The Prospect of Immortality

A 46 year-old computer programmer named Thomas Donaldson from Sunnyvale, California is trying to make legal history. He is suing the State of California, claiming his inalienable right to have his head chopped off, dipped in streaming liquid nitrogen at -320^o F, deep-frozen, and placed in a metal storage cylinder. The State of California thinks this might kill him. He insists it will not.

The legal problem, the least of many problems one might think, is that to aid and abet someone in committing suicide is a crime in California. Alas, the fellow needs help in his enterprise because its a bit of a stretch to do it alone. And the technicians who will assist in this process wish to be indemnified in advance by the courts. Hence the lawsuit, just one of many in our litigation-daffy society.

Perhaps I had better explain.

Mr. Donaldson has an inoperable brain tumor, which is growing steadily and which will eventually snuff out his life, in its own good time. To short-circuit this inevitability he wants to engage in a kind of preemptive strike. Ordinarily this would mean an early suicide--but not in this case. This thoroughly contemporary Californian is a believer in cryonic suspension. This is a process whereby a recently deceased individual is immediately frozen, hopefully to be revived at some point in the future when science discovers the cure for whatever it is which killed the person in the first place. The faith is that a body so preserved by deep-freezing can be revived and restored to health by some imagined future science. And so, from this fellow's point of view, what he contemplates is not suicide, but merely suspended animation.

There is a whole movement of cryonicists afoot in the land. It all started with a 1964 book by a Michigan physics professor by the name of Robert Ettinger (the title of which I have lifted for this essay). Ettinger theorized that someday we could freeze people in an indefinite cryonic suspension, wait until we discovered a cure for whatever it was that killed them, thaw them out, cure their disease, and, viola, human beings could thus become nearly immortal. (I remember reading Ettinger's book back in 1964, as a mere wisp of a youth, and thinking, as only the young can do, that all this stuff seemed perfectly logical to me.)

This all started with a 1960 experiment in which scientists successfully deep-froze chicken sperm, thawed it out, and used it to fertilize chicken ova. By 1990 a team of Japanese scientists were able to announce that they had successfully frozen water fleas for two weeks and successfully revived most of them. And that represents the current state of the art, from chick sperm to water fleas in 30 short years! Along the way, a few experiments with certain varieties of small frogs have encouraged scientists to think anything may be possible.

You can't be serious, you might be thinking. Au contraire, not only is this serious, an entire industry has sprung up catering to the freezing of the recently departed. In Riverside, California a company called ALCOR presently has 13 clients stuffed in metal freezing cylinders of two sizes. In the large cylinders are the frozen whole-bodies of four people, the oldest being a Southern California psychology professor frozen in 1967. In the eight smaller vats are the heads of eight other would-be aspirants to immortality. After all, if some future science can bring a frozen whole-body back to life it shouldn't be any big deal to do it from just a head. The going rate for a full-body freeze is $100,000. A simple head preservation can be had for about $35,000.

The logic here runs like this: If you are dead, or are about to be dead, anyway, what's to lose? You might as well be frozen, and if it works you get to live again, and if it doesn't, well, you're no worse off than you would be anyway. As logic, it has a certain appeal. But there are several problems. Consider first a few practical matters.

I dislike being cynical about the motives and nobler aspirations of my fellow human beings, but I confess to a certain worry here. It is certain to be decades, if not centuries, before the hoped-for future science materializes. The patrons know this, and the contract is that the companies in question will maintain the mortal remains in indefinite cryonic suspension until such time as science can support their revival. But what kind of legacy will it be which is passed down to the heirs of the present owners of these companies long after the present owners themselves have died (or been frozen)?

Assume your great-great- great grandfather contracted with someone 200 years ago to serve as a faithful custodian of their frozen head. How much moral or legal obligation will you feel to carry on the family tradition? In India a caste system dictates you will work in the same occupation as your great-great-great grandfather. But can you imagine being forced into this same kind of caste bondage by the presence of a collection of rusting metal canisters in the family garage?

Or take the pedestrian topic of money. One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money today, but how much value will it have in 200 years? At the current rate of inflation, one hundred thousand 1990 dollars will be worth about 28 dollars and 46 cents. Will ALCOR circa 2190 be pleased to continue paying the electric bill on an obligation worth about 28 dollars and 46 cents to the company, especially when today's $100/month electric bill will have risen to over $255,000/month by then?

Or just consider the multitude of mishaps which can happen over the course of 200 years or so. Riverside, California you say? No earthquakes to upset the apple cart in the next 200 years? No power failures? No one accidentally kicking out the plug or putting the wrong solution in the vat or forgetting to put the lid back on? The place couldn't possibly burn down could it? Or be the target of fundamentalist vandals? Or fall victim to an employee who loses their mental balance after a few decades of hanging out with a collection of frozen heads? You ever hear of Murphy? Immortality is a risky business.

There are of course even more weighty practical matters. To take one example: it is not yet totally understood how memory is encoded in the human brain, but it is known to be some combination of fleeting patterns of electrical activity along with relatively stable chemical changes. Freezing a dead brain may well wipe clean most of its memories. (Science has never demonstrated the persistence of complex associative memories in a frozen and revived critter--even frog memories are more fragile than that.) And without my memories it is not so clear I am still me. What sort of me would it be if my mind were a tabla rasa and I were just the same body that used to carry around my cart full of memories? There are such people, they are victims of Alzheimer's and similar diseases whose minds become funnels pouring out their contents until very little is left that is recognizable as the person they used to be. After all, the whole point of this dreamy exercise is for ME to survive death. I doubt if any of the pioneering frozen heads are really all that interested in coming back just to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the process. No, it's that I want to survive death. Me. The me I think of as me, here and now.

