People die of diseases and other conditions that sometime in the future might be easily curable. For most people that fact is of little comfort, as, say, cancer ravages their bodies and robs them of life. All there is to do is to make ones death as comfortable and as dignified as possible. Afterwards, ones relatives and loved ones will mourn.

But for some people, unwilling to go quietly into that good night no matter what the state of medical science is, there may be an option, albeit a controversial one. That option is to place ones body into a kind of suspended animation, right at the point of clinical death, in the hopes of being revived at some point when medical science can cure whatever condition has killed one. The option in question is called cryonics.

The theory behind cryonics stem from cases of people who have fallen into an icy lake and have been submerged for up to an hour in the frigid water before being rescued. The people who managed to survive did so because the icy water put their body into a sort of suspended animation, slowing down their metabolism and brain function to the point where they needed almost no oxygen. Cryonics is a little different than that, however.

The History of Cryonics

The idea of suspended animation has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. It has been featured in numerous stories and such movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Demolition Man.

A book entitled The Prospect of Immortality was published in 1964 by a physics professor named Robert Ettinger that was the first widely read work to popularize the concept of cryonics. Cryonics, derived from the Greek word meaning “cold”, is a very apt description for the process of preserving human bodies for future revival.

The first person to be preserved with cryonics technology was a 73-year-old psychologist, Dr. James Bedford in 1967. By the 1970s there were a number of companies that offered cryonics services, though some of them went out of business due to the great expense of maintaining the bodies of their clients indefinitely.

Today the largest cryonics companies are Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona and the Cryonics Institute in Michigan. By early 2004, Alcor had 650 members still alive but waiting to be preserved and 59 people in cryopreservation.