Cryopreservation to Wait for a Cure Is Crackpot Science but Is Still Being Promoted, Says Ethicist

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.