The Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

Korbett looked at me. “Are you personally interested in immortality?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “At least, I don’t think so. But the idea of it interests me, in its many permutations, the way it helps us ignore and transform reality.”

  “How so?”

  “You and I could both die at any point in the next five seconds. We all have a constant proximity to death, which we can’t understand. I guess I’m exploring how people grapple with that by telling stories, by creating narratives. It’s universal. Cryonics is a story about overcoming death. And any story about immortality is really a story about what dying means.”

  The next day, Korbett sent Ben an introductory note about my upcoming trip to Detroit, adding that I was writing a new book on the scientific quest for immortality. “He will stop by the CI to say hello and drop off the long overdue films. All the best from Montreal.”

  “Okay, Korbett, thanks for letting me know what to expect,” Best responded.

  We agreed to meet the following Monday.

  * * *

  I arrived in Michigan on a clement morning—nothing like that summer, when it got so hot in Detroit that steam poured from sewer tops because the streets were melting. Still, the city felt as apocalyptic as ever. Homeless zombies teetered around, swilling forties of malt liquor. Abandoned houses abounded, their roofs burned off.

  Compared to those skeletal dwellings, the Cryonics Institute’s building looked fully innocuous. I found it in a typical industrial zone in Clinton Township. The exterior had something of a Frank Lloyd Wright vibe. Heavy curtains shrouded the windows. Under the CI sign, smaller letters spelled out ERFURT RUNKEL BUILDING (in honor of two perfectly named donors). In short, nothing to make anyone suspect that over a hundred bodies rest within. But, then, abnormal things do have a way of appearing overtly normal.

  I rang the bell.

  Ben Best unlocked the door and blinked out at me, not returning my smile. “State your purpose,” he intoned gruffly.

  An abrupt greeting, but understandable, given the CI’s marginality. It felt less full-on rude than majestically nerdy, textbook Star Trek. An interloper had approached the fortress; precautionary communications were required.

  “It’s twofold,” I replied, unfazed. I, too, had been in chess club and could play the part easily.

  He stared at me, bug-eyed.

  “First, to deliver the DVDs Korbett mentioned in his letter.” I handed over the package. “And second, to speak with you about cryonics, for the book I’m writing about immortality.” I held up my reporter’s notebook.

  He considered the two purposes momentarily, then opened the door wider. “Okay,” he muttered. “Enter.”

  It smelled like sweaters and brine in there, with a hint of onion powder added to the mix. As we moved through the dim light, Best’s manner shifted from standoffish to his more usual emotionless neutrality.

  He gave me a tour. We started in a boardroom lined with framed sepia-tone photographs of the inductees. Here was Ettinger’s mother, his wives, a number of nebbish, bespectacled men. It felt like perusing a yearbook, not of high school students but of people who’d graduated to the beyond.

  We moved into the main storage area, where a grove of white, ceiling-high thermoses stood huddled together under the fluorescent lights.

  I looked at him and pointed at them. “So that’s where . . .”

  He nodded.

  The white fiberglass canisters are called cryostats. Arizona’s Alcor, favoring stainless-steel exteriors, uses the designation big-foot dewar, in honor of vacuum-flask inventor James Dewar. Essentially oversize thermoses, these large cylinders maintain a constant internal temperature. But instead of keeping coffee warm, these hold corpses—six per tank—at liquid-nitrogen levels hundreds of degrees below zero.

  Bodies are fitted into each container headfirst. The technical term for this is racking the body. The rationale behind lowering them in isn’t just extra weirdness for weirdness’s sake: being stored upside down permits the brain’s temperature to remain as steady as possible during the requisite refills. Feet handle the fluctuations better. As I made some notes, Best told me the single oddest thing I learned about cryonics: that each body is placed into a sleeping bag before being slotted into place. There they snooze, camped out around the frigid bonfire of a better tomorrow.

  As Best described the intricacies of cryostats, I couldn’t help but imagine a half dozen clowns trying to squeeze into one of those miniature smart cars. The CI’s aesthetic came off like a budget, outdated version of futurism; less iPod sleekness and more Atomic Age plastic flimsiness. Clusters of crumbs and lint had gathered in the room’s corners.

