A lab in the US is storing the bodies and heads of 200 people in hope that they can be brought to life in the future.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation offers the process known as “Cryonics”. It’s a science and technology that will advance to the stage where the deceased can be brought back to life again. Alcor offers to freeze a whole body for around $200,000 or just the head and brain for $80,000.
Cryonics is the practice of preserving life by pausing the dying process using subfreezing temperatures with the intent of restoring good health with medical technology in the future.
Alcor Life Extension Foundation is located in Scottsdale Arizona, where the bodies will be stored at deep-freeze temperatures for decades or even centuries. Alcor believes that: “The concept of Cryonics is optimistic… Many leading experts on nanotechnology anticipate that it will make it possible to reanimate cryonics patients.”
The said company was founded by Linda and Fred Chamberlain in 1972 after the couple met at a cryonics conference in the early 1970s. While she was in college, Fred was working as a NASA engineer.
In Linda’s interview on CNET, she shared that the Goal of the company was to start an organization that could save and help people’s lives and allows them to be restored to health and function.
Linda said: “If we’d known how hard it was going to be, we might not have tried to do it. But once you get started, something about saving lives, you can’t give up.”
Alcor preserves bodies by slowly lowering their temperature and storing them in giant vessels of liquid nitrogen at -196 C. In a typical procedure, the body is packed in ice and frozen, before the blood is replaced with a “cryoprotectant” solution, to stop ice crystal formation.
Cryonics believes that insist death is a process of deterioration rather than simply the moment when the heart stops, but a lot of people and science mates see the industry as quack science or even fraud, that’s why the industry was long been dismissed.
One of the bodies held by Alcor is the body of Matheryn Naovaratpong, known as Einz, who died from brain cancer in 2015, just before her 3rd birthday.
Einz parents Nareerat and Sahatorn, from Thailand, chose to have their late daughter’s brain preserved. She underwent 10 surgeries, 12 rounds of chemo, and 20 rounds of radiation, but was unable to win the battle against cancer.
Sahatorn began to realize that there is no hope of curing his daughter anymore, that’s the time he starts to research Cryonics, in the hopes of convincing his wife that it could offer their daughter a new life in the future.
In Netflix’s documentary Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice, Sahatorn said: “This was the way to keep her… we must keep her.”
He said that his whole family was against the idea and it took months to persuade them. He explained: “Can we stop the process of dying? Yes. Can you believe that we can stop it? This is what I have to show my family. I spent many months trying to persuade my wife before she finally agreed.”
For cryonics to be successful, experts say it’s best to begin the freezing process within 60 seconds of when the hearts stop beating. It meant Einz’s family watched on as her body temperature was lowered in front of them before her body was frozen and flown to Arizona.
The team from Alcor flew to Thailand when Einz passed away. The toddler’s parents vowed to do all they could to keep their daughter alive. They also began recording videos for their daughter, hoping that she could see them in the future.
Nareerat said: “I told her, come back and be my daughter again. Mummy loves you so much.”
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