Frozen To Death

Here's a weird case for the modern age. A 14-year-old girl in the Britain. who was dying of cancer and since has passed on, won the right to be cryogenically frozen after her death. Yep! A juvenile has decided to be put on ice.  in a case that's the first of its kind. The girl's identity is being kept a secret. She wanted to have her body preserved in the hopes that scientists someday would be able to bring her back to life and cure her illness. I suspect she has been watching too many bad Hollywood science fiction movies.

So what does a court do when a kid wants to make the decision about her body after death? Mom and dad are called in.  The Ice Maiden's wishes were initially supported by her mother but not her father, which led the girl to seek a judge's intervention to ensure that her mother would decide what would happen to her body. The judge granted her request  because, we all known that in domestic matters men lose.  The good news is that  her father changed his mind and agreed to support his daughter's last wish.

During the last months of her life, the teenager, who had a rare form of cancer, used the internet to investigate cryonics, and when convinced she did not want to be buried she sent a letter to the court the following: "I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I'm only 14 years old and I don't want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo‐preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years' time. I don't want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish."

But can a14 year old make that kind of decision? Cryogenic body freezing is still just a bad movie plot, not science. Even if more than just at theoretical possibility, preserving and reconstructing a human brain, for instance, is not remotely possible now, and it's not at all clear whether it's even possible at all, ever. But the Ice Maiden believed that future science may make it feasible.

I wonder if that child would find being thawed 200 or 300 years from now, the ideal she thought it to be prior to her death. She would awaken in a strange world, perhaps a hostile one. There may be no relatives and certainly no familiar faces nor a familiar culture relative. She might not remember things and be left in a desperate situation. Even the most comfortable of us today is often uncomfortable in this world we know well. But alas! Blame mom for a bad thaw if the Ice maiden is ever brought back.

The girl was too young to make a legally binding will, so she asked the court to intervene to guarantee that her mother would be solely responsible for determining how her remains would be handled. The judge visited the teenager in the hospital and said he was impressed by the "valiant way" she faced her death, and that he had no doubt she had the mental capacity to file a lawsuit. The girl died with the knowledge that she would be frozen, and her body has been sent to the United States for long term cryogenic storage at a cost of $46,000.

Even if cryogenics were possible, would someone from 2016 think the world is better that what she once knew?  Too, organisms die. It's what life is about. Are we selfish to want to cheat or delay death?