Frozen Guys

I heard they had a frozen guy in Southern California. I tracked him down to a small factory that tests and makes thermal equipment for natural-gas companies. At the time, I didn't realize he was a famous frozen guy, the first fellow ever to have himself packed away in ice.

"Can I look at him?" I asked the company owner.

"Hold on, there," he said. "I didn't say we've got him here. We don't want to be known as the body freezers. People would be showing up at all hours of the night with fresh cadavers, asking that we freeze them. Our insurance rates would go sky-high."

I had a feeling he wanted to show him off, despite his protestations. Why have a frozen guy there if you don't want to give people a look at him?

"Let me just take a quick peek."

"All right."

He led me out back to a kind of airplane hangar. The frozen guy was in a vacuum bottle about nine feet long. Liquid nitrogen was being pumped into it. I heard they had been running around all morning trying to stash him somewhere, after they found out I was coming. The sign on the container said: Contents Nitrogen-Cooled Biological Specimen. Add Liquid Nitrogen As Needed To Keep Liquid Level Above Three Inches And Temperature Below 150 Degrees Kelvin. You could not see him in there, which was all right with me. I had seen some frozen folks and they looked like hell. Each one seemed to be trying to say, "For Christ's sake, thaw me out. Can't you see I'm freezing my ass off?"

This particular fellow had been hauled up in a van one night by his son. He was in a container, but it had sprung a leak. At first, the son said he just had "a little tissue" in the container, but he didn't fool the company owner.

"I knew he had a frozen guy in there all along. He finally admitted it. The idea was to switch him from his old container into ours, but before I would do that, I insisted that the son join in. I didn't want the fellow to get dropped and then all of a sudden the boy would have four fathers."

I tapped the container a little to test it for coldness, and also to see if I could jiggle the fellow around in there. It was a little frosty on the outside, though not anywhere near as cold as it was on the inside. And the fellow was in there solid.

"What happens to him now?"

"Our main interest was to try (continued on page 203) Frozen Guys(continued from page 103) out our container," said the owner, "and to prove it was better than the old one. In ours, for example, he gets to lie horizontal instead of being on his toes for all eternity. We gave him a home for a while. It's time for him to be pushing on."

•

The process is called cryonic suspension. Getting frozen down, right after death, and kept at a low temperature (minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit) until the thing that did you in is cured, and then getting thawed out. Say it was your heart. You might get thawed out at a time when all they have to do is pop in a new heart. And off you go. Or it might be your brain. According to the freezing crowd, the brain doesn't suffer much damage from the cold. And Dr. K. A. Hossmann of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research showed that the brain nerve cells don't die when blood circulation stops; rather, the brain capillaries become constricted, choking off attempted recirculation. So they would replace a section of your brain. When you get thawed out, you don't necessarily have to go with the same body. Say you've been scattered all over the highway and they've been able to bury only a few sections of you. At the time you get thawed out, they may have perfected cloning, in which case all they will have to have is one of your cells to work with. With a DNA print-out of that cell, they can come up with a new you. Or, with some tampering, they might mix up your style and bring you back as a mixture of you and Bruce Jenner.

There are a few little hitches. For freezing to have any chance at all, you've got to catch the fellow at the moment of death (cessation of heartbeat, breathing and/or brain waves). That way, freezing has a chance of stopping cellular death. It would be even better to start cooling the fellow down before he went out. But if you throw a sick person into dry ice, it's still called murder. If, on the other hand, you can get that sick person's cooperation and that of the hospital, you can start cooling him down before he makes his exit. People are signing up to have this done to them. Not many, but some.

