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Life and ?

Cryonics offers a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of death. Approaching the process of death in this progressive way means recognizing that the current legal definition of death is not the same as actual, complete biological death. In modern medical practice, patients whose blood circulation and spontaneous respiration have ceased are considered dead. Yet among them are some who are "brought back to life" and good health through a combination of persistent life-saving treatments and the patientË˙s willpower and fortitude. Others suffer such extensive damage to their bodies' life-supporting systems that current medical resources and knowledge are inadequate to save their lives. They are then considered legally dead, and are left to the natural process of decay because we currently cannot do any more to save them. Yet we can attempt to save their lives by preventing this decomposition before irreversible biological decay occurs.

Cryopreserving people indefinitely is the method by which people could potentially be saved from certain biological destruction. Unfortunately this modern capability is too often ignored, mocked or even demonized. Many people are skeptical of cryonics because they do not see the point in preserving (legally) dead human beings or because they do not think that cryopreserved patients will be revived in the future. What skeptics fail to realize is that dead people are not being cryopreserved. "Dead" means that there is no possibility for life; but a cryonics patient is at least potentially alive - not certainly dead - because the structure necessary for living function continues to persist in cryostasis.

All science deals in probabilities and in considering the evidence, it is increasingly possible that a cryonically preserved person should not be considered (irreversibly) dead, because: if this person can be revived, then they are not dead (as death by definition is an absolute end to life). Today we know for certain that the cryopreserved patient has, at the very least, not been destroyed in the manner that would follow by cremation or decay. We also know that medical ethics demands that unconscious patients with an uncertain prognosis should be cared for and regarded as viable people until proven otherwise.

However, it is well known that a great many current medical procedures have little chance of success in the sense of providing quality of life or continued survival. Cryonic treatment can do no harm to a person who is certainly about to die and decay, despite the fact that the chances of success are as yet unknown. Though doctors will often offer an unproven treatment rather than give up on a very ill patient, cryonics is regarded differently. But experimental procedures must be and are an essential part of medical practice; without experimentation there can be no progress. Could it be that people simply do not understand cryonics well enough to make an informed choice? Or worse yet, could the resistance to cryonics be due to unexamined prejudice, much like the (mainly religious) objections to anaesthesia in the 19th century? It was considered to be an unnatural and irreligious practice; imagine the human suffering if such objections were still being enforced! And what of the 17th century successes in resuscitation using electricity and mouth-to-mouth? These advances made people afraid that death was not a certain state of affairs, resulting in fears over being buried alive, or in the demonization of these practices, like in Mary Shelly's popular horror story of electrical resuscitation. Many lives must have been lost due to these fears. Coupled with these problems, technical and scientific misunderstandings meant that these resuscitative techniques were not reassessed until the late 1950s. Unfortunately, these are not the only examples of life-saving medical techniques that were rejected and suppressed for years or centuries due to fear and ignorance (see Harris, 1992). Today‚s objections to cryonics seem to be similarly ignorant, with equally tragic effects.

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