Frozen 14-Year Old Dead Girl To Come To Life In 200 Years Time
I’m not in the habit of seeking banana skins on which to slip or, being anti-social to a pathological degree. I’m just imperfect. The world we live in is also imperfect. The present is built on a foundation of a flawed past, and the future will rest on the remains of the present. We come and die, thickening the outer layer of the Earth. As we get old we summon past events to our mind; some are pleasant and some are not. This we call memory that never dies.
The Greek philosopher Democritus wrote: “The truth of nature lies in deep mines and caves.” Indeed, microbes and bacteria exist deep down in the dark in every mine shaft, ice cores and deep in the ocean, drawing their energy not from the sun, but from chemical energy and natural radioactivity. They are earlier life forms long before the appearance of colourful life forms that need carbon dioxide to manufacture their food. They are born, live and die as we do up here, layering the Earth’s crust in fossil forms.
Unhappy with the shortcomings of God (Intelligent design) or Nature (Evolution), some scientists in America, have been making efforts to change the Biblical verse: ‘we came from dust, and to dust we return’ (Ecclesiastes 3:20; 12.7) without explaining where the dust come from in the first place.
On November 19 2016, British newspapers splashed headlines that a 14-year-old British girl who died of cancer, won her High Court ruling just before she died to be deep frozen using nanotechnology and cryonics in America, in the hope that she could be thawed in 200 years’ time and brought back to life, when doctors would eventually find a cure for her cancer. She is the first Briton to be cryonically frozen for this purpose.
The case attracted media attention, only because there was a court wrangle between her mother and her estranged father, who objected to her daughter’s decision. It was to be decided by a court Judge. The father was divorced by her mother just after her birth, and had not been allowed to see her for nine years after 2007, despite ten court attempts to see her.
The girl is now suspended in freezing nitrogen at a cryogenic centre in the US. Her extra-ordinary case sparked controversy in the UK where there is lack of regulation surrounding the industry. The father who also has cancer, was treated in the same hospital as her daughter, but he was never told about her by her mother. The head of the Charity-cryonics UK – a letting agent, is in Sheffield. The father said, he eventually and reluctantly, dropped his opposition to his daughter’s cryo-preservation because he respected his daughter’s wishes.
The girl from London, who was diagnosed with a rare cancer (?) in August 2015, announced her wish to be cryo-preserved after all treatment options failed. She researched the process online and told relatives in the months before her death: “I’m dying but I’m going to come back in 200 years.”
Her alienated father opposed the plan in the High Court, saying he couldn’t afford the £37,000 cost for the procedure. However, the girl’s maternal grandparents agreed to pay all costs. The judge, according to court documents, had had ‘a good discussion with the girl’ at her hospital bedside.
Cryonics technology is not exactly like pulling rabbits from a hat. It’s a future reality of life by cheating death. Scientists in the UK, condemn cryonics as ‘wishful thinking’ while in America, it is an industry with 4 centres. I wrote about it in my book (My Search for God. Science can do virtual miracles transcending into the realms of God. 2003: 222. Wheel Publications Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi).
As scientists agree that life on Earth emerged only once during the planet’s history, 3.8 billion years ago, some scientists in America, in the 1960s, began to think seriously about not wasting dead human bodies, such as by converting the cremated ashes to a diamond, to wear as a signet ring by living relatives. They also thought of a technology that could bring dead people to life in 100-200 years’ time, and restore them in good health. It’s called cryonics with nanotechnology that encompasses fundamental physics, biology and technology of nanometre-scale objects.
Its aim is to preserve human lives in such a state without physical decay, in the hope that sometime in the distant future, far more advanced scientific and medical procedures would be able to revive them. It’s the preservation of “living bodies” before the brain dies by freezing, along with other preservatives, so that in hundred years or so, the bodies may be thawed and life brought back to them, when there would be cures for the present incurable diseases.
The science of Cryonics was based on the principle that many living creatures could be frozen in liquid Nitrogen at temperatures usually about 196 degrees Celsius and below, with no sign of life or decay, and could be restored back to life. Many human tissues such as brain, sperms, embryos, or whole insects, have been chilled to a seemingly non-living state and revived. Many frozen human embryos have later grown into healthy children (Dr IM Singh. Quest Beyond Religion. Konark Publishers PVT LTD. New Delhi. 2006: 275).
