn’t dampened his desire to “become miracle immortal man.” A quick glance at his education sheds some light on how he formed his ideas. In school, he confides to the magazine, “I didn’t study. I only read science fiction.”
* * *
One surefire way to speak with cryonics leaders is to attend the annual open house at either the CI in Detroit or Alcor in Arizona. Journalists, however, aren’t welcome. Understandably, given the derision with which they’re regularly treated, cryonicists have an antimedia policy. Another means of getting an interview is to approach them as a prospective customer, someone contemplating taking out a membership. This was Stanley Kubrick’s method. He met with Ettinger to inquire about joining CI when he was designing the hibernation chambers for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
At first, I thought I’d have to attempt passing myself off as merely cryo-curious as well. But then, after a chance meeting, it turned out I wouldn’t need to cold-call the CI.
At an art opening, some friends introduced me to a filmmaker named Korbett Matthews. He’d directed a documentary about a cryonics advocate named Frank Cole. Cole, a Canadian filmmaker, had crossed the Sahara alone by camel in 1990, with a Bolex camera. After spending ten years editing the footage into a film he intended to ca
ll Life Without Death, Cole returned to the Sahara to shoot some B-roll. This time, Tuareg bandits murdered him. His remains were shipped home and ended up in the CI, as per his final wishes. Korbett’s film interspersed Cole’s unfinished footage with his own interviews with relatives and peers—and with Ben Best, president of the CI.
Korbett’s connection to Cole had granted him unfettered access to the institute, and he said he’d be happy to help me however he could. In fact, he hadn’t yet mailed them copies of his finished film. It would probably help if I dropped off some DVDs when I visited them.
Not long after our first encounter, Korbett and I met up again, and he showed me what he’d filmed at the CI. The images looked as if they’d been shot at dusk. “There’s something creepy about the neon-nitrogen ambience,” he explained. “They really don’t want natural light in there.”
Ben Best appeared lanky and gaunt. Bald on top, he had an unusual V-shape of baldness razing down the thin, dark hair on his cranium’s backside. It seemed like a mark of rank from some other society. An older man, in his midsixties, Best spoke softly and precisely. “To triumph over death,” he intoned, smiling lustily, his spine lengthening, “you need to get very close to death.” His eyes widened and flitted about with a kind of canine excitement.
Korbett turned to me, mimicking Best, and straightened his mouth into a line, tautened his jowls in a Frankensteinian way, and shifted his close-slit, beady eyes around suspiciously. “These people are terrified of dying,” he explained. “So they turn themselves into human Popsicles. I call them humansicles. It’s all just a fear of death.”
“Or a denial of death,” I added.
“Yes! Denial. But denying death is like denying birth.”
“They would say that we’re denying the reality of immortality with our deathist thinking.”
Book of Immortality Page 37