A 14 year old girl was frozen. A girl with cancer has won the right to freeze her body. How does cryopreservation work?

• Dying from an incurable disease, a 14-year-old girl persuaded the court to allow her to be subjected to a deep freeze. The procedure took place in Detroit (USA).
• The patient's father, who is also ill with cancer, worries that, after waking up in two centuries, his daughter will feel an acute longing - without relatives, friends and any memories.

A teenage girl, whose name has not been released, became the first child in the UK to be frozen at will for 200 years. The calculation is made on the fact that two centuries later, medicine will already know the method of healing from deadly oncological diseases.

In October of this year, on the 17th, a 14-year-old English woman, who suffered from a very rare form of cancer, died at home and her body was taken to the United States, where the cryonics institute operates in Michigan. The deceased was placed in a cryostat container, where she was slowly and carefully frozen to a temperature of minus 196 degrees. The grieving father is worried that in 200 years the girl will “resurrect” all alone, without friends and relatives, and also without memory of what happened to her in the 21st century. Therefore, for some time he was categorically against it, and the problem with the last will of his daughter had to be resolved in the Supreme Court, which treated the controversial decision with respect and understanding.

The procedure cost the parents of the deceased patient, who did not want to be buried in damp earth, 37 thousand pounds sterling.

After her death, the London schoolgirl was taken to America, where she was slowly frozen in liquid nitrogen for three weeks, named "patient number 143" and hung by her legs in a sleeping bag for storage in a special thermos - next to one and a half hundred other human bodies, waiting for a wonderful future in Institute, which is located near the city. Another such institution operates in the state of Arizona, and there is a similar cryonics company in Russia (KrioRus in the Moscow region).

About 250 men and women of their own free will are now on Earth in a frozen state. The first was in 1967 by "forever young" Dr. James Bedford. A few thousand more earthlings from different countries paid huge sums of money (from 35 to 200 thousand dollars) to be conserved and placed in cryostats after death.

During freezing, special preparations are introduced into the deceased organism, which protect the organs from irreversible destruction. Blood and other bodily fluids are then pumped out of the body, replacing them with a solution like antifreeze (so that ice crystals do not form in the body). Finally, the body is cooled to -130 degrees and then stored "until better times" in liquid nitrogen.

Many doctors and scientists consider this technique to be nonsense and adventurism for the sake of profiting from hope, since so far no one has been able to “resurrect” representatives of the class of mammals (including humans) preserved in the described way. Because the work of many billions of nerve cells of a dead brain cannot be restored at the current level of development of science and technology, and it is strictly forbidden by law to place a living person in a cryonics chamber.

There is nothing new in cryopreservation itself. Over the past decades, despite the high cost and lack of guarantees, hundreds of people have used it. But here a special case. In the last months of her life, the girl had to fight for the right to a second chance with her own father, who himself had cancer.

The girl, given the futuristic name JS in court papers, contracted a rare form of cancer in August 2015. A year later, she was informed that the disease had passed into the terminal stage, and all methods of fighting tumor cells had been exhausted. JS, 14, has spent the last three months of her illness online exploring the possibilities of cryopreserving her body after death. As a result, she made a decision and wrote such a will.

From the will: “I don't want to lie underground. I want to live, and live longer, and I think in the future people will be able to come up with a cure for cancer and wake me up. I wish I had this chance. It's my wish".

The High Court of London is accustomed to litigation between divorced parents, with whom the child will remain. But the parents have never sued for the right to whom the daughter's body will belong after her death. The girl's father, who has been divorced from her mother since 2008 and since then, by court order, has never seen her daughter, had to give formal consent to freezing the child's body. But he himself fought the tumor and considered cryopreservation a waste of money on empty promises.

The dying girl sued her father. The judge visited her already in the hospital and three weeks before her death made a decision: and the mother is appointed as its sole manager. The girl died on October 17 with the firm conviction of waking up in 2216, in a world in which a reliable cure for cancer would already be found.

Immediately after her death in a London hospital, the girl's body was prepared for freezing: the cells were dehydrated, and medical antifreeze was introduced into them instead of biological fluid. Then the body was cooled to minus 70 degrees, packed in a box with 40 kilograms of dry ice and sent to Michigan, to one of the three cryopreservation clinics. Another one is located in Russia, near Moscow, and the third one is in Arizona.

