by Jill Lepore
Michigan is also where freezers came from. The first refrigerator for home use was sold in 1918. It was invented in Detroit; refrigeration was an offshoot of the automobile industry. By 1923, the year after the Ettingers moved to Detroit, a company named Frigidaire, owned by General Motors and based in Detroit, began selling refrigerators in cabinets for home use. A chemist hired by General Motors developed Freon-12. In the 1930s, General Foods launched Birds Eye frozen foods. By 1944, more than 85 percent of American homes had refrigerators, but freezers were scarce. During the war, they couldn’t be had for love or money; their sale was banned for the duration. When the war ended, Americans had babies and built suburbs and bought appliances, including two hundred thousand freezers in 1946, and twice that many the next year.18
Haworth makes his arrangements in secret, sure that if anyone were to find out what he was doing, “everyone would demand a Frigidaire instead of a coffin.” He dies; the scientist puts him in a freezer. Three centuries later, he awakens in a room with a beautiful woman doctor, and observes—he is naked—that he is young, strong, and, to his astonished delight, ready: “A long-forgotten stimulus performed its ancient function.” Unfortunately, things don’t turn out as well as he had hoped. Word had gotten out, long since, and everybody had started going into the “freezatoria.” In the absence of any expectation of heaven, people had begun behaving very badly. Scientists had therefore invented the “Farbenstein Probe” to find out if a Sleeper had ever sinned; after scanning Haworth’s brain, the probe sentences him to a penal colony on a planet that used to be called Mars. What do they call it now? he asks. He is told, “Now they call it Hell.”19
Inside the Cryonics Institute, I stood with Ettinger, finding it hard not to think about “The Cerebral Library,” which appeared in Amazing Stories two months before “The Jameson Satellite,” and in which a mad scientist collects five hundred brains in glass jars. This place reminded me of a library, too, or, more, of an archive, a place where people deposit their papers—the contents of their heads—when they’re dead, so that someone, some future historian, can find them and bring them back to life.20
“Have you got any neuros?” I asked.
A neuro is a severed head; the theory is, scientists in the future, like the Zoromes, will give you a new body, so why bother saving your old one if your brain is all they’ll really need? In 2002, when Red Sox baseball great Ted Williams died, his head was sawed off and frozen. It is now stored at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcor, with nearly nine hundred members and eighty-four patients at the time, was CI’s chief rival, although it charges a great deal more for eternal life. After Williams died, his oldest daughter insisted that her father had not wanted to be frozen, and produced, as evidence, a will in which he stated that he wished to be cremated, whereupon his son found, in the trunk of Williams’s car, a piece of scrap paper that said something about “bio-stasis.”21
During the family feud that followed, Ettinger appeared on ABC World News Tonight and was interviewed by the New York Times, where he was referred to as “Dr. Ettinger”; elsewhere, reporters called him “a Michigan physics professor.” Ettinger has two master’s degrees, one in physics and one in mathematics, both from Wayne State, which he attended after the war on the GI Bill. Aside from having spent a freshman semester at the University of Michigan in 1937, he had no affiliation with that institution. Many decades ago, he taught at Highland Park Community College, a school that no longer exists.22 He didn’t call himself “Doctor” or “Professor,” but he did consider himself a scientist. “I’m a scientist by my own criteria,” he told me. That is, he has “a scientific attitude.”23
“Neuropreservation” has a scientific attitude, too, but that doesn’t make it a science; it’s more like extremely optimistic cosmetic surgery.24 The fountain of youth used to be a place, far away; more recently, people have been looking for it in pharmacies and outpatient clinics.25 In between “The Cerebral Library” and “The Jameson Satellite,” Gernsback ran “The Incredible Formula,” about a chemist who, in the year 1982, synthesizes an ephedrine-X, granting him eternal youth.26 Decades later, baby boomers were putting pressure on the Social Security system and getting plastic in their chests and titanium in their knees; they were buying hair dye, Viagra, Rogaine, and anti-aging cream; they were having face-lifts and neck jobs. Cryonics promises to cure hair loss, wrinkles, senescence, impotence, and death, all at once. Nip, tuck, sever, freeze, thaw, rebuild: head job.
