Ted Williams was feeling ill, and his difficult breathing concerned his caregivers. The 83-year-old baseball great had a history of heart disease, and out of an abundance of caution, an ambulance was called to his home in Hernando, Fla. It was Friday morning, July 5.
The ambulance took Williams to Citrus Memorial Hospital, some five miles away. Williams was barely inside the door when his heart sputtered and stopped. The doctors could not get it beating again -- and at 8:49 a.m., the legendary Boston Red Sox star was pronounced legally dead.
Time was of the essence now.
For Williams did not want to pass on in the usual way. He wanted to be frozen -- in the hope that science some day would find a way to not only resurrect him, but to cure his disease and even make him young again. Every minute that his body stayed warm, his cells beginning to expire, was a valuable minute lost.
And there was additional urgency. Cryonics, as the deep-freezing of bodies is known, involves an elaborate series of treatments beginning with the use of oxygen, medications, and ice immediately upon legal declaration of death. No one had expected Williams to die that morning in Florida, and a cryonics team was not standing by. The fallback plan called for a mortician.
Williams was moved to a funeral home two blocks away, where the mortician packed him in ice, which would delay cell damage, and pumped an anticoagulant into his bloodstream to prevent clotting, which would have hampered a later stage of preservation. Williams, surrounded by ice inside a shipping container, was flown by chartered jet to Scottsdale, Ariz., home of the world's foremost cryonics company, Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Alcor workers brought Williams's body to their headquarters, a one-story concrete building in an office park near the airport. Two surgeons, two nurses, and several others awaited Williams inside Alcor's operating room. All were gowned and masked. The operating room looked like one at any hospital, with the notable absence of a heart monitor and anesthesia equipment.
The surgeons connected Williams to a heart-lung machine to establish artificial circulation, and technicians began filling his body with glycerol, which provides cells a degree of protection from damaging ice-crystal formation. The procedure lasted about four hours, during which William's body was kept at close to zero degrees Celsius, the temperature at which water freezes. The surgeons drilled holes through Williams's skull and inserted temperature probes. Williams was wheeled into an adjacent room, where he was placed inside a large metal box called the cool-down chamber.
In Florida, meanwhile, Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell, Williams's older daughter, had discovered the truth behind the announcement by her father's lawyer that there would be no funeral. She was angry and disgusted. Ferrell argued that Williams never wanted to be frozen, as her half-brother and half-sister claimed. On July 6, she told reporters that she and her attorney would fight to bring Williams home for cremation.
Out in Arizona, the cryopreservation of Ted Williams continued. Over the next 12 hours, the computer-controlled cool-down chamber lowered his body temperature to 79 degrees below Celsius. He was encased in an mummy-style sleeping bag, to cushion and protect his increasingly brittle body, and the sleeping bag was strapped inside a metal pod that resembled a sort of space-age coffin. The pod was returned to the chamber, and over the next several days, Williams's body temperature was lowered to 196 degrees below zero, the temperature of liquid nitrogen and the point at which virtually all molecular activity ceases.
Williams was ready for long-term storage -- in another Alcor room -- and cryonics had hit the front page. The intriguing question was posed: Does cryonics belong in the brave new world of stem cells and genetic engineering, or is it just bad science fiction?
'They are inverted'
Late last year, Alcor President and CEO Dr. Jerry B. Lemler walked through a double-locked door into a clean, brightly lit, windowless room constructed of thick concrete. A personable middle-age man with thinning gray hair and beard, Lemler was a psychiatrist in Tennessee before joining the staff of Alcor.
"Welcome," Lemler said, "this is the Alcor patient care bay, where our 53 patients in cryostasis reside."
Stainless-steel tanks of two sizes line three walls of the room: the larger size tanks -- the "Bigfoots" -- are taller than a tall man, and the others are about the height of a first grader. Known as a Dewar (after its inventor, Sir James Dewar, a 19th-century scientist who was a member of the Scotch whisky-distilling family), the double-layered tanks act like giant Thermos bottles, maintaining nitrogen in liquid form. Each Dewar is secured with a heavy padlock. The patient-care bay is equipped with monitors and alarms, and at least one staff member is on site 24 hours a day. The care of would-be Lazaruses must not be taken lightly.
