The weird science of cheating death after freezing the body

Hyderabad: Linda Chamberlain works just down the hallway from her husband. She even walks past him every day and occasionally stops by to check on him and say “hello”. Sounds pretty normal, but it is not so. The problem? Her spouse, Fred Chamberlain, has been dead for eight years.

Shortly after he passed away due to prostate cancer, Fred was cryopreserved (his body was filled with a medical-grade antifreeze, cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius and carefully lowered into a giant vat of liquid nitrogen).

According to CNET, an American media website, Fred has been cryopreserved in a 10-foot-tall stainless steel chamber along with eight other people, and more than 170 people are preserved in similar chambers in the same room. Linda claims that all of them elected to have their bodies stored in subzero temperatures to await a future when they could be brought back to life.

What is Cryonics?

Cryonics is the freezing and storage of a human corpse or severed head at an extremely low temperature, with the hope that resurrection may be possible in the future.

It is regarded with scepticism within the mainstream scientific community and is generally viewed as pseudoscience and its practice has been characterized as a health fraud or ignorant medical practice.

The first corpse to be frozen was that of Dr James Bedford in 1967. As of 2014, about 250 dead bodies had been cryopreserved in the United States and 1,500 people have made arrangements for cryopreservation of their corpses.

“Legal death only really means that your heart and your lungs have stopped functioning without intervention,” says Linda Chamberlain, in the CNET report. “It doesn’t mean your cells are dead, it doesn’t mean even your organs are dead,” she added. Linda also believes that second life is possible and  is optimistic about it.

AlCOR life extension foundation

Alcor CEO Max More also said “We’re killing people who could potentially be preserved. We’re just throwing them in the ground so they can be eaten by worms.”

The self-proclaimed world leader in cryonics is selling a second chance at life for $220,000. The founder, Linda Chamberlain says, “Our goals were to start an organization that could save people’s lives and give them an opportunity to be restored to health and function.”

Linda also says that she would like to live forever and is very scared of death. She wants to be cryopreserved at ALCOR when her time comes just like her husband, mother and father in law.

Linda said while talking to Nas Daily, that the body she would like to have in the future would be non-biological, nanobot swam which means a body made of small nanobot computers that are all stuck together very much like our biological cells. Many scientists are however sceptical and some even call her crazy.