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Life

Some people choose to be frozen at death. Here's how it happens

How do you freeze a body so that one day it could come back to life? Here's how the experts intervene within seconds to stop nature taking its course

29 June 2016

operating theatre

The operating theatre at Alcor, where new members are prepared for storage

Murray Ballard, from the book The Prospect of Immortality

Cormac Seachoy, a graduate from Bristol, UK, was just 27 when his body succumbed to metastatic cancer of the colon. He was pronounced dead on 16 December last year. Not long after, he became Alcor’s 142nd cryopreserved member. Seachoy, who had decided he wanted to be frozen after death, had planned to relocate to Scottsville, Arizona, to be close to Alcor’s main facility, but his condition went downhill too fast. “Ideally, we are there at the bedside so that we can take over within 60 seconds of the patient being pronounced dead,” says Aaron Drake, head of Alcor’s medical response team. Instead, Drake made the journey to the UK but was still in the air when Seachoy passed away. An organisation called Cryonics UK stepped in, cooling the body and administering the first lot of drugs until Drake and his team arrived.” As soon as death is pronounced, we want to mitigate as much from happening in the cells as possible,” says Drake. To do that, his team restores blood circulation using a pump to mechanically do chest compressions and intubates the patient to restore oxygen to the lungs. “We can do bloods at this point to show they are every bit as normal as a living patient, biologically speaking,” he says.

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Inside Timeship’s cryogenic revolution

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Next, the team reduces the rate of metabolism to slow decay. “We immerse the patient in an ice bath and circulate chilled water that draws heat away from the body,” says Drake. “We then administer drugs that are designed to prevent clots from forming, break up existing clots and keep a good pH balance and blood pressure. And a general anaesthetic acts to reduce metabolic activity in the brain.”

The next step is to replace all the blood in the body with medical-grade antifreeze. “We are trying to prevent any ice from forming when we take the body below freezing point,” says Drake. “We continue to cool the body and eventually everything turns into a glass-like solid.”

Seachoy’s body was held in this state using dry ice, and flown to Alcor to be stored along with Alcor’s other members in liquid nitrogen at 196 °C. Here he will remain, possibly for hundreds or thousands of years, waiting for the day that technology can treat the cancer and bring him back to life. “We can’t promise that they’ll be able to be resuscitated some day,” says Drake. “That will depend on future technologies – but if we’ve been successful and started the process within seconds of clinical death, we’ve been able to mitigate all types of cellular damage.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “What happens when you are frozen?”

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