Girl wins historic bid to have body frozen until 'cure is found'

Fri 18 Nov 2016

By Premier Journalist

A 14-year-old girl has become the first British child to be cryogenically frozen after a landmark ruling.

The teenager wrote a letter to a judge shortly before her death arguing that cryogenic preservation would be her only hope of being "woken up" when a cancer cure was found.

The girl - who died 11 days after writing the letter - was supported by her mother but her father had tried to block the move to freeze her body.

The teenager - known only as JS - appealed to Justice Peter Jackson to ensure only her mother could make decisions about her body after she died.

JS had not seen her father for six years before she became ill.

In the letter, JS wrote: "I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up - even in hundreds of years' time."

Justice Peter Jackson ruled in JS's favor. He visited her in hospital shortly before her death to commend "the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament".

The girl's body has since been frozen and taken to a storage facility in the US.

At the facility, bodies are preserved in liquid nitrogen at temperatures between -130 and -196C.

As yet, no one who has been preserved in this way has been revived.

JS is the tenth Briton to be frozen and is the only British child.

The cost of preserving a body in this way is upwards of £37,000.

About a week after her death, JS’s body was packed into a metal crate with around 40kg of dry ice and loaded onto an aeroplane bound for Michigan, where it will be stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen by the Cryonics Institute at its facility in Clinton Township.

The company, which also stores dead pets, makes no excuse for the fact that it can only offer the “hope that future medical technology may be able to someday revive and restore them to full health”.

To date, around 350 people have been frozen since the process was invented in the 1960s. Around 20 bodies thawed out and had to be buried after a pioneer company went bust, but the Cryonics Institute and its rival, Arizona-based Alcor, have been storing bodies since the 1970s.

There is no proof that the process of cryo-preservation could ever be reversed.