page 18

Waiting for Immortality..... with a Thermostat in his Hand

Welded into a steel capsule, twenty-four-year-old Steven Mandell waits for immortality. Clutched in his right hand he holds a measuring device which indicates his body temperature on a dial outside the capsule. It shows minus 320° Fahrenheit.

Steven died in July while he was still a student at New York University. But he was a member of the Cryonics Society, which believes that if you are deep-frozen immediately after death it will be possible in the future to be thawed out, cured of whatever killed you and brought back to life.

So now his rock-hard body, zipped up in a plastic envelope, wrapped in tin foil, immersed in liquid nitrogen, welded in a steel container and inserted into a vacuum cylinder, waits in a red-brick building behind a crematorium on Long Island for a place in the next world. It could be a long wait-even the most optimistic cryonics don't expect Steven to be around again for at least a hundred years and many of them think it may be five centuries before he is up and about. Naturally they all expect to see him again they will either be at the opening of his capsule or they expect him to be at the opening of theirs.

Steven Mandell is the eighth prison to be deep-frozen in the United States and he is also the youngest, by far. The first body to be slid into a 'cryo-capsule' was that of Dr James Bedford, a seventy-three-year-old professor of psychology who died of cancer in California in January, 1967. Leaving nothing to chance, the professor has set aside a $200,000 trust fund to be spent on research into ways and means of bringing him back to life, Full details of Dr Bedford's pioneering demise were quickly made available to the somewhat sceptical public in a lurid book entitled We Froze The First Man, written by a cryonic with an eye to the main' chance.

Nine months later a woman followed Beford into deep-freeze and there were six in rapid succession early last year. Significantly Mandell is the first person to be frozen on the more conservative eastern side of the US and it indicates that the freeze-wait-reanimate concept is more than just a crackpot West Coast fad.

Cryonics societies now exist in Michigan, California, Florida, New York, San Francisco, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Oregon. A branch has been set up at Lyons in France and there are immediate plans to establish societies in Australia and Germany. The movement's latest venture in California is the formation of the Cryonics Youth Association, aimed at interesting young people in this special way of death. A seven-shilling annual membership fee buys the teenager, among other things, a subscription to Cryonics News, which reports new developments in the field under headings like 'The Role of the Mortician' and 'Life Extension by Clonal Reproduction.'

The man who can claim most credit for the birth of the deep-freeze movement is a physics professor from Michigan with thinning hair, round spectacles and the promise of an impressive paunch. Mis name is Robert C.W. Ettinger, author of Prospects Of Immortality, which is now the cryonics' bible.

It was Ettinger who persuaded the first embryonic organisation, Immortality Communication Exchange, to change its name to the Life Extension Society for fear that the abbreviation Ice would lead to accusations of deathbed levity. And from the Life Extension Society, the chain of cryonics societies was formed.

Ettinger says he got his idea for the book in 1947 while he was recovering from shrapnel wounds in an army hospital. "I had read about experiments with glycerine and frog sperm and it became clear to me then that these experiments allowed us the possibility of bridging the gap between the present and the future in human terms."

He did nothing about his theory for years because he felt it was so obvious that someone better qualified would quickly see the possibilities and take action. But by 1962 nothing had happened, so he wrote his book and published it privately. Although it was never a serious contender for a place in the best-selling lists, it did stir sufficient interest for Doubleday to publish it in 1964 and it subsequently appeared as a moderately successful paperback in a number of languages.

Crux of the book is Ettinger's belief that: "Death, like old age, can now be regarded as a disease: a very serious disease to be sure indeed, it's generally fatal but not necessarily uncurable."

The concept of non-fatal death through freezing was given an initial cold shoulder by most scientists and physicians and this was the main reason, according to the author, that the idea was slow to get off the ground.

"I had thought that within a year of the book we would have been freezing people by the dozen and would only take a few years before we would be freezing them by the thousand and the hundreds of thousands. But obviously I was wrong about that and at the present time our rate of growth is still rather slow. However, there are changes occurring in people's minds that are very real and very important and my impression is that large numbers of people are ready to change from passive to active interest."

No one views this prospect with more enthusiasm than Mr Edward Hope, a wigmaker from Phoenix, Arizona. Mr Hope is president of the Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation. He made the $1 250-a-time capsules which now contain the first eight frozen bodies and he intends, despite the imminent threat of competition, to make capsules for the hundreds of thousands of candidates that Ettinger is talking about.

