Chilling out at the Cryonics Institute
It was my practice to come in to the Galaxy office in New York once a week, generally on Thursdays, to deliver edited manuscripts and proof sheets for forwarding to the printer and to pick up the latest batch of submitted manuscripts to read on the way home. On one Thursday in the early 1960s, though, something unusual fell out of the mail sack. It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t exactly a manuscript at all. In its plastic binder, it had more the look of a self-published book, and it had an intriguing title: “Life Extension Through Freezing.”
Because it intrigued me, I read Robert Ettinger’s text right through then and there — skeptically at first, to be sure — and then I sat staring into space for a while because, against all expectations, the document made sense. I played its implications through in my mind, starting with someone dying. It didn’t matter what he was dying of — run over by a truck, cancer of the private parts, suicide by jumping off a bridge, whatever. Dead was dead, and what the cadaver’s nearest and dearest were to do was to get it down to cold.
I’m talking real cold here — not the wimpy temperature of your kitchen freezer where you keep the lamb chops and the broccoli, or even of dry ice, but liquid-gas temperatures, −250 degrees Celsius or colder. At temperatures like that organic material — including human corpses — does not decay. It doesn’t change at all for long, long periods of time.
All right, now the nearest and dearest have got their dearly beloved stiff in the very deep freeze. What has that accomplished for them?
Why, it has given them the indispensable gift of time. Time for the medical profession to identify what specific damage has been done to what specific parts of the body, either by being made dead in the first place or by being frozen itself. And then to repair all that damage, and then to start up once more all the body’s functions of breathing and pulsing and eating and excreting — that is, of being alive. And then, if any of that is beyond medical science’s capacities to do at the time, to get their asses back into their research facilities until they do have it all figured out.
The point, as this Ettinger fellow saw it, is that medical science, which has achieved so many wondrous successes in dealing so many of the harmful events which can take place in the human body, isn’t likely to quit the endeavor very soon. There is, to be sure, no guarantee that the researchers will keep on discovering new therapies indefinitely. But it’s still a pretty good gambling bet, especially if you stop to think of what the alternatives are for that poor, beat-up mortal frame you’ve been carrying around if you do nothing.
Anyway, if Ettinger’s idea got me that interested, I was pretty sure it would do much the same for many of my readers. So I sent this Dr. Ettinger an offer for the right to publish excerpts from his work and sat back to consider what to do next. First to schedule it: that was easy. I decided to put it in my new third magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, mostly because it was so new that there weren’t going to be any indignant letters from old subscribers complaining that a cherished tradition had been violated.
Copy-editing the manuscript presented no problems; Ettinger had done a thorough job, even going so far as to check out the bulk prices for several kinds of liquid gases. I was confident that, by and large, my readers would have no problem encountering the piece in the magazine. But I wanted more than that. This was the kind of thing that might attract new readers for the magazine, if I only had some way of telling them about it. . . .
Fortunately I did. I had the hundreds of thousands of insomniacs who were addicted to the all-night radio talk show run by Long John Nebel.
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