Efforts to cheat death could advance real-world science

On February 28 “Grandpa Bredo” turned 124. He’s been cryogenically frozen for 34 years.

Last month, 10,000 or so people gathered where Bredo Morstoel’s body resides, in Estes Park, Colorado, to celebrate the guy who “Frozen Dead Guy Days” has rallied around for more than two decades. The macabre event is a celebration of death (coffin races, a band dressed as mummies) and horror (Estes Park is not coincidentally the site of the hotel that inspired “The Shining”). But this year Frozen Dead Guy Days also served as an educational outreach event for the world’s oldest cryogenic-freezing company, Alcor.

A 52-year-old nonprofit with 230 patients in cold storage and 1,400 signed up to join them, Alcor stepped in last year to freeze the body of Grandpa Bredo, giving him a first-class upgrade from a shed tended by locals in the nearby town of Nederland, to one of its stainless-steel pods, before ferrying him to Estes Park. There, they built the first and only cryo-dedicated museum around it and made Frozen Dead Guy Days its Super Bowl. 

While the (un)beating heart of the fest has stayed mostly the same, Alcor has made a couple of additions to educate, and upsell, the cryo-curious. Attendees are encouraged to take a tour of Alcor’s International Cryonics Museum, where they’ll find a promo code for 25% off freezing services. And in the middle of FDGD’s main event, the coffin races (teams carry a coffin with a teammate inside around an obstacle course), Alcor now does a demonstration of the first phases of its freezing process. Spoiler alert: it’s not the most sentimental sendoff and involves a lot of ice.

Alcor charges $220,000 for full-body preservation and $80,000 for just the brain, plus a monthly fee of up to  $100. Adding Alcor as their  life-insurance beneficiary is how many patients afford the huge sum . That’s much more than Alcor’s competitors: the Cryonics Institute charges between $28,000 and $35,000, and up to $60,000 in fees for extras, as well as annual or one-time dues. Russia-based KrioRus’s charges are said to be similar: $36,000 for whole-body freezing and $15,000 for the brain. 

Alcor says it uses that extra money to ensure its patients long-term care. $140,000 of the $220,000 fee is placed  in a trust for costs such as  refilling the pod’s liquid nitrogen. The trust, managed by Morgan Stanley, was worth $15 million as of 2021. Alcor told Sherwood it could actually lose money on individual patients after the costs of the supplies and crew are tallied up.

Cryogenic facilities have one other source of funds: patients who pay to freeze their pets. About 100 cats, dogs, and other animals are frozen at Alcor. Members can opt to pay as much as $130,000 to fully freeze their furry companions with “no guarantees or representations that the science will be advanced enough to provide any form of revival of a pet during an owner’s lifetime.” 

That “no guarantees” language is a mainstay of cryo companies’ marketing materials because no one who’s been frozen has been reanimated, at least not yet, and there’s no certainty anyone ever will be. For some, the eventual, potential promise of coming back to life is enough incentive to shell out hundreds of thousands. 

Not everyone who signs up expects to be revived. Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel has called his decision to be frozen by Alcor an “ideological statement,” though he doesn’t expect it will bring him back to life.

Alcor co-CEO and President James Arrowood told Sherwood that he estimates “10–20% are on one end of the spectrum, where they absolutely think that this will work someday and maybe there’ll be consciousness in a meaningful way,” and there’s another “20% of people who think it probably will never work at all, but want to contribute to the science advancements that occur as a result of the research.” As for the majority, Arrowood put their sentiment like this: “There’s a 0.0001% chance it’ll work but if it will work and I can benefit science in the meantime…why not.”

The cryogenic-afterlife industry also likely gets a halo effect (pun intended) from other longevity-chasing trends. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has signed up to have his brain embalmed by startup Nectome, which Altman said may eventually upload it to the cloud. Just getting on Nectome’s waitlist costs $10,000. 

Other techpreneurs want to avoid the afterlife altogether. Venture capitalist Bryan Johnson spends $2 million a year trying to opt out of death through hundreds of supplements, MRI scans, microneedling treatments, and, in one experiment, a blood-plasma transfusion from his son. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg have taken a more passive approach, investing millions in anti-aging research. 

The money that immortality-chasers pour into longevity trends, both as consumers and patrons, is furthering real-world scientific progress. Even cryogenic freezing is less “Star Trek” than it sounds: human embryos are already cryopreserved as part of in-vitro fertilization. In the future, cryogenic freezing could help store human organs, keeping them viable longer for transfers. It could also save and revive endangered species.

Even if the millions spent trying to cheat death doesn’t achieve its intended goal and none of the bodies are ever reanimated, the scientific contribution could improve the world for the living. Or as Arrowood told Sherwood, “If you’re 10% successful, you change medicine, even if you never get to the ultimate goal of a brain becoming conscious again.”