Cryonics: Time to Wake Up
A girl has frozen her corpse—in hopes to save her life.
“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
— John Donne
I am late to this but that is fitting: a 14-year-old girl, who tragically died of cancer in 2016, won a legal battle allowing for her corpse to be cryogenically frozen. She is, by all accounts, dead—“sick dead”—as William Carlos Williams wrote. Yet her light body was taken into the hands of scientists and rapidly cooled in a process known as “cryoconservation”. The wild hope is that brain structure can be preserved and eventually recovered with advanced medical technology and at a time when her cancer can be safely removed. She will be thawed, and then cured, and then free to go about her day—representing perhaps the Platonic ideal for all cryonics patients: a second chance.
The feasibility of cryonics is not of particular interest here; the underlying mechanisms of preservation and restoration are largely uncontroversial in the most meaningful sense (those claiming that information processes cannot, in principle, be paused and subsequently replayed are making some powerful claims about contemporary physics—and sleep). Nor are the legal details important: the judge said that his ruling “was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.” (This does, however, signal the ongoing subjugation of children in modern society—yet another pathology waiting to be cured.)
Instead, I want to explore the spirit and ethical poetry surrounding medicine's most lambasted moonshot. Why do people want it? Why do people hate it? Why have hundreds of people, for going on one hundred years, signed away their remains to an arctic entombment? Why, after falling asleep for the final time, should we want to wake up?
The 14-year-old girl, known only as “JS”, answered this question. She wrote to the judge a very short letter outlining her reasons for fighting her case.
"I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done.
I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die.
I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up - even in hundreds of years' time.
I don't want to be buried underground.
I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up.
I want to have this chance.
This is my wish."
I find these lines quietly remarkable. In fewer than one hundred words a teenager reveals the very spirits of grief, fear, pain, and futility—but also hope, courage, love, and possibility. The first line is almost impertinent: why should I need to explain my right to life? (Once again, the authorship of a child is insulted where an adult’s would be sovereign.) She counters with stoic self-awareness in the face of mortality: “I know I am going to die”; and heroic self-esteem in the light of survival: “I don't want to die.”
There is an understated music to the brevity here: her statements are short—blunt even—composed perhaps with the courtroom in mind; yet they secure themselves as delicate strings fastening a burden far outweighing natural fibres. (Life itself.) Beneath that pragmatism lies romantic fiction—“even in hundreds of years' time”; and, beneath that, realist horror—“buried underground”. JS continues in that most powerful tradition of contrasting life in all its noble movement against death in all its shameful decay: mind against body; night against day.
But perhaps the most powerful line is the fifth. The first instance of “I want” after a procession of “I have”, “I am”, “I think” and “I don’t”... JS now flaunts a desire to spite her despair; she fixes her gaze staunchly ahead to undermine its close. And what does she want? “To live and live longer.” Life. And more life. This is her wish.
The story of JS, like that of cryonics more broadly, is a powerful symbol of existential hope. Reading it eight years later it is no less powerful to the spirit and heart—and JS’s body, unlike almost every other body committed to ground or to fire since hers was to ice, is no less primed for revival. This is the singular miracle of biomedical stasis: we are poor and we are ignorant now, yet we are capable of being not so tomorrow. We have pox and we have cancer now, yet we are capable of having vaccines the next day. There are no guarantees, of course; the “criticism-from-faith-in-progress” (so faithfully raised against preservation) is a fallacious one. The case for a suspended longevity need not be delusional; it need not go further than the desire to survive. But when it does, it rests on the universal arguments for solubility—one of our most fundamental laws of nature. Those who freeze themselves are not fearful halfwits pleading for miracles and furnishing huxters with the savings of their families—they are spirited heroes acting heroically on the rational ethics of our best explanations. Arguments to the contrary are, without hyperbole, arguments for omnicide. For the death of every person ever born, and yet to be born, and the rejection of their will to live and live longer.
This story is a happy one. A young girl has won the right to determine her own future and its publicity might allow for more to do the same. And even if she fails, she will have done so advertising a thirst for existence when so many her age have only a fear of it. And if she succeeds? I can hardly imagine it. The moment that first person wakes up, and is healed, all of history will shed its tawdry disguise and reveal itself as the torrid horror of illness and pain that so many have furied to behold and so many more have failed to survive. John Donne, who epigraphs this essay, said as much when he called for death to “be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so”. He did so with the light of Christian salvation in mind—yet I maintain that the most powerful rebuke of sorry mortality is the naturalistic marriage of wonder and reason. Death as something inescapable is mere inductive error. The past does not resemble the present. And all those who have died and never awoken might one day yet do so. This—this is my wish.
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Are you interested doing cryonics for yourself? People not wanting to die is not really that surprising. She recites the talking points of cryonics advocates and those who provide the services. What’s surprising is people who find cryonics “interesting” from a literally or philosophical standpoint and but don’t want to do it. If you could tell us in a florid way about that I would like to hear about it.
There's a lot of badassery going on here. Fighting for life and liberty against fate and "the system". This is future-punk, baby. Rebel against expiration.