Ted Williams was born in 1918. He played baseball for 19 years, won two triple crowns,
retired, hosted a TV show about fishing, and then died… maybe. Because despite his wishes
to be fully cremated, his family decided to save a piece for later: his head. Right now,
Ted Williams’ head is frozen in a lab in Arizona, with a contract to bring him back to life if
the technology to do so is ever invented, at which point he could, I don’t know, be really,
really bad at baseball. This process of preserving and reviving human bodies is called cryonics,
and right now, there are four major companies in the world that do it; you could, today, pay to
have your body preserved and be revived several centuries later. The only problem is, none of
these companies actually know how to bring people back to life yet—so how do they actually work?
Well, here are the four companies: there’s KrioRus in Russia, who have 92 bodies in storage,
Yinfeng with about a dozen in China, the Cryonics Institute with 240, and then there’s the US-based
Alcor—with 208 in storage but another 1,600 customers on their roster, they’re basically the
Michael Jordan of scamming people into dipping their heads in liquid nitrogen. Among their
patients is this guy: James Bedford, the very first person to be cryopreserved. He died in 1967,
and he’s been chilling in a liquid nitrogen-cooled thermos for the last 56 years. With no established
cryonics companies to take on the job after he was frozen, his thermos was passed around for a
few decades, before finally ending up at Alcor in the 90s, where they apparently got a real kick out
of dragging him out of his thermos and staring at him. Now, unfortunately for James, it turns
out that successfully cryopreserving a human being requires a slightly more involved procedure than
treating a corpse like one giant dippin’ dot, so James is probably never going to get to come
back and experience the wonders of climate change. But for those of whom were frozen more recently,
it might be a different story—modern cryonics companies have sorted out the surprisingly
complex logistics of freezing a human body without damaging it, and getting the process underway
within seconds of their death. For the sake of this video we’re going to look at Alcor’s process,
given that they’re by far the largest and most well-established of the four cryonics companies,
and also because they’re not afraid to write blog posts about how they take their corpses
out of storage and stare at them. Now, companies like Alcor have a bit of a legal hurdle right
from the outset, because freezing a living person is considered, in most countries, to be murder,
and murder is considered, in most countries, to be frowned upon. They’re not allowed to
begin their procedures until the patient has been legally pronounced dead, but after that happens,
there’s a pretty limited window before the brain and vital organs just become useless
piles of mush. In order to respond within seconds of someone’s death, Alcor has cryonics vehicles
stationed permanently in Florida and Southern California, and temporarily anywhere else with a
high concentration of not-yet-dead customers. Once one of their customers is in critical condition,
a 4-person stabilization team will be dispatched to their location, and then presumably wait around
awkwardly while they hurry up and die. Once that’s been taken care of, the body is submerged in an
ice bath and pumped with the following chemicals, before being transported—either by one of Alcor’s
ground vehicles or just, like, a normal cargo airline—to Alcor’s operating room in Scottsdale,
Arizona. Before the body arrives in Scottsdale to be frozen, it needs to be kept cold, but not
too cold; if the body drops below 32 fahrenheit, ice crystals will form in the blood and organs,
and you know what they say about ice crystals forming in the blood and organs: it’s not good
when ice crystals form in the blood and organs. Once in the lab, the patient’s blood is replaced
with a substance called M22, which is basically antifreeze, and this allows for a process called
“vitrification”—basically, the whole body can be frozen without any actual ice forming,
which is bad for previously mentioned reasons, and then the body gets cooled down to a brisk
-196 celsius and shoved into one of these until, well… that’s where we run into a bit of a problem.
Because, you see, now we’ve arrived at the part of this process where this whole business model
starts to feel a little sketchy—what do these companies do after they freeze you? Presumably
the exciting part about all of this isn’t that you die and your corpse is frozen for all
eternity—you can do that just by moving to Minnesota—the exciting part is that they’ll
bring you back to life one day. But as far as we know, they can’t. Because not only would
they need the technology to thaw you out without damaging any of your vital organs, they would
also need the technology to reverse whatever it was that killed you, because you know… you still
died. But if that technology doesn’t exist, and none of these companies know when it will exist,
then how do they operate a business that intends to keep a human freezer running without fail for,
potentially, centuries? Well, let’s take a look at their contracts. Yes, my writer Ben got his hands
on a human cryopreservation contract, and no, he won’t tell me where he got it. But basically, it
works like this: high end companies like Alcor and Yinfeng charge about $200,000 upfront if you want
your full body frozen, or $80,000 for just your head. The Cryonics Institute will go as low as
$28,000, and Kriorus will freeze your brain for just $15,000. At least in Alcor’s case,
they’ll take $115,000 of that money and invest it in this Patient Care Trust,
which is managed by Morgan Stanley, and assuming that the stock market doesn’t self-immolate,
should grow at a rate that would be able to keep the liquid nitrogen flowing indefinitely. To make
sure that their investment board doesn’t screw around with the money, the majority
of board members are contractually obligated to put their family in the tubes, because to
keep a highly-effective cult in line, you need to start at the top. I mean, I can’t legally say that
Alcor is a cult, but let’s just call them a “small group of people characterized by a great devotion
to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.” So what happens if none of this actually works?
Well, Alcor’s website sure has you believe that their contract obligates them to revive their
patients, because that’s, like, whole point of this procedure, but if you actually read the
contract, that sentence that they put on their website is preceded by a much longer paragraph
about how they have no idea if they can do that, if it’s even legal, and that if they don’t end
up reviving you you don’t actually have any legal recourse. So to answer the question of
how these businesses work, the answer is that you give them hundreds of thousands of dollars,
they put you in a freezer, and if you don’t magically come back to life, you can go to hell.
So is freezing your brain a worthwhile proposition? Who’s to say. But fortunately
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