The Deep Freeze And The Quick Thaw

The Deep Freeze and the Quick Thaw

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

John 11:25-26

Do you believe in Jesus’ resurrection power?

There are many folks who don’t, so they’ve taken their own resurrections in to their own hands.

This news article recently appeared on the ABC News website:

The Deep Freeze

Freezing the Dead With the Hope of Reviving Them Later

C L I N T O N T O W N S H I P, Mich., Feb. 8 — Instead of racing toward the emergency room, sirens blaring, a special type of ambulance transports patients away from hospitals. In fact, in this ambulance the “patient” is already dead.

The urgency is to limit the damage dying does to the brain and the body so that someone, someday, can reverse it.

Ninety people in America have been frozen, hoping to be brought back to life when medicine can cure them.

At least half of the new cases have been frozen in the past three years. To the handful of companies that charge $28,000 or more to freeze the bodies, these cadavers are optimistically called "patients."

The Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township currently has 37 people, 10 cats and six dogs frozen in its facility. Its most recent patient came in three days before ABCNEWS’ interview with David Ettinger, whose father, Robert, founded the Cryonics Institute.

The elder Ettinger began researching life-extending possibilities when he had a brush with his own mortality as a soldier in World War II. He eventually came to believe in the future of cryonics, and opened the Cryonics Institute in 1976. The institute froze its first person in 1977.

The newest patient was — or is — a 90-year-old woman who suffered a heart attack and is now inside a box cooling to negative 40 degrees with the help of ice and chemicals injected to minimize damage.

After a week, she’ll be moved into another chamber and cooled with liquid nitrogen to negative 320-Fahrenheit degrees. A week later, she’ll join others inside sealed vacuum chambers.

There are currently several facilities in the United States that will freeze people after they die. Starting at $28,000 plus any additional transportation costs, the Cryonics Institute is the least expensive of the bunch.

Interested parties must first pay $1,250 to become a lifetime member of the Cryonics Institute, and they then sign a detailed contract. After death, the following steps are taken:

1. The person should be cooled as soon as possible after they are legally pronounced dead. The hospital or funeral director packs the body in ice and sends it to the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Mich.

2. At the institute, a process called "wash out and perfusion" is performed. In this five-step procedure the blood is replaced with a glycerin-based solution that helps minimize the freezing damage.

3. The body is placed in a sleeping bag, and then in an insulated box made of wood on the outside and fiberglass on the inside for one week. Dry ice is placed on a fabric platform above the box, and the cold vapors descend upon and cool the body. The amount of dry ice is increased each day until the body reaches minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit.

4. The body is then moved to an insulated container that has liquid nitrogen at the bottom. Every day for a week, the body is slowly lowered into the liquid nitrogen until it is completely submerged. When the process is complete, the body temperature is minus-196 degrees Celsius, or minus-320 degrees Fahrenheit.

5. Finally, the body (still in the same sleeping bag) is placed in a long-term storage container called a cryostat.

The liquid nitrogen level is checked every day. Relatives can visit at any time, though the bodies cannot be seen through the cryostat.

— Daria Hirsch, ABCNEWS.com

Now in a related book:

Heather Pringle, author of The Mummy Congress, said she was surprised to find out how many tech-savvy people intend to end their days as Popsicles.

Pringle’s book examines the long history of humans’ efforts to preserve their mortal remains.

When she began to research the chapter on modern mummification, she visited cryogenic labs, expecting to find that the client list would include "your new-age crowd, people with strange ideas and bizarre beliefs about immortality. Kind of a well-heeled version of the folks who believe Elvis lives."

But Pringle said that when she really thought about it, geeks on ice made perfect sense.

"The Silicon Valley crowd has an enormous faith in technology and the science of progress," she said. "They believe that you can conquer just about any problem if you throw enough money and technology after it -- so why not immortality?"