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The Sad Mushy Popsicle Bodies of the Cryogenically Frozen

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Cryonics is a process where we stick rich people into sealed thermoses and lower the temperature down to around -190 degrees Celsius. If you need the conversion, this is like negative 370 degrees in freedom units. One thing to highlight from the start is that cryonics is not what you’d call a standard science. Some of the first people who underwent this process had to be scraped off the bottom of their capsules. Make sure to watch to the end because I’m going to talk about that happening, but we’re going to start with the real science behind freezing human bodies for possible future reanimation in a segment I’d like to call lifestyles of the rich and famous popsicles. 


Cryonic freezing is commonly and erroneously called cryogenic freezing. Cryogenics is actually a totally different thing, it’s a field of real science that studies objects at ridiculously low temperatures. The designation officially begins at -153 degrees Celsius, or 120 degrees Kelvin. Cryonics is something more akin to cryopreservation, which is another real science with a lot of practical medical implications. Cryopreservation deals with freezing single-celled biological material. This involves things like freezing your eggs for fertility treatments and family planning, it also includes freezing blood platelets for future transfusion, preserving stem cells for use at a later time, and producing gene therapies for leukemia or lymphoma. So cryopreservation is a real medical science used every day to treat and research and move medicine forward and take care of people. 


Then we have cryonics, which a lot of people in the first two fields would say is a complete pseudoscience, but the industry itself would say that it’s just an extreme form of cryopreservation, because instead of freezing just one cell, you’re freezing an entire human body, or sometimes a human head. Either way, the problem is, we don’t know how to do that. We don’t know how to freeze a whole human body, we can’t even successfully freeze anything bigger than a cell right now, or a small cluster of cells. We just froze rat kidneys and successfully thawed them out again for the very first time in 2023, and that’s an organ, but it’s not a human organ, and if we can’t freeze one organ, we absolutely can’t freeze all the organs wrapped up inside the whole human ravioli packaging and the whole bag of tomatoes it comes with. 


Cryofreeze still has way more in common with services in the wellness space right now than it does with any real science. And in point of fact, early procedures were marketed as strictly cosmetic situations instead of preservation attempts. Cryonics is a space where lots of things are being promised, a lot of the time not directly but through inference, but also it’s a space where the main deliverable is legitimately physically impossible to accomplish. And yeah, there’s a chance that could change in the future, but right now it’s not going to happen and the companies that do this to people know it’s not going to work. They sometimes say this in the FAQs on their websites. (FAQs POV be like: “Well….maybe!”)


And I’m not at all saying it’ll never work. In my opinion, it’s really really dumb to ever say that, maybe with one or two exceptions. I for one will never discount human ingenuity and curiosity and our ability to science our way into the coolest shit around. Especially when there are piles and piles of money involved. Cryonics is billionaire immortality. Some of these guys would pay any amount of money in order to have more time to spend staring at themselves lustfully in the mirror. 


So why can’t we make this work? And what happened to all the people who’ve already been frozen? The biggest problem with cryofreeze right now is all the damage to living tissue from ice crystals and how we need to deal with that. We’re talking massive, body-wide damage at the cellular level, because these ice crystals are tiny tiny and form in various parts of the cell, because we’re all made of water and when you freeze that water, it gets sharp and pointy and things like our brains really don’t like that. So after you put people in their little capsules, and these containers where people are frozen and stored are basically big insulated thermoses called dewars. Which…wait a minute, isn’t that a whiskey? Is everyone in the field of cryofreeze actually just drunk? Because that would explain a lot. 


Okay, I have a confession to make; I lied about the fact that ice crystals are the biggest problem with cryonics right now. Because the actual biggest obstacle to getting this to work at all is the fact that you can’t be prepped for cryofreeze until you are dead. Dying, death, being dead, is very genuinely the biggest problem with this process. Proponents of cryofreeze will say that industry prep teams go to work within minutes and it’s all totally fine. Unfortunately, the body really doesn’t have that long to go before irreversible damage sets in. According to the Cleveland Clinic, brain damage can start after just four minutes of reduced oxygen flow, and in this case the brain is not experiencing reduced oxygen, it’s experiencing no oxygen because it is dead. 


