Weird Goals
Whenever cryonics appears in the media, it is nearly always portrayed with a certain dose of scepticism, and is paired with such adjectives as “weird”, “crazy”, “fictional”, or “scammy”. For instance, a 2015 article in the Financial Times was titled “Inside the weird world of cryonics”, a headline not too different from that of a 2016 National Post article entitled “Inside the strange world of cryonics, where people are ‘frozen in time’ with hopes of escaping death”. As anyone can independently verify through a quick Google search, similar headlines abound in the hundreds. Typically, the tone of the article is one of incredulity, often with a hint of derision and sometimes even outright contempt. The message usually goes along the lines of “there are some weird people planning to do this strange thing in order to achieve a crazy goal.”
To be fair, the plan behind cryonics—also known as cryopreservation and cryosuspension—is quite ambitious. In short, the idea is that one can preserve legally dead individuals in liquid nitrogen and store them for decades or even centuries, in the hope that future technology will not only succeed in reviving them with their mental faculties intact, but also cure the condition that led to their demise in the first place. Among people choosing to undergo cryonics (henceforth referred to as cryonicists), the most optimistic ones hope that they, once revived, will have the option of undergoing various rejuvenating treatments, allowing them (at least in theory) to live indefinitely, or at least for many more years than they would have otherwise lived. As of 2018, cryonics companies already exist in the United States and Russia. Although countries differ in their legal requirements for allowing a citizen to be cryopreserved, the option is generally open to any autonomous, consenting adult willing to pay the fee required by the cryonics provider.
So cryonics might not be the ideal icebreaker on a first date, so to speak. But weird goals are not necessarily bad or irrational goals, and investing in an unusual plan does not make anyone a bad person. Yet some of the moral objections to cryonics seem to suggest that, at the heart of the disdain towards cryonics, there may be a conflation between what is considered weird or unusual and what is considered immoral.
In this sense, scepticism towards cryonics should not come as a surprise. Most novelties in the biomedical sciences have elicited, and continue to elicit, similar reactions.
In general, it seems that the closer a technology is to interfering with issues of life and death, the stronger the scepticism or outright aversion it raises. As an illustration of this fact, it is both helpful and interesting to look at the historical change in attitude towards another kind of technology that was also considered “weird” and “immoral” at first, but that is now widely accepted—namely in vitro fertilization (IVF) with embryo cryopreservation (EC ). Despite having faced considerable initial scepticism after their introduction in 1983, IVF and EC have since found their place in the public’s sphere of acceptance and become part of standard medical practice in most countries.
Cryonics has not become as popular and is not perceived as “normal” as IVF and EC , even though it has been discussed for a very long time.1 In fact, the first real case of human cryopreservation took place in 1967, thus predating the birth of Louise Brown, the first IVF baby, by 11 years. Although the procedure was primitive by today’s standards, the patient—psychology professor James H. Bedford—remains in cryosuspension to this day.
There are several reasons why IVF and EC have fared much better than cryonics. The main reason is probably the technical complexity of cryonics: it requires far more advanced technology and knowledge to cryopreserve a fully developed person, made up of trillions of highly specialized cells, than to preserve an embryo consisting of just a few cells. But even if the cryopreservation process itself were simpler, the revival process remains incredibly difficult to realize. More than half a century after the first cryopreservation, no attempt to revive a cryopreserved patient has been made, and there is no agreement among experts about whether and when revival will be feasible. IVF and EC , on the other hand, produced reliable results soon after they were first developed, allowing them to be made publicly available rather quickly. As a result, their increasingly common use has made them look less weird and uncontroversial. Given the lack of confidence in the possibility that revival will someday become available, it is easy to understand why people choose not to invest in cryonics and keep perceiving it as weird.
But technical difficulties alone do not explain the unusual deadlock of cryonics compared to other technologies, as cryonics is surely not the first extremely ambitious plan in the history of humanity. A century ago, it would have seemed ludicrous to suggest that humans might someday visit another planet in the solar system. Since then, humans managed to land on the Moon, and now the prospect of visiting and even colonizing Mars is on the table.