Always a private man, Williams had not waived his confidentiality regarding the peculiar circumstances of his afterlife, and so Lemler would not confirm that the Boston Hall of Famer is in this strange aseptic room. But he is -- hanging upside-down in a sleeping bag in one of the "Bigfoot" Dewars.
Speaking in general of clients preserved like this, Lemler said: "They are inverted, in that the toes are up, the head is down. There's been some fun made of that by certain irresponsible individuals, but there's actually a safety reason involved: if there is a leak in the Dewar, or if the supply of liquid nitrogen for whatever reason gets held up, the first body part exposed to the air would be the toes and the last would be the brain."
Toes and limbs and the like matter less to cryonicists than the brain, which they consider the seat of identity -- and ultimately the most important organ for the future they hope to see, a future in which scientists will not only be able to bring the frozen people back, but to clone a new body.
It is this hope -- and a new preservation technique for brains, vitrification, thus far unavailable for whole bodies -- that has prompted many of Alcor's clients to decide to have only their heads preserved. Were it not for the savage difficulty of extracting a brain from its skull, only the gray matter would be preserved.
The bay contained eight "Bigfoot" Dewars: five occupied, two reserved for future residents and one serving as a 1,600-liter reservoir for the liquid nitrogen, enough to last 80 days without a delivery from the supplier. Lemler pointed to a marking on the outside of one of the bigfoots.
"See this horizontal circumferential line?" he said. "From this line down are whole-body Alcor patients, up to four in this Dewar, for instance. From this line up -- in the center of the Dewar -- are five 'neurocases,' or five heads. So the maximum total number of patients in any of our 'Bigfoot' Dewars is four whole bodies and five heads, for nine Alcor patients altogether." It is an unusually intimate coexistence for people who, for the most part, never met before their trip to Scottsdale.
Lemler drew his visitors' attention to the two smaller Dewars. "Those two containers over there," he said, "are heads only and there are eight in each of those. They are full." With the freezing of two new clients since late last year, Alcor's census last week stood at 55.
A visitor asked what the preserved heads look like. Nothing dramatically different than a person embalmed, Lemler replied.
"It takes on a little bit of a bronzer color," he said, "but other than that, I daresay you probably wouldn't know the difference."
Liquid nitrogen slowly evaporates away and so the Dewars must be regularly topped off, through an ingenious system of pipes, meters and valves connected to the reservoir. Other than that, clients require no maintenance.
"You can stay this way perfectly preserved for centuries," Lemler said.
Turning a hamburger back into a cow
Most scientists working in cryobiology, the legitimate study of the effects of cold on living organisms, dismiss cryonics as unrealistic at best, fraud at worst. They note that despite decades of cryobiological research, today, only the smallest units of life can be deep-frozen, then restored to function when thawed: human eggs, sperm and embryos, for example. More complex units involving many organs, multiple tissue layers, and trillions of cells, they say, present obstacles that science may never overcome -- and if science someday does, current freezing methods will have caused irreversible damage.
"I sometimes use the analogy that if you took a cow and ground it up into hamburger that science someday will learn to turn the hamburger back into a cow," said Peter Mazur, a pioneering cryobiologist for many years at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a professor now at the University of Tennessee. "I think cryonics's credibility is about zero."
Cryonicists do not dispute that they face uncertain odds, and Lemler and his company do not promise success. Indeed, Lemler says that the best possibility is to live until preservation techniques are perfected -- or, better yet, until medicine finds the Fountain of Youth and natural aging can be stopped or reversed. Cryonics then would be obsolete.
"The objective is to stay vertical as long as you can -- stay alive as long as you can," Lemler said that day at Alcor.
Nevertheless, Lemler imagines salvation for people already or soon to be frozen. With knowledge in the Internet Age increasing exponentially, Lemler maintains, why should it be impossible to think that scientists might even be able to revive, cure, and rejuvenate someone frozen under inferior circumstances like Ted Williams?
"Just 50 years ago, a blink of the eye in human history, if you had suffered a major heart attack, you would have been pronounced dead then and there by any physician in the world because that's all they could do," Lemler said. "Those patients were dead 50 years ago. Today they're alive, they're you and they're me, and we're walking around and living active lives."
