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Baby, It's Cold Inside
A GOOD VIDEO ABOUT DEATH
by Elise Vider OCTOBER 13, 2009
SNL FUNERAL SKIT, HILARIOUS
TAGS: CRYONICS, BURIAL, SCIENCE, WEIRD
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Suppose you were to die tomorrow.
PROMESSION PROMISES GREEN FUTURE MICHAEL CRICHTON, THE SKEPTIC
Here’s one version of what comes next: An emergency response team would race to your side to inject your body with anti-coagulants and pack your head in ice. Your body would be rushed to an operating room where your blood would be replaced with chemical preservatives. From there, you’d be loaded into a private jet, U-Haul or rented car and taken to Scottsdale, Arizona where another surgical team using a hammer and chisel would cut off your head. Unless you paid extra, your headless body would be taken away by a mortician and cremated. Your decapitated head would be filled with chemicals and several holes drilled into your skull to accommodate small microphones rigged to a computer called the “Crackphone.” That way, as your head was gradually cooled to -321 degrees Fahrenheit, technicians could monitor the degree your brain was cracking and splitting apart during freezing. Your head would be balanced on a BumbleBee tuna can and placed upside down in the first of several devices where it would finally rest in frozen storage along with DNA samples and the heads of beloved cats and dogs.
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Years, possibly centuries, later, when medical science could cure whatever had killed you, you would be revived. Nanotechnology would have advanced to fix those pesky brain cracks and create a new body for your head. Or it would be attached to a robot body. Your “memory box” would be opened, with your birth certificate, family photographs, teddy bear, whatever you’d saved to help you feel right at home in this new future. A re-education machine would download data straight into your brain, so you’d be all caught up on the news. If you’d been a smart investor, you’d have a nice trust fund with billions of dollars waiting for you. This is the ultimate happy ending promised by cryonics, the use of extreme cold to preserve bodies until they can be restored to full health. But the reality is much more chilling, according to whistle-blower Larry Johnson who, with Scott Baldyga, has written the new book Frozen (Vanguard Press). Johnson has gotten a lot of press over the years for his account of the scandal over the “cryo-preservation” of baseball great Ted Williams, whose frozen head (despite lawsuits, public outcry and the rancor of family members who claim Ted wanted to be cremated and his ashes spread at sea) resides at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the Scottsdale-based cryonics facility where Johnson worked for seven months during 2003. Every day for the last three months of his employment, Johnson, a paramedic with 25 years experience, wore a wire to work. A self-described “adrenaline junkie,” Johnson spins a tale of misdeeds, everything from sloppy record-keeping to allegations of murder, with a swagger and no dearth of gruesome detail. Johnson claims that Alcor’s procedures amounted to nothing more than the mutilation of corpses. He provides a particularly gory eyewitness account of a co-worker’s whacking at Ted Williams’ head with a monkey wrench to disengage the frozen, tuna-can pedestal. “Little chunks of Ted’s head flew off, peppering the walls, skittering across the floor and sliding under the machinery.” Johnson also charges that Alcor routinely dumped toxic chemicals and AIDS-contaminated blood out its back door. Most sinister of all, Johnson accuses Alcor of hastening several deaths, quoting the monkey-wrench swinger on another occasion as noting, “We did not want anyone waking up and causing problems.” (This is clearly not a guy you want to hang out with at the water cooler.) On one occasion, Johnson reports, the Alcor team sped up a demise to beat Los Angeles traffic. As disturbing as all this is, far creepier in the final analysis is the existence of an entire sub-culture– and business model – built around the refusal to accept death. Johnson portrays a world of paranoid fanatics willing to take what they concede is a billion-to-one shot that they can beat death. One of the hard-core devotees tells Johnson: “I know the science isn’t there yet. I’m no fool. I’m going to die. But I have a choice. If I’m cremated or buried, there’s absolutely no chance for a second life. But if I’m frozen at Alcor, there is always the hope that future science can reverse the freezing damage, and then reverse death. Given those choices, I choose cryo-suspension. If it doesn’t work, what have I lost?”
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So cultish is the world of cryonics Johnson described that it has its own, death-defying lexicon. Thus mortal lifespans are merely “first life cycles;” the frozen bodies are “patients” and “cryonauts.” Death is only “deanimation;” the cryonauts will be “reanimated” upon thawing. And in a particularly sci-fi wordplay, the most dedicated members of Alcor are “Alcorians.” No matter how gruesome the process, Johnson reports a festive atmosphere during the three cryosuspensions he observed, with spectators in the operating room “chatting, joking and patting each other on the back. There was lots of laughter, giddy excitement in the air…I realized that for the true believers, the deanimination and cryo-preservation of a fellow Alcorian for his second life cycle was a time of celebration, not mourning.” Despite the bad press and the wishful thinking, there are more than 620 members of Alcor signed up for cryo-suspension; about 70 percent of them live in Southern California. (Some die-hards have moved to Arizona to be near the Alcor facility, since time is of the essence when they deanimate from their first life cycle.) Many have paid over $100,000 and continue to give regularly to Alcor, which is a legal nonprofit organization and remains in business. Homicide investigations, inquiries into the Ted Williams case, lawsuits and countersuits have yielded nothing. Johnson claims that he has been threatened with death (not to be confused with deanimination) and terrorized since blowing the whistle, and he frets that “if nothing is done, this book … will only serve to boost hits on Alcor’s Web site and increase their membership.” Perhaps so for the lunatic fringe who prefers to shuffle off the mortal coil frozen upside down to a tuna fish can. For most readers, though, Johnson’s book is an unnerving glimpse into a bizarre cabal where death is an option instead of a cold, hard fact. Elise Vider is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. PRINT
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