Another significant hitch is that they have had no success whatever in doing this. They have been able to freeze people and put them in suspension, but they have not been able to thaw anybody out yet. All they have to show thus far is a revived cat's brain, some dog kidneys and a couple of hamsters. There has been much excitement in the freezing community about that cat's brain. Professor Isamu Suda and two associates of Kobe University froze it for more than six months (to minus 20 degrees centigrade), thawed it out and heard it give off almost normal brain-wave patterns. Dr. Frank M. Guttman of the University of Montreal and four associates froze some dog kidneys (to minus 80 degrees centigrade), thawed them out, hooked them back up to some dogs; some were able to trot right off, using the thawed-out kidneys. There has been good work done on beetles and rabbit and mouse embryos. I saw some hamsters that had been frozen and thawed out; they were walking a little funny, but they seemed to be getting on all right. Relatively simple stuff such as skin, corneas, blood, sperm and bone marrow gets frozen and banked in liquid nitrogen all the time and later used. The only thing they haven't been able to freeze and bring back is a whole complex organism. The freezing community feels that once it can do that to a chimp, say, everyone will climb aboard the band wagon and want to get frozen.

•

The fellow in the Southern California container was Dr. James Bedford. He became the subject of a book called We Froze the First Man, written by Robert F. Nelson, one of his freezers. The bible of people freezing is a book called The Prospect of Immortality, written by Robert C. W. Ettinger and published in 1964. Dr. Bedford, along with a lot of other Americans, came under its influence. But he was different, in that he decided to do something about it. When he saw that the end was near, he left his money to the Bedford Foundation, whose aim was to get its founder frozen and keep him that way. Bedford was frozen in 1967. (While the blood was drained from his body, cooled to two degrees centigrade, the arteries and lungs were perfused with DMSO and Ringer's solution. Bedford was then wrapped in aluminum foil, put into an insulated container and packed with dry ice. There his temperature was reduced to minus 79 degrees centigrade. Later, he was put into his permanent capsule, that giant container filled with liquid nitrogen, and held at minus 196 degrees centigrade. A foil face covering allows him to be easily identified.) He wound up in a capsule made by Ed Hope of Arizona. Since then, he has been kicking around. The freezing crowd celebrates Bedford as America's first cryonaut, but he has not had much of an afterlife. After I came across him in Southern California, he was sent to the Bay Area of San Francisco and is currently back in Southern California. The truth seems to be that nobody is terribly interested in having a frozen guy around.

Not too many others have followed in Bedford's footsteps. There have been about 30 known freezings in this country. There were 14 stored in Chatsworth for a while. There are a handful in San Francisco and New York. Two lawyers with pistols showed up at the south Florida cryonics group and said they had 70 wealthy men frozen in Trenton, New Jersey, and wanted to know the correct way to freeze the 71st. No black people have ever gotten themselves frozen. Some of the early frozen people have been thawed out and buried old-fashioned style. Those in charge of them seem to have said the hell with it.

The people who have gotten frozen are spoken of in the freezing community with a certain superstar reverence. Ann DeBlasio. Jim Bedford. Little Stevie Mandell. Genevieve de la Poterie. It's as if they're talking about Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The freezing community tends to be tight and clannish. A romance sprang up between Stevie Mandell's mother and Ann DeBlasio's policeman widower. Both were visiting their departed kins' containers and fell in love.

The idea of getting frozen has not caught fire. The people in people freezing feel it's because they haven't nailed a star. "If we could just get Raquel Welch" is what they say. Omar Bradley's wife looked into it on behalf of the general but then backed off. When Eisenhower was fading, the group fired off a letter to Mamie but got no response. They had heard he might go that way. A strong rumor persists that Disney is in cold storage in Salt Lake City, but it won't be pinned down. They still feel they need a Telly Savalas to put them over with the public.

Most of the freezing community (often called The Immortality Crowd) lives in the Bay Area of San Francisco. The "action arm" of the group is called Trans Time, Inc. ("Life Extension Through Cryonic Suspension"). Those are the people who actually freeze you. What you do is pay $1000 to the Bay Area Cryonics Society, just to get on board. Then you take out at least a $50,000 life-insurance policy, payable to the society. That covers the cost of getting you frozen and keeping you in a container until you are ready to get thawed out. Each person who signs up wears a bracelet that says: Whole Body Donor. Resuscitate And Cool. Do Not Embalm Or Autopsy. If you drop dead on the street, the hope is that someone will read your bracelet and phone the Trans Time hotline number. A beautiful truck speeds over and starts freezing you as fast as possible.

