Time and death have entered a kind of “pause” for some people in Scottsdale, a city in the American state of Arizona, where a company specializing in cryogenics promises to bring them back to life, reports the Reuters agency, quoted by Agerpres.

Inside pools filled with liquid nitrogen are the bodies and heads of 199 people who chose cryopreservation in the hope that they can be brought back to life in the future when science advances further than is currently possible, Reuters reports.

Many of the “patients,” as representatives of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation call them, were terminally ill with cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other diseases for which there are currently no cures.

Motherin Naowaratpong, a Thai girl with brain cancer, is the youngest person to undergo cryopreservation, she was two years old in 2015.

“Both parents are doctors, she underwent several brain operations, and unfortunately, nothing helped. So they contacted us,” said Max Mohr, chief executive of Alcoor, a nonprofit that claims to be a world leader in cryogenics.

Arizona Company Promises

Bitcoin cryptocurrency pioneer Hal Finney, another Alcor patient, requested that his body be cryopreserved after he died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2014.

The process of cryopreservation begins after a person is officially declared dead. Blood and other fluids are removed from the patient’s body and replaced with chemicals designed to prevent the formation of harmful ice crystals.

After vitrification at very low temperatures, Alcor patients are placed in pools at the Arizona facility, where they will remain “until the technology catches up with us,” Max Mohr said.

The minimum cost is $200,000 for a body and $80,000 for just the brain of a dead person.

Questionable business model

Most of Alcor’s nearly 1,400 “members” pay those amounts, naming Alcoor as the beneficiary of their life policies for an amount equal to the cost of cryopreservation, Max Mohr said.

The wife of Alcor CEO Natasha Vita-More compared this process to a journey into the future.

“Once the disease or wound is cured or repaired and the person receives a new cloned body or a full prosthesis, or after their body is reanimated, we can meet our friends again,” she said.

But many health professionals disagree with that method, said Arthur Kaplan, who chairs the department of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

“The idea of ​​freezing yourself in the future is science fiction and naive. The only group of people who are excited about this possibility are people who specialize in studying the distant future, or people who are interested in you paying money for these things,” said Arthur Kaplan.

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