A nanometre (nm) is 1,000 times smaller than a micrometre (micron in English) – one billionth of a metre. You can’t see them with your eyes. In the scale of things, eg human hair is 60-120 micrometre wide. Nanotechnology or molecular engineering [see below] goes hands to hands with Cryonics, which is a branch of physics and engineering that study how to produce very low temperatures and how materials behave at those temperatures. Nanotechnology involves ‘cryobiology’ that studies the effects of low temperatures on organisms especially for the purpose of achieving cryopreservation.
We now realise that many science fiction stories come true. There is such a science fiction movie.
In 1967 (50 years ago), one year after my arrival in Britain, I went to see a movie with my girlfriend (now wife), called Fantastic Voyage – a science fiction starring Raquel Welch. A microscopic submarine carrying surgeons, nurses and technicians, all reduced to microscopic size, and was injected into a vein of a man suffering from a stroke.
Their task was to clear a clot in a brain artery of this man and bring him back to health. They got out of the submarine and swam through the blood of his circulatory system, removing plaques from the artery with pick axes and shovels, and killing bacteria and removing viruses at the same time. They replaced the damaged DNA sections with normal DNA; repaired and replaced any damaged, diseased and missing tissues or, even the whole organs. They came out of the man’s circulation in their submarine, once the man was restored to health.
Nanotechnology is like this science fiction [see below]. As people are made of atoms and molecules, in order to restore youth and health, all you have to do is to make wrong molecules into right molecules, and put them in the right places. The brain is the most important organ and the patient must undergo deep freezing before the brain dies (in 6 minutes without oxygen). Human brain has a volume of 1350 cubic centimetres and a weight of about 1400 grams (same as the weight of your skin). It is 75% water by weight. An average brain has about 1000 grams of protein, about 175 grams of fat, and about 30-40 grams of other stuff.
The cryonic movement kicked off with the first publication of a book, The Prospect of Immortality by Robert CW Ettinger, and the formation of an organisation called ‘Immortal Society’ in Michigan, US in 1967. Nanotechnology can be called “molecular engineering” as it was first envisioned by the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman in the 1950s. In the 1980s, Eric Drexler was the pioneer. He published his book Engines of Creation in 1986. His projections included what he called “assemblers” – nanoscale devices which could bring things in more or less the same way that biology can bring things – by “growing”, using materials from the environment. These assemblers could also assemble themselves ie replicate (reproduce like themselves) as many as needed”.
In 1986, two physicists, of the International Business Corporation (IBM), won the Nobel Prize for the ‘Scanning Tunnelling Microscope’ (STM), which can “see” individual atoms, and even see them move around – something the physicists of my college time, could only dream. This was a great fillip to cryonicists with the promise of nanotech as evidence (not proof) that it will become possible to revive, repair, and rejuvenate even the most badly damaged cells of the present or future patients, and that patients should be frozen by the best methods we can learn or devise and also have the capability to implement and not just rely on nanotechnology, and in particular, repair of freezing damage.
There are now four major cryonics organisations in America. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, is by far the largest. It is a non-profit organisation. You don’t have to be very rich to register for cryonic suspension. Most people pay through a life insurance policy. The younger you are the less you pay.
The membership of Alcor is gradually increasing. There are now 1,678 members, including 290 associate members and 164 who have died and whose bodies have been subject to cryopreservation, 96 of which have only their head preserved. Associate members are financial supporters of Alcor, who are not yet ready to make cryopreservation arrangements. Alcor also cryopreserves pets.
What is Nano technology? It’s difficult to define, and more difficult to understand. Nanotechnology literally means technology that is very small. It’s technology that refers to technology that takes place at the very tiny sub-atomic levels in any scientific discipline. All things living or non-living are constructed of atoms. It was first introduced by the American physicist Richard Feynman in his lecture in 1959. The Japanese physicist coined the term Nanotechnology in 1959.
For an idea, one nanometre is the width of about 5 atoms.
NanoOrchard – Electrochemically overgrown CuNi nanopillars. (Image courtesy of the Materials Research Society Science as Art Competition and Josep Nogues, Institut Catala de Nanociencia i Nanotecnologia (ICN2), Spain, and A. Varea, E. Pellicer, S. Suriñach, M.D. Baro, J. Sort, Univ. Autonoma de Barcelona)
This is future science for you, bypassing the realm of God.
Not everything is impossible.
Website: drimsingh.com
Image Credit: pixabay.com
