The Alcor Life Extension Foundation has hundreds of clients who have signed up to be frozen. Is the ultimate goal immortality?
I don’t like the word immortality – that’s not what we’re offering. If you lived forever, I’m sure it would get awfully boring. What we do is freeze people with the expectation that one day it will be possible to bring them back to life into a world in which we can control the ageing process. Then we can stop it or reverse it and decide what age we want to be biologically. You won’t die of old age, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be immortal – you could be killed, have a fatal accident or choose to die.
How can you be so confident that it will ever be possible to bring frozen people back to life?
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I don’t know if we will be able to bring people back, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to – it’s just a matter of time. There’s nothing here that violates the laws of physics. It just requires a better understanding of this incredibly complex machine that is our body and brain, and very fine medical tools that can repair cells. We’ve extended average lifespan by figuring out how to fix people, it’s inevitable that for some of our patients it should be possible to undo the damage that caused them to die – old age, a heart attack, cancer. We have to assume it will happen at some point.
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What happens at Alcor when someone dies?
Ideally they have already relocated somewhere close by. When they are nearing death we arrive, and within seconds of being pronounced dead, we start our procedures. We cool the body and then transport it back to Alcor to begin the process of replacing their blood with drugs that prevent ice formation as they freeze. That minimises damage to cells in the body. We store four people in each container, which is filled with liquid nitrogen.
What if you can’t get to someone that quickly?
There are situations in which our members die and aren’t found for 24 hours. That’s really bad; there will certainly be decomposition. Are they beyond revival? We let our members draw that line because we don’t know. Most people say “no matter how or when you find me, go ahead and do the best you can”.
Do people’s families ever object?
We had one case where the family didn’t approve and so didn’t tell us that the person had died. A year later we tried to contact him and they said “oh, he died, we buried him”. We got a court order and had him exhumed because it was in his contract – he said “no matter what I want to be cryogenically preserved”. We had to send a clear message – don’t interfere with the wishes of our members. We have to protect their rights.
Is cryonics becoming more widely accepted?
I do believe that we are becoming more accepted by the medical community – particularly since they’ve started using cooling processes to help in surgery. I think cryonics is just an extension of emergency medicine.
Would you say that the people you have frozen are dead?
ճ’r not dead and they’re not alive. They are in a third state that we don’t have a good word for. We talk about them being de-animated. I don’t particularly like that word because it makes me think of a horror movie, but that’s what we’re doing. We are slowing down the metabolic process, we are taking away animation. ճ’r not alive because you need metabolism to be alive, but if by dead we mean irreversibly, irretrievably, permanently beyond recovery, then no, we don’t consider them to be dead.
Have you ever managed to bring back to life anything that was cryopreserved?
Yes, we trained worms to find food by following a specific chemical gradient. We cryopreserved them and then rewarmed them. We of how to find the food after being brought back. We have slides of brains from vitrified animals where you can see all their membranes and synapses are intact. These show that this isn’t a big leap of faith – we are actually preserving all the structures that are relevant for memory and personality. It’s a reasonable projection of future capabilities.
What do you make of religious objections to cryopreservation?
I think those arguments are rubbish. Show me any holy book that says “thou shalt not cryopreserve”. If they get cancer, do they say “It’s god’s will, I better just die”? No, they go to hospital and spend huge amounts of money extending their life. In fact, don’t most religions say you were given this body and should take care of it so you can do more good work? Isn’t there in fact a duty to be cryopreserved if there’s a chance of it working, rather than rushing off selfishly to your reward?
Why isn’t cryopreservation more popular then?
Because it’s unfamiliar. People see it on TV and they think we’re going to be reviving zombies with no soul or they think the future will be horrible. In reality, if this ever did work, any future that we will wake up in should be pretty good – at least as good as today and probably better. Why? Because if we screw ourselves over and run out of resources we’re not going to be spending money on bringing people back. So any future in which we return has to be one that’s sufficiently wealthy and civilised to have been able to achieve that feat.
What are the biggest criticisms you face?
The most common is not religious or ethical, but the idea that cryopreservation is only for rich people. It costs $200,000 to preserve a whole body, which sounds like a lot, but most members pay for it using a life insurance policy. It pays for your treatment and storage. Most people have life insurance, it’s very affordable. I signed up as a neuro when I was a poor student.
“Everything that matters to me is in my head – that’s what I want to keep“
What’s a neuro?
A neuro is someone who only has their head cryopreserved rather than their whole body. My decision was based on the fact that if we develop the technological capabilities that are able to go into a hundred billion neurons and repair damage, then regrowing a body should be pretty easy by comparison. We’re already growing organs. Also if I die at 93, my body is going to be a mess – why waste all that money storing this piece of junk when it’s going to have to be regenerated anyway. Everything that matters to me is in my head – that’s what I want to keep. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But this option gives me more chance of living again than any other options we now have.
How long would you want to live for?
I don’t know. Come back in 1000 years and ask me then. Why should I accept an arbitrary end that I haven’t chosen for myself? We die because our bodies aren’t designed to live indefinitely, because nature doesn’t care about that. All evolution cares about is giving genes to the next generation. Once you pass reproductive age you can start rotting. There’s no reason why we can’t say “we have other ideas, we want to stay healthy and keep producing and creating and loving and all the good things that life allows”.
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Max More is CEO and president of in Scottsdale, Arizona, a non-profit research centre that focuses on cryopreservation of whole human bodies and brains
Find out more about the big freeze in our special report on Timeship’s cryogenic revolution
This article appeared in print under the headline “The man who freezes time”
