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Terminally Ill Teen Won Historic Ruling To Preserve Body (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the wish-granted dept.

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.

16 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. The ultimate in postmortem narcissism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    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. Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism by unixisc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Thing I'm wondering is - why don't they freeze her while she's still alive? Even if they find a cure for cancer, that will likely not be something that resurrects the dead. So if they are gonna freeze her after she dies, it's a wasted effort, too.

      Instead, freeze her now while she's still alive, and whenever the cure is discovered, the doctors will thaw and cure her. Of course, nobody she knows may be alive, her relatives - descendants of any siblings she may have - won't know her, she won't know any of the things that may have developed by then, so her only choice may be to marry someone 700 years younger to her - assuming they haven't abolished marriage and divorce by then.

      Too bad the judge's heart trumped his brain, and he couldn't say 'no' to the ridiculous request of this precious snowflake

    2. Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Thing I'm wondering is - why don't they freeze her while she's still alive?

      Because that would be murder as opposed to preservation of an already dead body.

      Too bad the judge's heart trumped his brain, and he couldn't say 'no' to the ridiculous request of this precious snowflake

      Oh go fuck yourself. The father who opposed it is an asshole who hadn't had contact with her in six years, yet felt he had the right to overrule what the girl and her family wanted done with her remains.

    3. Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism by TWX · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And what about human lives is worth saving? There is no sanctity of life. Very few people actually make enough of a dent on the rest of humanity to legitimately be called important, and even then, many if not most of those people make negative impacts.

      If you disappeared off the planet right now, only a few people would really, truly be devastated. Your parents, if they're still alive. Your spouse or significant-other. Your children. Possibly your siblings and possibly their children if you have a close relationship. Devastated as they would be, however, even they would probably move-on with life, and in time would remember you somewhat dispassionately instead of being consumed with mourning. Parents would remember you from time to time. Spouse or significant other would move-on. Children would have to move on as it's normal for their parents to die before them anyway.

      We all die. We're all pretty good at handling the death around us, even in cultures where significant effort is made to thwart death. The death of a fourteen year old girl from disease past the ability of medical science to treat is unfotunate, but it's also pretty routine, and to be honest, our ability to suspend the body and preserve it is so poor that she's never going to be reanimated and cured from what ails her now. It's a shame that snake-oil salesmen have convinced some people that it's possible to do this, when all it will do is consume resources without any return.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    4. Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism by Ixitar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Another few questions to ask:

      Who is going to keep on paying for her being frozen? Her parents may do that for the rest of their lives, but then who will pay after they are gone?

      What if the cryonics business that is keeping her frozen goes out of business?

      Who is going to expend resources to revive the person, cure the disease and get her trained for living in the world of then. (It won't be cheap!)

      If there are relatives (distant at that) living at that time, then will they take care of this stranger?

  2. Problem ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Problem ... by Salgak1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      1. They may, and they may not. Time will tell.

      2. Again, they may hate us, or they may not. Hell, they might worship the cyborged head of Bill Gates. Again, time will tell.

      3. Cryo may not work NOW, because we lack the tech to successfully reverse it. Cryo **may** be the best currently-available method of maintaining structure as much as possible after death, but generally causes severe enough damage to be un-recoverable, with current tech. But this young lady isn't counting on current tech, she's counting on FUTURE tech. And she was dying anyway, so what's the worst that would happen ? She'd STAY dead. . .

  3. Regardless of the girl's wishes by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Understandable, but foolish by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Understandable, but foolish by Jason+Levine · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      I've often wondered this. If you could take a random person from different eras and plunk them into the present (even allowing for some sort of "techno-magic language translation"), how would they adjust? Obviously, the further back you go, the less able they would be able to cope. Someone from 1950 would stumble but might be generally fine. Someone from 1860 would have a lot of trouble. Someone from 1060 would likely run fleeing from all of the weird things they saw. What's the furthest back you could go and still have the person relatively well-integrated into society?

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
    2. Re:Understandable, but foolish by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So you've just turned a societal pariah into a lab specimen.

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    3. Re:Understandable, but foolish by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Consider the vast multitude of cultures today, she's probably no worse off than that odd foreign kid. For that matter, what you describe is not much different from what many refugees experience today. And 14 is young enough to get a perfectly normal education, job, find friends and start a family same as your peers. I'd take 70 more years of that over dying at 14 any day. Cryogenics is a fantasy, but I'd take the fantasy over reality any day of the week.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:Understandable, but foolish by Aaden42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Honestly, it sounds like a pretty amazing adventure. Time travel, basically. Albeit low chance of actually arriving & zero chance of a return trip. If I'm dying anyways and have the disposable income, why not? I can always choose to kill myself again (permanently) if I find myself unable to adapt to the future. Other than having a wide variety of things I'd rather do with the money while I'm alive, I don't see a down side.

      I was born into a world I knew nothing about once & learned all I could to get where I am now. Granted, I'd lack the neuroplasticity of a child's brain for the second attempt, but I'd be willing to give it a try. Beats the alternative anyways.

    5. Re:Understandable, but foolish by jdavidb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Obviously the complete eradication of one's own existence is the best possible solution to those problems.

      --
      Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
    6. Re:Understandable, but foolish by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are assuming that she will be the ONLY one that is "woken up". But if she can be revived, so can all the others. So there will be a whole group of people that share the culture of the early 21st century. They can hang out together.

    7. Re:Understandable, but foolish by khallow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      What's bizarre here is that you think this is worse than death. I guess you're one of those believers in an afterlife that no one, including the powerful supernatural beings who supposedly manage the thing, has bothered to show exists.