Slashdot Mirror
Terminally Ill Teen Won Historic Ruling To Preserve Body (bbc.com)
A teenage girl has been cryogenically frozen in the hope of being revived at a time when her cancer might be cured. The terminally ill 14-year-old girl from London won a legal fight to be frozen after she died. After her death in October, the girl's remains were transported to a cryonic facility in the United States. From a report: The girl, who was terminally ill with a rare cancer, was supported by her mother in her wish to be cryogenically preserved -- but not by her father. She wrote to the judge explaining that she wanted "to live longer" and did not want "to be buried underground." A High Court judge ruled that the girl's mother should be allowed to decide what happened to the body. The details of her case have just been released. "I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up -- even in hundreds of years' time. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish," the girl wrote. The judge, Mr Justice Peter Jackson, visited the girl in hospital and said he was moved by "the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament." His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
In Colorado, there's a town famous for having a frozen dead guy on hand. It's important to recognize what this is: a vain (and hopeless) bid for immortality.
1) The people in the future may not even have our level of technology and resources anymore
2) The people in the future may hate us for what we did and didn't do, they wouldn't owe you shit
3) Cryo is a 1970s techno-religious manifestation of the human want to live longer, except it doesn't really work. There's no way to repair the damage to every cell in the human body.
That being said, we need to support research into life extension so we can understand life processes to cure people now. Not create expensive mausoleums.
Is there a Mr I C Wiener here?
They paid for it so why is this news? No different then a custody battle.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
nobody in the far future when we can fix cancer AND death...
is going to spend the time or money to bring back random teen girl from 2016.
IF her corpse is even still around.
Regardless of the girl's wishes or the scientific viability of cryo, it must be absolutely awful to have your parents arguing about what to do with your body after you die. Even worse knowing that one of them is against it, she must have some feeling that her father doesn't want to see her again.
For the sake of argument, suppose this is possible.
You will wake up about 5 generations beyond where you are now. Assuming her death doesn't end the bloodline altogether, the relatives she has in 100 years will have no real familial connection to her. Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally.
So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age. For all we know, Mandarin could replace English by 2116.
People imagine it like a movie where you wake up in a shiny, accepting utopia and you just go like Ender to the stars where no one knows your past or cares. The reality is probably more akin to you becoming a ward of the state for years, being looked down on except as a curiosity.
His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
Exactly. Even before I could reach the closing sentence of the summary, I was trying to figure out what this situation had to do with "science" or even cryonics. This was just a dispute between parents over a kid. Nothing to see here.
Imagine waking up in 400 years, surrounded by scientists and doctors all cheering at their breakthrough. "Is there still a WWW?", you ask. "Yes! Just think of what you want to visit and this holographic unit will bring it up in 3D for all of us to see." Smile then concentrate on goatse.
Trolling is a art,
moon pie what a time to be alive
The father probably didn't want to pay for the yearly costs of keeping a dead corpse on ice in the pointless idea that it will be possible to revive a corpse in the near future. If the mom and daughter want to spend needlessly on this than by all means pony up the cash.
I'm waiting for the breakthrough discovery of a special chemical that will prevent ice crystals from forming and allow for a better thaw that doesn't destroy cellular membranes. It'll be ironic when the cryonic scientific community goes and says, "Our bad, all of those previously frozen people cannot be safely revived."
No, no, no! You freeze them before they die, not after! What are you people, a bunch of morons? Now you have to wait not only for humanity to figure out how to unfreeze her while fixing the inevitable widespread cell damage due to freezing and cure the cancer that caused her to die in the first place - you have to wait until we figure out how to literally bring dead people back to life because that's how she was frozen, dead.
Hope she gets treated better than Ted Williams.
http://www.espn.com/boston/mlb...
Sorry, what were the "rights or wrongs" about cryonics again?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
So she wants to be frozen so she can be cured are re-awoken once there is a cure, but they don't freeze her until AFTER she has died? Kind of late there, guys. Once we find a cure we can unfreeze her dead body and bury it.
but he shouldn't have to pay.
Thanks mom, for supporting my lifestyle choice
In Trump's 'murika, we sue our children.
This has to be a new record for the time between when something showed up in my Facebook feed to the time when someone cross posted to Slashdot. Sad, sad day.
