‘Centre for Immortality’ it calls itself, a place where death can possibly be reversed. It claims to be just an extension of emergency medicine that aims to stretch time for us mere mortals. It uses high tech procedures to retrieve bodies of people within a few minutes of their clinical death and then subjects them to cryopreservation. The aim is to minimize the rate of cellular degeneration. The blood is substituted with medical antifreeze and the bodies are kept at -196 degrees until such time as medical technology advances far enough to treat the condition the person died of. In other words, resurrect them.

Max More is the CEO of this company called Alcor Life Extension Foundation based in Arizona, USA. According to him, ”Who’s to say that in 100 years we won’t have some kind of nanotechnology that can fix cells at an individual level and repair what’s necessary to return someone to good health. We think of cryonics as a scientific experiment. People that are buried or cremated are our control group and so far, everyone in the control group has died.”

There are many arguments for and against this project. I am not sure what death is but it certainly is more than just the cessation of cellular function. For me it also involves the departure of some kind of a subtle life force from the body that cannot be reinstated merely by cellular regeneration. If these bodies are brought back to cellular life, what force of the universe would animate them? This sounds awfully like the perfect way of creating zombies.

Who knows!