An American institute is offering to raise us from the dead – at a price, writes Sue Nelson
ACCORDING to legend, every 500 years the phoenix, a mythical Arabian bird, would fling itself on to a funeral pyre. But instead of dying, it would rise from the ashes with renewed vigour.
It’s an appealing tale. If science offered new life, would you sign up for immortality? Mona Dick, a retired librarian from California, decided it was worth a chance. So too did an Australian computer programmer, a rock musician, a TV repairman and comedy writer Dick Clair. Their photographs – along with Clair’s Emmy award – decorate the foyer of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation headquarters in Arizona. Phoenix, Arizona, naturally.
Each photograph represents an Alcor “patient” – a strange term since the patients are all dead. Unfortunately, reality lacks the romance of the phoenix legend. Most of Alcor’s patients have had their heads severed, frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored until technology has advanced to a stage where the brain or, in the case of whole bodies, other vital organs can be revived.
At least that’s the theory. It’s called “cryonics”, and Alcor is the largest provider of cryonics services in the world. A non-profit organisation, housed in a salmon-pink building, the outside is more like a shopping mall than a morgue.
Inside, only the operating theatre gives a clue to the nature of Alcor’s business. The storage room surprises because it contains two waist-high concrete vaults and five tall aluminium dewars.
“Many people tell me it looks like a winery,” says Alcor’s Brian Shock. “They’re rather like giant thermos bottles. There’s an inner and an outer layer of steel with a vacuum in between to insulate the contents.”
The contents consists of 22 heads and 13 bodies all stored in liquid nitrogen, at – 196 C. Most of the heads are in the vaults – incongruously adorned with pot plants – while the dewars can hold four vertical bodies. It looks a tight fit.
“Once a doctor has declared a patient legally dead then we can begin to work,” says Shock. If an Alcor team is present at the time of a patient’s death it will perform CPR to force oxygen into the lungs, pump blood through the body and restore cells.
“We’re trying to arrest the process of death at some intermediate point,” says Shock. “Obviously, death is a process because people whose hearts have stopped can be revived for a few minutes afterwards.” Shock claims there is a grace period of up to 10 minutes after the heart stops when a patient can be revived without brain damage.
But he admits that nothing is certain: “We can’t tell you what the probability is that we can bring you back. In fact, some people say if you can’t get to me immediately don’t bother. Others say if there’s anything left at all, go ahead and freeze it.”
Unless the patient lives in Phoenix, a local mortuary will wash out the blood with an organ preservative solution before the body or head is transferred to Alcor. The blood or organ preservative is then replaced with a cryoprotective solution called glycerol, the biological equivalent of anti-freeze.
Alcor argues that the damage is minimised by freezing the head or body in stages. First, the patient is cooled with a bath of dry ice and silicon oil to -78 C as this produces the fastest, most uniform cooling. It also stabilises the patient before reaching the tricky stage at around -90 C. This is when the cryoprotected tissue approaches a transitional glass-like state, where fracturing occurs. The next cooling stage, using liquid nitrogen at -196 C, is spread over seven to 10 days to minimise “cracks” in the tissue.
What follows next is astonishingly low-tech. Shock points to a demo dewar in the cooling room. It contains a bright blue sleeping bag – the kind you’d take on camping trip – which cushions whole-body patients and absorbs liquid nitrogen. Finally, to add insult to injury, the patient is stored upside down.
This is because liquid nitrogen evaporates with just a small temperature rise and, since insulation is not 100%, containers need to be topped up once a week. Bodies are inverted so that in an emergency the most important part – the head – is uncovered last.
But that’s the easy bit. The difficult part is how to reverse the process. This is where there is a South African connection. Olga Visser (see story at left) and other researchers based at the University of Pretoria, claimed to have made breakthrough in cryobiology when they resuscitated a rat’s heart from -196 C and published a research paper detailing the process. However, the paper was rejected by the Cryobiology Journal.
“Companies like Alcor are operating pseudoscience and science fiction,” says Dr John Armitage, who sits on the journal’s editorial board. “There isn’t a shred of evidence that they’ll be able to resuscitate a head or body. They’re playing on people’s fears of death.”
And fear of death doesn’t come cheap. The cost of being kept in a vat of liquid nitrogen varies from $50 000 to $120 000 (heads are cheaper). Payment is usually made by taking out a life-insurance policy naming Alcor as the beneficiary. There’s also a Patient Care Fund of more than $1-million to ensure future maintenance in case of financial problems. “Some of the early cryonics organisations failed in the Seventies,” says Shock. “They ran out of funding and many patients were thawed.”
Says Alcor member Mike Price: “It’s a gamble. A risk. A hope,” he says. “You do it because you think it might work.” If it doesn’t, all you’re buying is a cold, expensive funeral.