However tempting it would be to think otherwise, I don’t think we will be seeing ‘JS’ on Earth again. She is the 14 year old girl who died of cancer and whose mother has won in the high court the right to have her body cryogenically-preserved in the US – against the wishes of her estranged father. There are moral issues involved in this case, but the question of which parents’ wishes should be taken into account in such cases seems rather secondary. Far more to the point is how moral is it for a company to charge £37,000 to preserve your body in ice when nobody has the faintest idea of how it could ever be brought back to life.
At best, I suppose, you could argue that the Arizona-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, where the remains of JS will be spending an indeterminate number of years, is doing nothing worse than the Church of England – enticing us with the possibility of some kind of afterlife, without actually proving that it is possible.
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