All the members---and directors---of the Bay Area Cryonics Society and of Trans Time wear those bracelets and have signed up to get frozen. There don't seem to be any weirdos in the group. They are intelligent fellows, many of them distinguished scientists at Berkeley, biophysicists, gerontologists, futurists. They are an upbeat, optimistic group, and even though all have signed up to be encapsulated, none expects that that will happen. It is their feeling that by the time their number is up, breakthroughs in life extension, transplants, artificial organs, suspended animation, etc., will enable them to live forever. Each of them has a side research gig, since, at this point, there is not much money in people freezing.

Since there did not appear to be any great rush to get onto the freezing band wagon, the people at Trans Time gave a kind of freezing cocktail party while I was in San Francisco. Folks who had already signed up were there to talk to people who were flirting with getting frozen but wanted to be convinced it was the right move. Again, no weirdos in the crowd. The cocktail party was given at the home of a professor of communications at San Francisco State. Many of the people at the party were older guys with young wives. That may have been a factor in their wanting to get frozen. These fellows were marathon runners and pumped iron, but inevitably, they were losing the race. "Once you're thawed out, can you go back to sex?" one of them wanted to know. "If not, the hell with it."

It may have been my imagination, but all of the people there seemed to have chilly handshakes. Only half of the invited guests showed up. The host felt it was because they were scared stiff of living forever. There was a lot of diet talk. Sardines and asparagus. J. D. Rockefeller's diet of breast milk from recent mothers. And the usual bad jokes. People in the freezing community tell the world's worst jokes. Freeze a jolly good fellow. Many are cold, few are frozen. That kind of thing. They love that. There were some knocks at the Government for its lack of interest in cryonics. "Only thing those guys ever freeze is wages." The talk switched to the Russians who were claiming to live to be 150. Paul Segall of Berkeley's department of physiology-anatomy pooh-poohed these claims. He had heard the men had falsified their birth certificates to get out of Army duty. People who lived in the Andes were another story. There was something about living high up and at an incline that made for longevity. Anyone who wanted to live in the mountains at a slant had a shot at a long life.

Several people took pot shots at a passage in Arthur Hailey's book The Moneychangers in which a character thinks that the cryonics people make a mockery of death.

"That's exactly what we want to do," said Saul Kent, a futurist and strong freezing advocate, "make a mockery of death."

Segall took over and told of his experiments with a tryptophan-deficient diet in which he had gotten rats to live the equivalent of 85 years. And to give birth to little rats, late in life, as if they were having children at 70. He also said it was his view that diet, marathon running, living at the right altitude and not smoking were all fine---but that the key to long life was each person's "biological clock," which, barring a building collapse or a highway crash, determined how long each person would be around. And the only way to live indefinitely was to get in there and fiddle with the hands on that clock. Most of the cryonics people are gerontologists, but the "sexy" part of life extension is freezing and Segall always went back to that. His partner, Harold "Frosty" Waitz, a biophysicist at Berkeley, was freezing yeast under pressure. When water freezes, it can exert a pressure of 30,000 pounds per square inch. Which is what makes steel pipes burst in the winter. Frosty was freezing his samples under an equivalent counterpressure, which, logically, would make for a nice easygoing freeze. At best, we would learn how to freeze people without messing them up too badly; and we might finally learn how to freeze tomatoes.

Segall envisioned a time when a man who wanted to "get away for a while" would simply freeze himself for a decade, get thawed out and pick up where he had left off. What about the social, educational, mind-boggling "re-entry" problems a cryonaut would face after being frozen for 100 years or so and waking up to an outrageously different world? Answer: At that time, we would hope to have an "education pill" that you would pop and be brought right up to date. Still, the complications were endless. A man has himself frozen: his son follows suit. The man thaws out before the son does and a situation arises in which the father is much younger than the son. More immediately, maybe even just around the corner, was a method of freezing people and laying them out in the vast permafrost, presumably saving all that cemetery space for high-rises.

An angry fat guy suddenly stood up and declared that the freezing people were tampering with "the natural order of things."