Ah, yes, but will it work? Well, it would be going too far to say that stranger things have happened, because they haven’t. Reanimating and rejuvenating the dead would be several orders of magnitude stranger than, say, landing on the moon. But it does boast a handful of somewhat prominent promoters and a much larger group of defenders whose position amounts to, basically, What the hell, it’s worth a try. Ralph Merkle, a former professor of computer science at Georgia Tech who went on to teach at a place called Singularity University, served on Alcor’s board. (Merkle happens to be the great-grandnephew of Fred Merkle, whose base-running error—he failed to touch second—cost the New York Giants the National League pennant in 1908, an error forever after known as the Merkle Boner.)27 The MIT professor Marvin Minsky, who will await resurrection at Alcor, e‑mailed me, in lieu of an explanation, this helpful chart:
Which looks a lot like this chart:
And which, while altogether different from faith, is another way of trying to cover all the bases.
As for its scientific plausibility, credentialed laboratory scientists who conduct peer-reviewed experiments having to do with the storage of organic tissue at very low temperatures (embryos, for instance, or organs for transplant) generally don’t think the dead will one day awaken.29 The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse, you get mush. And even if, in the future, scientists could repair the damage done to cells by freezing and thawing, they’d have, at best, a cadaver. Merkle believes that nanotechnology will solve this problem—microscopic robots will repair the cells, one by one—but, as Ettinger himself points out, anyone wanting to resurrect and rejuvenate the dead must complete four tasks: cure the person of what killed her, reverse the decay that set in between death and freezing, repair the damage done by the freezing itself, and make her young again. Even Orpheus would be daunted.
And, of course, success would seem to depend on whether the people doing the freezing are doing it well. On August 18, 2003, Sports Illustrated published an investigative report by Tom Verducci. Using tapes, photographs, and documents provided to him by Alcor’s chief operating officer, Larry Johnson, Verducci described how Williams’s head had been “shaved, drilled with holes, accidentally cracked as many as 10 times and moved among three receptacles,” until it was finally put in “a liquid-nitrogen-filled steel can that resembles a lobster pot.” (The week Verducci’s article was published, Johnson, who had cooperated with the investigation, resigned from Alcor and launched a website called freeted.com.)30 It was Williams’s decapitation that brought the Cryonics Institute to the attention of the state of Michigan and resulted in the filing of a cease-and-desist order, three days after Verducci’s article appeared.31
“No,” Ettinger declared. “We don’t do neuros.”
“But—” Andy began.
“Oh, right.” In 1999, CryoCare, a cryonics firm once run by Ben Best, who later replaced Ettinger as president of CI, went out of business.
“We do have two heads,” Ettinger said. “Transfers.”
Robert Ettinger announced the dawn of what he called the Freezer Era at the height of the Cold War. In 1949, he met his first wife, Elaine, at a Zionist meeting. In the 1950s, they moved to the suburbs and had two children. In the basement of their house in Oak Park, Michigan, Ettinger built a fallout shelter and waited for a scientist to read “The Penultimate Trump” and turn today’s extravagant fiction into tomorrow’s cold fact.32 Finally, he decided he’d have to do it himself. In 1960, he wrote a
two-page flyer and sent it out to a few hundred people whose names he’d found in Who’s Who. The response proved underwhelming.33 In 1962, he wrote a sixty-page manifesto and sent a copy to Frederik Pohl, the editor of the science fiction magazine Worlds of Tomorrow. Pohl, who was a regular guest on an all-night New York AM-radio show, The Long John Nebel Show, arranged for Ettinger to be invited. One thing led to another and, eventually, Thomas McCormack, a junior editor at Doubleday, agreed to read Ettinger’s sixty pages. One day at the office, McCormack was having an argument with Doubleday’s science editor. McCormack thought it was not logically impossible to resurrect the frozen dead; the other guy disagreed. Just then, Isaac Asimov, a Doubleday author, happened past. “Asimov walked into the room,” McCormack recalls, “and it didn’t take him ten seconds to say, ‘No, it’s not logically impossible.’ ”34
In 1964, the year Doubleday published The Prospect of Immortality, Dr. Strangelove hit theaters. Through that lens, mortality begins to look rather a lot like mutual assured destruction and immortality at 320 below like nothing so much as a fabulously air-conditioned fallout shelter. In Strangelove, the world faces a nuclear Armageddon. On orders from a U.S. Air Force general convinced of a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” (shades of Steinach), American airmen have dropped a bomb on Russia, thereby triggering the Soviets’ Doomsday Machine. From the war room in Washington, the U.S. president (played by Peter Sellers) entertains proposals made by his scientific adviser, Dr. Strangelove (also Sellers):
STRANGELOVE: Mister President, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy, at the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts. . . .
