This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine.
It's hard for me to believe, but cryonics is back in the news again. This is the practice of freezing your body, or sometimes just your head, at hypercold temperatures when you die. Experts suffuse your body with preservatives intended to make sure that freezing doesn't damage your cells, put you in a tank, and hope that someday science and medicine are sophisticated enough to figure out how to defrost you — and if it's just your head, stick it on a robot or another body — so that you will be resurrected; you will come back to life.
Obviously, the dreams of eternal life and resurrection are powerful, particularly in cultures like Western society, where we have beliefs about heaven and resurrection of the body; and the Hindu traditions of reincarnation, where you're just cycling back to life, maybe in different forms, but life is kind of eternal that way. It's been a dream of humankind for a long time to never die.
I think this cryonics movement is nothing more than a sad hoax. Even billionaires and entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel have said they're going to or have signed up for this. There are other prominent people who have done it. There are probably 300 people who have already been frozen at the facility that does cryonics, Alcor, in Arizona.
More than 1000 other people, including Thiel, have said they plan to be frozen so that they can come back to life. There are other centers in different parts of the world that are also doing this. It costs you about $200,000 to have the procedure done, and then you've got to pay an annual fee for maintaining your frozen self in one of these liquid nitrogen chambers.
Why do I say it's all a hoax? Right now, we don't know how to freeze you without doing damage. The way cryonics currently works is that, when you die, hopefully somebody gets there pretty quickly and is able to put this defrost solution into your body and then freeze you so you're not harmed. It's only seconds or minutes after death that damage to your brain and bodily cells takes place.
Unless those people are standing by and ready to jump in as soon as you're pronounced dead, there's already going to be tremendous damage to your bodily cells. You're going to be freezing something that's already damaged.
Then, even though perhaps we could freeze you, we certainly have no idea how to defrost you. If there's damage done through the freezing process - and we know there is from trying to freeze human organs for transplant and defrost them, and trying to do this in animals - then I don't care how advanced future science is; if mush goes in, mush is coming out. There's no way they're going to be reconstituting you — either your brain and your head or your body — to live 500 years or 1000 years from now.
Putting aside the technical limits, which I think are staggering, you're also going to wake up 1000 years from now in a different culture and environment. You'll have no friends and no family. You won't understand what's going on and you won't understand historical events.
I think one of the reasons not to try to do this is because you're basically creating yourself as a kind of oddity or even freak. You're going to be around as a messenger from the past. People are not going to be able to relate to you and you won't be able to relate to them. I think you're going to find yourself miserable, in a situation where you're alone and you don't really have any connection to the world that you once knew.
Forget cryonics. There may be ways, ultimately, to live longer in our present form. Regarding the idea that we can put ourselves into a deep freeze and then get woken up, defrosted, and be running around in the future without misery, suffering, and the likelihood of total failure, I bet - 100% - it's not going to work.
I'm Art Caplan, at the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Thanks for watching.
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Cite this: Arthur L. Caplan. Body Freezing Is Not the Way to the Future, Ethicist Says - Medscape - Mar 21, 2024.
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