Which, in turn, led the host to make a quite moving speech. "If I run seven miles before breakfast because I want to live longer, is someone going to tell me that I'm tampering with the natural order of things? If I eat a low-cholesterol diet and try to breathe clean air and take vitamins, is someone going to tell me . . . ?"It was a speech along the lines of Joseph Welch's famous "Have you no shame?" admonition to Joe McCarthy. It shut up the angry fat guy and it rallied the cocktail party.

One fellow said, "If there's a chance that freezing works and the Government doesn't freeze people, then the Government is committing murder."

Everyone then ate a lot of cheese and went home.

There is something about the mere mention of people freezing that makes some people angry. Full of new insights, I went to the Washington Square Bar and Grill and tried to share my budding interest in cryonics with a vacationing waiter from Las Vegas. "You say that kind of thing to me," he said, "and I'll smack you in the mouth."

The next day, I meet Segall and Frosty Waitz at the Trans Time Warehouse near Berkeley, where people are taken to get frozen. They talk, nostalgically, about great freezings of the past---the judge's mother, the rabbi who said a prayer over Stevie Mandell's container, the Catholic priest who blessed Ann DeBlasio's capsule.

"What happened to some of those people?" I ask.

"Well, you're leaning on a liquor-store salesman."

I am, too. There are a couple of frozen people in capsules on hand (it's two to a capsule at Trans Time, for economy's sake). But apart from them, the pickings are lean.

"People just aren't going for this," says Waitz, "and it's a shame."

"Do you really enjoy this work?"

"I can always get up for a freezing."

We wander over to Earth People's Park Commune to see the Trans Time freezing truck and to meet some people who have assisted Segall in his freezings. The truck looks like the kind that sells ice cream. Segall lives at the commune, which is filled with leftover Ken Kesey people. There is much talk about Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm and DMT and Abbie Hoffman. Moppet hippie girls pop in and have a glass of wine. Segall calls these people "the Chinese Army." They are casually interested in freezing. "Can you get frozen with a hard-on?" one of the moppets wants to know. "Jesus," says another, "a hundred-year hard-on."

Segall and I wander off and his mind begins to soar in a manner that reminds me that scientists are the only remaining heroes. The humanists tell us that the heart is a reservoir of pity and courage and that man will endure. Stuff that we know. Enough already. Segall tells of devices that will let you stand in Hoboken and look around in San Francisco. Each man his own CBS-TV network. Gadgets that will let you look around inside yourself. Take a brisk tour of your internal organs. ("I can't see you today, I'm visiting my pancreas.") Cloning shops where, if you can't have Cybill Shepherd, you can get a replica of her.

"But what about freezing? Are we really going to be able to do that? Bring people back?"

"Absolutely," Segall says. "It's just money. There is no reason why people have to die."

"Besides," he says, "I understand we're getting Timothy Leary. If Leary comes over to freezing, watch everybody jump onto the band wagon."

By this time, I've had enough freezing. I don't want to hear any more about Ann DeBlasio's being maintained at minus 196 degrees centigrade. I have visions of Segall and Kent and Waitz all throwing me into the Trans Time dry-ice container and sealing me in there, the first sensitive Jewish writer cryonaut. I'm sorry I ever heard of perfusion and Forever Flasks. I've got the secret minutes of past cryonics meetings that tell about the moment Stevie Mandell's cryocapsule was welded tight. I just don't want to be frozen. Ben Franklin once said he wouldn't mind being preserved in madeira, but that's different. Every frozen person I've seen looks like he's sorry he ever got involved with the thing and wishes someone would please toss him a sweater. It's too goddamned cold. That's why they can't get themselves a Telly Savalas.

Still . . . if they ever actually froze a chimp stiff and brought it back to life. . . . The philosophy isn't all that bad. You get frozen and at least you have a shot. You get sealed up, forget about it.

On the way home, I have a dream in which I am reunited with all my dead uncles. I wake up and I have my first head cold in ten years.

"They have been able to freeze people, but they haven't been able to thaw anybody out yet."