While drinking coffee this morning I read the current issue of WIRED and came across their advice column. Usually I don’t read advice columns, but the one in WIRED is kinda interesting and this one is just to good not to be shared. Somebody wrote that their mother had just passed away and they were wondering what to do with their father, who had died a couple of years before and, thanks to his wife’s belief in cryonics, had is head cut off and stored at a cryogenics facility. Here’s a snip of the answer:
Let’s first consider why Ma put Pa on ice. Was it because she genuinely believed that a cure for death (and decapitation) was imminent and that the lovebirds would someday be reunited? That seems improbable, because she didn’t arrange for her own remains to be frozen (or “vitrified,” in cryonics industry lingo). The more plausible explanation is that your mother never made it through the five stages of grief. Maybe she got stuck on bargaining, two steps away from acceptance. Arranging for the “neuropreservation” of her husband—a process that costs $80,000 and up—probably helped her evade the terrible finality of her beloved’s death.(via Mr. Know-It-All : WIRED)
This makes a good point. Even more so as I thought that cryogenics were, well, sooo 1990s (see if you can find the documentary Synthetic Pleasures (NYT review) somewhere. It’s a great trip down memory lane. Plus: it’s very interesting to see what counted as cutting edge 14 years ago).
Funnily enough, just a couple of weeks ago a friend pointed me towards a great episode of This American Life (which I’m recently becamse addicted to, by the way) called “Mistakes were Made“, which deals with cryonics and the shady characters involved in the trade of freezing humans. It’s a great listen, if you have the time, give it a go.
Filed under: History, Science, Technology , advice columns, complications, cryonics, dilemmata, freezing, This American Life
