Cryopreservation (part 2) – who could you trust?

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Of course the prospect of cryopreservation raises a literally endless list of questions. If you choose to freeze your body after death, how long will the company keep your body frozen? How will you even know if they don’t keep their side of the bargain? Even if the relatives want to check, they could be fobbed off with some assurances and official-looking paperwork, I doubt many descendants would go so far as to travel to the storage facility and peer into tanks of liquid nitrogen in search of their dead loved one, and even if they did it would be easy to fake the appearance of a corpse in a cloud of liquid nitrogen vapour. It seems as if this is such a golden opportunity for ‘snake-oil salesmen’ because the dead can’t sue, and desperate people have always been willing to spend a fortune in the hope of achieving immortality. In addition of course there is no proven technique for freezing humans (or any mammals beyond the early embryo stage) and successfully reviving them afterwards. This has so far only been achieved in microscopic worms. Yes freezing things is easy enough, it’s the reviving part that is so difficult and has never been even partially successful yet. So even if such a method was eventually developed, it’s quite likely that the freezing process would involve certain procedures we don’t yet know about and so these would not have been performed for people already frozen. It’s extremely likely that thawing any person who has been frozen so far would just result in a warm corpse. Some of the people who have been frozen more recently have undergone more sophisticated treatment, for example having the body infused with protective liquids and being frozen within minutes of death. But even then it is likely that some organs would survive the procedure better than others. Living cells have previously been extracted from frozen bones, for example, and organs like the liver are able to regenerate from a small portion, so if only part survived the freezing and thawing they could still go on to function normally. But freeze-thawing is often used as a technique for breaking up cells to extract the contents, so that doesn’t bode well for the successful thawing of most organs, such as the gut and of course the brain. What would happen if the body was successfully thawed but the person remained brain-dead? Would they then just be disposed of as a ‘normal’ dead person? Or would they be put back in the freezer in the hope that better procedures in the future would have a better outcome? What if they were successfully thawed but had minimal brain activity and remained in a coma? Would they be considered alive, and subject to all the usual protections, meaning society would then be obliged to keep them alive indefinitely and provide endless costly medical treatment? And of course I haven’t even considered the possibility of accidents - what if there’s a major power outage, or some sort of natural disaster or war? All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2023.