Daily Express Friday, 20 January 2006
ALAN SINCLAIR, 67, a retired electrical engineer, is married to Sylvia. 54, a housewife. The couple have. four grown-tip children and live in Peacehaven, East Sussex. This is his story.
WHEN I die a team of specialists will rush to my bedside and pump me full of a special type of anti-freeze. This will prevent my body from shattering as it is immersed in liquid nitrogen. The same think will happen to my wife when she passes away.
Our bodies will then be put on a plane to Arizona where we will be stored at almost minus 200C in a tank that looks like a huge thermos flask. We will be kept there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years until advances in medical science eventually mean we can be brought back to life.
Sylvia and I are among a growing number of Britons who plan to achieve immortality thanks to "cryonics", which is a form of cryogenics. People may say it's gruesome but I think this idea is really going to take on. After all, who doesn't want to live for ever? The thought of being brought back to Life is surely one of the most exciting concepts in medical science.
I began putting £112 a month into an insurance policy 10 years ago to pay for my body to be frozen and then resuscitated although no one knows if that will be enough to cover it all. The longer I live, the more the whole thing will have cost me.
If you are buried or cremated that's the end of the matter. But if doctors can preserve your body, it's just a case of waiting until the time is right to wake up again. It might take 50 years or it might take 1,000 but I'm confident it will happen at some point.
Part of the reason I'm doing this is because I fear death. Most people don't want to die and I am one of them. Since I have signed up I am less concerned about what happens to me because I feel I have a second chance at life.
My four children are very supportive of the idea. They, like me, think it's a sensible step to take, a reasonable gamble, although they haven't signed up for it yet. It's strange to think that I might be alive in 200 years time when they are dead. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will work. But if you don't have your body frozen, you have no chance.
Advances in medical science over the next couple of hundred years might also make it possible for me to come back at any age I like. Imagine being able to wake up again as a young man. If doctors are able to bring me back in the first place then surely they can also rejuvenate my body, regardless of what age I am when I die. There would he no point in reviving a 90year-old crippled with arthritis, would there?
If I become seriously ill before I die, information on my dog tag will inform the doctors who revive me and, hopefully, by then they will be able to cure such things as cancer.
However doctors - or society at large - may decide not to bring me back and there's nothing I can no about that. But, I'm willing to take that risk too.
My fascination with the subject started 20 years ago, when I saw a TV programme about cryonics. I knew that firms in the US had been offering this service for many years so I started to investigate the possibility of having it done in the UK. Thecy advertised the telephone number of an American company called Alcor on the programme and, after speaking to them, I set. up a group called Cryonics UK.
We have regular meetings and have developed our own "standby" team, with the help of an undertaker, to perform the freezing process. We have a trailer with all the equipment we need and the simple process can be carried out at home or in hospital. Experts from the US have come over to train us in the "embalming" process and once you have txeon frozen you are transported to the US to be stored. There are only four organisations, including Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, that offer storage services but as yet none exist outside the US.
As yet there's no professional body in the UK offering cryonics because there arent enough people signed up to meet the cost so our group has to be run on a voluntary basis.
People may think it's like a science fiction film such as Demolition Man, in which Sylvester Stallone is cryogenically frozen and then "thawed" out in the 21st century. But I believe science fiction follows real life rather than the other way round.
In 1984, physicist Robert, CW Ettinger wrote a book called The Prospect Of Immortality which would change the way we look at death for ever. It is a very simple concept that uses a well-proven idea that low temperature preservation, or cryopreservation, might be a way for the dying patients of today to gain access to developments in medicine later on "an ambulance to the future" so to speak.
We know that embryos and small organs can be cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen (minus 190C) and we know DNA survives well because of so-called test-tube babies. Last year in Cambridge a doctor took a liver from a rabbit, froze it for a week and transplanted it back into the rabbit, which survived.
Cryonics is the name given to the process of maintaining patients at low temperature for future revival. It is controversial because freezing an entire body is not yet reversible. Although many cells remain viable and are able to resume function after freezing and thawing, the ice crystals that form between cells can cause extensive damage. You can reduce this damage as far as possible with cryoprotectants, a form of human anti-freeze.
I would say that interest in cryonics is growing. We are contacted through our website by all sorts of people, ranging in age from 20 to 70. In the US four or five people a year are frozen and worldwide there are about 1,000 people who have signed up for the process.
I have already helped with the preparation of one man from England. So far, he's the only person from this country to have been through the process. His family don't want too many details given out but I can tell you that it happened about 10 years ago in a London hospital.
He was an elderly man who died from cancer so we had about 12 hours notice. When he died in hospital, the doctor immediately moved him into a private room. I was part of the standby team that helped get his body ready. With the help of an undertaker, we had to feed special fluid into his arteries, which is not dissimilar to the embalming process. It was peaceful and clinical, and the man was flown out to Arizona and placed in a tank the same day. He paid in the region of £75,000 through his life policy for the process.
When you sign up for cryonics you have to fill in a form saying that you want to leave your body to medical science, otherwise we could have a legal problem when it comes to accessing the body. We have all sorts of people in our group.
There are around 10 of us in the team and we meet every couple of months to practise using the equipment for the suspension system. The people I know who plan to be frozen after they die range from dustmen to vicars.
Some people regard me as a bit of an eccentric for being involved in cryonics but, when they hear the details and the logic behind it, they begin to realise it could be a viable option. Naturally, there's opposition and some doctors I have spoken to think it is a complete waste of time and money. Other are quite supportive and even fascinated by the process. We do have doctors involved within our group, which gives us moro authority. I think gradually the medical profession is coming round to our way of thinking, although many doctors will never recogniuse it as a viable process unit/ someone is actually brought bark to life.
Some people criticise what we are doing on religious grounds, saying we are cheating death, but I tell them that we are just redefining it. It's no different from the fact that, 80 years ago, you'd probably die if you had a heart attack but now doctors can bring you back from the brink.
Some people also think that cryonics will cause difficulties for friends and family because they can't complete the grieving process, but I believe the opposite to be true. The possibility that I could come back at a later date should soften the blow for my children when the time comes. The only thing that worries me slightly is, if your family had received a big payout from a life insurance company when you died, would you have to pay it back when you returned?
It's nice to think that, because my wife has the same policy, after I die we could be reunited at some stage in the future. It's all rather romantic, really I know of one man in the US who signed up with tus wife but after she died and was frozen he married again. His second wife signed up, too, which could leave him in a bit of dilemma if all three of them come back at the same time!
I like to think of the whole process as something akin to the Egyptian mummies who were preserved thousands of years ago. They can't be brought back to life but who's to say we won't be able to be? Think of the advances in technology we've seen in the past century. If we can put people on the Moon it's only a matter of time before we can bring people back to life and I want to be one of the first to be born for a second time.
• More inforntation is available from http://www.cryonics.uk.com