What is CRYOGENICS?

CRYOGENICS The science and technology of low temperatures. Because temperature is a reflection of the energy of atomic motion, the lowest conceivable temperature is that at which all motion ceases: ‘‘absolute zero’’ (–273° Celsius, or 0° Kelvin). To a cryophysicist ‘‘low’’ means within a few degrees of 0° K, but cryobiologists are interested in the broader range of temperatures at which biological activity is suppressed, opening up the possibility of suspended animation; the refrigeration temperature of liquid nitrogen, 81° K,is usually adequate forc ryobiologicalpurposes. The phenomenon of most interest to cryophysicists is electrical superconductivity, which has numerous potential technological applications, although development was long inhibited by the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining such refrigerants as liquid helium. Although the notion of absolute zero once exerted a certain fascination on the speculative imagination—examples of its use include Harold M. Colter’s ‘‘Absolute Zero’’ (1929) and Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘‘The Human Zero’’ (1931)—literary interestin cryophysics has alwaysbeen limited, andwas not significantly increased by the discovery of ‘‘hightemperature superconductivity’’ in 1986. Cryobiology is a different matter.

The preservative effects of low temperatures were known before the seventeenth century—Francis Bacon’s death was linked by rumor to a cryobiological experiment—so the notion of freezing-induced suspended animation was a ready recourse for subsequent tales of accidental time-displacement; Leonard Kip’s ‘‘Hannibal’s Man’’ (1873), W. Clark Russell’s The Frozen Pirate (1887), Robert Duncan Milne’s ‘‘Ten Thousand Years in Ice’’ and ‘‘The World’s Last Cataclysm’’ (both 1889), and Louis Boussenard’s Dix mille ans dans un bloc de glace (1889; trans. as 10,000 Years in a Block of Ice) spearheaded a tradition that extended into the twentieth century in such stories as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘‘The Resurrection of Jimber Jaw’’ (1937) and Gerald Kersh’s ‘‘Frozen Beauty’’ (1941, initially by-lined Waldo Kellar). The application of cryopreservative techniques to living tissues was, however, hindered by the problem of cell damage inflicted by ice crystals during freezing and unfreezing. The cells of freezeresistant plants and animals are protected from such damage by ‘‘natural antifreezes’’—mostly glycol derivatives and sugars—which allow supercooled tissue to vitrify.

Artificial cryopreservation made considerable progress in the last quarter of the twentieth century in connection with the freezing of egg cells and early embryos; by then, animal embryos treated with a crypoprotective solution could be preserved in liquid nitrogen for many years. Determining the practical limits of such preservation is likely to be a hazardous business whose experimental tests will inevitably last for centuries, but the narrative utility of the notion is considerable. The most significant extrapolation of the idea is that of ‘‘cryonics’’—a term coined by Karl Werner for the use of cryogenetic techniques in preserving the human body, which entered common parlance after 1964, when R. C. W. Ettinger’s treatise The Prospect of Immortality—self-published two years earlier and publicised in the science fiction magazine Galaxy—was reprinted in a mass-market edition. Ettinger advocated the freezing of recently dead bodies or severed heads in liquid nitrogen in order that still-viable brains might be preserved until medical technology is sufficiently advanced to reverse the various kinds of damage leading to ‘‘heart death’’.

The idea that the frozen dead might be reanimated by advanced technology had been broached in pulp science fiction by Neil R. Jones’ ‘‘The Jameson Satellite’’ (1931), but was used sparingly thereafter. The notion of using suspended animation as a means of preserving a human body until it could be repaired by advanced medical technology was featured in Poul Anderson’s ‘‘Time Heals’’ (1949), but was not initially coupled with the idea of cryonic preservation. In Leo Szilard’s ‘‘The Mark Gable Foundation’’ (1961) freezing oneself to visit the future becomes a fad, but James White’s Second Ending (1961; book, 1962)—whose protagonist’s awakening is drastically belated—moved closer to Ettinger’s prospectus. Ettinger not only inspired a sudden glut of such narratives but also the establishment of such corporations as Alcor and TransTime, which attempted to put his ideas into practice.