So this is how it works. You sign on with a company. The doctor in charge of your care tells them when they think you’re about ready to plunge into the abyss. At that point, the company sends their team from whatever nearby depot they spawn from, I don’t know, Hagen Daas, probably, and they stay close to the hospital until you code. At that point, the team packs up the body like a cooler full of beer on a fishing trip, and bags of dry ice are used to keep the patient from breaking down before they even get in the freezer. This whole initial step of packaging and transportation is possibly already too time-consuming, and it may be already too late to reanimate someone in the future at this point anyway. If by some miracle that wasn’t enough to derail the whole thing right from the start, there are still more problems to deal with. 


Clive Coen, professor of neuroscience at King's College London, told the BBC this year that cryonics is quote, “a misplaced faith in antifreeze.” I really like that. He goes on to say that it’s a misunderstanding of death and physics, and the process of decomposition would just start right back up again anyway as soon as someone’s body is thawed out. 


Though cryopreservation scientists did figure out how to avoid the formation of ice crystals in the freezing process of biological matter, therefore preserving the tissue for reanimation later. Technically in both cryopreservation and cryonics, tissues and people aren’t frozen, they’re vitrified. They undergo a process called vitrification. The liquid in your body is replaced with cryopreservatives like dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and ethylene glycol, which is a component, that yes, like Professor Coen mentioned, is in the antifreeze that you put in your car. Then the temperature in your dewar is lowered in phases. This prevents ice crystals from absolutely devastating the tissues of the human body. The process nowadays is totally ice-free, so no hope anymore of drinking your Dewar’s on the rocks. 


But the biggest problem is still the death thing. And this’ll never work until we figure that out. Or will it? 


Anna Bagenholm is a Norwegian woman who survived a skiing accident in 1999, and she’s a super famous medical marvel of a case that’s often pointed to by cryonics and longevity proponents. Anna broke through the ice into freezing water where she was held for 80 minutes. Forty minutes in she had a heart attack and died. Three hours after she fell through the ice, and about two and half hours after her heart stopped completely, she was resuscitated, and went on to make a full recovery. In 2009 it came out that she was having minor symptoms in her hands and feet related to nerve injury, but that seems to be the extent of any long-term effects. 


What the cryonics people miss about this incredible medical story is that Anna was getting CPR the whole time, starting from when rescuers were finally able to get her out of the ice to the time she was hooked up to a ventilator in the hospital. CPR was giving her brain oxygen, and since her metabolism had slowed down to almost nothing from the low temperatures, she didn’t need much of it to maintain survivability. But the people in the pods, the frozen popsicle people, they aren’t sealed up with a second person in their little tubes who are doing chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth for potentially hundreds of years until they’re revived. And, the reasons Anna miraculously survived are really an educated guess, we don’t actually know 100% what happened, and there’s no way to repeat that kind of experiment over and over again until we do know. 


Alright, we have Anna, who was naturally frozen and reanimated. Let’s talk about the people who are unnaturally suspended into frozen fish sticks and what their fates have been. 


The first person ever cryonically frozen was an anonymous woman from Los Angeles. We still don’t know her identity even today. She was frozen in 1966 by the now-defunct Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation. She was plopped into liquid nitrogen without the use of any cryopreservatives at all and stuck in cold storage at temperatures just above freezing. Just one year into that whole thing, her family ended up taking her out of the capsule to bury her. 


The second person cryonically frozen was James Bedford, a psychology professor at the University of California. He died from metastatic kidney cancer in 1967 and paid $100,000 to be frozen by the now-defunct Life Extension Society, and he’s now stored at Alcor, which is confusingly formally named the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Bedford is the only person frozen before 1974 that’s still frozen now. Yeahhhhhh……


Alcor is one of the bigger and most well-known cryonics company, and they’ve managed to stick around where lots of other companies have come and thawed out…... In the early days, the model for generating revenue didn’t make a lot of sense, because the people who the companies would be charging to freeze them were the people who were frozen. So generating a stabilizing income was a little challenging, because the frozen popsicle people weren’t like, going to the ATM. 


