Those opposed to cryogenic freezing worry about the ‘Frankenstein’ effectDr Macro

Disclaimer: I am not remotely qualified to write this article. I’m not even entirely sure how to pronounce cryogenic freezing, let alone comprehend it.  But I’m not writing this piece as a scientist speculating on the plausibility of the idea – rather writing about what it tells us about us as humans, and the way in which we interact with our bodies, our brains, and the very idea of living. 

So, cryogenic freezing. ‘Cryo’ means cold, the Wikipedia page tells me, and what this refers to is the freezing of a patient’s body after they have become legally dead, and preserving that body in the hope that one day humankind will possess the technical knowledge to restore the body to life and cure its illness so that the person can live again. At the moment, we don’t have this scientific ability, and a large number of experts believe we never will. But there is a vocal minority who advocate the practice. In 2014 there were already 250 bodies preserved in the US, and over 1,000 people on waiting lists to be cryogenically frozen when they die. 

This is an idea that has been around since the 1960s, but it reared its head again recently in the ugly court case of a 14-year-old girl who won the right to have her body preserved after her death.  A lot of people were deeply uncomfortable with this idea, including her father. This in itself is interesting because, at the moment, nothing is happening. The bodies remain dead, just prevented from decomposing, much as if they had been frozen in ice.

Why, then, are we so uncomfortable? There is the inevitable ‘Frankenstein’ effect: the idea of ‘messing with’ nature, and the process’ striking similarity to an episode of Doctor Who doesn’t help. Although vast swathes of today’s society are atheists, we still have a somewhat fixed idea of what is natural and unnatural. For the majority of us, blood transfusions, organ transplants and even defibrillation do not cross this line, but cryogenic freeing does. There is something sacred about death itself, in which we do not want to intervene.

“There is some need to cling onto the idea of death as something fixed, something definite”

The second question I cannot help but ask is: how do we define death? Medically, legally, death is when the heart stops beating. This is because these fields require an exact meaning. The rhetoric surrounding cryogenics is keen to stress that death is not an event but a process, beginning perhaps before the heart stops beating and ending when the body is no longer able to sustain life. This narrative, then, tells us that the process of death can be paused. 

But for many of us, there is some need to cling onto the idea of death as something fixed, something definite, something absolute. We need that closure to grieve the deaths of our loved ones. We also need this idea to live our lives. YOLO works as a neat catchphrase for a broadly post-religious society: most of us operate on the assumption that ‘you only live once’: that this, whatever this is, is it. Living in the belief that there is something more, that we will live again, requires a fundamental paradigm shift. 

But there are others who struggle to cope with this concept, and arguably it is this primal inability to comprehend everything just ending that religion is a response to – from Ancient Egyptian mummification, to the Christian heaven and Hindu reincarnation, we could choose to see cryogenic freezing as the latest belief which avoids coming to terms with death. Most of us are capable of conceptualising simply not existing before we are born, but there is something about ceasing to exist after we have lived which is so much harder to understand.

We could also choose to be cynical, and view cryogenic freezing as merely a form of exploitative capitalism. The father involved in the court case has said: “I believe they are selling false hope to those who are frightened of dying”, and it is the “selling” here that is key. Cyrogenic institutions charge between $80,000 and $200,000 for a process which may or may not work. Of course, this is no price at all to pay for a second life, but ultimately, as it exists today cryogenics, is a business which provides employment for people. 

Even if the cryogenic freezing process works, there is no guarantee that the bodies, once woken up, will retain their memories. We do not know enough about how the brain works and how memory is stored to work out whether the bodies will simply be clones of the people who once existed. Our bodies and our memories are not one. The idea of just the body and not our self living again is uncanny, and quite frankly undesirable. 

Finally, what happens if the process actually works, and the patients are reawoken in 100, 200 years’ time, body and memories intact? The country and the world we know would no longer exist. We would have no property or money. Our knowledge and skills would be irrelevant in a world capable of resurrecting the dead. We would have to return to school and build a new life for ourselves in an alien world. Is this something we want?

Cryogenic freezing, even if it works, seems to do nothing apart from resolve our fear of death. The other solution to a fear of death? To live our lives, here, now, to the full, as if there is nothing more. It’s a cliché and it’s trite, but there is only one solution. Carpe diem