Cryonics—the practice of freezing human bodies in the hope of reviving them in the future—often finds its place in science fiction. While many are familiar with stories like Captain America being brought back to life after decades on ice, some individuals believe this could one day be possible. Their belief rests on the idea that if their bodies are properly preserved, future advancements in technology might be able to restore life. However, the science needed to make this resurrection possible remains far from reality. For now, cryonically preserved individuals—sometimes referred to as “cryonauts”—may be in for a much longer wait than 70 years—assuming their bodies can endure the test of time.
History’s First Cryonaut
Cryonics has come a long way since it began in the late 1960s, with significant improvements in preservation techniques. However, in its early days, many of the first frozen bodies were poorly handled, resulting in disturbing outcomes. While cryonics is often dismissed as pseudoscience, it is rooted in the legitimate field of cryopreservation—the process of using extremely low temperatures to preserve cells, tissues, and organs. This technique is used in modern medicine, for example, to store organs for transplantation. Some animals, like the Canadian wood frog, even use natural cryopreservation to survive harsh winter conditions. Despite the hundreds who underwent cryonic preservation in the 1960s, only one—Dr. James Hiram Bedford—remains preserved to this day.
Dr. James Hiram Bedford, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, passed away from renal cancer on January 12, 1967. His body has been stored at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona since 1991. At the time of his preservation, the standard method was to freeze the body directly—a process that often caused ice crystal damage. Today, however, cryonics uses vitrification, a technique that involves treating the body with ice-preventing chemicals. This allows the body to harden at extremely low temperatures without forming damaging ice crystals.
Unfortunately, the method of vitrification only emerged after considerable trial and error. Bedford’s preservation—like that of others during the early days of cryonics—was rudimentary by today’s standards. The process included injecting the solvent dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) several hours after his death, placing his body in a Styrofoam box packed with dry ice, and eventually transferring it to a liquid nitrogen chamber. Bedford’s preservation was largely made possible by the dedication of his wife and son, who took on the responsibility of maintaining his cryogenic unit. Many other early cryonauts, however, were not as fortunate and suffered from poor preservation conditions and neglect.
Cryonics in Its Infancy: A Cautionary Past
One of the earliest cryonics operations in California, run by a man named Robert Nelson, was marked by poor practices and troubling outcomes. His first four clients were not preserved in liquid nitrogen as standard cryonics procedures would later require. Instead, their bodies were simply stored on dry ice inside a mortuary. In one especially disturbing case, the son of a preserved client reclaimed his mother’s body, which then remained on dry ice in the back of his truck for an unknown period before he eventually buried her.
Nelson and a mortician eventually attempted to move the remaining three bodies into a liquid nitrogen storage capsule—but it was already occupied. The two men spent an entire night trying to fit four bodies, which may have already suffered from partial thawing, into the same unit. For about a year, Nelson sporadically refilled the capsule with liquid nitrogen until the families stopped making payments. At that point, he removed the bodies from storage and left them to thaw and decay in a vault beneath the cemetery.
A second capsule held another group of cryonically preserved individuals, but it malfunctioned without anyone noticing. The bodies inside thawed before likely being refrozen and stored again for several years. One capsule, better maintained than the rest, contained the body of a six-year-old boy. However, improper freezing caused the body to crack severely, and the grieving father ultimately reclaimed and buried his son. The capsule was then reused for another man who had died ten months earlier—but his body had already decomposed. It thawed again during storage, rendering preservation impossible.
Despite these deeply flawed efforts, Nelson’s cases were arguably in better condition than those stored in a similar underground vault in a New Jersey cemetery. There, poorly designed capsules with uninsulated piping led to frequent thawing and refreezing. This caused bodies to move, stick to the container walls, and suffer serious tissue damage. To free the corpses, caretakers had to completely thaw and refreeze them repeatedly. Eventually, system failures led to full decomposition, with remains turning into what caretakers described as a “plug of fluids.” The remains were quietly buried.
Dr. Bedford was spared the tragic outcomes faced by many early cryonics patients thanks to the dedicated care of his family. At their own expense, his relatives took responsibility for his preservation, moving his body from one cryonics facility to another over the years. His body passed through various types of frozen storage tanks before ultimately arriving at Alcor, where modern cryonic techniques are far more advanced. Alcor’s approach emphasizes not only preserving the body but also maintaining the highest possible quality of preservation.
Is It Possible to Preserve a Body by Freezing?
Preservation remains one of the biggest challenges in cryonics. While cold temperatures can significantly slow down decomposition, they cannot halt it indefinitely. Unlike food, which can only be kept fresh for a limited time in a freezer, human bodies face the added danger of ice crystal formation during freezing, which damages tissues. This means that future scientists won’t just need the technology to revive cryonically preserved individuals—they will also have to develop methods to repair the damage caused by the freezing process itself.
“There is currently no proven scientific method to freeze an entire human body to such low temperatures without utterly destroying the tissue,” explains Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist affiliated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. She adds that attempts to freeze living human tissue result in complete cellular destruction, stating, “The cell membranes are completely shattered, so there’s no evidence that anything is truly preserved because the science simply hasn’t advanced enough yet.”
In 1983, Alcor removed the heads from three cryonauts—some believe that preserving only the head is sufficient, as future medical advancements might allow for a new body to be attached. This procedure gave researchers a chance to examine the condition of the thawing bodies, but the findings were disappointing.
he warming bodies began cracking through layers of skin and fat. Blood vessels ruptured. But the insides looked even worse. Almost every organ system had fractures, including great damage to all major blood vessels around the heart, the intestines, lungs, and spleen. The third body thawed more slowly, so it looked better on the surface, but inside was even worse. The heart had fractured, the organs had severed, and the spinal cord had snapped in three places.
Hope and Uncertainty
The researchers at Alcor determined that the level of deterioration observed would require extremely advanced medical technology to address—and even then, it might not be possible to repair the damage. It’s likely that future medical approaches will involve rebuilding the body from scratch rather than trying to fix it, but such possibilities are still far from becoming reality. Despite these challenges, cryonics remains an intriguing subject, especially for those who are passionate about science fiction, hopeful about what the future holds, and willing to take any chance to prolong life, no matter how slim the odds.
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