PRESIDENT: How long would you have to stay down there?
STRANGELOVE (pulls out a circular slide rule): Well, let’s see now.…Hmm. I would think possibly, uh, one hundred years.35
No, we’re not all going to “die,” Ettinger insisted. We’re all going into freezers, to be paid for by Social Security. After the Manhattan Project, after Sputnik, after dishwashers and electric mixers, either scientists and engineers were on the verge of solving everything (in which case, go into the freezer, because you can be sure the world will be even better when you wake up) or else someone was about to launch an atomic bomb (in which case, go into the freezer, because maybe you’ll survive). “Before long,” Ettinger predicted, “the objectors will include only a handful of eccentrics.” Freezers might even help in the fight against the Reds: Soviet leaders, who “will want immortality for themselves,” will be forced to kowtow to the West. Not to mention that since Siberia offered “natural cold storage,” it might prove useful, diplomacy-wise, as some kind of trade.36
Ettinger did concede that the logistics of freezing the dead could be difficult at first, especially in the “retarded nations,” where “makeshifts may be necessary to stretch the rupees, pesos, etc.” No one would be left behind, though. In poor, hot countries, “the bodies will be stored in pits insulated with straw and dry ice.” Okay, right, yes, that might not actually work; very likely, the dead of the retarded nations will simply rot. No worries. “It will not at first greatly matter how skillfully the bodies are preserved, so long as hope is preserved.”37 Hope, after all, springs eternal. But wait: If no one ever dies, won’t there be too many people on the planet?
STRANGELOVE (laughs, distastefully): Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time and little to do.
“The people could simply agree to share the available space, in shifts,” Ettinger suggested, “going into suspended animation from time to time, to make room for others.” Anyway, overpopulation won’t be a problem. While it goes without saying that there will be a great deal of excellent sex in Ettinger’s golden age—the men will look like Charles Atlas, the women like Miss Universe—there will be no childbirth; childbirth is gross. Fetuses will be incubated in jars. No woman will dream of breast-feeding, either—blech. “Essentially, motherhood will be abolished,” he predicted. Moreover, Ettinger informed me, “When people no longer die of old age, more people will choose to omit children.” Why bother? They only disappoint you.38
PRESIDENT: But, look here, Strangelove. Won’t this nucleus of survivors be so shocked, grief-stricken, and anguished that they will envy the dead, and indeed not wish to go on living?
STRANGELOVE: Certainly not, sir.
Then, too, eugenics will help keep the birthrate down, and deformed babies could be frozen, against the day that someone might actually want them, or figure out how to fix them. “Cretins,” for instance, or babies born with cerebral palsy: “would not early freezing be a true mercy?” For the weak-minded, who might find making such a decision difficult, Ettinger offered a philosophical rule of thumb: Ask yourself, “if the child were already frozen, and it were within my power to return him to a deformed life, would I do so? If the answer is negative, then the freezer is where he belongs.”39
On the floor in front of the freezers at the Cryonics Institute were two slotted boxes painted white, with a black number in each slot, like the slots in a company mailroom.
“What’s this?”
Ettinger didn’t answer; he looked away. Andy explained that the numbers refer to the patients, most of whom choose to remain anonymous, and the box is for their families. Over the years, a half dozen have sent flowers, mostly roses, long dead. Attached to one bouquet was a card in an unopened envelope. It turns out that staring at an unopened envelope inside a freezatorium is substantially more depressing than looking at the blank space on a tombstone. Thoughts of spring eluded me.
“Do patients’ families ever visit?”
“Not many,” Andy said. Ettinger had wandered off toward the office, passing a half-open door I hadn’t noticed before.
“What’s in there?”
“A storeroom,” Ettinger called over his shoulder. “Used to be a library.”
