The team then prepares the body to be cooled down to its permanent storage temperature. Drugs are administered to slow down metabolic processes, the body is intubated to maintain oxygen levels, and a mechanical thumper pumps the heart to ensure blood keeps flowing around the body. The ice bath is the first step in the preservation process, and it's here where the patient is placed in a kind of post-death life support. One of Alcor's employees picked up the dummy's hand to wave at me and I genuinely think that moment shortened my life span by two years.) At least, that's what I thought when I saw a human dummy waiting in the ice bath by the door. (I also didn't expect to see a dead person in the operating room. From here, the body vitrifies, rather than freezing. It seems like a convenient gap for cryonics: Sell the promise in the present without the burden of proving the end result.ĭuring the first stages of cryonic preservation, bodies are "perfused" with a medical-grade antifreeze, all in a bid to prevent ice crystals forming. That responsibility will be handed on to the next generation (and potentially many more generations after that) - scientists of some undetermined time in the future, who will have developed the technology necessary to reverse the work that Alcor is doing now. In fact, no one currently working at Alcor is likely to be responsible for reviving patients. The company is in the business of selling preservation, but it's not developing the technologies for restoration. Its website speaks about the possibility of molecular nanotechnology - that is, using microscopic nano-robots to "replace old damaged chromosomes with new ones in every cell."īut that level of cellular regeneration isn't something Alcor is working on.
#CHEATING DEATH DREAM FULL#
Claire Reilly/CNETĪlcor hasn't exactly mapped out how its patients will be brought back to full function and health, or what revival technologies the future will bring. "It doesn't mean your cells are dead, it doesn't mean even your organs are dead."Īn early copy of Cryonics magazine sits in Alcor's offices, showing the inside of one of its preservation chambers. "Legal death only really means that your heart and your lungs have stopped functioning without intervention," Linda Chamberlain tells me. What drives someone to reject the natural order of life and death, and embrace an end that's seen by many, scientists and lay people alike, as the stuff of science fiction?īut after a short time at Alcor, I realize the true believers here don't see cryonics as a way to cheat death. I've come here to find out why someone would choose cryonics. After all, this is a place that's attempting to answer the question at the heart of human existence: Can we cheat death? When I arrived at the company's headquarters, a nondescript office block in Scottsdale, Arizona, a short drive out of Phoenix, I expected something grander. John Kim/CNETįrom the outside, Alcor's facilities don't look like the kind of place you'd come to live forever. Photographs of "patients" line the walls of Alcor's offices. Scientists say there's no way to adequately preserve a human body or brain, and that the promise of bringing a dead brain back to life is thousands of years away.
For the low price of $220,000, Alcor is selling the chance to live a second life.Ĭritics say cryonics is a pipe dream, no different from age-old chimeras like the fountain of youth. And I have the potential of being with them again."Īlcor proclaims itself a world leader in cryonics, offering customers the chance to preserve their bodies indefinitely, until they can be restored to full health and function through medical discoveries that have yet to be made. "Because I know that they have the potential to be restored to life and health.
Being in a room with 170 dead people isn't morbid to her.
She places her hand on the cool steel and gives it a loving pat. Linda Chamberlain is cheerful as she shows me her husband's perhaps-not-final resting place.
#CHEATING DEATH DREAM SERIES#
This story is part of Hacking the Apocalypse, CNET's documentary series on the tech saving us from the end of the world.
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