The first dead man ‘‘frozen down’’ in the hope of future revivification was Dr. James Bedford in 1967. The case immediately involved Alcor in a legal conflict with the California Department of Health Services (DHS), which refused to issue permits for the disposition of human remains to the company. The legal wrangle—which lasted until 1990, when the Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered the DHS to issue the forms—helped to add an extra dimension of melodrama to technothrillers featuring near-future cryonics such as Ernest Tidyman’s Absolute Zero (1971) and Gregory Benford’s Chiller (1993; by-lined Sterling Blake).

The potential social and political issues arising from cryonic projects were extrapolated in numerous literary works. In Clifford D. Simak’s Why Call Them Back from Heaven (1967), trusts managing the financial assets of the frozen become significant powerblocs. In Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron (1969), access to cryonic vaults—advertised as a ticket to immortality—becomes the ultimate bribe, and its denial the ultimate blackmail. Larry Niven’s ‘‘The Defenseless Dead’’ (1973) points out that while the living have all the votes the ‘‘corpsicles’’ of the dead might become an exploitable resource. Tanith Lee’s ‘‘The Thaw’’ (1979) examines the predicament of a distant descendant called on to welcome an ‘‘awakener’’. In Greg Bear’s Heads (1990) the possibility arises that the memories of frozen heads—and hence their secrets—might be recoverable without their being defrosted. The problems of long-term storage space for corpsicles require their removal to Pluto in Charles Sheffield’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1997). The fascination with cryonics was by no means limited to the United States; Nikolai Amosov’s Zapiski iz budushchego (1967; trans. as Notes from the Future) and Anders Bodelsen’s Frysepunktet (1969; trans. as Freezing Point and Freezing Down) made significant contributions to the dialogue.

The notion that cryobiological storage of astronauts and extraterrestrial colonists might help to overcome the challenging time spans of interstellar *space travel—trailed in Walter M. Miller’s ‘‘Cold Awakening’’ (1952)—was quickly co-opted into the myth of the *Space Age following Ettinger’s popularisation; the considerable imagistic boost it received by virtue of its employment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001— A Space Odyssey (1968) led to the motif becoming a common feature of cinematic science fiction, used in such works as John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974) and the Alien series (1979–1992). E. C. Tubb’s ‘‘Dumarest’’ series (launched 1967) envisaged interstellar travel reproducing the class system of international flights, with ‘‘high’’ travellers enjoying the benefit of time-dilating drugs while ‘‘low’’ travellers must endure more hazardous cryonic procedures. This usage encouraged speculations about possible psychological effects of cryobiological preservation, as in Philip K. Dick’s ‘‘Frozen Journey’’ (1980; aka ‘‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’’) and James White’s The Dream Millennium (1974).

Many stories in which people try to ‘‘cheat’’ death by committing themselves to cryonic storage are formulated as contes cruels in which fate finds suitably ironic ways to thwart them. The common assumption that one would be able to wake up rich by virtue of the effects of compound interest on their investments is casually overturned in Frederik Pohl’s The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969) and M. Shayne Bell’s ‘‘Balance Due’’ (2000). In Terry Carr’s ‘‘Ozymandias’’ (1972) people who employ cryobiological methods to avoid a war fall victim to professional ‘‘tomb-robbers’’, like the mummified pharaohs of ancient Egypt. The angstridden protagonist of Brian Stableford’s ‘‘...And He Not Busy Being Born’’ (1987; incorporated into The Omega Expedition, 2002) successfully delivers himself into a world of immortals, but fails to escape his own destiny. Ian Watson’s ‘‘Ahead!’’ (1995) satirically examines awkward corollaries of being frozen down without a body.

One of Ettinger’s earliest converts was Alan Harrington, who embedded advertisements for cryonics in his manifesto for longevity research, The Immortalist (1969), and the science fiction novel Paradise 1 (1977). Another convert was K. Eric Drexler, who used the speculation that *nanotechnology might provide a means of repair and of providing protection against risks incurred during the thawing process as one of the key advertisements for his own hypothetical technology in Engines of Creation (1987). The latter supplementation increased the plausibility of cryonics to the point at which it became a standard feature of near-future scenarios in most science fiction published after 1990.