Humans have yearned for immortality for as long as we‘ve understood our fragile permanence. But while dodging the Grim Reaper was once relegated to the realm of religious myth, now technology is attempting to find the cure for death. Most popular is the idea of cryopreservation — that is, any process which preserves biological tissues by storing them at extremely cold temperatures — which can be traced back to a 1931 science fiction novel, “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones. The first in a series of adventure tales about the titular Professor Jameson, the story includes a detailed description of the professor freezing his brain by sending it into space, where it is eventually revived and installed into a mechanical body.
Jones’ ideas were so provocative, they inspired American academic Robert Ettinger to write a 1962 non-fiction book, “The Prospect of Immortality.” In 1976, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute, a nonprofit that freezes both humans and pets in the hope of someday reviving them, and the cryopreservation movement was born.