She's 14... your telling me a 14 year old can't adjust to a new world? She WANTS to live, I think she will be fine if this works.
What's the furthest back you could go and still have the person relatively well-integrated into society?
Judging by recent events, 50% of people aren't well suited to fit into society -- without displacing them in time %N years.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Doesn't it need to be done immediately? I would imagine that the body changes dramatically after death and I wouldn't think that those changes would be reversible.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
While I don't think there's any actual chance of her ever being revived and cured, I'd be willing to bet that the thought that there was a chance (however slim) helped the girl accept her situation and made her last days a lot less hellish than they might have otherwise been.
I'm imagining a high tech looking front room and lab with a hidden door that leads to a crematorium. You could do it for the bargain rate of $20k per pop (less than the $37k listed in the article) and it would, for all intents and purposes, be the same.
The problem is a question of faith? What justifies faith. What type of evidence is enough to give one faith. Faith is 'the belief in things not yet observed' a conjecture based on available evidence.
I find it ironic, that some have faith in cryogenics given the evidence for any possible success is certainly no better and in many ways much less then the evidence for a omnipotent creator who will resurrect your body at a future date.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Was she cryonically frozen on-site upon 'death' of her body? And if so, how long after her death was this done? Was crystalizing-free artificial blood pumped into her system in order to avoid cellular damage? Was her cryonic preservation continuous between britain and her storage facility in the US?
If any of these answers were 'no', then what is the point? I am all for cryonic preservation, but not 'upon death of the host'. At that point it is too late. If you are going to have this done, you should be put into a medically induced coma soon before your expected demise, and then have your blood replaced while under reduced metabolism cooling, so that you are properly staged for cryonic preservation. Anything less than this (and even this might not be enough!) just results in a corpsicle, which is more or less just an alternative to cremation or having your body stuffed in a box to decompose without stinking up the world (assuming a deep enough grave.)
They did this with John Wayne too. He's not dead. He's frozen. He's gonna be pissed when they thaw him out.
And in a 120 years even if there was technology to revive the person why would they? What makes anyone that special? Especially after everyone who knew you was dead? There's very few people as a society that we'd even consider reviving anyway. Just get over it, we all die, and always will.
Maybe the people in the figure just won't care about waking you up and will just throw your frozen remains in the garbage.
I'm always amazed at the cost people will spend to do this kind of thing, but I'm also highly skeptical that anyone on the other end would bother to finish the process.
Think about it, if you need a person - it's a lot easier, cheeper, and more fun to make someone new than to spend a ton of money to revive someone who was so extremely sick that they have already died, plus all the cellular damage that death brings on top of that, plus the freezing damage.
If it was Albert Einstein perhaps. Making some clones of Marilyn Monroe would be technically easier and lots of fun.
Reviving a dead unknown 14 year old cancer victim, I can't realistically see that happening.
Taking her family's money to keep the hope alive from now until the checks run out - yep.
Right, she's 14, and would therefore be a minor then. Except her parents won't be around, so social services would have to take care of her. I'm assuming that she'd be in the US, not UK, so she'd have no family here. (Even if she went back to the UK, her family's descendants wouldn't know or recognize her: I don't know the name of my ancestors beyond my granddads). Had she been, say 20+, she could have found a boyfriend (or girlfriend, if she was a lesbian), married and started a family. But she'd be totally lost, the way things are
First, it's precedent. Second, you clearly have read absolutely nothing about this situation. I spent a total of about 10 seconds skimming the article and still picked up enough to know that this was not the case you want to make your "men have no rights" stand on. You're hurting the very cause you're (apparently) trying to help by doing so.
This father-of-the-year had no contact with his terminally ill daughter for SEVEN years prior. His daughter didn't even want him to see her body when she was gone.... So, yeah, I'm kinda thinking he gets no say whatsoever in this.
Easy. One of them has been classified as science and the other has not. Easy to see why one is more acceptable to a certain crowd anyway.
But I agree with your basic premise.
there's a town famous for having a frozen dead guy on hand
Slackers take notice. Here's a guy who's already dead and he's still ready to help at a moment's notice. Maintenance, property appraisal, emergency services, streetlamp replacement -- he's all over it.