So while the person may someday reawaken, they might do so as a child, or as an idiot, or as someone else, which may not be exactly what they had in mind.

Also, imagine the searing psychological stresses of the time-warp involved in awakening in a different world than the one you left the last time you were conscious. Those plaintive World-War II era Japanese soldiers who periodically come out of hiding from some jungle somewhere to see how the War turned out, suffer enough readjustment stress from a 45-year time warp. Can you imagine a world 200 years different than the one you left? What if the culture of the distant future no longer even speaks the language you learned, or uses the math you know, or stills possesses any of the technology with which you are familiar. Are you prepared to be a 46 year-old kindergarten student?

If Tom Donaldson does in fact reappear in this world 200 years or so after his death, everyone he knows will have long since departed. No family, no friends, no coworkers. The celebrities and authorities and everyone who constitutes his world will be no more. There will be a whole new set of players, all of whom are strangers to the new Tom. It's the web of human relationships which gives life on earth its emotional pull; it is the loss of this interconnectedness with the familiar which is one of the things we most fear about death. Even people who live to the outer edge of (single) human life spans often complain about how impoverished their worlds have become because everyone they knew has died. Of course you can make new friends in the future, but you will not have a mother or a father or brothers or sisters. Someday, I suppose, if immortality becomes common, mom and pop and all your friends will be around with you forever, but for those first intrepid voyagers in time, everyone they knew will be no more and their world will be frightfully barren. I fear this might not bode well for the sanity of the recently-thawed. And where, by the way, will we put all those people if everyone who has ever lived lives forever? Would we stop having babies and the population of the Earth would be frozen in place, the same cast of characters, to go through eons of time together?

But these are all practical matters, and what are practical matters when immortality is at stake. There may be deeper problems however.

It is by no means obvious that any future science can ever have the kind of power required. Recent scientific studies have concluded that there may be an inborn limit on human life spans. During the last 90 years the average life span in America has risen from 49 years to 75 years, but almost all of this increase is attributable to a decrease in infant mortality--which raises the overall average. In fact, if the leading causes of death for adults were magically eliminated this would only raise the average life span from 75 to 82. Scientists now seriously theorize that 82 may, on average, represent the upper limit of human life--no matter what any future science may discover. This limit may be programmed in the very structure of our DNA in the form of an inborn limit on the number of times the genetic material of our cells can divide and reproduce itself before the coding becomes too garbled to support life.

There is another cold fact about our Lazarusian dreams: Even in the laboratory tests Ettinger and his kin cite as evidence of what is possible, the spark of life has never been extinguished beyond doubt and then relit. No one, for example, has ever chopped the head off of one of those frogsicles, thawed it out, and regenerated a living frog. That's the hoped-for part of this hoped-for future science. What they have done is lower the body temperature of a whole frog to a point where no signs of life are evident, then thawed the frog out and revived it. This may not be quite the same thing.

There is also a little matter of some implicit philosophical assumptions here. Consider the implications of a standard religious view of man and of the essence of life. In most religious traditions, something like an immaterial soul is the animating principle in human life. Death is explained by the soul departing the body. If this is in fact what life is and what death is, then thawing out a frozen body and removing its maladies can hardly be expected to call the departed soul forth to reanimate the corpse. And how silly the whole enterprise must look to the dear departed, if in fact this is how the universe works.

Now of course, one can obviate this worry if one throws in with the materialist theory of life which holds that life is nothing more than a chemical reaction in a collection of suitably arranged molecules. If life is just an organized collision of molecules, then arranging a new collision down the road of time, may prove possible. The hint that this might be possible for some hoped-for future science comes from decades-old experiments which succeeded in creating the building blocks of life from a rich chemical soup bearing no traces of organic life. What the scientists did was to take a vat of chemicals, manipulate it in certain ways, and produce amino acids, which are the bricks which go to make DNA and other organic molecules essential to life. But to tell the truth, this achievement suggests the ability to create life in a test tube about like a brickyard taking water and sand and forming it into a brick and taking this as evidence that they could build the Empire State Building. But here again, we can always imagine that some future science will actually succeed in kindling the spark of life, assuming life is just a crystallized collection of molecules. I won't argue the case either way. I think it important, however, that we are honest about our implicit assumptions here.

There is a fundamental logical dishonesty in the way we speculate about what some future science may be able to provide--we use this promissory note as a blank-check here whenever the going gets tough and we need a trumping move to make the enterprise continue to have some plausibility. Because the future is undefined, we can always imagine it to contain anything we like; but the only truth history shows us is that the future is never what we imagine. There are lots of universal laws governing what any future science may be able to do--there are parameters the universe sets on our meddling. Among these laws may be limits on how long we can live, and on our ability to resurrect the dead. Just because we don't know what the future holds, this is not equivalent to saying we can make it hold anything we desire.

I know, I know, all of this can just be so much yard mulch for those desperate to go on living. Personally, I don't understand the compulsion. I like life just fine thank you, but I prefer to do my time and go on to other things. And if there are no other things, then I prefer to do my time and be done with it. Hanging around Planet Earth in this fleshy form indefinitely, strikes me rather like wanting always to stay in first grade because its warm and familiar. But if that's how you want to spend your time . . .

For those of us who are not already committed to the long deep-freeze, but who fear we may fall prey to its siren song, I offer this final advice. Whenever you find yourself tempted by thoughts of storage in liquid nitrogen, remind yourself of a few simple facts. I give them to you in the form of a mantra which you can recite whenever you feel the need: LIFE IS REAL. LIFE IS EARNEST. LIFE IS SHORT. Whenever thoughts of immortality begin to fever your brain, silently repeat: LIFE IS REAL. LIFE IS EARNEST. LIFE IS SHORT.

Perhaps it isn't fair, perhaps it proves Gods perversity, but that's the way it is.