Cryonics—that is, the deep chilling of corpses with the hope that at some point in the future, they can be resurrected—is the focus of my story in VICE's Future of Technology issue. All told, an estimated 300 or more people are cryogenically frozen in the US today, including Ettinger, the movement's unlikely father, who died in 2011 and is cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan.
Like the concepts he espoused, Ettinger remains controversial. While some revere Ettinger as an optimistic pioneer ahead of his time, others have lambasted him and his views as the stuff of snake oil, noting he sought to gather funds from unsuspecting individuals with a false promise of a second life. (Representatives with the Cryonics Institute did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) [...]
After the war, Ettinger returned home to write. In 1948, he published a short story called "The Penultimate Trump," a science fiction tome that laid out some of his ideas' potential (it does not reference the 45th President of the United States). Ettinger made contact with people on the "Who's Who in America" list with his pitch for freezing. Responses were lackluster.
But instead of retreating, Ettinger went bigger. That's when he published his cryonics magnum opus, The Prospect of Immortality.
The book is a strange paleo-future, unscientific pitch that at times bears more resemblance to an even more offbeat take on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than a medical journal. Ettinger wrote that freezing would unhatch a world of unbridled positivity. With fetuses incubated, childbirth would become moot and through a eugenics-like lens, Ettinger proposed that those born with cerebral palsy could simply remain frozen.
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