And that was okay, I guess, because early cryogenics operations were just the wild west anyway. If you had paid good money back in the '60s and '70s to go through this, there was no guarantee that you wouldn’t be accidentally thawed out at any random time, possibly thrown away like trash or just forgotten, or the subject of multiple failures that made sure you could never be reanimated in even the best of cases even if you were technically still frozen. 


I mean back then it was basically just one guy doing this as a hobby. We’re talking like Mr. Freeze and the Crypt Keeper rolled into one. Patients in those days really did not have a lot of hope of ever being reanimated. We’re talking people who were frozen as an afterthought, or not even remotely in time or with any logic involved. In one case, a man was kept in a mortuary freezer for a year before they could get him in a capsule. In another case, a woman was autopsied before being frozen, which is like what? But not only that, she was hauled around in her son’s truck bed for a while that he’d just filled up with dry ice. In another case, a teenage daughter who’s father died suddenly dug the man up out of his grave with a backhoe to stick him in a capsule at CSNY. One young boy who was frozen too fast seems to have physically shattered. A man in Nederland, Colorado named Bredo Morstol was cryonically frozen by his grandson but taken out of his facility and stored in a shed in the backyard under dry ice. After it was found that you can’t store dead people in your shed in town, a brief legal kerfuffle followed that resulted in mass media coverage of the situation which then led to the creation of an annual festival there called Frozen Dead Guy Days. In 2023, Bredo was moved to the Stanley Hotel’s ice house in Estes Park, which is now the site of the world’s only museum of cryonics. 


The stories go on and on, but the most incredible, haphazard, bafoonery I’ve seen comes from a guy named Robert Nelson. Nelson would be responsible for the Chatworth Cemetery incident, which is apparently the biggest horror story in cryonics even today. 


Nelson led one of the three main original groups. There was the Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, the Cryonics Society of California in Los Angeles, and the Cryonics Society of New York, which was the organization that first coined the term cryonics. But it was the Cryonics Society of California, the CSC, that was helmed by Robert Nelson. Nelson started out by initially freezing James Bedford before shortly handing him over to the family. And normally back then this would be a major failure point and possible thawing event, but his Bedford’s son was unusually diligent and this is why he’s the only person still frozen from those early days. 


Nelson began by keeping bodies on dry ice at a mortuary. It wasn’t too long before that situation became untenable and he was kicked out. Cryo-Care, which had stepped out of the game because their president realized there was no money in cryonics, made their own capsules and they were storing one at CSC because their rates were the lowest. So what Nelson did was that he cut that capsule open and stuffed his frozen popsicle people in with the guy who’s capsule it was, and after somehow managing to fit all these people inside like puzzle pieces, welded it back up. Of course, this took hours, and there’s no way the bodies stayed frozen that whole time. And then, Nelson bought a cemetery vault that opened from above and he stuffed the capsule down in there. The capsules had to be refilled periodically with liquid nitrogen because of course they didn’t figure out how to seal these things so they didn’t leak. Nelson said in a court document that he’d been maintaining the capsule out of the kindness of his heart because the families of the four bodies inside had stopped paying him. About two years after he’d bought the vault, it looks like he just stopped showing up to refill the liquid nitrogen and the bodies inside thawed out. He also had a second capsule in there that leaked too quickly because the vacuum tubing failed, and in that capsule, of course he’d combined multiple patients transferred from other capsules and facilities, and this one included an 8-year-old boy who’d died of leukemia. 


It was at this point that the press got wind of things, and supposedly, they went to the cemetery and forced the vault open. This was 1979 and Nelson’s operations had all failed by now and he’d cleared everything out, so they didn’t find anything except a stench that quote, “strips away all defenses, spins the stomach into a thousand dizzying somersaults.” 


