The Mansion of Happiness (34 page)

During the family feud that followed, Ettinger appeared on
ABC World News Tonight
and was interviewed by the
New York Times
, where he was referred to as “Dr. Ettinger”; elsewhere, reporters called him “a Michigan physics professor.” Ettinger has two master’s degrees, one in physics and one in mathematics, both from Wayne State, which he attended after the war on the GI Bill. Aside from having spent a freshman semester at the University of Michigan in 1937, he had no affiliation with that institution. Many decades ago, he taught at Highland Park Community College, a school that no longer exists.
²²
He didn’t call himself “Doctor” or “Professor,” but he did consider himself a scientist. “I’m a scientist by my own criteria,” he told me. That is, he has “a scientific attitude.”
²³

“
Neuropreservation” has a scientific attitude, too, but that doesn’t make it a science; it’s more like extremely optimistic cosmetic surgery.
²⁴
The fountain of youth used to be a place, far away; more recently, people have been looking for it in pharmacies and outpatient clinics.
²⁵
In between “The Cerebral Library” and “The Jameson Satellite,” Gernsback ran “The Incredible Formula,” about a chemist who, in the year 1982, synthesizes an ephedrine-X, granting him eternal youth.
²⁶
Decades later, baby boomers were putting pressure on the Social Security system and getting plastic in their chests and titanium in their knees; they were buying hair dye, Viagra, Rogaine, and anti-aging cream; they were having face-lifts and neck jobs. Cryonics promises to cure hair loss, wrinkles, senescence, impotence, and death, all at once. Nip, tuck, sever, freeze, thaw, rebuild: head job.

Ah, yes, but will it work? Well, it would be going too far to say that stranger things have happened, because they haven’t. Reanimating and rejuvenating the dead would be several orders of magnitude stranger than, say, landing
on the moon. But it does boast a handful of somewhat prominent promoters and a much larger group of defenders whose position amounts to, basically, What the hell, it’s worth a try.
Ralph Merkle, a former professor of computer science at Georgia Tech who went on to teach at a place called Singularity University, served on Alcor’s board. (Merkle happens to be the great-grandnephew of Fred Merkle, whose base-running error—he failed to touch second—cost the New York Giants the National League pennant in 1908, an error forever after known as the Merkle Boner.)
²⁷
The MIT professor
Marvin Minsky, who will await resurrection at Alcor, e‑mailed me, in lieu of an explanation, this helpful chart:

Which looks a lot like this chart:

And which, while altogether different from faith, is another way of trying to cover all the bases.

As for its scientific plausibility, credentialed laboratory scientists who conduct peer-reviewed experiments having to do with the storage of organic tissue at very low temperatures (embryos, for instance, or organs for transplant) generally don’t think the dead will one day awaken.
²⁹
The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse, you get mush. And even if, in the future, scientists could repair the damage done to cells by freezing and thawing, they’d have, at best, a cadaver. Merkle believes that nanotechnology will solve this problem—microscopic robots will repair the cells, one by one—but, as Ettinger himself points out, anyone wanting to resurrect and rejuvenate the dead must complete four tasks: cure the person of what killed her, reverse the decay that set in between death and freezing, repair the damage done by the freezing itself, and make her young again. Even Orpheus would be daunted.

And, of course, success would seem to depend on whether the people
doing the freezing are doing it well. On August 18, 2003,
Sports Illustrated
published an investigative report by
Tom Verducci. Using tapes, photographs, and documents provided to him by Alcor’s chief operating officer,
Larry Johnson, Verducci described how Williams’s head had been “shaved, drilled with holes, accidentally cracked as many as 10 times and moved among three receptacles,” until it was finally put in “a liquid-nitrogen-filled steel can that resembles a lobster pot.” (The week Verducci’s article was published, Johnson, who had cooperated with the investigation, resigned from Alcor and launched a website called
freeted.com
.)
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It was Williams’s decapitation that brought the Cryonics Institute to the attention of the state of Michigan and resulted in the filing of a cease-and-desist order, three days after Verducci’s article appeared.
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“No,” Ettinger declared. “We don’t do neuros.”

“But—” Andy began.

“Oh, right.” In 1999,
CryoCare, a cryonics firm once run by
Ben Best, who later replaced Ettinger as president of CI, went out of business.

“We do have two heads,” Ettinger said. “Transfers.”

Robert Ettinger announced the dawn of what he called the Freezer Era at the height of the Cold War. In 1949, he met his first wife, Elaine, at a Zionist meeting. In the 1950s, they moved to the suburbs and had two children. In the basement of their house in Oak Park, Michigan, Ettinger built a fallout shelter and waited for a scientist to read “The Penultimate Trump” and turn today’s extravagant fiction into tomorrow’s cold fact.
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Finally, he decided he’d have to do it himself. In 1960, he wrote a two-page flyer and sent it out to a few hundred people whose names he’d found in
Who’s Who.
The response proved underwhelming.
³³
In 1962, he wrote a sixty-page manifesto and sent a copy to
Frederik Pohl, the editor of the science fiction magazine
Worlds of Tomorrow.
Pohl, who was a regular guest on an all-night New York AM-radio show,
The
Long John Nebel Show
, arranged for Ettinger to be invited. One thing led to another and, eventually,
Thomas McCormack, a junior editor at
Doubleday, agreed to read Ettinger’s sixty pages. One day at the office, McCormack was having an argument with Doubleday’s science editor. McCormack thought it was not logically impossible to resurrect the frozen dead; the other guy disagreed. Just then,
Isaac Asimov, a Doubleday author, happened past. “Asimov walked into the
room,” McCormack recalls, “and it didn’t take him ten seconds to say, ‘No, it’s not logically impossible.’ ”
³⁴