I don't understand why this post isn't modded up higher. It is the correct answer.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
When I think of suicide (and i'm not suicidal by any means), my first concern would be to create a situation with minimal clean-up for the people who are left behind. The guy who slit his wrists in the hot tub in the Godfather comes to mind here. Some bleach and a scrub brush should make everything good as new after they get the corpse moved. Maybe i'd lay out all the required documents - insurance policies, last will, whatever directives I have - on a nearby table so that nothing is missing. The reason why is that i'm not a sociopath. I don't want to make people's lives worse, even after i'm gone.
Translate this to cryogenic storage. It's incredibly expensive in terms of energy. The chances of success are near nil, because over time, there's about a zero chance that I won't get inadvertently thawed due to power or refrigeration problems. Besides which, it doesn't work for any standard definitions of 'working'. Every cell in your body will more or less burst when frozen and if thawed, you'll just rot the faster.
I'd weigh the fantasy against the real-world effects of wasting resources in a futile endeavor and just get myself cremated and flushed down the toilet. In fact, my directive inside my will says just that.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
What's valiant about being frozen? The right thing to do is accept your fate, and not fool yourself that you'll be "woken up" someday. You won't be.
Though it understandable to want to cryogenically preserve these dead 'meat puppets' into the future where they may be 'revived', it may not work out as intended. The vital organs supporting circulation, respiration and alimentation may well function 'normally'. But without a conscious and self-animated mind it will resemble a brain-dead person.
We can already keep 'dead' bodies on life support for a long time, but not the spirit of life. Worse still is that no one yet understands exactly how consciousness and free will works. This mechanism, which animates all living creatures, more or less, is called the "Life Principle", and has not yet been discovered. Until then, cryogen is a complete waste of time and money.
I don't think having faith necessarily means there is limited evidence. There might not be any and yet someone believes.
Faith is something that is inside you and not your apparent circumstances (noumenal not phenomenal).
I think people dying look at it this way: hell im dead already, what's the worst that can happen. I don't think most of them are religious. They just don't want to die. And this gives them a way to atleast know when they do die, there is a small chance they will someday wake up in the future in Dr. Beverley Crushers lab.
Religion serves the same purpose, it gives people a reason. When you die god is waiting for you with all your relatives. I mean who would turn that down ;).
What about the poor girl's soul?
Ishi, 1911, the last un-contacted native American walks out of the wilds. He spends his final five years on a university campus being studied by anthropologist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi
If this has nothing to do with her wishes and has only to do with the rights of her parents to decide on the disposition of her body, then why did the judge visit her in hospital? The mother's (apparent) belief in this technology actually becoming realized is less implausible than Heaven actually existing, it's a religious belief imho. I'd say that the judge decided it correctly - but I know nothing about U.K. law. The idea that she couldn't cope if this actually happened is a far worse assumption than the idea that it will happen. If she needs help in 2116 to navigate society, her A.I. assistant/friend/maid will be there for her, just like the billions of other A.I.s will be there for the people with emotional, physical and/or mental health deficits who need similar help. Who knows, when she wakes up (not that I think that will happen) she may wake up into a VR world indistinguishable from 2016.
The fact that the girl feels that she has some hope of some day waking up probably made her imminent death easier to accept. That is why the religious afterlife is there. To ease the fear of death. Cryo plays the same role.
I find it ironic, that some have faith in cryogenics given the evidence for any possible success is certainly no better and in many ways much less then the evidence for a omnipotent creator who will resurrect your body at a future date.
I forget who said it, but there is an argument for believing in God which says "if you don't believe, and He does exist, you lose everything. If you do believe, but He does not exist, then you've lost nothing. So you might as well believe."
The problem with that, is which God should you choose to believe in? Zeus? Odin? Amun-Ra? Someone else?
The reason I bring this up, is that cryogenics is a bit like that. If you choose to be frozen, and in the future they are able to revive you, you get a second lease on life. If it turns out that they cannot revive you, it's no different than if you hadn't gotten frozen. So if you can afford it, you might as well freeze yourself. The difference here, is there is no "but which God should I believe in?" problem. At least not as far as I can tell.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
This is "Pascal's Wager". There are versions that pre-date Pascal.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Faith justifies itself. It's a circular belief bound by emotions and subconscious thought patterns. It is the antithesis of logic, belief in the unprovable. If you can prove it, there is no need for faith.
That's Pascal's Wager, by the French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal in the 17th century.