CSC would fold soon after as the lawsuits would arrive. The court ruled Nelson liable for a million dollar fine, but he ended up paying nothing except $18,000 in attorney fees, while his partner paid out $400,000 from his insurance. The worst part of all of this is that Nelson had helped a handful of people set up their own in-home or in-cemetery cryonics operations, and those people would go on to maintain their own frozen family members, negotiate and accept deliveries of liquid nitrogen, and all the rest, all on their own. Obviously not the most ideal of operations just done by regular people. In one of these cases, Nelson helped a man named Nicholas DeBlasio store his wife Ann, who they set up in a cemetery in New Jersey in 1971. Of course, she was also not alone as seemed so often to be the case in the early days, and she had someone else frozen by CSC in there with her. This particular dewar was designed so that you could refill the liquid nitrogen without having to open it up, but that also meant that the tube structure let more liquid nitrogen boil off than other capsules did, and the lid also frosted over. They had to break the ice off the lid with a hammer, which eventually led to the failure of the entire capsule after multiple attempts to restore it. At one point they even had to take the bodies out to fix it when they had become stuck to the capsule like a child’s tongue on a metal post in the winter time. Of course, this resulted in the bodies thawing out completely, and they still decided to keep trying, and froze them all over again. And then when they finally gave up because they couldn’t maintain the capsule, that’s when they had to scrape what one industry professional called “a plug of fluids” off the bottom of the capsule that had once been people. They did this with help from a local mortuary and then gave back the capsule so it could be repurposed for someone else. 


These days there are less horror stories. Probably because there’s money in the field now. Technology has improved drastically, and the number of participants has climbed. There are two main players in the space now, Alcor we’ve talked about, and the Cryonics Institute. There are also companies in Russia and China. 


Not a lot of exact figures from trustworthy sources, but possible that there are about 500-600 frozen people right now, along with a couple dozen pets, including one chinchilla named Button. Companies charge differing rates, but it seems to cost on average about $200,000 to be frozen, and that’s not counting monthly fees and annual membership dues. 


Cryonics is just a wildly romantic concept for humanity. And I mean romantic in the old-timey sense, where it meant like fantastical and filled with awe-inspiring wonder, like a Jules Verne or H. G. Wells story was called a scientific romance before science fiction was a real genre. Humanity is highly obsessed with making concepts from science fiction exist in reality. Cryofreeze is probably one of the most highly pursued and widely anticipated of those concepts. Maybe only second to teleportation, and that little box on Star Trek that could just make whatever you wanted to eat or drink. I want that thing. 


And while it may be possible to bring someone back from cryofreeze in five hundred years, a thousand years, more, we certainly can’t do it right now, and there’s also the whole problem of having your descendants agree to keep paying for you to be frozen for that long. In 1983, Alcor had three patients transition from a full body freeze to what’s called a neuropreservation. This is where just the head is frozen, and this is done to save on costs and it’s also just easier to sustain. They had to decapitate the patients with a chainsaw since they were rock solid, but after that they went to work to figure out just how difficult it would be to reanimate someone, using the bodies of these people. What they found was that when the bodies began to thaw, multiple insurmountable mechanical errors showed up in the physiology. While everything looked fine while they were still in the meat freezer, upon thawing, they found multiple giant cracks that ran deep, fractures in almost every organ including the heart and the intestines, one spinal cord was broken in three pieces. Alcor documented all this and you can read about it in a link in the description, and what they also said at the time was that there was no way to see what was happening at the molecular level, but they predicted the bodies were equally destroyed there, too. The company’s take seems to be that the problems with the freezing technology aren’t necessarily current obstacles at all, but issues that future technology will work out and have repair mechanisms that can make people whole again at some hypothetical distant time. 


As the CEO of Tomorrow.bio says, which is a newer entry in the space, "I can't say how high the probability is. But I'm pretty confident in saying the probability is higher than cremation, if nothing else." 


Someday, we might figure out whether or not we can bring back our friends, family, and Button after stuffing them inside a giant thermos full of liquid nitrogen. Until then, I’ll see you guys at the bar crawl during Frozen Dead Guy Days in Colorado this Spring. Stay frosty.





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