Cryo-Care's future didn't always look so rosy; in fact Mr Hope's first venture into the freezing business was more slapstick than scientific. The Life Extension Society persuaded him to provide a cryo-capsule for a live dog which was then hauled off to Marts Laffal's Steakhouse in Washington, scene of the Society's third annual conference.

Marty was furious as he felt a frozen dog in his restaurant was not good for business and he insisted that it was left outside in a van which police promptly booked for parking in a non-waiting area. Then the wrath of American dog-lovers descended on Mr Hope's flinching head and the result was that he reneged on his promise to store the dog in perpetuity, claiming that he had always thought a pig should have been the victim as there were fewer pig-lovers in the US.

What eventually happened to the dog is not known, but the incident provided no more than a temporary setback to the amazing wigmaker's plans and Crvo-Care is now recognised as the leading supplier of non-death capsules. Mr Hope was last quoted as remarking: "I suppose you could say I am bringing new hope to the dead."

Ettinger insists that the chances of another life for the eight people now in 'cryonic suspension' are good. "This has been the central issue all along—how realistic are their chances? In the past most scientists have said yes, there is a chance, but this chance is only a very minute one, or a very remote one, or a vanishingly small one, or a negligible one.

"We have always insisted from the beginning that this is not true and to say so is scientifically incorrect and extremely irresponsible. It tends to convince the layman that this statement from an alleged authority is a fact when it is not. When scientists say the chances are extremely small, they are not telling you the result of any calculation. They simply don't have any measurable evidence: they can't state what the probability of revival is. They can't say it is less than fifty per cent, or less than ten per cent, or less than one per cent, or less than one tenth of one per cent, or whatever it is they are trying to suggest."

Professor N. Kurti, the Hungarian-born physicist of Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, told the British Association meeting in August (1968) that while it was possible that bodies could be frozen and revived after long intervals—even 10,000 years-if they had been alive immediately before freezing, if the heart had stopped beating for even a few minutes before freezing revival as a normal person would be out of the question. Death, he said, meant irreversible brain damage and it is a "terrible misuse of science to persuade people that there is hope when there is none."

The cryonics refute this kind of criticism absolutely, although they admit that the chances of revival would be even better if they could freeze people before they actually die. Saul Kent, a thin young man with a sallow complexion and deep-set eyes, is secretary of the New York Cryonics Society. He says that freezing is an alternative to traditional means of burial for a person who happens to be unfortunate enough to die. "We know burial is final, but freezing might not be. And as methods of freezing and preservation improve, their chances will improve. Hopefully, within ten years or so, if the freezing process is perfected you will have a situation in which you can put people into suspended animation before they die. Then their chances would be excellent."

American funeral directors understandably blanch at this idea. Most of them saw the birth of the cryonics movement as a possible threat to their livelihoods, although they warmed to the concept later on when Casket and Sunnyside, one of the biggest funeral trade magazines in America, came out with an imaginative feature titled 'How Embalmers Can Serve the laving.'

Fred Horn, cheery owner of the St James Funeral Home on Long Island (where Steven Mandell was taken for freezing) says almost convincingly: "I personally would like to see all funeral directors go out of business including me. Because that would mean we had conquered death and that would also include me. So I would take my fishing pole and go fishing for the next five hundred years."

Silting behind a mahogany desk adorned with a coloured photograph of a coffin instead of his wife and kids, Fred explained the problems of his first cryonic suspension. "First we needed ice, so someone went over to a little pub across the road called the Twilight Zone and bought some from their ice machine. You could say we bought it in the Twilight Zone and used it in the final zone.

"We used a pneumatic piston operated by an oxygen bottle to depress the heart and force blood through the body to keep the (issues in a living state. Then we drained the blood and replaced it with glycerol and a salty solution to dehydrate the body. You see the human body is just a big bag of water when you analyse it, and if you are going to freeze this bag something is going to bust. That's why we dehydrated him.

"All the time we were slowly cooling the body until a point at which the body tissues no longer required oxygen and suspension took over."

After the funeral (during which Mandell was in a coffin packed with ordinary ice), the body was transferred to an insulated metal container and the New York Cryonics Society placed a regular order for dry ice with Jolly Tim's Ice Cream Servide. They spent $500 before the body could be sealed in the cryo-capsule and someone had to replenish the ice in the container every two days.

"It's a pity you weren't here two or three weeks ago," Saul Kent told me over lunch in a New York bar. "You could have seen him. We just had him in his big metal box packed all round with dry ice. I could have lifted the lid and shown him to you. And I'll tell you something: he looked better after he had been in that box for a month than he did the day after he died.

