Feature: Belief in science
In the picture: Rising like a phoenix
We tend to laugh at people who have their remains frozen in hopes of science resurrecting them at some later date. From 2006 to 2016, the photographer Murray Ballard investigated this controversial practice of cryopreservation in a series of images which he hopes remain sober and unbiased. He takes photos of the technical processes and makes portraits of the people who want to overcome death. The public can then decide for itself whether the adherents of this practice are caught up in a science-fiction fantasy world, or are engaged in true scientific innovation.
Lidia Fedorenko was the first person in Russia to have herself frozen. Her head and assorted DNA samples are now being preserved in a so-called Dewar vessel by the company KrioRus. Image: ©Murray Ballard
When Fedorenko died in 2005, KrioRus did not yet own its own cryostorage facility. So her family kept her brain on dry ice for several months instead. Image: ©Murray Ballard
An employee of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona is preparing the drugs that are utilised in the opening phase of cryopreservation – storage in liquid nitrogen. Image: ©Murray Ballard
This is a DNA archive that is intended to serve as a back-up if the physical bodies of those concerned should be destroyed in an accident and cannot be placed in cryopreservation. Image: ©Murray Ballard
Across the whole world, some two thousand people have signed up to have themselves frozen after death. Some of them will probably end up in liquid nitrogen in these cryostats of the Cryonics Institute in Michigan. Image: ©Murray Ballard
The bodies or body parts of these people are currently being kept in liquid nitrogen in the Cryonics Institute in Michigan in the USA. Across the world, there are some 200 ‘patients’ being preserved for the long-term in this manner. Image: ©Murray Ballard
This is how a patient is frozen in one of the Dewar vessels at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona. This Foundation was set up back in 1972, ten years after Robert Ettinger published his book ‘The prospect of immortality’, which first put forward the idea of cryonics. Image: ©Murray Ballard