'A dozen people just died'
One weekend late last year, more than 100 people gathered at the Marriott Hotel in Newport Beach, Calif., for the fifth Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension. Several doctors, a pilot, the CEO of a $120-million printing company, and numerous software developers were among those who attended. Most everyone was middle age or older. Men greatly outnumbered women. The big joke was that the thermostat was set so low. Cryonicists at least have humor.
During the speaking program, several lecturers described the latest developments in cryopreservation, while another, National Medal of Technology winner Ray Kurzweil, an artificial-intelligence expert, painted a future in which humans merge with computers and spend part or all of their lives in virtual reality. Kurzweil was applauded when he demonstrated Ramona, an interactive virtual woman with tight-fitting clothes and a suggestive way of moving whom he and his engineers created.
The universal themes of the weekend were a stubborn refusal to accept death and a zealous faith in science. Where others trust God to deliver them from eternal nothingness, cryonicists believe mere men can spare us the grave.
"During the time that I'm speaking this sentence, a dozen people just died, worldwide," said scientist Robert A. Freitas Jr. "There. Another dozen people have perished. I think this is an outrage!"
Freitas measured the loss of human capital of the planet's estimated 52-million deaths in 2001 at $100 trillion. The loss from so many permanently extinguished brains, he maintained, was incalculable.
"Each one of us carries within us a complex universe of knowledge, life experience, and human relationships," Freitas said. "Each individual is gifted with unique insights possessed by no one else. Almost all of this rich treasury of information is forever lost to mankind when we die."
A research fellow at California's Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and a consultant to Zyvex, a Texas nanotechnology startup company, Freitas specializes in the emerging field of nanomedicine: the engineering of molecule-size machines to cure disease. While mainstream researchers investigate the more immediate potential of stem cells and gene therapy, Freitas envisions a day when tiny nanorobots will function as vigorous new blood cells or even repair DNA damaged in the normal course of aging, a process he has dubbed chromosome-replacement therapy. Such technology would constitute the Fountain of Youth.
While nanomedicine is in its infancy, Freitas believes its wonders may be within reach of aging baby boomers. And so, his first advice is to stay healthy.
"Try to do whatever you can that will stretch out your years," he said, "because you never know. If you can buy an extra year or two -- that extra year or two might be the year or two when the breakthroughs are made."
Like Lemler, Freitas views cryonics not as the ideal approach, but rather a measure of last resort.
"You kind of use cryonics as an insurance policy," he said. "If for some reason you don't make it -- you know, you just miss [the breakthroughs] by that much, just a few years -- it's good to have that in there. I would recommend signing up for Alcor as kind of a backup."
The bill is $120,000
Mankind's yearning for immortality is ancient, and it is reflected in the core beliefs of many modern religions, including Christianity and Islam. But cold wasn't seriously contemplated as a bridge to a distant tomorrow until the 18th century. That's when the great English surgeon-scientist John Hunter froze animals and tried to revive them. His resurrection experiments all failed.
"'Till this time, I had imagined that it might be possible to prolong life to any period by freezing a person in the frigid zone," Hunter wrote. "I thought that if a man would give up the last ten years of his life to this kind of alternate oblivion and action, it might be prolonged to a thousand years; and by getting himself thawed every hundred years, he might learn what had happened during his frozen condition. Like other schemers, I thought I should make my fortune by it; but this experiment undeceived me."
Scientists after Hunter experimented with using cold to preserve life, but the movement now called cryonics was not born until 1964, when Robert C.W. Ettinger, a junior-college physics teacher and science-fiction writer from Michigan, published a book called The Prospect of Immortality. Cryonics clubs soon opened around the country, and a college professor named James Bedford became the first person to be frozen, after he died of cancer in January 1967, one month after Walt Disney passed away. The coincidence may explain the persistent myth that Disney is on ice (in fact, he lies in a cemetery in Glendale, Calif.).
This was the era of the TV show Star Trek, and of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece. In real life, astronauts were headed to the moon and computers were reaching the masses. Who knew what further marvels the future held? Who did not want to be around to see them? What a bummer to be foiled by mortality!