  In front of the thermoses, on the floor, were small, white cubicles: places to keep loved ones’ mementos. They were empty for the most part—here a dried rose, there a card. I felt wings of depression flapping around me.

  Best led me deeper into the room, to the rear of the facility, where we paused next to a boxlike chamber. I climbed onto its side and took a glimpse inside. An army-green mattress lay on the floor. I wasn’t too sure what I saw: spikes, meat hooks, a dark, deep stain. They prepare dead bodies here before putting them in the sleeping bags: “the customer’s thorax is cut open, the lungs’ blood vessels are separated from the heart, and the brain is connected directly to the heart. . . .”

  Best suggested I climb in.

  Did he have a leer on his face? I could just imagine it: the cryonicist’s revenge. Perfusing the skeptical journalist—the precise media type who had mocked the movement so many times. Yet posterity would ultimately show it had been for the young man’s benefit! When resuscitated as an immortal decades later, he would certainly thank Ben Best for having saved him.

  Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Being in a room full of frozen dead bodies can have that effect. Either way, I declined his invitation.

  He brought me to a smaller, waist-high cryostat. “For pets,” he clarified. Dogs, cats, parakeets, and other animals were in there. Just under one hundred frozen pets are preserved at the CI. He lifted the container’s lid, and clouds of dry-ice mist billowed out. He waved his hand over the smoke, a warlock tending his cauldron, and pointed out a freshly stored cat on top.

  He said something about how, if it comes back to life, he’d wrap it properly.

  I wasn’t sure I heard correctly and couldn’t get the quote exactly because, when I asked him to repeat it, he brushed me off with a rapid-fire, bravura display of liquid-nitrogen handling. He placed both hands into the broth and brought out a handful. White fog curled from his palms for a moment. When the chill became too much, he flung the contents onto the floor, where they sizzled and fizzled away before our eyes for a few moments. He wiped his hands on his pants. It had singed him, but not badly, and he seemed to relish the pain.

  I felt a pressing urge to leave. I hadn’t spent much time there—fifteen minutes, maybe. But I’d seen all I needed to see. As we turned to head out, he showed me a chart on a computer, some research he’d been developing regarding freezing levels. My heart went out to him. He was sharing his work with me, unworthy though I may have been. In that gesture, his vulnerability, his humanity, shone through. I could see how, as with the 2068ers, Best’s greatest passion in life, the thing that makes life make sense, is immortality. How strange that those who want life to never end seem so removed from it already. Perhaps it’s a sense of benevolent usefulness that keeps him going, the hope that, even if he’s misunderstood today, the defrosted superpeople of the future will be grateful for his sacrifices and toil.

  The CI’s competitors claim that, until Best took over as president in 2003, “even the simplest and most basic parameters of patient care” were not monitored or documented. He changed that, but it didn’t change cryonics. His graph’s plot points may have appeared scientific-like to a believer, but so did those in that Islam book the Sunni librarian lent me. Defrosting cats to correlate prospects of humans’ revival is not science: it’s somewhere betwee
n a bizarre hobby and a ritual activity that helps lessen death’s incomprehensible sting. Oughtn’t we know by now, a half century into the cryonics experiment, whether dead beings can be resuscitated? The answer, at least among those who aren’t cryonics faithful, remains resoundingly unaffirmative. Despite the veneer of similitude, a belief system—a form of magical thinking—does not science make.

  The entire logic-stretching enterprise of cryonics requires multiple leaps of faith. The first stretch is believing that one day we’ll be able to bring dead bodies back to life. The second is that the only type of dead bodies we will be able to reanimate are those that were vitrified (rather than those that were merely heaped into the earth and covered with clods of turf). One also has to buy into the notion that medical science will one day be able to cure all illnesses. This is where the immortalist thinking comes in. For in that medical utopia over the horizon, we will also know how to make people live forever, thereby justifying a return from the frigid hinterlands.

