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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
Laura Sharman

Inside US lab where 200 frozen people are waiting to be brought back to life

Frozen heads and bodies of 200 people are being stored in a lab in the hope that they can be brought back to life in the future.

A whole body can be frozen for slightly under £150,000 while just the head and brain costs around £59,000.

The process, known as cryonics, is being offered by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Alcor runs under the belief that science and technology will advance to the point that it can bring back the dead in the future.

Bodies are sent to Scottsdale Arizona, where the company is based, and stored at deep freeze temperatures for decades or even centuries, reports The Sun.

Experts slowly lower the temperature and store the bodies in a giant vessel of liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees.

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation offers the service in Scottsdale Arizona (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Each body is typically packed in ice and frozen before the blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant formula to prevent ice crystals form forming.

Linda and Fred Chamberlain founded the company in 1972.

The couple met at a cryonics conference in early 1970 when Fred was working as a NASA engineer and Linda was in college.

She told CNET : "Our goals were to start an organisation that could save people's lives and give them an opportunity to be restored to health and function.

Mr Hixon prepares an operating room at Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

"If we'd known how hard it was going to be, we might not have tried to do it. But once you get started, something about saving lives, you can't give up."

Cryonics supporters believe that death is a process of deterioration and not the moment the heart stops.

But critics have dismissed the industry as science fiction or even fraud.

One of the bodies held by Alcor belongs to two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong, who was nicknamed Einz.

Two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong became the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen (BBC)
President and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation Dr Jerry Lemler (Reuters)

The toddler's parents, from Thailand, vowed to do all they could to keep their daughter alive after she was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer in 2015.

Desperate to find a way to save their little girl, Sahatorn and Nareerat Naovaratpong turned to an extreme solution.

When it became clear no medical intervention could stop the ceaseless march through Einz's body, they were determined Einz would have her body frozen to enable her to have the chance to live again.

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