We sat down in the conference room. Along the wall hung twenty-six eight-by-ten photographs of patients, beginning with Ettinger’s mother. His father, who died in 1984, at the age of eighty-nine, is not among them. “He’s in a mausoleum,” Ettinger said, shaking his head. “I tried very hard to get him to be frozen, but his second wife was against it. He was too wimpy to stand up to her.” In 1964, Ettinger had anticipated this difficulty: “If your husband or wife is mentally competent but opposes freezing, a difficult moral problem arises. The easy way out is compliance and burial, but you will have to live with your conscience for a long time.”40 Ettinger’s brother, who died in 2000, proved as weak as his father. “In his last illness he became depressed and told his children he didn’t want to be frozen,” Ettinger said. “I told them they should freeze him anyway, but I couldn’t get them to, and he was lost.” This is how Ettinger always put it when he talked about the unfrozen dead. His uncle Herman drove his car into a river: “That was a shame. He was lost.”
When Doubleday agreed to publish The Prospect of Immortality, it made Ettinger into something of a star. (Thomas McCormack is not a convert. When he dies, he will be lost. “I’ll be buried in a place called Valhalla,” he told me. “That’s the name of the goddamned cemetery, believe it or not.”)41 Ettinger claimed, and he is probably right, that nearly everyone active in cryonics first heard about it, directly or indirectly, from him. Cryonicists talk about where they were when they first read The Prospect of Immortality the way some people talk about where they were when Kennedy was shot.42 Ben Best, who later succeeded Ettinger as CI’s president, picked up a copy in a health food store. Stanley Kubrick read it, Ettinger said, and then “bought dozens of copies, gave them to his friends,” and arranged to meet with him to talk about signing up and, presumably, to fish for material for 2001. (“I’m afraid his obsession with immortality has overcome his artistic instincts,” Arthur Clarke wrote in his diary in 1965.) In a 1968 interview with Playboy, Kubrick said, “Dr. Ettinger’s thesis is quite simple.” H
e proceeded to propound it, quoting Ettinger at length, and expressed his own conviction that, within ten years, “the freezing of the dead will be a major industry in the United States and throughout the world.”43
But when Kubrick died, in 1999, he was lost. He is buried in Hertfordshire.
During a book tour appearance on The Long John Nebel Show, Ettinger said he had been gratified by the book’s reception: “Almost everybody is willing to take it seriously.”44 Nebel, who believed in UFOs, ghosts, and CIA mind control, took Ettinger seriously. Nebel died in 1978. I don’t know if he was lost.
Ettinger says he was also interviewed by David Frost, Steve Allen, Merv Griffin, and Johnny Carson.
“Did these people take you seriously?” I asked.
“Talk-show hosts don’t take anything seriously. They’re idiots.” He told me he was once on a show with William Buckley Jr.
“What did Buckley make of you?”
“He was aghast at everything I said.” This is the first time I’d seen Ettinger smile. “He thought it was immoral, unethical, unsanitary, against the will of God!” He laughed. “Buckley understood nothing.”
In May 1965, the month after Lennart Nilsson’s photographs of the drama of life before birth were published in Life magazine, Wilma Jean McLaughlin lay dying of heart disease in a hospital in Springfield, Ohio. Her husband asked Ettinger to freeze her, but at the last minute, the hospital refused to cooperate.45 The first human being was frozen in 1966; it went badly, and a few months later, the body had to be buried. Ettinger wasn’t there for any of it. The next year, a man named James Bedford was frozen by an organization that later became the Cryonics Society of California; Ettinger held a press conference.46 (What with one snafu and another, most of the people who were frozen in California rotted.) Alcor and Trans Time were founded in 1972. That same year, St. Martin’s Press, where McCormack had moved, published Ettinger’s second book, Man into Superman: The Startling Potential of Human Evolution—and How to Be a Part of It. It begins, “By working hard and saving my money, I intend to become an immortal superman.”47 The following year, Sleeper came out. Woody Allen’s film is very loosely based on Wells’s 1899 novel. Miles Monroe (Allen), who runs a health food store in Greenwich Village, goes into the hospital for an ulcer, but when the surgery goes awry, he is covered in “Birds Eye wrapper” and stuck in a freezer for two hundred years. He eventually falls in love with Luna (played by Diane Keaton), although when first he wakes, he’s peevish, especially after his doctor tells him his resurrection is a miracle of science.