Grim reality of what really happens to the bodies of people who have been cryogenically frozen in labs
Though cryonics is widely considered a pseudoscience, experiments dating back to the 1960s focused on preserving people in the hopes of one day bringing them back to life.
Cryonics is different from cryopreservation (which happens naturally in some cases and involves freezing and reviving cells or small organisms), but the goal of cryonics is to someday revive a human. It also takes quite a bit more scientific rigour.
Back then, scientists trying out the process would start by cooling the bodies on dry ice before transferring them to Dewar capsules, which were large containers for keeping things ultra-cold.
The largest operation was running out of a cemetery in Chatsworth, California by a man named Robert Nelson.
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Initially, Nelson tried freezing patients on dry ice but soon switched to liquid nitrogen.
Nelson had one Dewar which he managed to fit four bodies inside before storing them in an underground vault. The bodies remained here until Nelson stopped receiving money from the relatives of the patients involved.
At that point, he would let the bodies thaw out.
As reported by Big Think, Nelson had to thaw out three more patients when the liquid nitrogen system in one of the Dewars failed. Among them was a six-year-old boy, frozen in 1974, who was ultimately thawed and buried after they found his body had cracked.
In other cases, like in New Jersey, the setup didn’t work well, and the poorly insulated Dewar led to partial and full thawing of the bodies multiple times before they could be refrozen.
Other occasions saw the Dewar fail again, and the bodies decomposed into fluids which had to be scraped out of the capsule.
Of all the bodies frozen before 1973, only one remains preserved today. Dr. James Bedford was 73 years old when he was frozen in 1967.
Reddit users were horrified after hearing about the conditions early cryonics patients went through.
One person commented: "I didn't notice my freezer had gone out until it started to get really smelly. I had to refreeze everything so I could get it into trash bags without throwing up. It had to have been multitudes worse when it was heads and bodies."
Another joked: "Imagine blowing all your savings on this, just to be treated like chicken breast with freezer burn..."
In another Reddit forum, r/todayilearned, users also responded to discovering that 250 people in the US have cryogenically preserved their bodies.
"I think that number is both too high and too low," said one.
Meanwhile, another user that was down with the idea said: "People love to make fun of those who do this and I get it, its kind of silly. But you have a 100% chance of not coming back in 500 years to discover that we have figured out space travel to other galaxies if you don't freeze yourself, right? [...] You've basically got nothing to lose by trying it."