But the early days of cryonics were less than marvelous. Bedford's luck held and he remained frozen (he was eventually transferred to Alcor) -- but many of the early cryonauts, as they were called, fell victim to incompetence, legal challenge, and bankruptcy. Refrigeration failed, tanks leaked, and an untold number of cryonauts ended up as lukewarm ooze. Not even a visionary believed that ooze could be reassembled into a person.
Fred and Linda Chamberlain, a married couple who were prominent in the California cryonics movement, founded Alcor in 1972, naming the new company after a star near the Big Dipper -- a star that approached an acronym for what they referred to as Allopathic Cryogenic Rescue. Alcor launched its first cryonaut, Fred's father, in 1976. Alcor's second client was frozen in 1981 and its third in 1985, when the organization claimed 50 living members. Alcor credits its founders' belief in sound fiscal management with succeeding in a business that proved treacherous for most competitors. In the United States today, only the Cryonics Institute of Clinton Township, Mich., still offers preservation services and long-term freezing. In all, about 100 people nationwide are preserved -- all but five or so in Scottsdale and Clinton Township.
As it enters its fourth decade, Alcor claims some living 600 members who pay annual dues of $398 for adults and $100 for children under 18. A whole-body preservation costs $120,000, with the head-only option $50,000, fees that are ordinarily paid from the proceeds of life insurance. Members get to wear an identifying bracelet if they wish, and they are entitled to certain privileges, including having their pets frozen -- although not inside the same tanks.
Alcor does make promises. It promises a Patient Care Fund with the financial resources to maintain preservation indefinitely, security in a geologically stable region, and safekeeping in underground storage of a client's chosen possessions -- photos, CDs or movies, for example -- to help refresh memories that understandably could fade during decades in the frigid zone.
And if a member so desires, the company promises all it can to save a client, regardless of circumstances.
"Some of our members say, 'Well, if you can't really suspend my brain, if you don't find it reasonably intact, then don't bother.' " said Lemler. "There are other members who say that even if you get a thumb or a thumbnail or something, suspend whatever you find. In which case, that's exactly what we do." Lemler cited the instance of a member who died in a helicopter crash in Alaska: Alcor preserved his brain, even though it arrived in slices from the medical examiner. So far, no remains have been identified of another Alcor member who perished inside the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 -- but if identification is ever made, Lemler says, Alcor will keep its promise, even if that means freezing little more than scraps of DNA.
'We're not at all sure'
The Alcor lobby displays photographs of clients who waived confidentiality before their descent into frigid isolation. Tags reveal the name, date of birth, and date of legal death of each person. The period so described is labeled "First Life Cycle."
One photo depicts a long-haired young man with a guitar: his first life cycle lasted 29 years, ending in 1987. Another is of a 52-year-old man whose widow had attended the Newport Beach conference, where she sought reassurance that one day she would see her husband again, and not just in Scottsdale. A third photo shows Richard C. Jones, an Emmy Award winner who wrote for the Carol Burnett show under the name of Dick Claire. Jones died of AIDS in 1988, leaving one of his Emmy trophies to Alcor. Lemler delights in letting visitors hold it.
Another photo depicts Hugh Hixon Sr., a machinist whose first life cycle ended in 1981 after 71 years. He was Alcor's second cryonaut.
Hixon has an exceptional connection to Alcor: his son, Hugh Jr., 60, is the firm's longtime facilities engineer, board member, and designer of preservation equipment. The younger Hixon also belongs to Alcor's 24-hour security team -- and he lives at Alcor, in quarters not far from the patient care bay, where his father's head passes the years in "Bigfoot 5."
Although he is sometimes mere inches away, the younger Hixon does not visit Dad per se. "It's not that sort of thing," he said. "He's in a 'hospital' being taken care of and at this point there's not much point in putting an emotional investment into it. I've done what I can."
Hixon himself hopes that scientific advances will spare him from the very technology he has helped advance. "It's a desperate thing to do," he said, "because we're not at all sure it's going to work."
Still, if science does not afford him longevity in this, his first cycle, Hixon will be frozen. Either way, he hopes to bring his father back.