In total, about 200 bodies have been frozen since the 1970s, but JS was the first child. Twenty clients had to be thawed and buried after another American company went bankrupt. But bankruptcy isn't the only thing that could keep JS, the other 200 people, and several hundred pets from waking up in the future. So far, only freezing technology is known to science. So far, not a single patient has been thawed and revived.

Details in the report NTV correspondent Lisa Gerson.

The body of a 14-year-old British woman was frozen in a cryogenic chamber in the US after she died of cancer. Due to her age, the child could not leave a will, so she had to go to court, The Guardian reported. The girl herself wanted to cryogenically freeze her body in the hope that she could return to life when medicine finds a cure for cancer. In recent months, she has studied in detail the process of cryogenic preservation of the body.

The British court held the desire of the child and gave its consent to the freezing. The girl wrote a letter to the court explaining why she wants to go for it.

“I was asked to explain why I want to take such an unusual step. I am only 14 years old and I do not want to die, but I know that death is near. I think that if my body is frozen, I will have a chance to be cured, even if I wake up hundreds of years later. I don't want to be buried underground. I want to live longer and I think that in the future, when a cure for my disease is found, I will be awakened. This is my desire, ”the teenager wrote to the court.

The girl's parents are divorced. She spent most of her life with her mother, and she did not want to communicate with her father since 2008. She also resisted his desire to re-contact after he learned of his daughter's illness in 2015.

The girl's parents perceived the desire in different ways. Her mother supported her, but her father was initially against it. The court gave the right to single-handedly decide on the disposal of the daughter's body to the mother. Already during the court session, the father agreed with the decision of his daughter.

“I respect her decision. This is the last and only thing she asked of me,” he said.

By decision of the judge, the story was not covered in the media. Since this could become additional stress for the child. The girl herself was so ill that she could not attend the court hearings, so the judge himself came to her hospital.

As a result, the body of the girl, whose name is known only by the initials J.S., was transported from London to the United States. There, her body was frozen "for all eternity." For their services, the commercial company took 37 thousand pounds sterling (about three million) from the parents. The girl was not from a wealthy family, but British volunteers who support cryogenic freezing offered their help to the family to raise the necessary amount of money.

The UK Department of Health noted that such cases are quite rare. According to the representative of the department, the authorities do not plan to change the current legislation in this area.

Since the first cryogenic freezing in the 1960s, this procedure has been carried out only a few hundred times. In order to be frozen, the body must be prepared immediately after death, ideally within a few minutes.

A London court has allowed the body of a 14-year-old girl who died of cancer to be cryogenically frozen.

In the last months of her life, the girl, who suffered from a rare cancer, was very interested in cryonics (the technology of preserving organisms in deep cold). She hoped that in the future, people would be able to find a cure for her illness, and she could continue to live.

“They asked me why I want to make such unusual thing, she wrote in her appeal to the court. “I'm only 14 and I don't want to die, but I know it will happen. I think that cryofreezing will give me a chance to heal and wake up even after hundreds of years.”

“I don’t want to be buried underground,” continued the girl, known only by her initials JS. “I want to live, and live longer, and I think that in the future people will be able to find a cure for my cancer, cure and wake me up. I want to have this chance. It's my wish".

The girl's parents were divorced. She lived with her mother and had not seen her father since 2008. Having learned about his daughter's illness, the father tried to restore contacts, but the girl resisted this. The mother supported the teenager's desire to undergo cryopreservation. The father at first opposed, but then, during the hearings in court, changed his mind.

The court ruled that the girl's mother has the right to single-handedly dispose of her body. In accordance with the court decision, the child's body was sent to the US and cryogenically frozen by a commercial company "indefinitely" for £37,000. Funds for this were provided mainly by the mother's parents.

Judge Peter Jackson, who visited the girl in the hospital, said: “I was touched by how courageous she is in such circumstances. Not surprisingly, a petition of this kind is the only one in judicial practice our country, and probably anywhere else. This is an example of how science raises new questions for legislation, and above all, for family law…”

Cryofreezing was first performed in the 1960s and has only been repeated a few hundred times since then. “The scientific theory behind cryonics is speculative and controversial, and there are serious discussions about its ethical implications,” said Jackson, quoted by the Guardian. – On the other hand, cryopreservation, or the preservation of cells and tissues by freezing, is a well-known process in certain areas of medicine, such as… fertility treatment. Cryonics is cryopreservation taken to the extreme.”

According to the judge, a medical institution faced especially serious legal and ethical conflicts in the case of a 14-year-old British woman.