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A terminally ill 14-year-old girl from the London area recently won a legal battle that allowed her to be cryogenically preserved in the U.S. against her father's wishes:
A 14-year-old girl who wanted her body to be frozen so she could be brought back to life, won an historic legal fight shortly before her death. The girl, who was terminally ill with a rare cancer, was supported in her wish to be cryogenically preserved by her mother - but not by her father. A High Court judge ruled that the girl's mother should be allowed to decide what happened to the body.
The girl, who died in October, has now been taken to the US and frozen. The details of her case have just been released. The teenager - who cannot be named - and who lived in the London area, used the internet to investigate cryonics during the last months of her life.
[...] The teenager's letter to the judge
"I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up - even in hundreds of years' time. I don't want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish."
(Score: 2) by mendax on Saturday November 19 2016, @02:37AM
One of my favorite Monty Python quotes applies well here, "He's not dead yet!". In this case it's a she, but she's not been frozen YET.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Saturday November 19 2016, @02:55AM
Actually she has, which is why the story has been released. She is in cryonic storage at Cryonics Institute in the U.S., founded by Robert Ettinger, the father of cryonics, who himself went into liquid nitro just a few years ago.
The real error in the title is the confusion of "cryogenics" with "cryonics." Many cryogenics practitioners really don't appreciate being identified with the practice of cryonics.
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(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Saturday November 19 2016, @02:58AM
I meant to add that the error is all over the media on this story, so nobody say any thing nasty to our dedicated SN editors, who might or might not be familiar with the distinction.
It has been interesting to see the number of cryonics stories in the media rise the last few years. I wonder if this is the beginnings of cryonics becoming somewhat respectable, or at least of people's freedom to choose it being respected.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @03:30AM
"Actually, the process of cryonics was never more than a fad, and did not continue much beyond the mid-twenty first century."
(Score: 5, Informative) by dlb on Saturday November 19 2016, @03:57AM
: a branch of physics that deals with the production and effects of very low temperatures
cryonics
: the practice of freezing a person who has died of a disease in hopes of restoring life at some future time when a cure for the disease has been developed
FYI for those of us who confuse the two...
(However, even Google's auto definition gets them confused: cryogenics -the branch of physics dealing with the production and effects of very low temperatures -another term for cryonics.)