1) go to jw.org and search for "resurrection"
2) Hebrews 11:1 gives the definitive definition for faith.
Easy. One of them has been classified as science and the other has not. Easy to see why one is more acceptable to a certain crowd anyway.
Even then though the belief in cryogenics is hardly consistent. If you are going to believe that science in the future can figure out how to rebuild a body in which every cell has been ruptured and the person was already dead when frozen then why not believe that science in the future can build time machines which can send tiny probes back in time and download your consciousness just before death? Both are based on wild guesses about future science but only one requires a huge expediture of money and effort.
Then the mother can pay for the bill
Think of all the things a normal fourteen-year-old girl has to look forward to. Now, think of what this girl's future held: death. Knowing that her body would be frozen and that she might come back some day gave her hope, and maybe made her fate easier to accept. It doesn't really matter that we can't bring her back now, or that we may never be able to; don't you all think that she knew it? All that matters is that it allowed her to end her life in hope instead of dispair, and what we think about her chances doesn't matter in the least.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
All it will take is one sustained power outage, and that's all she wrote.
The amount of power consumption required to keep things that cold must be enormous. What a waste.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
If she was hot enough to have sex with? I love early teenagers.
Imagine that in 5 generations, someone will even find her and all other frozen bodies if the equipment hasn't broken down by then !
Your daughter is fucking DYING. Lie to her and fight with the wife after she's gone if you're that bothered by the idea, but Jesus Christ, let her be in peace for her final days. I think she has enough shit going on.
You really think "buried in the ground" or "burned" is better than "frozen"? Luckily you don't live too far north or you wouldn't even have the choice. I don't think this argument happens much in Siberia.
For fuck's sake -- freeze ME, and wake me up when people are rational.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'm just sorry she has to die so young. It's life I know but if it brings her comfort to have herself frozen then why not? I hope she is freer and happier after death than any experience here would provide her..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
They could clone her if/when this becomes an available option. But unfreezing - not really.
The dewars need topping off as they lose nitrogen every couple weeks, and the vacuum has to have pump attached about as often to maintain. This will not be done over 50 years, let alone centuries. All the corpses will rot when the company goes under or there is natural disaster that prohibits resupply of nitrogen or running vacuum pumps
How is this considered the slightest bit complicated?
Cryo's already paid for. Mom doesn't share any expenses with Dad. If she's frozen, there's a tiny chance she'll wake up. If she's buried, there's no chance she'll wake up.
If she wakes up and life is too hard, she can still off herself. But no, let's not even give her the option?
It's a fucking no-brainer and the father should be shot. Well OK not shot, but sternly admonished for sure.
If the process of freezing the body took place in zero g as opposed to earthbound gravity, would the process of freezing the cadaver still cause the shredded cell damage we see in the earthbound process? Likewise since you already have the body in space maintaining frozen tempature in the absolute zero vacuum environment would alleviate the issues of energy expenditure. Simply put the body in an 'ark' type construct, no life support, no engine, steering, etc and get it into a 50 or 100 year orbit. Sounds like science fiction but...
I find it ironic, that some have faith in cryogenics given the evidence for any possible success is certainly no better and in many ways much less then the evidence for a omnipotent creator who will resurrect your body at a future date.
Given that the evidence of an omnipotent creator is precisely zero, how can the evidence of the possibility of successful cryogenics be any less than that. In fact there is a species of frog that can be frozen and thawed without dying, so that is some evidence in favour of cryogenics.
Therefore there is in fact infinitely more evidence in favour of cryogenics than there is for any kind of supernatural afterlife. That isn't to say that I think cryogenics in its current form is remotely likely to work even with unknown future tech, but at least believing in it is more reasonable than religion.
Terminally Ill Teen
Sounds like the third season / prequel-sequel about someone who never grows up.
Peter Pan?
XKCD Cryogenics
She's gone already. She's just like a side of beef in the freezer, probably get freezer burn too.
Bury her people.
Father was not in touch with daughter for last 6 years. This was major part of evidence. Judge thus took actual carers in close contact (mother and grandparents) into account. Daughter did not at this stage wish to see or inany way contact father who was no longer part of her life.
Regards Eion MacDonald
I would assume that medical scientists in the future will find a way to eliminate cancer long before they'll figure out how to counter death itself.
Glad the little girl died happy before being turned into a semi-permanent popsicle?