Chapter 18

Ted Williams—The Story of One Recent Suspension

When news broke that beloved baseball player Ted Williams had been cryonically preserved, I watched the Williamses’ family drama unfold from the sidelines, still in self-imposed exile from cryonics. I was amazed by how far the technology had advanced in those years, yet the ensuing controversy was eerily familiar.

For more than thirty-five years, the cryonics movement had been hoping for famous individuals to choose cryopreservation. Prior to Ted Williams, perhaps the most famous cryopatient had been Richard “Dick Clair” Jones. Jones was a TV scriptwriter and producer for several shows, including The Facts of Life, Flo, and Mama’s Family, and had won three Emmy awards for The Carol Burnett Show. Jones left some two million dollars to Alcor when he was cryopreserved in 1988. On July 5, 2002, Ted Williams was declared clinically dead and cryopreserved. As with so many other cryonic suspensions, controversy swirled around the case.

In 1996 Williams had signed a will stating that he wished to be cremated and his ashes scattered over the ocean off the Florida coast, where he’d been an avid fisherman. But his son, John-Henry, had become interested in cryonics. He had studied the literature and spoken with experts, and he wanted his famous father preserved in “biostasis”—cryopreserved—for possible later reanimation. As an indication of the love between father and son, Ted had given his son power of attorney over his estate. At that time, both John-Henry and his sister, Claudia, were named as beneficiaries in the will. A child of an earlier marriage, Barbara Joyce “Bobby Jo” Ferrell, had become estranged from her father and was excluded.

When Ted Williams was close to the end of his life, John-Henry called the Alcor Foundation from the Florida hospital. John-Henry requested that the Alcor recovery team come to Florida at once. A private airplane was on standby to fly Williams from Florida to Scottsdale. The operating room and surgical team at Alcor were on full alert, waiting for the patient’s arrival. The private airport adjacent to the Alcor facility brought Williams’s body to within a few minutes’ drive of Alcor’s front door.

As with all cryonic suspensions, rapid action is vital, and Alcor was ready. On July 5, 2002, at 2:10 p.m., the great Ted Williams’s heart stopped beating and he was pronounced clinically dead. At once the Alcor team took over and introduced a cooling agent through the carotid artery, while a heart-massaging machine maintained Williams’s heart at a normal rhythm. The objective was to reestablish circulation and cool the brain as fast as possible while lowering the entire body temperature.

His body was released by hospital officials and rushed by emergency medical vehicle to the waiting jet, which promptly headed for Arizona. As the plane landed in Scottsdale, the medical team prepared Williams for the transfer to the waiting ambulance, which soon delivered him to the Alcor operating room.

Once he was on the table, the medical team took over preparing the body, shaving his head and adjusting tubes and valves. After about thirty minutes of preparation, they began to surgically remove, or “isolate,” the head, having first obtained John-Henry’s approval. This step was controversial to many in cryonics, including Professor Ettinger, especially since this was a whole-body preservation, which some interpreted as an “intact whole body.” The surgical isolation was intended to optimize perfusion or infusion of cryoprotectant into the brain via the neck arteries.

As the seat of consciousness, feeling, memory, and selfhood, the brain is the all-important part of the anatomy for future recovery of a person. By optimizing the cryoprotection of the brain, the doctors could achieve a new, high level of preservation known as vitrification. As the patient was cooled to cryogenic temperatures, vitrification would prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals as cooling progressed. In this way, the quality of preservation is greatly improved over earlier techniques, further raising hopes that eventually the patient can be recovered in a healthy state. Such recovery would involve treating any ailments, including aging, and of course reattaching the head to the rest of the preserved body with all connections of blood vessels, nerves, and other structures restored.

At the time, cryopreservation techniques did not permit vitrification of the whole body, so the rest of the body, or trunk, was perfused by another method, and both head and trunk were cooled to cryogenic temperatures. For a while the head was stored at about -130°C in a low-temperature refrigeration unit known as the Cryostar, and then both head and body were transferred to an upright capsule and submerged in liquid nitrogen.

Controversy boiled up even as Ted Williams was undergoing the careful preparations at Alcor. Bobby Jo, the estranged daughter, insisted that her father be cremated as requested in his 1996 will. Meanwhile, John-Henry produced a document he had retrieved from the trunk of his car dated November 2, 2000, and signed by himself; his father, Ted; and his sister, Claudia. The note indicated their agreement “to be put into Bio-Stasis after we die. This is what we want, to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance.” The document, if proven genuine, would supersede the request in the will for cremation. Two different testing labs determined the signature of Ted Williams to be genuine. The analysis also determined that Ted and John-Henry used the same pen, while Claudia used a different one. Claudia testified in a sworn affidavit to the note’s authenticity.

Regardless of these results, Bobby Jo claimed the note was a forgery and did not negate the cremation request. She agreed to accede to her father’s wishes in exchange for a settlement from the estate amounting to several hundred thousand dollars. Ted Williams remains in suspension and was joined at Alcor by his son when he died of leukemia in 2004.

Ted Williams’s procedure of a whole body suspension should not be confused with another option as a final effort to save the patient: to recover only the head and allow the rest of the body to go. The rationale is that the brain is the important part and that head-only, or “neuro,” preservation might be sufficient to recover the entire patient someday, when the rest of the body could be replaced by advanced means of tissue and organ regeneration. Preserving just the head would save greatly on maintenance expenses and might have made it possible to stretch CSC’s meager funds enough that some or all of the suspensions could have been continued.

I learned much later that Ev Cooper had written about neuro-­preservation (head only) in the 1960s, but it was not much considered, if at all, in the early years. The idea of decapitation is morbid and profoundly associated with the very worst of circumstances; of course people didn’t want to think about it. If they did consider it, people questioned whether the body could be replaced as hoped, whether the result would still be the original person, and so on. I don’t remember that neuro-preservation was ever discussed until after the capsule failures, when it was too late. If we had, I shudder to think how Nothern would have exploited decapitation at our trial. No one was neuro-preserved before Alcor’s first suspension in July 1976, and the practice is still controversial. None of those I froze had expressed a wish for a neuro option, or to be converted to it should the funds run short. None of the relatives told me they wanted it performed as a way of either reducing expenses for their loved ones or continuing a suspension if it otherwise had to be terminated. During my years of involvement, we never tried or even considered the head-only option.

The struggle among Ted’s children over what evidently amounted to money proved stressful to those in cryonics, because the procedures designed for optimum care seemed morbid to the public. In addition to the head being isolated, the skull was drilled with small openings, or burr holes, to observe the brain during the perfusion process. During the later cool-down to cryogenic temperatures, an apparatus detected sound bursts, indicating small hairline cracks formed in the solidified tissue, as normally occurred. These cracks too must be repaired by future technology, but in terms of loss of information, they are believed to be quite minor. Larry Johnson, an Alcor employee, leaked confidential information to the media in violation of the wishes of John-Henry and Claudia. A legislative initiative was started to restrict or eliminate cryonics in Arizona. In the end, this effort failed, and things returned to normal as media attention subsided. Cryonics in Arizona and elsewhere continues much as before. The wry observation was made that perhaps one day Ted Williams can confirm his real wishes and whether he is satisfied with how things finally turned out.

As of July 2013, numerous celebrities and millionaires have made covert arrangements for themselves. There are about 250 people currently in suspended animation; and well over a thousand people like you and me are all signed up, waiting for a time capsule ride into the future.

When we consider how far the science of human suspended animation has already advanced, we have vast reason to embrace a sublime, greatly extended life on the beautiful planet we call Earth.