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- NEW YORK - Kennita
Watson likes to think about what she'll be doing in a few hundred years.
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- "Some things that come to mind are traveling to
the stars; terraforming an asteroid; learning dozens, then hundreds, of
languages; understanding general relativity; playing musical instruments
that haven't been invented yet... I could go on and on," mused the
self-employed book promoter.
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- Like about 700 other extremely optimistic Americans,
Watson has placed her hope - and money - into a highly experimental technique
known as cryonics. Even though she is young and in perfect health, Watson
recently purchased two expensive life insurance plans. When she dies, that
money will go directly to Alcor, a nonprofit cryonic center in Scottsdale,
Arizona.
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- In return, Alcor technicians will appear at Watson's
side after her death and immediately begin cooling her body to freezing
temperatures using dry ice or liquid nitrogen. As her temperature is lowered,
they will flush fluids, known as cryoprotectants, through her veins and
arteries to prevent water in her cells from forming ice crystals. Other
solutions pumped into her system will work to shore up the walls of her
millions of cells.
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- Watson's treated body will then be lowered into what
Alcor technicians describe as a "giant thermos flask" filled
with liquid nitrogen. The liquid nitrogen will keep Watson's body at an
icy -320 degrees Fahrenheit.
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- At that point Watson and the other frozen patients at
Alcor will wait for a wakening call from science.
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- "I think we'll be able to develop the technology
to revive cryonic patients based on our understanding of physics and chemistry,"
asserts Ralph Merkle, another Alcor candidate.
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- One of the fields that cryonic candidates are banking
on to bring them back to life is nanotechnology " the development
of molecular-sized robots and computers. The hope is once these microscopic
robots are created, they can be inserted into the bloodstream. Inside they
will set to work repairing cells that were ravaged by years of being frozen.
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- "Think of it this way, nature has given us a Lego
set," says Merkle, who is a nanotechnology expert at the Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center. "The 100 elements of the periodic table provide
the basic building blocks. And today, we have boxing gloves on our hands.
Someday, we'll have small enough tools."
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- Brand Name Believers
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- Cryonics, which obviously relies heavily on technology,
has prompted many in the technology and computer science fields to start
payment plans for their eventual freezing. One of the most famous cryonic
patients is Marvin Minsky, the director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
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- Contrary to rumors, other famous figures have not bought
into the idea. Walt Disney, for example, was not frozen, but cremated.
And the 1960's guru Timothy Leary also forwent freezing himself to instead
have his ashes blasted into space. Leary, who promoted a laid-back, spiritual
lifestyle, looked into cryonics and then backed down, complaining the cryonics
people "didn't have a sense of humor."
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- Leary wasn't the only one who noticed a marked sobriety
among those in the cryonics business.
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- "It's like a religion to them," said David
Iserson, a bioethicist at the University of Arizona and author of Death
to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? "It may be irrational, but people
in cryonics truly believe in it."
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- If cryonics is a kind of religion, then its bible is
a book written in 1967 by the current director and founder of the Cryonics
Institute, the second largest cryonic foundation in the country. When Robert
Ettinger described the concept of freezing the body for later revival in
The Prospect of Immortality, he imagined human kind wasn't far from achieving
his vision.
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- "I thought things would move much faster than they
did," Ettinger said. "I was way overoptimistic in terms of the
pace of progress. But I still expect it will become a much larger movement."
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- The first person Ettinger lowered into liquid nitrogen
was his mother in 1977. Since then his institute has prepared 29 more corpses
for the future. More than 240 people have enrolled to be frozen when they
die. Alcor, the largest cryonics center, holds 36 bodies with more than
400 signed up for future freezings.
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- Many patients opt for the cheaper "neuro" treatment
" in which only their decapitated heads are treated and frozen. They
reason that science will be able to fabricate bodies to go with their heads
in the future. Freezing the head costs about $50,000 while the whole body
treatment can run more than $150,000.
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- Sketchy Science?
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- While cryonic centers like to boast about the high numbers
of scientists among their current and future patients, the concept has
found few followers among those who specialize in freezing living tissue
" cryobiologists.
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- Peter Mazur spends his time at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee finding ways to freeze reproductive and organ tissues
one cell at a time. He likens the prospect of successfully reviving an
entire frozen human body, or even brain, to taking a hamburger and making
it back into a living cow.
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- "Very often the conditions for preservation for
one type of cell differs from those required for another cell," he
said. "You can't say the possibility is absolutely zero, but I think
it's so close to zero that for all practical purposes, it is zero."
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- Another concern is that even if scientists reach their
goal and revive frozen corpses hundreds of years from now, it's unlikely
cryonic patients will have the same consciousness they once had.
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- "Biology and medicine doesn't understand how the
brain really works," said Iserson. "It may be that it operates
by chemicals and electricity and these are things that nanotechnology could
never repair."
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- Merkle admits he worries that he may not be the same
person hundreds of years from now if and when he is brought back to life.
But he is comforted by the fact that his wife and many friends are also
signed up with Alcor and they would be going through the revival process
together.
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- Fred Chamberlain, the director of Alcor also concedes
that cryonics is a big gamble. "It's an experiment and we don't know
what will happen," he said. "We only know what happens if we
don't do anything."
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- As for Watson, her reasons for entering the cryonics
experiment are simple. She's looking forward to a long future and, as she
puts it, "Death sucks."
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