Somebody in China is trying to do an Austin Powers.
A middle-aged Chinese woman in Chongqing might experience the same feeling, after dying in May from what killed Steve Jobs - pancreatic cancer. Du Hong, a 61-year-old writer of children's literature, agreed to have her head "frozen" and preserved in the America Alcor Life Extension Foundation after she died, in the hope of being resurrected after 50 years.
Du's condition deteriorated in March, but she kept calm. "At that time my mother often joked about freezing my body,"Du's daughter, Zhang Siyao said. Zhang told her mother's idea to her husband, Lu Chen. "I was surprised when I heard it," Lu said. He kept in touch with a Chinese company who already stopped cryonics due to its high cost. Then he contacted Alcor through volunteers and some U.S. classmates. "We think the information they provided is reliable", Lu said.
According to its website, Alcor is a nonprofit organization that researches, advocates for and performs cryonics, the preservation of humans in liquid nitrogen after legal death, with hopes of restoring them to full health when new technology is developed in the future.
Whole-body cryonics costs more than 2 million yuan ($314,200), while simply freezing the head only costs 750,000 yuan. So Du Hong chose to freeze her head for economic reasons.
From a biological perspective, doctors will turn a dead body into a phase of "medical stability." "People do not immediately die," Wei Jingliang, a Ph.D student studying genetic engineering at the China Academy of Agricultural Science, told the Chongqing Evening News on Thursday.
A series of measures will be taken, preserving the dead body in a low-temperature condition, said Wei.
"We believe it is practical to defrost the body when the time is right," Wei said.
Wei said he has paid close attention to Alcor's cryonics since 2011, which has made several breakthroughs in the past ten years.
Yue Shanshan, a lawyer from the Yuecheng Law Firm, told the Global Times Thursday there are no laws on cryonics, but laws on freezing eggs exist. Du passed away in the U.S., so Chinese laws do not apply in her case.
"If Du is brough back to life in 2065, it would be unclear how she would deal with the new society," Yue told the Global Times.
