Time of Death….
Dr. James Bedford died on January 12, 1967.
Sort of.
Unlike the millions of deaths that came before his, Bedford did not go to the grave with an intent to stay there. Therefore, his body is not buried underground, nor are his ashes contained to an urn or scattered somewhere he held dear. No, Dr. Bedford is currently at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, where his cryogenically frozen corpse–the first ever–remains frozen, awaiting reanimation.
Sounds like something out of science fiction, doesn’t it? Or maybe even a horror movie? But I assure you it’s all very real…and very strange.
James Bedford was born in 1893 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. After suffering from a bout of diphtheria that nearly took his life as a four-year old, Bedford became determined to live a life as full and as adventurous as he possibly could. Eventually, he moved to California and attended UC Berkeley, earning a masters in education while teaching high school in Escalon. His focus was vocational training and career development, a subject about which he published a number of books. He married twice (his first wife, Anna, died during their first year of marriage) and had five children, Doris, Donald, Frances, Barbara, and Norman. He was an avid photographer and traveler, going on safari in Africa, touring rainforests of South America, and visiting ancient cities all across Europe.
It was likely this zeal for life that made his stubbornly refuse to accept the end when it came. In his seventies, Bedford was diagnosed with kidney cancer that had spread to his lungs. Inoperable. Uncurable. Unbeatable.
Unless…
Just two years early, in June 1965, the Life Extension Society (LES), the world’s first cryonics organization, made waves by offering the opportunity to cryopreserve one person free of charge, stating that “the Life Extension Society now has primitive facilities for emergency short term freezing and storing our friend the large homeotherm (man). LES offers to freeze free of charge the first person desirous and in need of cryogenic suspension.” Founded in 1964 by Evan Cooper, who first promoted the idea of cryonics in his 1962 book Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now, the LES sought to promote its ideas as well as connect cryonics advocates through a network of similar minds.
One of those similar minds was Bedford. Though not a member of any cryonic group, the idea intrigued him. However, when the offer was made in 1965, Bedford was still an active, healthy, and robust man who believed he had still had years left.
His diagnosis in 1967 changed all that. And so, fronting his own money, Bedford agreed to become LES’s–and the world’s–first cryopreserved person upon his death with the hope of future revival.
In early January 1967, Bedford moved from the hospital to hospice care at a neighbor’s home in Glendale, California. The end was near. On January 12, doctors were summoned. According to Dr. B. Renault, Bedford murmured, “I’m feeling better,” before dying quietly at 1:15 p.m.
The Cryonics Society’s doctors–cryobiological researcher Robert Prehoda; physician and biophysicist Dante Brunol; and Robert Nelson, president of the Cryonics Society of California–had just seven minutes from the moment Bedford died to complete the first phase of the rest of his life. He was put on artificial respiration to keep oxygen flowing to his brain while dimethyl sulfoxide was pumped into his veins to replace his blood and protect his organs from freezing. Once that was done, he was placed on ice in a metal, tube-shaped capsule, known as a dewar. The body was then transported via hearse from a Los Angeles mortuary to the Edward Hope’s Cryo-Care cryonics facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
A few days later, the Cryonics Society announced to the world that the first human had been successfully frozen with liquid nitrogen, ready for revival when the cure for cancer was found.
Or had he been?
As the science behind cryogenics progressed, doubts arose. Vitrification, which provides the benefits of cryopreservation without the damage caused by ice crystals, was not introduced until the 1980s. In addition, dimethyl sulfoxide, when used on its own like it was in Bedford’s case, was discovered to destroy brain cells. UCLA biotech laboratory head Dr. John Lyman called the project “extremely naive” and “absurd.” “The metabolism of the cells breaks down and when even the small bodies have been cooled by liquid nitrogen, the cells burst and what you get out is something like a dishrag,” he said.
In addition, the mechanisms needed to maintain Bedford’s frozen sleep began to falter. Just three years later, in 1970, the dewar housing Bedford began to malfunction. He was moved to Galiso facility in California, but in 1976, that facility also couldn’t maintain the upkeep necessary for continued freezing. So Bedford’s son Norman picked up dad in a U-Haul and drove him to a commercial cryonics company in Emeryville. Eventually, Bedford’s body ended up in the care of his children, who housed it in liquid nitrogen in southern California until 1982, when it was moved to Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it remains to this day.
The jury is still out on whether an entire human can be revived after cryopreservation. What is known is that the rest of Bedford’s family has elected to be buried or cremated, meaning if Bedford does revive someday, he will wake up in the company of strangers and to a world irrevocably changed.
