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The Daily Mail Tackles Cryonics

The Daily Mail, a UK tabloid legendary on the Internet for its dense celebrity reporting, has finally taken on the coolest topic of all -- cryonics. Like many articles about freezing yourself solid to be revived in the future, this one is negative, and the question is not what exactly they will say (I've heard all the criticisms a hundred times), but whether there will be any funny/juicy quotes along the lines of Smalley's "You and people around you have scared our children" (directed towards Eric Drexler) or from that time Aubrey went on some talk show and the hosts were worried about Christmas being ruined by life extension. The Daily Mail has frequently proven itself to be one of the most giggle-worthy tabloids on the Internet in the last decade, so I hope they don't let us down.

The first thing I notice with this article is a good thing -- they point out that cryonics costs no more than a slice of pizza per day! The title of the article is, "Please freeze me! How scores of middle-class British couples are hoping to buy immortality for just £10 a week". The intro sentence then says, "It sounds like the loopiest science fiction, but - like Simon Cowell - scores of middle-class couples are paying £10 a week for their bodies to be frozen when they die. So can you really buy immortality for the price of a pizza?"

No Daily Mail article about an edgy international phenomenon would be complete without a dig at the Americans, and we predictably find that here:

"The Americans, unsurprisingly, have been doing it for years, setting up the first 'storage facility' for frozen corpses in the Seventies. Over here, the notion has taken a bit longer to catch on, but while no British firm offers the technology to store bodies, a growing number of Britons have made arrangements to be flown to the U.S. when they die to await the next leg of their eternal journey."

Interestingly, even Russia has founded a cryonics company before the UK.

Then, they review the concept a little more:

Quite what they are signing up for still makes for mind-boggling reading. The process involves cooling, and then maintaining, a dead body in liquid nitrogen in the hope future scientific procedures will be able to revive the corpse and restore it to youth and good health.

It all sounds a bit terrifying, not to mention slightly gruesome - although not to Adele. As a full-time science-fiction writer, she has long dabbled in the boundaries of human possibility, and believes it to be no more sinister than any other life-saving medical procedure.

What I am slightly surprised about is -- are there really people out there who haven't heard of cryonics at all yet? I mean, there's Austin Powers, the rumor of Disney getting his head frozen, the Ted Williams saga being covered by all the major networks... maybe it's just the shock of this article writer finding it for the first time, and cryonics isn't as well known in England as it is in the United States?

Next is something quite heart-warming -- the story of Mark Walker, a friend of mine, convincing his fiance to get signed up:

At least Karen Marshall knows her fiancè is in her corner on the issue. Mark Walker, 47, is a cryonics old-hand, having signed up with the Cryonics Institute in Michigan nine years ago.

Today, he is one of the founders of Cryonics UK, a British support group for those interested in the process, which also offers facilities to be temporarily 'suspended' over here pending transfer across the Atlantic.

He has certainly persuaded his 38-year-old fiancèe, who is in the final stages of sorting out her own cryonics contract. She probably didn't stand a chance, given they even spent their first date discussing it.

'Mark and I had worked together for a computer company in Leicester for a few months before we started seeing each other romantically. During our first date we chatted about everything from work to the weather,' she recalls.

'Then talk turned to hobbies, and as I wittered on about my love of football and motorsports I noticed Mark was starting to look a little bit edgy. I must admit I started to get nervous and was imagining all sorts. I honestly thought he was about to tell me he liked dressing in women's clothing. Instead, he told me about his interest in cryonics.'

Some might have preferred cross-dressing to a desire to be suspended in liquid nitrogen, but Karen wasn't put off.

'It actually wasn't half as scary as the other possibilities I had been imagining,' she says. 'And after that, I didn't really think about it again - we continued dating and then, about six months into our relationship, Mark asked if I wanted to go along to one of the quarterly Cryonics UK meetings in Brighton.

'I agreed, although I had no idea what to expect and was fully prepared to be a bit bored for the day.'

Instead, she found a number of 'normal' like-minded people - and the more she discussed things with them the more she was won over.

Some cryonics fans are more "normal" than others -- but I'm happy that the people she found were sufficiently normal as to inspire her to sign up! Whether or not people who are involved in cryonics are normal, there's a major difference between letting your neurological patterns getting eaten by worms or preserving them in ice.

Next in the article is a cute photo of two young Brits who want to be frozen, and how they think about what to tell their children. Then, there's a pic of another couple, the woman being a sci-fi writer who wants to be frozen and says "cryogenics [is] no more sinister than any other life-saving medical procedure".

I'm at the end of the article, and there has been no weird negative quotes aside from a few at the beginning -- the main thing I take away from it is that cute couples in the UK are signing up to be frozen at Alcor or the Cryonics Institute. Definitely a market in the UK for cryonics if someone wants to start a company!