"Hopefully," he added, rubbing his hands in anticipation, "we'll have at least a dozen bodies in capsules by this time next year." Hopefully, he could have said, he won't be one of them.

"My feeling is that if Steven is left in the capsule long enough, we will reach the technical capability to bring him back to life. He might have to stay there five hundred years, it is really impossible to estimate exactly how long. It depends what is going to happen and what institutions will be evolved to protect people in his condition-whether anyone will be interested in bringing him back, or whether they will be interested in bringing certain people back and not others. I dunno. What you can say is that if he is maintained at this temperature for a very long time his chances will improve.

"We spend all our weekends at our Laboratory for Life Extension Research over on Long Island. Say, why dontya come out on page 19 Long Island. Say, why dontya come out on Sunday?"

The Laboratory for Life Extension Research is a garage tacked as an afterthought on to a faded green wooden house in a faded suburb called Lindenhurst. The house is taken over a weekends by members of the Cryonics Society, many of whom wear something like Fascist uniforms comprising black trousers and dark blue military shirts with the Society badge stitched on one sleeve. Some even sport wide leather belts with buckles made of the initials CS.

Not much research was going on when I arrived as a Bob Dylan record all but drowned conversation. On a mattress in one corner of the room a chubby man was drawing a plan of a multiple-body capsule for the benefit of a girl in an Indian head-band who introduced herself: "Hi, I'm a pop star."

Curtis Henderson, a lawyer who is president of the New York Cryonics, spluttered a greeting and attempted to explain the multitude of legal difficulties with which he had to cope. "My motto is freeze-wait-litigate," he sprayed. "We get a lot of hasselling about who owns the body after a cryonic dies because some of our members forget to sign the body authorisation.

"We only need two things to freeze someone—the money and the body. So all a member has to do is sign the body authorisation and take out an insurance policy. If they do these two things well freeze 'em.

"Steven has a $10,000 insurance policy to cover the cost of freezing, but I think $15,000 would be more realistic. Ideally you need enough left over after initial costs have been met to provide a trust fund that will accumulate interest over the years and will pay for the cost of an attempt to bring a person back and give him some money to start with.

"One of our biggest problems is that a lot of people with money who think they are coming back want to take their money with them. The law of perpetuity says you can't tie up funds indefinitely, but we are setting up a kind of fund which we think will get round that."

The following day we all drove out to the Washington Memorial Park where Mandell's capsule is kept in a square red-brick building alongside shelves of small cardboard boxes containing human ashes. While Paul Segall, Director of Biological Research at the Life Extension Laboratory was trying to explain to a nearby grave-digger how he could perform his own experiments with mice, Harold Waitz, Director of Engineering Research at the Laboratory, checked the capsule's liquid nitrogen level.

"Say what you like about Steven's chances," he announced suddenly, "but I tell you something—they ain't coming back for sure." He cocked his thumb at the ashes.

All the macabre events and people surrounding the death of Steven Mandell have been accepted with remarkable equilibrium by his widowed mother, Mrs Pauline Mandell. In a quiet voice she told me: "I realise of course that Steven's hopes are very slim, but I feel that if there is a particle of a chance, any flicker of hope, then I think it is worth it because that is what he wanted. Even if it doesn't help Steven, perhaps it will help someone else.

"I don't have much scientific knowledge, but my son had—he studied aeronautical engineering—and he really believed it was worth while. Will I be frozen? No, I don't think so. Quite frankly, I don't particularly want to come back at another time."

Ettinger certainly disagrees with her last sentiment. In fact not only does he want to come back with his family, but is hoping that perhaps they may never have to go. "I think there is a possibility that a simple answer will be found within decades to cure old age. But if I do die I will certainly be frozen and so will my wife and children—we have made all the necessary arrangements. I believe that any attitude other than an optimistic one towards the possibility of revival is unrealistic. Assuming of course that civilisation continues to exist and we don't blow ourselves up, and given what one might call a normal progression of events, I am extremely optimistic."

Plenty of people must agree. In California now they are building large multiple-occupation capsules, one capable of holding two dozen people and the other big enough for several hundred. At Washington Memorial Park a large warehouse is to be built behind the graveyard to store capsules of the frozen dead from the New York area. And this, Ettinger belives, is only the beginning. Eventually, he says, it will become universal.

Who knows? Maybe one day poor Steven Mandell will listen once again to the Beatles-on a tape recording of his 'fondest memories' that he took with him to his deep-frozen non-deathbead.