AS Oscar Wilde lay dying he looked at his bedroom curtains, whose pattern he detested, and said: "Either they go, or I do."
Each of us will die. This is one of the few things, perhaps the only thing, that we can be certain of. Needless to remark, death has always been a universally unpopular visitor but until recently nobody attempted to get around the problem.
Some people now arrange to have their bodies frozen immediately after death in the hope of being revived at some future date. As regards the prospects that these hopes will bear fruit, well, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Most people find it uncomfortable to think about their death. The agnostic does not believe in any spirit life beyond the grave and, for him, death is the end of all consciousness. Even for the Christian who believes that the spirit lives on after death, there is the concept of Heaven and Hell and therefore no certainty that the spirit will have a happy existence.
Most of us would like to postpone death for as long as possible. I suspect that if immortality went on special offer in the supermarket, almost everybody would avail of it. Imagine the gay bantering exchanges between the clergy and the laity as they jostle for a favourable place in the queue!
Most of us have ambitions for a sort of immortality anyway, whether in a grand way by hoping to be remembered by future generations for some great deed, or, in a more mundane way, by having our genetic characteristics carried forward through our descendants.
Woody Allen said he would choose to achieve immortality by living forever. However, this might not be a good idea. I recently heard that the (reputedly) oldest man in the world at 30 years old has declared that he longs to die, being "weary of life
The practice of freezing a human corpse in the hope of reviving it in the future is known as cryonics. The idea began with Robert Ettenger, a Michigan physics teacher, who published a book called The Prospect of Immortality in 1964. Cryonics is now practised at several centres in the United States and, I believe, at one centre in the UK.
The process of cryonics must begin very quickly after death. The body is gradually cooled down towards 0C while the blood is kept circulating using a heart/lung machine and oxygen is maintained to the brain. The blood thickens as the temperature drops and is replaced with a blood substitute used in organ transplants.
The body is now further cooled down to a temperature of -79 C and "anti freeze" substances are pumped into it to prevent the formation of ice. The body is now further cooled down to -196C, the temperature of liquid nitrogen, and placed in a capsule containing liquid nitrogen. At this temperature all biological processes in the body are stopped.
Typical charges that apply if you enrol on a cryonics programme are as follows: $100 to sign up, and $288 a year (before death), and then $ 120,000 for the process of suspending the body in liquid nitrogen. An extra $10,000 is payable if the person is living outside America.
An alternative to having your whole body suspended in liquid nitrogen is to just have your head frozen, which costs $41,000. So now you know how much it will cost you if you want to give someone, or even yourself a uniquely thoughtful present - "Darling, I'm going to have you frozen".
There are several problems at the very least, associated with the process of cryonics. Ideally, cryonics would preserve body cells in an undamaged state so that they could be revived in good condition at some stage in the future.
However, present cryonic practices damage cells. It is possible to freeze some cells and to revive them later in good condition. This is already common practice with sperm cells, as any artificial insemination technician will tell you. Freezing and revitalisation techniques now available can only be successfully carried out with small samples such as sperm and embryos. The process is unsuccessful with large aggregates of cells such as tissues and organs in such cases the process irreversibly damages the cells.
Our thinking process, personality and memory bank reside in the brain. If, on revival at some future date, a person is to retain the unique personality that he/she had when previously alive, then the revived brain will have to work with the same efficiency as it once had.
We are all aware of the dramatic effects that even minor brain damage suffered in a stroke can have on personality and performance. It is vitally important therefore that brain tissue be well preserved in the cryonics process.
Unfortunately, however, brain tissue is probably the most difficult of all to preserve using present cryonics methods.
The practitioners of cryonics answer the objections regarding tissue damage by forecasting that methods will eventually be developed to repair cell damage at the molecular level. Whether or not such technology is developed in the future remains a matter for conjecture. If it is not, it is difficult to see how full and whole human beings could emerge on revival of a damaged corpse.
There would be little point in dying and then waking up later to a life of severe mental and physical retardation and, possibly, excruciating pain.
Every cell in the body contains a complete copy of the genetic information that is necessary to specify every detail about us. It is theoretically possible to take any one of these cells, and, using this genetic information, to recreate the entire whole individual. Technically this process is called cloning.
Cloning can presently be successfully carried out using simple organisms. The technology is not currently available to allow it to be carried out for complex organisms like human beings. However, this technical capacity may be developed in the future.
If you take a cell, say from your leg, and clone it into a whole individual, the new person will be your identical biological twin but will not be a new you since he/she will not have your memory and experience. Your new twin will also develop a somewhat different personality to yourself.
This is why it is so important to preserve the brain in cryonics if that unique personality is to be revived in the future.
All things considered, cloning would seem to me to be a good second best option. With current freezing technology, it is feasible to have a good shot at adequately preserving a small number of body cells and these could be stored at relatively little expense, in the hope that eventually technology will be developed that would allow them to be cloned into whole new individuals.
Cryonics as presently practised is probably no more than an exotic and expensive way to handle a corpse, compared to the conventional method of burial, with the prospects for the corpse remaining the same in either case.