Click to Open Overlay Gallery Simon & Schuster Some people consider James Bedford the world’s longest-surviving person. In 1967, at the age of 73, the psychology professor stopped breathing at a nursing home in Los Angeles. But in the hours that followed, a medical team performed the first successful cryonic suspension, using ice to freeze Bedford’s body before placing him in a capsule filled with liquid nitrogen. Bedford’s family stayed vigilant to ensure he never thawed, at one time stashing him in a garage-sized storage locker they rented in Burbank. Twice a month, they paid a truck to top off Bedford’s container with liquid nitrogen.
Bedford is now in the care of the nonprofit Alcor Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. The largest cryonics organization in the world, it currently holds 146 patients—52 frozen whole bodies and 94 frozen brains—including baseball hall-of-famer Ted Williams and Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney. Alcor’s president, Max More, was there the day Bedford’s body was transferred into one of the state-of-the-art storage pods. “The original ice around his body was still intact,” More says. The technology to reanimate Bedford—and cure him of the cancer that caused his health to deteriorate—has not been developed. Yet More’s team believes that the part of his brain that makes him human has been preserved. So they hope, and they wait.
Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Zero K , puts forth a much surer—and darker—vision of the future. In his book, cryonics enables the superrich to “live the billionaire’s myth of immortality” on an exclusive desert commune in southeast Kazakhstan, waiting until they can be successfully reanimated. We’re not in Arizona anymore. A Chilling Effect
DeLillo, a National Book Award winner and “ chief shaman of the paranoid school of American Fiction ,” has trod his share of dystopian landscapes in his 15 previous […]