In 1964, the year Doubleday published
The Prospect of Immortality
,
Dr. Strangelove
hit theaters. Through that lens, mortality begins to look rather a lot like mutual assured destruction and immortality at 320 below like nothing so much as a fabulously air-conditioned fallout shelter. In
Strangelove
, the world faces a nuclear Armageddon. On orders from a U.S. Air Force general convinced of a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” (shades of Steinach), American airmen have dropped a bomb on Russia, thereby triggering the Soviets’ Doomsday Machine. From the war room in Washington, the U.S. president (played by Peter Sellers) entertains proposals made by his scientific adviser, Dr. Strangelove (also Sellers):

No, we’re not all going to “die,” Ettinger insisted. We’re all going into freezers, to be paid for by Social Security. After the Manhattan Project, after
Sputnik
, after dishwashers and electric mixers, either scientists and engineers were on the verge of solving everything (in which case, go into the freezer, because you can be sure the world will be even better when you wake up) or else someone was about to launch an atomic bomb (in which case, go into the freezer, because maybe you’ll survive). “Before long,” Ettinger predicted, “the objectors will include only a handful of eccentrics.” Freezers might even help in the fight against the Reds: Soviet leaders, who “will want immortality for themselves,” will be forced to kowtow to the West. Not to mention that since Siberia offered “natural cold storage,” it might prove useful, diplomacy-wise, as some kind of trade.
³⁶

Ettinger did concede that the logistics of freezing the dead could be difficult at first, especially in the “retarded nations,” where “makeshifts may be necessary to stretch the rupees, pesos, etc.” No one would be left behind, though. In poor, hot countries, “the bodies will be stored in pits insulated with straw and dry ice.” Okay, right, yes, that might not actually work; very
likely, the dead of the retarded nations will simply rot. No worries. “It will not at first greatly matter how skillfully the bodies are preserved, so long as
hope
is preserved.”
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Hope, after all, springs eternal. But wait: If no one ever dies, won’t there be too many people on the planet?

“The people could simply agree to share the available space, in shifts,” Ettinger suggested, “going into suspended animation from time to time, to make room for others.” Anyway, overpopulation won’t be a problem. While it goes without saying that there will be a great deal of excellent sex in Ettinger’s golden age—the men will look like Charles Atlas, the women like Miss Universe—there will be no
childbirth; childbirth is gross. Fetuses will be incubated in jars. No woman will dream of
breast-feeding, either—blech. “Essentially, motherhood will be abolished,” he predicted. Moreover, Ettinger informed me, “When people no longer die of old age, more people will choose to omit children.” Why bother? They only disappoint you.
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Then, too, eugenics will help keep the birthrate down, and deformed babies could be frozen, against the day that someone might actually want them, or figure out how to fix them. “Cretins,” for instance, or babies born with cerebral palsy: “would not early freezing be a true mercy?” For the weak-minded, who might find making such a decision difficult, Ettinger offered a philosophical rule of thumb: Ask yourself, “if the child were
already
frozen, and it were within my power to return him to a deformed life, would I do so? If the answer is negative, then the freezer is where he belongs.”
³⁹

On the floor in front of the freezers at the Cryonics Institute were two slotted boxes painted white, with a black number in each slot, like the slots in a company mailroom.

“What’s this?”

Ettinger didn’t answer; he looked away. Andy explained that the numbers refer to the patients, most of whom choose to remain anonymous, and the box is for their families. Over the years, a half dozen have sent flowers, mostly roses, long dead. Attached to one bouquet was a card in an unopened envelope. It turns out that staring at an unopened envelope inside a freezatorium is substantially more depressing than looking at the blank space on a tombstone. Thoughts of spring eluded me.

“Do patients’ families ever visit?”

“Not many,” Andy said. Ettinger had wandered off toward the office, passing a half-open door I hadn’t noticed before.

“What’s in there?”

“A storeroom,” Ettinger called over his shoulder. “Used to be a library.”

We sat down in the conference room. Along the wall hung twenty-six eight-by-ten photographs of patients, beginning with Ettinger’s mother. His father, who died in 1984, at the age of eighty-nine, is not among them. “He’s in a mausoleum,” Ettinger said, shaking his head. “I tried very hard to get him to be frozen, but his second wife was against it. He was too wimpy to stand up to her.” In 1964, Ettinger had anticipated this difficulty: “If your husband or wife is mentally competent but opposes freezing, a difficult moral problem arises. The easy way out is compliance and burial, but you will have to live with your conscience for a long time.”
⁴⁰
Ettinger’s brother, who died in 2000, proved as weak as his father. “In his last illness he became depressed and told his children he didn’t want to be frozen,” Ettinger said. “I told them they should freeze him anyway, but I couldn’t get them to, and he was lost.” This is how Ettinger always put it when he talked about the unfrozen dead. His uncle Herman drove his car into a river: “That was a shame. He was lost.”