A television image from the 1960 baseball season is indelibly etched in my mind. It features Ted Williams striding to the plate for the last time and slamming a home run into the right-field bleachers. Fittingly, the “Splendid Splinter” left the game in a blaze of glory. Unfortunately, he left the game of life in a blaze of controversy. Today, Williams’ fans have to contend with a different image of their hero. That of “Teddy Ballgame’s” body and head resting in separate liquid nitrogen–cooled containers at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Alcor is a “cryonics” company, meaning that it stores bodies and heads at very, very low temperatures, hoping to preserve them until scientists of the future find a way to “reanimate” them. It’s a long shot, the cryonicists admit, but at least it’s a shot. The alternatives, they suggest, are not particularly attractive: you could either be incinerated into dust, or served up as a meal for bacteria and worms.
The quest for immortality is nothing new. Ancient Egyptians thought mummification was the answer, the alchemists believed the secret lay in finding a way to make gold, a metal they considered to be immortal, and Ponce de Leon searched in vain for the fountain of youth. But the introduction of any vestige of science into this quest came with the development of methods to reach very low temperatures. At -196°C (-321°F), which is the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, essentially all biological activity stops. In theory, bodies or body parts can be kept from ever decaying. “Reanimation,” though, is quite another matter.
Back in 1965, physics teacher Robert Ettinger got the ball rolling with his book The Prospect of Immortality, in which he laid out his theory about cryonics. By 1967, a company had been founded, and the first patient, if that’s the right word, had been frozen rock hard. James Bedford, a psychology professor from California, now awaits reanimation, along with some ninety others who have invested anywhere from $40,000 to $130,000 for a chance to be thawed out in the future to resume their lives. For some reason, the company insists on receiving payment up front. I suspect, though, that the reanimated people will not have any financial problems if they wake up. Writing books, granting interviews, and appearing on talk shows (if those still exist) should be pretty lucrative. People will certainly be interested in hearing about our primitive way of life.
Preserving the body, according to the cryonicists, is not really necessary. Only the head is needed (and that can be frozen for the bargain price of $40,000). If indeed future scientists find a way to bring frozen tissues back to life, they will certainly have also found ways to clone the body from cells. But the brain is unique. This is where our memories, hopes, fears, and bizarre thoughts about immortality lie. That’s why a number of the patients are just “neuros,” the term used for heads with no bodies.
It comes as no great surprise that biologists and cryonicists don’t see eye to eye. When water in tissues freezes, it expands. This can cause blood vessels to burst. And as water outside cells freezes, the concentration of solutes in the remaining fluid increases. This then causes water to flow out of the cells by osmosis, resulting in the collapse of the cell. Alcor representatives maintain that they have solved such problems by developing a technique through which a “cryoprotectant” (essentially anti-freeze) solution is injected immediately after death and before cooling. This, they claim, results not in traditional freezing, but in “vitrification,” without the formation of ice crystals.
To date, there is not much evidence that Alcor will be able to deliver the goods. We can’t even preserve kidneys, livers, and hearts destined for transplants for more than a few days. And they certainly can’t be frozen. Sperm cells, on the other hand, can; farmers commonly use frozen sperm for artificial insemination, and human sperm remains viable after freezing. The very first step in the Alcor quest, it seems, should be to freeze a live mammal and then thaw it out to see if it can be brought back to life. Nothing like that has been done. Obviously, there are ethical issues involved with such experiments as well. And Alcor has had its experiences with that. Back in 1987, the company was accused of having removed Dora Kent’s head before she was dead. Dora was the mother of Saul Kent, one of the earliest proponents of cryonics. He had her transported to the Alcor facility, then in California, so that she could be decapitated and processed immediately after death. The Coroner’s Office labeled the death a homicide after barbiturates were found in the headless body. The head itself was never located, and eventually charges were dropped.
An even more interesting case is that of Thomas Donaldson, a computer consultant who was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 1988. Donaldson decided that his only chance was to have his head removed immediately, before his whole brain was ravaged by cancer. Realizing that the technicians involved could be accused of murder, Donaldson petitioned the state to allow the process by which he would be anesthetized and placed on a heart-lung machine as his blood was replaced with a chemical solution. His head would then be removed and frozen. The State of California denied the petition and a subsequent appeal. As it turned out, it’s a good thing Donaldson kept his head. His tumor went into remission, and he is still alive. And how will Ted Williams, the last man to bat over .400 for an entire season, eventually fare in the hands of Alcor? If I were a betting man, I would bet on a lifetime average of .000 for the cryonicists.