alcor-uk.com Homepage


	Cryonics is defined by its proponents as "the freezing of humans as shortly as possible after death with the hope of eventual return to life."Proponents claim that it is possible to preserve "with reasonable fidelity" the basic biologic components of the brain and that future technology will be able to repair brain damage caused by "imperfect preservation, premortal disease, and postmortem changes.


	As soon as possible after legal death, a member patient is prepared and cooled to a temperature where physical decay essentially stops, and is then maintained indefinitely in cryostasis. When and if future medical technology allows, our member patients will be healed and revived, and awaken to extended life in youthful good health.


	News & Info

The History of Cryonics
In 1964 an American physicist, Robert Ettinger, wrote a book entitled "The Prospect of Immortality". In that book, Ettinger proposed that death was not so much an absolute end, but the definition of the limit of medical science's abilities to keep a patient alive despite threats like ageing, disease or injury. This limit continues to change over time, as our understanding and technology improves. Think about it, the person whose heart stopped beating in the twenties or thirties was considered dead, and no further attempt was made to resuscitate them. Today CPR and electrical defibrillation is successful in recovering many such patients. So, death in the 1930's is not necessarily death in the 1990's - the boundaries of the medical profession's abilities to keep their patients alive have moved considerably.

On the basis of this continual improvement in medical technology Ettinger proposed that many patients with ailments which are fatal today would at some point in the future be easily curable. His conclusion was that it made sense to seek some mechanism to preserve these patients until that point in the future. The mechanism he proposed was Cryonic Suspension, preservation by deep freezing.

The scientific community's sceptics pointed then, as now, point to the damage that freezing does to human cells and to the fact that current medical science does not allow for the reliable resuscitation of frozen patients. The cryonauts response to this is simple - cryonic suspension is a two-stage process: preservation and resuscitation. All we have to master today is stage one: preservation. Resuscitation will come in time, along with the ability to repair any freezing damage, cell-by-cell.
The impact of Ettinger's book was such that Cryonics began to receive a lot of attention both in the media and in the scientific community. In 1966, a Japanese Scientist, Suda, froze some cat brains and revived them after a month or so. He demonstrated that they recovered much of their function, and the interest in Cryonics, particularly in the preservation of human patients, began to generate serious interest. It was only a matter of time before human freezings began in earnest.

The First Human Freezings
In 1967 an ex-TV repair man set up a "cryotorium" and led the team that cryo-preserved the first man. In the years that followed his organisation, CSC, froze another five or six people. Unfortunately, Nelson's organisation was hopelessly under-funded, poorly managed and too heavily dependant on maintenance fees from relatives of the frozen patients, many of which dried up soon after preservation. Due to lack of funds, or accident according to Nelson, liquid nitrogen supplies were interrupted and the patients thawed.

That scandal, and the failure of subsequent cryonics organisations around that time, set cryonics back many years, and cast doubt even upon many of those cryonics organisations to be established later with highly professional, responsible and ethical charters. One Californian, James Bedford, who was frozen after his death in 1967 from cancer, remains frozen to this day at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Between 1967 and the mid eighties Cryonics did not enjoy a lot of popularity, but with recent increased interest it is on the way back in a big way.

Cryonics Organisations Today
Robert Ettinger went on to establish the Cryonics Institute in 1976, one of eight or nine organisations who are today offering cryo-preservation and maintenance services. The current players include The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, CryoCare Foundation, Cryonics Institute, CryoSpan, American Cryonics Society and Trans Time. Between them they have about fifty patients in suspension and another three hundred who have made the necessary financial and legal arrangements to be frozen, should they be injured or become fatally ill.

Is it possible?

Bacterial decay may stop, but that is not enough to make recovery possible. As noted by Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine:

Cryonicists believe that people can be frozen immediately after death and reanimated later when the cure for what ailed them is found. To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.

National Council Against Health Fraud president William T. Jarvis, Ph.D., calls cryonics "quackery's last shot at you." In an interview he said:

Cryonic technology has not been demonstrated to work in laboratory animals. Even if the rest of a person's body could be revived after hundreds of years, the brain could not. Brain cells deteriorate within minutes after death, and any still viable when the body is frozen would be burst by the freezing process. Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery.