{"id":3099,"date":"2016-11-21T22:07:18","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=3099"},"modified":"2016-11-21T22:09:32","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:09:32","slug":"a-hot-take-on-a-cold-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2016\/11\/21\/a-hot-take-on-a-cold-body\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hot Take on a Cold Body"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s good to see Nils’ post<\/a><\/span> about the recent UK cryonics ruling<\/a><\/span> getting shared around quite a bit – so it should. \u00a0I thought I’d throw in my own voice, too.<\/p>\n

About 18 months ago, Imogen Jones and I wrote a paper musing on some of the ethical and legal dimensions of Christopher Priest’s\u00a0The Prestige<\/em>. \u00a0One dimension of this was a look at the legal status of the bodies produced as a result of the “magic” trick – in particular, the haziness of whether they were alive or dead; the law doesn’t have any space for a third state. \u00a0The paper was something of a\u00a0jeu d’esprit<\/em>, written to serve a particular function in a Festschrift<\/em> for Margot Brazier<\/a><\/span>. \u00a0If I say so myself, I think it’s a pretty good paper – but it’s also meant to be fun, and is clearly rather less serious than most ethico-legal scholarship (or anything else in the book, for that matter).<\/p>\n

\"coldlazarus5\"<\/a>
Not quite “Cold Lazarus”, but close enough…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So it’s a bit of a surprise to see relevantly similar themes popping up in the news.\u00a0 If we’re freezing people in the hope of curing terminal illness in the future, what’s the status of the bodies in the meantime (especially if the death certificate has been signed)?\u00a0 There’s a load of questions that we might want to ask before we get too carried away with embracing cryonics.<\/p>\n

Right from the start, there’s a question about plausibility. \u00a0For the sake of what follows, I’m going to treat “freezing” as including the process of defrosting people successfully as well, unless the context makes it clear that I mean something else. \u00a0Now, that said, the (moral) reasons to freeze people rely on the plausibility of the technology. \u00a0If the technology is not plausible, we have no reason to make use of it. \u00a0It wouldn’t follow from that that using it’d be wrong – but since the default is not to act in that way,\u00a0it’s positive reasons that we need, rather than negative ones. \u00a0Neither could we really rely on the thought that we could cryopreserve someone in the hope that the freezing-and-thawing process becomes more plausible in future, because we’d have no reason to think that we’d chosen the right version of the technology. \u00a0We can only cryopreserve a person once: what if we’ve chosen the wrong technique? \u00a0How would we choose the best from an indefinitely large number of what we can at best treat as currently-implausible ones?<\/p>\n

So how plausible is it to put a body on ice, then revive it many years later?\u00a0 It’s been pointed out by some that we currently do preserve embryos without apparent ill-effect, with the implication that there’s\u00a0no reason in principle why more developed humans couldn\u2019t be frozen successfully.\u00a0 However, whole humans are a wee bit more complex than embryos; it’s not at all clear that we can extrapolate from balls of a few cells to entire humans. \u00a0Even the admittedly limited experimental evidence that it’s possible to freeze whole organs won’t show us that, since we’re systems of organs. \u00a0One can accept that an organ is a system, too; but all that means is that we’re systems of systems – so we’ve squared the complexity.\u00a0 And, of course, the timescales being considered here are tiny compared with the kind of timescales envisaged in cryonic fantasies.<\/p>\n

It’s not worth labouring the point; but it suffices to say that freezing people usefully\u00a0might well remain outside of our technical abilities for a long time. \u00a0Moreover, it\u2019d be difficult to see how the procedure could be researched in such a way as to settle the matter one way or the other. \u00a0The only people who’d volunteer, at a guess, would be those who had a serious illness, and a correspondingly serious interest in being thawed when that illness could be treated – it’d be too risky for others to think it worthwhile. \u00a0My gut says that they’re the only people whom ethics committees would accept as volunteers. \u00a0But those volunteers are unlikely to want to be thawed\u00a0unless<\/em> the cure for their illness is available – why would they expose themselves to the danger otherwise? \u00a0And, of course, people that ill might make spectacularly bad research subjects anyway, what with them having one foot in the grave\u00a0already.<\/p>\n

For that reason, it\u2019s always going to be hard to say whether being frozen and thawed would be in someone\u2019s best interest, and therefore worth doing.<\/p>\n

But let’s put that aside for a moment, and concentrate on a much bigger issue. \u00a0Even if the freezing process were feasible, there\u2019d be another question about whether and when to revive people.\u00a0 A person might want to be thawed if and when, say, a cure for her cancer is discovered; but in the meantime, who would look after the body?\u00a0 Who would pay for the maintenance?\u00a0 A right to life doesn\u2019t imply a right to have life maintained indefinitely at all costs, and it might well be quite a lot to ask of the public sector that it subsidise this stuff. \u00a0What of the private sector, then? \u00a0In that case, we’d have to be able to say something persuasive about it being financially worthwhile, but that’s not at all a given. \u00a0The Cryonics Institute offers a bargain-basement entry-level deal whereby you can be frozen for $28000<\/a><\/span>; but the cynic in me wonders how far that’d really go. \u00a0And if the company maintaining you went bust… well, it’s no easy to see how a warehouse full of bodies in tanks would be much of a saleable asset. \u00a0Not all companies that go out of business do so because they’re bust, of course; but they do go out of business. \u00a0What would happen to what I’m going to have to hold my nose and call cryonauts?<\/p>\n

And what’d happen if someone switched off the machine? \u00a0And what’d happen to the cryonaut’s property while they’re in their tank?\u00a0 Does it get treated as would a dead person’s estate, or perhaps held in trust?\u00a0 Oh, to be the lawyer working on a retainer in one of those cases!<\/p>\n

There’s something else that’s been bugging me, too. \u00a0The desire to be frozen can\u00a0– at least as it’s conventionally presented – be unpacked as a desire of an ill person to be put on ice until a cure for his illness can be found and exploited. \u00a0That’s not so wild. \u00a0Some people have been treated for rabies by having a coma induced<\/a><\/span>; success rates aren’t stellar, but they’re better than anything else available, and one might suppose they can only improve. \u00a0Cryonics might be seen as a radical version of that: shut the body down a bit until the imminent threat has passed.<\/p>\n

However, rationale for freezing\u00a0seems to assume that the person being frozen would be in at least tolerably good health when they were frozen. \u00a0The recent story involved a 14-year-old frozen after her death – I’m much less confident that the law would be so easy going on someone being frozen before death. \u00a0But that’s already – surely – going to confuse matters. \u00a0Death is metabolic breakdown; the cancer won’t have changed appreciably in the time just before and just after death, but the body in which it’s found will, by definition: if it weren’t to have changed in a radical way, it would still be alive.\u00a0 The point is that it\u2019s one thing to freeze someone in the early stages of cancer in the hope of a cure; it\u2019s quite another to freeze their corpse in the hope of reversing not only the illness, but the death it caused as well.<\/p>\n

Note here that even freezing someone in the late stages of the illness may not be all that desirable: presumably, they would want not only to be cured of the cancer or whatever killed them, but to have whatever damage it caused repaired as well – and that seems to suggest being frozen as early in the disease process as possible, to minimise the damage caused by the illness that’d have to be repaired on top of<\/em> the illness itself being halted.\u00a0 That is to say: someone who’s frozen a day after being told that she has six months left to live would – I’d guess – have a better chance than someone with an identical condition but in whom the death rattle can already be heard.\u00a0 Someone who’s frozen at a late stage may have a corresponding reason to be on ice for a long time, while the technology catches up not only with their illness, but also with its sequelae… if it ever does.\u00a0 And that brings us back to the question of who ought to pay for all that.\u00a0 Is it money well spent?<\/p>\n

And, frankly, why would future generations see any merit in defrosting the kind of egomaniac who thinks that future generations will want to defrost him?<\/p>\n

I’m really not persuaded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s good to see Nils’ post about the recent UK cryonics ruling getting shared around quite a bit – so it should. \u00a0I thought I’d throw in my own voice, too. About 18 months ago, Imogen Jones and I wrote a paper musing on some of the ethical and legal dimensions of Christopher Priest’s\u00a0The Prestige. […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2143,2146,511,591,328,397,576,472,407],"tags":[317],"class_list":["post-3099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-distributive-justice","category-in-the-courts","category-in-the-news","category-life-and-death","category-philosophy","category-research-ethics","category-the-art-of-medicine","category-thinking-aloud","category-wtf","tag-research"],"yoast_head":"\nA Hot Take on a Cold Body - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2016\/11\/21\/a-hot-take-on-a-cold-body\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Hot Take on a Cold Body - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It’s good to see Nils’ post about the recent UK cryonics ruling getting shared around quite a bit – so it should. \u00a0I thought I’d throw in my own voice, too. About 18 months ago, Imogen Jones and I wrote a paper musing on some of the ethical and legal dimensions of Christopher Priest’s\u00a0The Prestige. 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About 18 months ago, Imogen Jones and I wrote a paper musing on some of the ethical and legal dimensions of Christopher Priest’s\u00a0The Prestige. 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