Company will freeze your dead body until it gets ‘reanimated’ years later, but there’s a steep price

In recent years, a few companies have sprung up to offer a controversial service: preserving human bodies after death in hopes of being able to reanimate them someday. That’s the practice known as cryonics, and it has captured the imagination of those bent on cheating death—albeit at a steep cost and with hefty skepticism from the scientific community.

One such company is Berlin-based Tomorrow.Bio, which has become Europe’s first cryonics lab. Founded in 2020, Tomorrow.Bio is offering a method of freezing dead bodies in liquid nitrogen with the rather ambitious goal of bringing them back to life in the future. The company has already signed up 650 customers for its rather unorthodox post-mortem service.

The company claims it is the only one in the world to offer such a service. “In order to avoid the formation of ice in the body fluids while freezing, the body fluids are replaced with a special medical-grade antifreeze,” explains Pinheiro. “The temperature is then lowered, little by little, over the span of a week to -196°C (-320°F). Afterwards, the body is placed in a container filled with liquid nitrogen for long-term storage.”

Tomorrow Bio has successfully cryo-preserved a rabbit kidney that is a ray of successful hope. It has storage facilities all over Europe and is now planning to extend itself to New York City.

Cryopreservation is the practice of freezing the body or brain at very low temperatures shortly after death. The Cryonics Institute has been one of the leaders in this field and is presently offering whole-body human and pet cryopreservation, as well as DNA and tissue storage.

But the cost of such services is steep. Some companies charge as much as $200,000 for the freezing and storage process. The high price point has led many to question whether cryonics is simply a way for wealthy individuals to attempt to buy their way out of death.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, 147 brains and bodies are frozen in liquid nitrogen, awaiting the day when science may be able to revive them. This facility and others like it are tangible manifestations of a half-century-old experiment, one that gave rise to an entire industry specializing in freezing the dead.

The same comes from Dr. Ralph Merkle, a researcher in nanotechnology and board member of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, an organization that touts cryonics: “The basic concept behind cryonics is that memory, personality and identity are encoded in the structure and chemistry of the brain. We already know that trivial preservation methods can preserve these structures for hundreds of years.”

But many scientists doubt that cryonics will ever be able to revive frozen bodies. The process of undoing the damage done by freezing is very complicated, and the state of medical technology today presents a big obstacle.

The driving force behind people choosing cryopreservation was put well by Robert Ettinger, the so-called “father of cryonics,” who once said, “The likely prize is so enormous that even slender odds would be worth embracing.”.

While the scientific community argues over the possibility of cryonics, companies offer their services to those willing to take a chance. The Cryonics Institute says on its website, “Our mission is to preserve life at liquid nitrogen temperature as a means of saving lives for a future where advanced scientific procedures may allow revival and restored health.”

While the cryonics debate rages on, it remains a very controversial yet fascinating topic that is bound to ignite debate at the point of convergence among science, ethics, and human aspirations. Whether a realistic hope to be alive someday or simply a too-expensive type of wishful thinking, cryonics would somehow mesmerize dreamers against the possibility of conquering death itself.