Wondery
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FROM his childhood, Laurence Pilgeram was preoccupied with death. He would vividly imagine his parents in their caskets, wondering why people had to die. Pilgeram went on to build a lab on the family farm in Montana and experimented on guinea pigs, injecting bovine growth hormone into their pituitary glands to see if he could stop ageing and dying. 鈥淗e was just so afraid of death,鈥� his brother Jim recalls.
Pilgeram became a vascular disease researcher and developed an obsession with cryonics 鈥� the practice of cooling a newly dead body so life might be restored when technology has progressed. He also signed up to be cryogenically frozen when he died. The Frozen Head podcast follows his quest and the stories of other cryonics supporters.
Some opt for the cheaper choice of preserving only their head, since our brains contain the critical parts of our identities and it is assumed that a body could be recreated in the future. 鈥淔or Laurence and others like him, death isn鈥檛 the end,鈥� says Alaina Urquhart, a novelist and autopsy technician who co-hosts the show with her niece Ash Kelley.
Sceptics argue that the odds of reanimating cryogenically preserved humans are low, but breakthroughs, such as the first successful thawing of a rabbit brain in an almost-perfect state, show the possibility is still open.
That said, cryonics can be shrouded in mystery, which can land its supporters in unusual situations. The podcast recounts why Mike Darwin was taken into police custody in the 1980s while he was the president of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a prominent cryonics organisation. The police investigators were unfamiliar with cryonics and supposedly wanted to thaw the severed heads that the company had stored in liquid nitrogen. 鈥淭hey had no conception of what was involved,鈥� says Darwin.
Urquhart and Kelley previously hosted the popular true-crime podcast Morbid, and they are engaging hosts who bring out the human side of this macabre subject.
Cryonics seems to provide enthusiasts with an alternative way to deal with death. Baseball player Ted Williams鈥檚 son, for example, wanted to freeze his father so he could spend more time with him some day.
The six-part series also shows the absurdity of trying to plan for what happens after death. Someone might be really committed to having their body frozen, but the complex logistics may not fall into place. Or, in some cases, people have been cryopreserved without enough proof it is what they want. Lengthy lawsuits often ensue, and can leave everyone unsatisfied.
Ultimately, the big question may be whether believing in cryonics prevents people from living life to the fullest. As Urquhart and Kelley say, people hoping for reanimation may live in denial of death, with a rose-tinted view of what 鈥渃oming back鈥� might be like. Aside from the improbability that the world would be a better place, they could, for example, be brought back in a body that they dislike. In Pilgeram鈥檚 case, trying to control every aspect of his life and death backfired (to say more would be a spoiler).
Frozen Head is entertaining and informative, hinting at certain personality traits of many cryonics fans. This leaves me wondering whether people with other temperaments and motivations may also want to be frozen after death. And where are the women queueing up to be cryopreserved? Perhaps a sequel is in order.
Sandrine Ceurstemont is a writer based in Morocco
