The future of death

Abegunrin Gideon
2 min readDec 2, 2020

Do you know that the divide between death and life has been on a thin path? This was revealed in research by a Russian Billionaire who had the major intention to immortalize men using a scientific approach that might make men defy death in the future. Though, good but it present with it some ethical issue about the sanctity of human life and it’s legal dynamics. I have been held spellbound by a scientific concept that came to the fore in 1960 and has evolved more in 2016. The approach involves freezing the human body momentarily for several years. This is necessary to preserve the body till a time when there will be a remedy for the ailment that has no cure at the moment.

Cryonics is a scientific procedure in which the human body momentarily after death is crio-preserved under liquid nitrogen for a particular number of years and the body is woken with few changes to it. Cryonics is all about timing. The bodies of the deceased are cryogenically frozen immediately after the heart stops beating. “Freezing” is not apposite in this context because cryonic freezing tries to avoid ice crystal formation which destroys the cells of the body tissues.

A chemical cocktail of preservatives like glycerol and propanediol, in addition to antifreeze agents, are commonly used to get the body into a stable state where it won’t be decaying, but also won’t suffer damage from being stored at low temperatures for, conceivably, a very long time. This means that if you have a terminal illness with no cure in view and you can meet the legal and commercial terms, your body can be temporarily cooled in anticipation of a futuristic cure to what ails you. Awesome init?.

A UK lady of 14years who died of cancer won the case to be cryogenically preserved in 2016 with the commercial implication of 37000pounds after which she would be woken up when the cure for cancer is proven and available. Is this attempt at preservation and elongation of life not against the good book? Does it lend credence to legally validated euthanasia, what do we make of all this? Let God be the judge

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Abegunrin Gideon

A researcher with a forte for scholarly writings. He is adept in the design and implementation of trans-disciplinary research procedure and data management.