MirrorUK: Knowing she had only weeks to live rather than her whole life ahead of her, a dying schoolgirl desperately turned to cryogenics in the hope she could one day be brought back.
Described as a “bright, intelligent young person”, the tragic 14-year-old spent her last months fervently researching how she could be frozen until a cure is found for her rare form of cancer in the future.
But as she ran out of time, her divorced parents were locked in a bitter battle about what to do with her remains.
Too young to make a will, the teenager went to court to protect her dying wish.
In a heartbreaking letter to the judge, she said that while she did not want to die, she had accepted her fate. read more
The freezing is the easy part; it’s the thawing-out that’s a bitch. Just ask Han Solo!
If you read the article, it says she wasn’t actually frozen until EIGHT DAYS post-mortem.
At that point, you’re no longer freezing anything that has any hope of revival. Her central nervous system has already turned into soup.
I’ve had autopsies that were conducted less than a week post-mortem, and the brain is already disintegrating (not to mention the other organs, kidneys and liver in particular) and that’s on bodies that were stored at refrigerator temperature in the morgue within a hour of death.
*IF* whatever this girl’s disease was is eventually cured, they can thaw out her sack of rotting meat, have nothing to preform treatment on, and bury her. Until then, her family can pay through the nose for a very expensive method of delaying her burial.
If we’re going to do cryonics, and I have no problem with it if that’s what people want to do, then it needs to be done in such a way as to conceivable produce results. But this? These people should be sued out of existence and imprisoned. They are taking this family’s money, and giving nothing but false hope in return.
They’re no better than any other fraudulent snake-oil salemen.
So, there’s 14 year old girls who have enough cash for this?
Her cryonics were financed by Jared Fogle.
Which reminds me, how are Joe DiMagio and Walt Disney doing?
@Tony R: Joe DiMaggio is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California. You may be thinking of Ted Williams. Walt Disney was cremated after death, yet the myth that his body was cryogenically frozen persists to this day.
I don’t know what process they use for cryogenics, but if there is any water left in the cells, the ice crystals that MUST form at those low temperatures will rupture the cell walls. This little girl is almost certainly permanently dead unless there’s some way to recover her memories and personality and inject them into another body.
Maybe she’ll become a rammer (Larry Niven fans will get this).