X-Message-Number: 15813
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 09:03:35 -0800
From: 
Subject: Freezer culture

 thought you would be interested in this article at
Salon.com http://www.salon.com
 came from IP: 157.252.128.79


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Freezer culture
By Christopher Kemp

http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/03/07/cryonics/index.html


When Robert Ettinger froze his mother's body in 1977, she became the <a 
target="new" href="http://www.cryonics.org/">Cryonics Institute's</a> first 
customer. Last year he froze his wife too, cooling her body to minus 196 degrees
Celsius and storing it in an insulated tank of liquid nitrogen. For $35,000 
Ettinger and his attentive staff will provide the same service for anyone. 


<P>"Dead people don't have much fun," says Ettinger, the 82-year-old founder of 
the Cryonics Institute. "It's not a question of whether you're happy now," he 
says. "I think in the future it's going to be better, not worse." 


<P>Twenty miles northeast of Detroit, the institute sits atop a small patch of 
grass, backed by a screen of trees, squat and unremarkable. Few would guess from
its drab exterior that it houses the bodies of 38 customers frozen and 
suspended in liquid nitrogen. Even fewer would guess that seven dogs and nine 
cats, equally frozen, are keeping them company. But since opening the institute 
almost 25 years ago, Ettinger has seen membership grow steadily, and his team is
performing more suspensions now than at any other time. 


<P>"In recent years we've been getting maybe three or four a year, I guess," he 
says. Ettinger, like his patients and their pets, is waiting for the day they 
can all be revived.

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Wed Mar  7 09:03:35 2001

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