A terminally ill 14-year-old girl from Great Britain in court won the right to cryogenic preservation of her body in order to wake up in the future, when her disease will be treated, writes the Guardian newspaper.
A teenage girl who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, before her death, expressed the hope that new technologies will allow her to live longer.
“I am only 14 years old and I do not want to die, but I know that I am dying. I don’t want to be buried. I think that cryopreservation will give me a chance to recover by waking up even after hundreds of years,”the Guardian quotes the girl from a letter addressed to the court.
The girl's name is not disclosed, the press knows only her initials - JS.
The girl's parents are divorced, most of her life she lived with her mother, and since 2008 she has not kept in contact with her father. Parents' opinions on cryopreservation were divided. The mother supported her child, the father at first opposed it, but in the course of the trial, the court nevertheless changed his decision.
Judge Peter Jackson ruled that it was the girl's mother who had the right to single-handedly decide the fate of the minor. After the court's decision, the girl's body was transported from London to the United States, where it was cryogenically frozen.
The storage of the body for "unlimited period" is carried out by the commercial organization Alcor in the state of Arizona, which charged 37 thousand pounds sterling for its services.
As the newspaper notes, the first cryopreservation was carried out in the 1960s, since then this procedure has been carried out only a few hundred times.
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Professor of the Department of Polyclinic Therapy at FPDO MGMSU, geriatrician Yuri Konev told RIA Novosti that defrosting a person after cryogenic preservation is impossible, since this method destroys the structure of body tissues.
“It (helps) only to create the illusion for a person that something will happen to him in the future. I think he dies after being cryopreserved. Anyway, after the death of a body, its frozen state does not preserve a person, because a person is, first of all, a mind,”the expert explained.