  “Fact: at very low temperatures it is possible, right now, to preserve dead people with essentially no deterioration, indefinitely,” wrote Ettinger, in The Prospect of Immortality. But postmortem deterioration isn’t the point: the point is that dead people are dead people. They aren’t “patients” tasting “the wine of centuries unborn.” They’re cadavers. How we dispose of them—or hold on to them—is our choice. To be capable of perfusing craniums in no way implies that we’ll be able to regenerate them. Only believers could conflate cryopreservation with immortality. Storage of bodies is not eternal life.

  Cryonics isn’t that different from mummification or sky burial. Other American options include becoming fireworks or artificial diamonds. Cremated human ash can be transformed into lead and inserted into pencils. Our remains can be melted down, formed into bullets, and fired into the night. They can be inflated into balloons and floated over the Salton Sea. They can be mixed with bird food and dispersed by sparrows or tossed into concrete mixing bowls and paved into garden paths or sucked into airport ventilation systems and blown into the ether or shaped into man-made coral reefs and submerged beneath the ocean. Or we can choose to float upside down in vertical repose among our fellow ice dreamers.

  * * *

  While waiting for Best to write up a receipt for the souvenir CI baseball cap I picked up on my way out, I noticed a plaque on the wall of his office. It was their cemetery license. That’s it, I realized, with a start, a cemetery.

  Ettinger once spoke of the cryonic movement as a “mighty undertaking,” a double entendre even more fitting now that I understood that the so-called “temporary incurables in suspended animation” are simply “dead people” buried on ice rather than in subterranean coffins. They’d deanimated, sure, but they’re undisposed-of cadavers, nothing more. The CI is a long-term morgue. And Best isn’t so much an Igor figure as a mortuary director.

  When he handed me the invoice, he also offered me an autographed copy of Ettinger’s final, self-published book, YOUNIVERSE: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy. The book describes itself as an attempt at “unriddling the universe, or at least the innerverse.” Whether it is successful or not depends on one’s attitude toward death, but it certainly attempts to tackle some weighty philosophical questions.

  How did the universe originate? “Nobody has a clue. One guess is that our ‘universe’ is a simulation in some joker’s computer.”

  What is life? “A disease of matter, a skin condition of the planet.”

  Is physical immortality possible? Absolutely. “Aging and death can be conquered—not only for the species, but for individuals now living. Duration of your life need have no limit—even if you die next month.”

  Regarding the works of Shakespeare, with their “puny” language and “weak” intellect, Ettinger argues that once we attain immortality, they will “interest us no more than the grunting of swine in a wallow.” He saw himself as the movement’s lyricist: “Blue is for violet, Red is for rose; After you croak, I hope you’ll be froze.”

  One of the most disconcerting sections of the book describes his wife Mae’s deanimation. They were living in Arizona at the time, and Ettinger himself pronounced death, mere seconds after she’d stopped breathing. He immediately set about operating on her to get her ready for the deep freeze. True cryonic love.

  Different states have different rules, which is part of the reason Alcor moved from California to Arizona. In 1988, Alcor was subjected to a protracted legal battle after cryopreserving a woman named Dora Kent who hadn’t been pronounced legally dead. The coroner’s office claimed she’d been murdered. “How dead is dead enough?” asked the defendants. In the end, no charges were laid.

  In Michigan, Ettinger wrote, “You are supposed to wait for the paramedics to pronounce death.” The subtext to that “are supposed to” suggests “shouldn’t have to.” Indeed, until his own death, he had been a vocal opponent of what’s called legal death, which is when authorized physicians pronounce a person dead. Ettinger called this “death by jabberwocky,” meaning totally ridiculous. Waiting to get “snuffed-out by a fundamentalist physician,” he fumed, can interfere with cryopreservation. The worst eventuality is having an autopsy, which eliminates or reduces chances for a successful perfusion.

  The best time to intervene, cryonicists agree, is before death, particularly with terminally ill people. That way the disease can be paused until the body is pulled out, revived, and cured. Unfortunately, the meddlesome legal system doesn’t allow for that. Soon things will change, Ettinger prophesied, for “who would not trade a few declining years in the present for a larger number of more active and rewarding years in the future?”

