Ted Williams was born in 1918. He played\h baseball for 19 years, won two triple crowns,\h\h
retired, hosted a TV show about fishing, and\h then died… maybe. Because despite his wishes\h\h
to be fully cremated, his family decided to\h save a piece for later: his head. Right now,\h\h
Ted Williams’ head is frozen in a lab in Arizona,\h with a contract to bring him back to life if\h\h
the technology to do so is ever invented, at\h which point he could, I don’t know, be really,\h\h
really bad at baseball. This process of preserving\h and reviving human bodies is called cryonics,\h\h
and right now, there are four major companies in\h the world that do it; you could, today, pay to\h\h
have your body preserved and be revived several\h centuries later. The only problem is, none of\h\h
these companies actually know how to bring people\h back to life yet—so how do they actually work?\h
Well, here are the four companies: there’s\h KrioRus in Russia, who have 92 bodies in storage,\h\h
Yinfeng with about a dozen in China, the Cryonics\h Institute with 240, and then there’s the US-based\h\h
Alcor—with 208 in storage but another 1,600\h customers on their roster, they’re basically the\h\h
Michael Jordan of scamming people into dipping\h their heads in liquid nitrogen. Among their\h\h
patients is this guy: James Bedford, the very\h first person to be cryopreserved. He died in 1967,\h\h
and he’s been chilling in a liquid nitrogen-cooled\h thermos for the last 56 years. With no established\h\h
cryonics companies to take on the job after he\h was frozen, his thermos was passed around for a\h\h
few decades, before finally ending up at Alcor in\h the 90s, where they apparently got a real kick out\h\h
of dragging him out of his thermos and staring\h at him. Now, unfortunately for James, it turns\h\h
out that successfully cryopreserving a human being\h requires a slightly more involved procedure than\h\h
treating a corpse like one giant dippin’ dot,\h so James is probably never going to get to come\h\h
back and experience the wonders of climate change. But for those of whom were frozen more recently,\h\h
it might be a different story—modern cryonics\h companies have sorted out the surprisingly\h\h
complex logistics of freezing a human body without\h damaging it, and getting the process underway\h\h
within seconds of their death. For the sake of\h this video we’re going to look at Alcor’s process,\h\h
given that they’re by far the largest and most\h well-established of the four cryonics companies,\h\h
and also because they’re not afraid to write\h blog posts about how they take their corpses\h\h
out of storage and stare at them. Now, companies\h like Alcor have a bit of a legal hurdle right\h\h
from the outset, because freezing a living person\h is considered, in most countries, to be murder,\h\h
and murder is considered, in most countries,\h to be frowned upon. They’re not allowed to\h\h
begin their procedures until the patient has been\h legally pronounced dead, but after that happens,\h\h
there’s a pretty limited window before the\h brain and vital organs just become useless\h\h
piles of mush. In order to respond within seconds\h of someone’s death, Alcor has cryonics vehicles\h\h
stationed permanently in Florida and Southern\h California, and temporarily anywhere else with a\h\h
high concentration of not-yet-dead customers. Once\h one of their customers is in critical condition,\h\h
a 4-person stabilization team will be dispatched\h to their location, and then presumably wait around\h\h
awkwardly while they hurry up and die. Once that’s\h been taken care of, the body is submerged in an\h\h
ice bath and pumped with the following chemicals,\h before being transported—either by one of Alcor’s\h\h
ground vehicles or just, like, a normal cargo\h airline—to Alcor’s operating room in Scottsdale,\h\h
Arizona. Before the body arrives in Scottsdale\h to be frozen, it needs to be kept cold, but not\h\h
too cold; if the body drops below 32 fahrenheit,\h ice crystals will form in the blood and organs,\h\h
and you know what they say about ice crystals\h forming in the blood and organs: it’s not good\h\h
when ice crystals form in the blood and organs.\h Once in the lab, the patient’s blood is replaced\h\h
with a substance called M22, which is basically\h antifreeze, and this allows for a process called\h\h
“vitrification”—basically, the whole body\h can be frozen without any actual ice forming,\h\h
which is bad for previously mentioned reasons,\h and then the body gets cooled down to a brisk\h\h
-196 celsius and shoved into one of these until,\h well… that’s where we run into a bit of a problem.\h
Because, you see, now we’ve arrived at the part\h of this process where this whole business model\h\h
starts to feel a little sketchy—what do these\h companies do after they freeze you? Presumably\h\h
the exciting part about all of this isn’t\h that you die and your corpse is frozen for all\h\h
eternity—you can do that just by moving to\h Minnesota—the exciting part is that they’ll\h\h
bring you back to life one day. But as far as\h we know, they can’t. Because not only would\h\h
they need the technology to thaw you out without\h damaging any of your vital organs, they would\h\h
also need the technology to reverse whatever it\h was that killed you, because you know… you still\h\h
died. But if that technology doesn’t exist, and\h none of these companies know when it will exist,\h\h
then how do they operate a business that intends\h to keep a human freezer running without fail for,\h\h
potentially, centuries? Well, let’s take a look at\h their contracts. Yes, my writer Ben got his hands\h\h
on a human cryopreservation contract, and no, he\h won’t tell me where he got it. But basically, it\h\h
works like this: high end companies like Alcor and\h Yinfeng charge about $200,000 upfront if you want\h\h
your full body frozen, or $80,000 for just your\h head. The Cryonics Institute will go as low as\h\h
$28,000, and Kriorus will freeze your brain\h for just $15,000. At least in Alcor’s case,\h\h
they’ll take $115,000 of that money and\h invest it in this Patient Care Trust,\h\h
which is managed by Morgan Stanley, and assuming\h that the stock market doesn’t self-immolate,\h\h
should grow at a rate that would be able to keep\h the liquid nitrogen flowing indefinitely. To make\h\h
sure that their investment board doesn’t\h screw around with the money, the majority\h\h
of board members are contractually obligated\h to put their family in the tubes, because to\h\h
keep a highly-effective cult in line, you need to\h start at the top. I mean, I can’t legally say that\h\h
Alcor is a cult, but let’s just call them a “small\h group of people characterized by a great devotion\h\h
to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.” So what happens if none of this actually works?\h\h
Well, Alcor’s website sure has you believe that\h their contract obligates them to revive their\h\h
patients, because that’s, like, whole point of\h this procedure, but if you actually read the\h\h
contract, that sentence that they put on their\h website is preceded by a much longer paragraph\h\h
about how they have no idea if they can do that,\h if it’s even legal, and that if they don’t end\h\h
up reviving you you don’t actually have any\h legal recourse. So to answer the question of\h\h
how these businesses work, the answer is that\h you give them hundreds of thousands of dollars,\h\h
they put you in a freezer, and if you don’t\h magically come back to life, you can go to hell.\h
So is freezing your brain a worthwhile\h proposition? Who’s to say. But fortunately\h\h
for you, I have a much better investment\h for your brain, and it’s called Brilliant.\h\h
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