Cryopreservation: 'Crackpot Science' but Still Promoted

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Let me tell you about a case that I recently learned of.

A patient was dying at a hospital up in Canada in Kingston, Ontario. She was dying of breast cancer that had disseminated throughout her body. The woman was 79 years old. The cancer was in her breast and had spread out to her lungs and other organ systems, and she knew that she was going to die.

The physician reported to me that her son had read about cryopreservation, which is the idea of freezing your body so that someday you might be, if you will, loosely, defrosted and then brought back so that future scientists and doctors could cure your disease and allow you to resume life.

He thought this was very strange and he hadn't really heard about it before. We had a situation where he wanted to know if that was ethical to even raise this prospect with this gentleman's mom. She, by the way, decided to do it. I know it cost them about $30,000.

Not to get grim about it, but what happened was, shortly after death, she was taken to a funeral home, and the process by the company that does this is called deanimation. The blood is drained out of your body, and you're basically infused with a kind of crude antifreeze to preserve your cells so that when they freeze you, hopefully the cells don't get damaged.

You're then dropped down to a very, very low temperature; put into a container with the brain and body preserved with these cryoprotectants, hopefully stopping ice formation; and then off you go into a facility where, if you keep paying your fee, your body will be frozen apparently to eternity.

I think this is crackpot science. It borders to me on deceiving people. Why? There are so many steps here that would have to come true in order to make this a possible, practical answer to death. We don't really know how long you can wait after death until you freeze a head and a body. We do know that the brain is very sensitive to losing oxygen.

Not only does the person who's being sent off to this hoped-for voyage into the future have diseases, but also they are in a situation where you're testing out, if you will, hypotheses that the brain probably will be functional enough despite going without oxygen for a period of time to get restored.

Then hopefully, the cryopreservation idea will work, and you won't damage cells when you freeze and defrost, which is a real problem these days even in trying to deal with human eggs. We freeze them, but often, many get destroyed because the defrosting process harms the cells.

To put it bluntly, I don't think we have the technology to know how to do this. It's a gigantic experiment. I think it's being sold as a path to live forever, or at least to come back later, but I don't believe there's any science that would back that idea now. Even in the future — sorry to put it this way — but trying to restore mush and then cure the disease that killed you at the age of 79 seems to me incredibly optimistic, deceptive, and just wrong.

Happily, there aren't that many people trying this. By the way, I should add that some people do it, but they only freeze their heads. I won't go into the grimness of that. The idea of wanting to live forever, I think, is very interesting. It is something we hear about often as people try to pursue anti-aging interventions. This is probably the most extreme.

I would ask everybody to think about this. If your patients ask you about this or someone brings it up in casual conversation, let's assume it worked. Let's assume 200 years from now, you would get defrosted and your disease that killed you would be cured. Maybe even at age 79, they'd be able to give you some sort of intervention that would make you more youthful. It would still be a rather emotionally demanding and, I think, terrifying existence.

The people you know are all dead. Your relatives are all gone. Your friends are gone. Presumably, they didn't take the path to cryopreservation. You're living at a time where you don't understand the technology. You don't know what's going on. Many of the things that you enjoyed in your life have been replaced by other kinds of interventions.

I think you'd find yourself isolated and almost living a freakish life as someone who was put forward in a different time. Imagine what it would be like for us to go back 300 years and say, "I'm alone and I don't know people, but now, I'll start existing and being a citizen in the 1700s." Maybe you'd be interested to see what was going on, but I think that would wear pretty thin.

In essence, I'm not going to say death isn't reversible, but I'm going to say that if you're banking on being able to come back to life far into the future, I don't think you're going to find cryopreservation the rewarding experience that's being sold to people today.

I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU's School of Medicine. Thank you for watching.

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