  Even though YOUNIVERSE is addressed to a hypothetical “dear potential customer,” its core teaching is summed up in its subtitle’s aim: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy. Self-centered. The dedication says it all: “I dedicate this book to myself or selves.” It’s pure narcissism, the mind-set in which we place ourselves above Shakespeare and tell people we’ve solved death and charge them tens of thousands of dollars to access immortality. Still, his vision offered others a novel means of contemplating death. Now that he has passed on, and life goes on, the most revealing thing he ever wrote can be laid to rest in the cryostat of history: “If the Tiger of Death eats you, that is the ultimate tragedy; that is when the world ends, when the cosmos disappears, when Everything becomes Nothing.”

  * * *

  Best signed me up to a cryonics society e-mail list before I left Detroit. For the next few months, I looked in on their chats. The members, united by their interest in being frozen, displayed community spirit. Those with homes near cryonics facilities willingly let strangers spend the night so they could see the technology firsthand. They held potlucks together. They celebrated Bedford Day. They debated the ins and outs of vitrification. They recommended substrates made of carbon nanotubes from general nano assemblers. They spoke of how biologically based humans will become superfluous within decades.

  At a certain point, I sent a “please unsubscribe” e-mail. The response came directly from Ben Best: “I have removed you.”

  * * *

  1. Books! How telling that technoutopians still have to resort to something as archaic as writing books, even with eternal life around the corner.

  2. It launched in California in 1972 as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia, but switched states in 1994 due to regulatory constraints, legal trouble, and earthquake concerns.

  3. In the 1970s, Father Gervais met Ted Williams at an airport when they were in line for the same flight. “It’s really you, isn’t it?” Gervais asked him. “Yes,” he said, laughing, “it’s really me.”

  4. The scientifically legitimate field of cryogenics—studying low temperatures in chemistry and engineering—has long been at pains to distance itself from cryonics. It’s one thing to store germplasm; reviving deceased bodies is an altogether different aim.

  5. Alcor offered sci-fi great Frederik Pohl a free c
ryopreservation in 1979. He told them he’d think about it, but then never responded to their attempts to contact him again. More recently, when one cryonicist approached Ray Bradbury at a public event, the writer made it clear he “was anxious to terminate the encounter as soon as it had begun.”

  6. Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, also began as a sci-fi fantasy writer. His extrapolations were so persuasive, they attracted millions of followers around the world. Immortal life plays a role in Dianetics as well. Members of Scientology’s Sea Org (the corps of insiders who oversee the church’s functioning) sign billion-year contracts, as they are expected to pledge allegiance to the organization for at least that long.

  7. The former president of Alcor Mike Darwin has complained about the movement’s penchant for attracting “dysfunctional and sometimes frankly sociopathic personalities as members.”

  23

  Secret Santa Barbara

  How will you find some madder adventure to cap this coming down alive to Hades among the silly dead?

  —Homer, The Odyssey

  I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

  —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  I’D MET with physical immortalists. I’d been removed by cryonicists. Although they were all drawn to the fringes of science, it seemed to me that belief played a crucial role in everything they did. But I hadn’t yet spent enough time interviewing scientists from Harvard and MIT. Surely they would be able to tell me clearly and honestly where we stand with regards to the possibilities of life extension and immortal life.

  With that in mind, not long after my visit to the Cryonics Institute, I found myself driving up the coast to Santa Barbara on a curious tip from a woman who’d read my first book. Her name was Nicole Nicole (or so she identified herself in her e-mail message). She’d come across my research and knew of someone worth meeting: “He is the president of a foundation based in Carpinteria, CA, that spends millions on anti-aging research,” Nicole wrote. “If you are looking for the fountain of youth, or for people looking for the fountain, he is your man. He must know something, because he looks forty and he’s over sixty. He also has a habit of leaving weird letterpress cards with random information and instructions in strange places for people to find.”