Cryonics: Quest for eternal life

Cryonics: a route to eternal life, or a waste of money?

Edward Stourton asks why people are prepared to pay huge sums of money to have their bodies frozen in the hopes that one day science will bring them back from the dead

When you step into Barry Albin-Dyer's funeral home in Rotherhithe you step back into history - the horse drawn hearses and the top hats evoke the Victorian way of death, when they did these things in style.

His family have been in the business for 200 years, and he is something of a philosopher in matters of mortality.

Barry Albin-Dyer

"If you come to one of my chapels here to view someone you've lost", he says, "you are looking at your certain future.

When you look in that coffin, that's your certain future. How hard is that for us as human beings to deal with?"

Traditional the business may be, but that does not stop Mr Albin-Dyer catering for those who want to believe that a coffin is NOT their certain future; for the last 12 years, he has been the European agent for the Cryonics Institute of Detroit.

Cryonics

Cryonicists put their trust in what they call an "ambulance to the future"

Cryonicists put their trust in what they call an "ambulance to the future". They want to be embalmed and frozen in liquid nitrogen as soon as they are dead.

They hope that science will one day find a way to revive and rejuvenate them.

It is easy to sympathise with the all-too human emotions that drive them. Barry Albin-Dyer cites the case of a young man who is terminally ill and without religious faith: "Although he knows there is only this much chance that it will ever work, his is prepared to have the one little chance that may be left to him".

Paul and Maureen Michaels, who live on the Isle of Man, have also booked themselves in for the appropriate treatment at Mr Albin-Dyer's hands when they die.

"We're talking," says Paul, "of something that science may be able to do in the future". "I enjoy living", adds his wife simply, "I enjoy being alive and I'd like to continue".

The Cryonics Institute

A place in the ambulance to the future does not come cheaply; the Michaels have shelled out $28,000 to the Cryonics Institute and will pay a further $5,000 for the appropriate embalming and associated preparations for long term storage

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To find out what that kind of money buys, we travelled with Barry Albin-Dyer to the Cryonics Institute in the United States.

The bleak, snow-covered landscape of a Detroit suburb did not help, but the Institute is a chilling place in more ways than one.

There are nearly 40 bodies stored in huge white containers - cryostats, as they are technically called. Adam Zowacki, the plant manager, lives with his charges 24 hours a day, and fills up their liquid nitrogen when necessary.

He calls the bodies "patients". Will they ever be revived to enjoy a new life?

I think if they come back in the future, it will be on the day of the resurrection

Barry Albin-Dyer

Barry Albin-Dyer, a Catholic, doesn't think so. "I think if they come back in the future, it will be on the day of the resurrection", he says.

Ambulance to the Future:
19.20 GMT: Sunday 15th April, on BBC 2

Reporter: Edward Stourton
Producer: Louise Adamson
Executive Producer: Farrah Durrani
Series Producer: Kate Snell