Suspended animation, cryogenic freezing, the search for immortality… They’ve been the stuff of science fiction for many years. Forever Young, with Mel Gibson. Sylvester Stallone's Demolition Man. The truly hilarious Woody Allen classic, Sleeper. The equally brilliant Austin Powers.
Oh, and then there's Idiocracy, with Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. Some might say, in light of recent events, that this (on the face of it) frivolous satire actually offers a more realistic glimpse into where we are going, as a society, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
One way or another, cryogenic freezing will be familiar to most people, mainly through those works of fiction.
But recent newspaper reports of a 14-year-old girl, known only as JS, who is dying from a rare form of cancer and has just has won the right to be cryogenically frozen and (possibly) reanimated in the future, have brought the issue out of the realm of science fiction and very much into the real world.
Although we don’t know the identity of JS, the team at Today with Sean O’Rourke did manage to track down another person who is going down the same road. He’s a Londoner, although both his parents are from Dublin, and his name is Garret Smyth.
His reasons for going down this line?
“I signed up in 1986. In all that time, I have wondered why everybody else doesn’t do it. It seems from my perspective, an obvious thing to do, to try to stay alive.”
Well, like he said, that is his perspective. Other people would clearly differ. And in the course of a fascinating interview where the scientific as well as ethical questions arising from cryogenic freezing were discussed, those alternative perspectives received a good airing. Given the explosion in population over the last half-century, where we’re adding 1 billion people almost every decade, how much more of humankind can this planet take, if we are keeping people alive indefinitely? And from a religious perspective, there is, many believe, another life to look forward to after this one. If you believe in that life, why not just live this one through, naturally?
But presenter, Sean O’Rourke, kept it a little more real.
“Are you prepared to wake up to whatever world may be there in 150 years time? Who do you think you'll know? What do you think you'll do? Who will look after you? Where is your bank account going to be?
Here is Garret's perspective again.
“I do know people who are already signed up. So I will know, hopefully, someone in the future. When I joined in 1986, I would tell people various things that we would hope would happen. One of them was that they would find a cure for the ageing process. .. It used to be considered ridiculous. But now, there are large foundations and research institutions actually doing something about it. So I think I would be woken up after they had found a way to stop, or even reverse, ageing.”
But is this a realistic proposition or is it all just pie in the sky? How is it even achieved, this cryogenic freezing?
Enter our friend, liquid nitrogen. (You might know me from such films as Terminator 2, were the T1000 is frozen by liquid nitrogen and blasted away!) The company Garret has signed up with, Alcor, in California, uses liquid nitrogen to freeze people as soon as possible after they die.
There are other fascinating developments, one of which was outlined by another of Sean’s guests, David Shaw, Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Biomedical Ethics in the University of Basel, Switzerland. He told of a fascinating study where a particular worm had been trained to follow certain pathways to food. When the worm was frozen in liquid nitrogen, and then reanimated, it actually remembered the same pathways to that food.
But science aside, the ethics of cryogenic freezing are a matter of huge debate, with some of those ethical considerations explored by Dr. Andrea Mulligan, a practicing barrister who lectures in Medial Law and Ethics in Trinity College.
Consent, for example, is required for any medical procedure, but it absolutely must be “informed consent”. But how can consent in this issue possibly be “informed”, when the science is completely unproven and nobody has yet been reanimated following cryogenic freezing. And more practically, if the company housing the cryogenic tubes (coffins?) goes bust, who is responsible for them?