In what form is quite another matter.
Even assuming that nanotechnology or some other wonder could undo the damage of Hixon Sr.'s crude preservation -- could somehow recover the contents of his brain before his heart stopped beating in 1981 -- could any of his personality possibly have survived a 1972 heart attack that damaged his brain? Hixon is mildly optimistic. "The question is: was the memory gone, or was there an access problem?" he said. "There may be something there."
If there is, he could see Dad as he remembers him again. And if not, Hixon Sr. would emerge from "Bigfoot 5" as nothing but a blank brain -- but from its cells, a new being might be cloned. This is where things could get really weird.
"The possibilities are anywhere from seeing my father at the end to raising a child who would be my father's twin brother and my son both, genetically," Hixon said.
An amnesia clone of yourself
Lemler has always conducted his life from a different score. He dropped out of high school in New Rochelle, N.Y., to sing in nightclubs as one-half of a Simon and Garfunkel-like duo. He eventually earned his high school diploma, then graduated from college and medical school, after which he was a private psychiatrist for almost 20 years in Alabama. Moving to Tennessee, he continued practicing psychiatry and was chief of staff at a mental hospital. Along the way, he said, he earned his pilot's license, assisted at an exorcism, and cowrote Journey to Noah's Ark, based on one of his many trips abroad. The book reports on finding traces of an ancient boat, perhaps the biblical character's, on a mountaintop in Turkey.
Lemler knew little about cryonics until one day in February 2000, when he visited a bookstore in Knoxville and happened on a copy of K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, a seminal work on nanotechnology. In it, Drexler, who holds a doctoral degree from MIT, recommends cryonics as the bridge to the future for older people who would die before aging is conquered. This belief is held by respectable others: as the human genome yields its secrets and stem-cell, nanotechnological, and related treatments are developed, growing numbers of scientists predict a redefinition of what it means to be old.
Lemler, 53, found Drexler's vision an epiphany.
"I have always been an adventurer," Lemler said, "and to me this is the grandest adventure of all." Lemler and his wife joined Alcor in June 2000, and early the next year, he became Alcor's medical director. In September 2001, the medical director was elected president and CEO.
Lemler's early days in Scottsdale unfolded in relative peace. Then Ted Williams arrived, and Alcor became all but a household name. Cryonics stories flooded the news, and hits to Alcor's Web site, www.alcor.org, increased from a daily average of about 5,000 to 600,000 during July and August, Lemler said. Some of that interest came from Alcor's most lucrative market: Baby Boomers, who are beginning to glimpse the Grim Reaper as they wrinkle and go gray.
If future scientists can -- and decide to -- bring the frozen back to life, Lemler imagines returning to a sort of utopia. "It will be a world of fantastic wealth, of incredible technology, of traveling to stars in the galaxies -- a world in which mankind has learned not only to live with the technology, but in peace with one another," the doctor said.
Even more intimidating than the challenge of reviving frozen cells, perhaps, is the question of how much, if any, of a person's former identity could be restored. Critics are especially harsh on the feasibility of memory recovery, and Lemler concedes their point.
"You could come back anywhere from exactly who you are with all your wishes, fantasies, fears, hopes, dreams, etc.," he said, "or you might come back -- again, this is if you do come back -- as nothing more than an amnesia clone of yourself. That is, you'd have no memory of who you were back when you signed up. You'd probably be very grateful to that person who signed you up because you are a living, thinking being -- and you've been told who you were. So in a way it would almost be like being reincarnated."
Along with traveling to other galaxies, Lemler desires simple pleasures in his second life cycle. "Gosh I'd love to see my great-great-grandchildren!" he said. "It's a peculiarity with me, but tennis was my father's sport, it was my sport, and it became my son's sport. I would just love to go out and hit backhands with my great-great-grandson."
The case of Ted Williams, meanwhile, was resolved just before Christmas, when daughter Bobby-Jo Ferrell accepted a $215,000 cash settlement to drop her legal action. For the indefinite future, baseball's last .400 hitter will remain upside-down in a "Bigfoot" Dewar.
Whether he will ever step to the plate at Fenway Park again is the sort of question a cryonicist likes to ponder.