One reason why there has not been as much progress in the research on cryonics is a lack of funding. Cryonics research is not supported by state funding, but is instead conducted largely by private research groups relying on private donations. This lack of funding hampers progress, and this lack of progress is, in turn, used as a reason for not investing in more research. Needless to say, one cannot be sure that more research would guarantee success; but at least it would allow a more accurate assessment of the potential of cryonics, and make it a bit less dubious whether it is a potentially successful enterprise.
In the first chapter of this book, cryonics will be frequently compared with IVF and EC . Despite the obvious anatomical differences and the (perhaps less obvious) moral differences between embryos and fully developed humans, there are a number of morally relevant similarities in how cryopreservation is applied to each of the two. For example, both practices essentially aim at interfering with natural processes—embryonic development in the case of EC and death in the case of cryonics—by using ultra-low temperatures to slow down the body’s metabolic activity.
EC and IVF carry the unique advantage of having been introduced recently enough for many readers to have witnessed first-hand the change in society’s attitudes towards the two. It took only three decades for EC and IVF to go from being seen as weird and immoral to being considered normal and, by many, good. People today who are against cryonics because it is weird need only look at the recent acceptance of EC and IVF to see that weirdness alone is a bad proxy for moral permissibility. What this consideration suggests is that, if cryonics is unethical, it must be unethical for reasons that have nothing to do with its being weird and unusual. Instead, we would need to ask whether it causes harm to individuals and/or societies, either now or sometime in the future.
Comparing cryonics to EC is also useful because it shows the enormous potential of cryopreservation beyond IVF and cryonics. In Chap. 6, we will discuss one instance of such potentiality, namely a hypothetical future technology aimed at cryopreserving human foetuses . At the moment, it is not possible to cryopreserve embryos beyond the blastocyst stage, which occurs roughly five days after fertilization, that is, when the embryo is five days old. Meanwhile, we are as far from being able to preserve foetuses as we are from being able to preserve adult humans—indeed, we are not even able to keep a foetus younger than 24 weeks alive outside the womb. We will see how cryonics, paired with hypothetical techniques that would make it possible to extract the embryo/foetus without causing damage to its tissues, could become a less controversial alternative to abortion. Given that abortion is regarded as one of the most divisive social issues in many cultures, this option would not only help women who cannot continue their pregnancy and yet do not want to abort, but would probably also help reduce the conflict between pro-life and pro-choice groups by offering a best-of-both-worlds compromise solution.
On a similar note, we will also explore the potential of cryonics as a practical alternative to euthanasia, another highly controversial medical procedure. Although euthanasia is illegal in most countries, there is a growing global movement in support of its legalization. As we will discuss in Chap. 5, so-called cryothanasia may offer a less permanent alternative to euthanasia for patients suffering from prolonged, unbearable, and incurable pain. Unlike euthanasia, cryonics does not seek to end someone’s life, but rather to pause it in the hope that future medical technology will give them a new chance to continue living.
So perhaps some technologies, including cryonics, can be used to finally overcome profound disagreements in our societies. And although such technologies often provide grounds for new conflicts between, say, the religious and the atheist, or the conservative and the liberal, we will see how technology may also be used to mend social fractures that originate in non-negotiable and irreconcilable moral views.
Starting and Ending Life in Liquid Nitrogen
Over the past two centuries , science and technology have progressed at an extraordinary speed. For better or worse, humans have gained the knowledge necessary to understand and, to a certain extent, to alter some of the most complex mechanisms governing the natural world.
One of the many groundbreaking achievements in recent decades has been the development of reproductive technology, allowing ever more control over the earliest stages of the human life cycle. Even though this kind of technology receives less public attention than many other recent feats, it has had a significant impact on society: since 1978, around 5 million people have been born thanks to in vitro fertilization (IVF). In 1983, it became possible to also cryopreserve embryos in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of −196 °C, thereby enabling prospective parents to implant their embryos long after they were conceived in the laboratory (Andersen et al., 2005; Horsey, 2006).
Given how IVF and embryo cryopreservation (EC ) tend to be last-resort options for parents struggling to conceive, it is likely that most of these children would not have been born if these options had not been available. IVF was also the first successful attempt at going beyond the traditional medical aim of “merely” saving lives by actually conceiving lif...