In tanks filled with liquid nitrogen in Scott, Arizona, lie the bodies of 200 people who paid for cryogenization to the company Alcor Life Extension Foundation with the aim of “reviving in the future”.
The “patients”, as the company calls them, were terminally ill with cancer, ALS and other diseases that currently had no cure, and who, preserving their bodies, hope to return to life when technology and science allow them. .
back from the dead
Alcor Life Extension Foundation claims to be the world leader in cryonicsthe preservation of human bodies at very low temperatures since medicine cannot do anything for them.
His youngest patient is a Thai girl with brain cancer, who was cryopreserved in 2015 at just 2 years old. “Her parents were doctors and she had multiple brain surgeries and nothing worked, unfortunately. So they contacted us,” said Max More, CEO of Alcor.
For treatment, the company starts working following the person dies. They remove internal fluids, including blood, to add chemicals designed to prevent ice crystal formation. Then the bodies are placed in liquid nitrogen tanks to wait for the years to pass.
To date, there is no technology or science to revive a “vitrified” patient, a term they want to call their technique.
“We don’t want to freeze the patient. We want to vitrify them… And the reason is that once it cools down to very below zero, the solution, instead of crystallizing, becomes thicker and thicker and it’s like a glassy block that keeps all the cells in place without any internal structure and therefore no damage,” More said.
“And once we reach that point, the body becomes really solid and absolutely nothing happens in the body. There is no biochemical activity, certainly no neurological activity. So at that point, it doesn’t matter if you wait a day or 100 years, you’re going to be the same as when you started.”
Many medical professionals disagree, he told Archyde.com Arthur Caplan, who heads the division of medical ethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.
“This notion of freezing us in the future is pretty science fiction and it’s naive,” he said. “The only group that gets excited regarding the possibility are people who specialize in studying the distant future or people who have an interest in wanting you to pay the money to do it.”
How much does it cost to be a patient of Alcor Life Extension Foundation?
According to the outlet, the minimum cost is $200,000 for a body and $80,000 for the brain alone.
Most of Alcor’s nearly 1,400 living “members” pay by making the company the beneficiary of cost-equivalent life insurance policies, More said.
More’s wife, Natasha Vita-More, likens the process to taking a trip into the future.
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