{"id":20185,"date":"2026-03-27T09:26:02","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T09:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/27\/cryonics-store-bodies-brains-after-death\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T09:26:02","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T09:26:02","slug":"cryonics-store-bodies-brains-after-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/27\/cryonics-store-bodies-brains-after-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s why some people choose cryonics to store their bodies and brains after death"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This week I reported on some rather unusual research that focuses on the brain of L. Stephen Coles.<\/p>\n

Coles was a gerontologist who died from pancreatic cancer in 2014. He had spent the latter part of his career specializing in human longevity. And before he died, he decided to have his brain preserved by a cryonics facility. Today, it\u2019s being stored at \u2212146 \u00b0C at a center in Arizona, where it sits covered in a thin layer of frost.<\/p>\n

Coles also tasked his longtime friend Greg Fahy with studying pieces of his brain to see how they had fared (partly because he was worried his brain might crack). Fahy, a renowned cryobiologist, has found that the brain is \u201castonishingly well preserved.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean Coles could be reanimated. Over the past few years, I\u2019ve spoken to people who run cryonics facilities, study cryopreservation, or just want to be cryogenically stored. All those I\u2019ve spoken to acknowledge that the chance they\u2019ll one day be brought back to life is vanishingly small. So why do they do it?<\/p>\n

The first person to be cryonically preserved was\u00a0James Hiram Bedford<\/a>, a retired psychology professor who died of kidney cancer in 1967. Affiliates of the Cryonics Society of California, an organization headed by\u00a0a charming TV repairman with no scientific or medical training<\/a>, perfused his body with cryoproctective chemicals to protect against harmful ice formation and\u00a0\u201cquick-froze\u201d him<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, Bedford\u2019s body is still in storage at Alcor, a cryonics facility based in Scottsdale, Arizona. It\u2019s one of a handful of organizations that offer to collect, preserve, and store a person\u2019s whole body or just their brain\u2014pretty much indefinitely. It\u2019s where Coles\u2019s brain is stored.<\/p>\n

Both men died from cancer. Medicine could not cure them. But in the future, who knows? One of the premises of cryonics is that modern medicine will continue to advance over time. Cancer death rates have declined significantly in the US\u00a0since the early 1990s<\/a>. I don\u2019t know what exactly drove Coles and Bedford to their decisions, but they might have hoped to be reanimated at some point in the future when their cancers became curable.<\/p>\n

Others simply don\u2019t want to die, period. Last year, I attended Vitalist Bay, a gathering for\u00a0people who believe that life is good and that death is \u201chumanity\u2019s core problem.\u201d<\/a> Emil Kendziorra, CEO of the cryonics organization Tomorrow.Bio, spoke at the event, and a healthy interest in cryonics was obvious among the attendees.<\/p>\n

Many of them believe that science will find a way to \u201cobviate\u201d aging. And some were keen on the idea of being preserved until that happens. Think of it as a way to cheat not only death but aging itself.<\/p>\n

This sentiment might have support beyond the realms of Vitalist Bay, according to research by Kendziorra and his colleagues. In 2021, they surveyed 1,478 US-based internet users<\/a> who were recruited via Craigslist. They found that men were more aware of cryonics than women, and more optimistic about its outcomes. Just over a third of the men who completed the survey expressed interest \u201ca desire to live indefinitely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, cryonics is a niche field. Worldwide, only around 5,000 or 6,000 people have signed up for cryopreservation when they die, Kendziorra told me when we chatted at Vitalist Bay. He also told me that his company gets between 20 and 50 new signups every month.<\/p>\n

And there are plenty of reasons why people don\u2019t<\/em> do it.<\/strong> A small fraction of the people who responded to Kendziorra\u2019s survey said that they thought the idea of cryonics was dystopian, and some even said it should be illegal.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the cost. Alcor\u00a0charges<\/a> $80,000 to store a person\u2019s brain, and around $220,000 to store a whole body. Tomorrow.Bio\u2019s\u00a0charges<\/a> are slightly higher. Many people, including Kendziorra himself, opt to cover this cost via a life insurance policy.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the main reason people don\u2019t opt for cryonic preservation is that we don\u2019t have any way to bring people back. Bedford has been in storage for more than 50 years, Coles for more than a decade. All the scientists I\u2019ve spoken to say the likelihood of reanimating remains like theirs is vanishingly small.<\/p>\n

The fact that the possibility\u2014however tiny\u2014is above zero is enough for some,<\/strong> including Nick Llewellyn, the director of research and development at Alcor. As a scientist, he says, he acknowledges that the chances reanimation will actually work are \u201cpretty low.\u201d Still, he\u2019s interested in seeing what the future will look like, so he has signed himself up for the cryonic preservation of his brain.<\/p>\n

But Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells me that she wouldn\u2019t sign up for cryonic preservation even if it worked. \u201cIt turns into a philosophical question,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo I want to be revived hundreds of years later when my family is gone and life is different?\u201d she asks. \u201cThere are so many complicated philosophical, societal, [and] legal complications that need to be thought through.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article first appeared in The Checkup,\u00a0<\/em>MIT Technology Review\u2019s\u00a0weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,\u00a0<\/em>sign up here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I reported on some rather unusual research that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}