A 14-year-old British girl who wanted her body to be frozen as a means of preservation, in case she could be cured in the future, won a historic legal fight shortly before her death.
The girl -- who can’t be identified and is referred to only as ‘JS’ -- suffered from a rare form of cancer and expressed a hope to be brought back to life and cured in the future.
She wrote to the judge explaining that she wanted “to live longer” and did not want “to be buried underground”.
The girl, who died in October, has been taken to the United States and preserved there.
A London high court judge ruled that the girl’s mother should be allowed to decide what happened to the body.
Cryonics is the process of preserving a whole body in the hope that resuscitation and a cure are possible in the distant future.
It is a controversial procedure and no-one yet knows if it is possible to bring people back to life.
There are facilities in the US and Russia where bodies can be preserved in liquid nitrogen at very low temperatures (less than -130C) but not in the UK.
The details of her case have just been released.
In his judgment, obtained by CNN, Justice Peter Jackson said the girl had expressed her desire to be cryogenically frozen.
She wrote: “I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time. I don’t want to be buried underground.
“I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish.”
The teenager’s father, who is against the decision, said, “Even if the treatment is successful and [JS] is brought back to life in let’s say 200 years, she may not find any relative and she might not remember things and she may be left in a desperate situation given that she is only 14 years old and will be in the United States of America.”
However, he subsequently changed his position, saying he “respected the decisions” his daughter was making.
His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter’s body.
Image used for representational purposes only. Photograph: Fred Prouser/Reuters
