Terminally ill teen now cryogenically preserved after winning court case
A 14-year-old British girl, who was terminally ill with cancer, won a historic legal fight shortly before her death to have her body cryogenically preserved in the hopes that she will be cured and resuscitated in the future.
Writing to the judge who oversaw the case, the girl explained that she wanted to “to live longer” and did not want “to be buried underground”.
The girl died in October and has already been taken to the US and preserved there.
A High Court judge, Justice Peter Jackson, ruled that the girl’s mother should be allowed to decide what happened to the body. The teen’s father did not approve of the request initially.
He said: “Even if the treatment is successful and she 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.”
He subsequently changed his mind and said that he respected his daughter’s decision.
The teenager, who lived in the London area and cannot be named for legal reasons, used the internet to investigate cryonics during the last months of her life.
The judge visited the girl in hospital and said he was moved by “the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament”.
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.
It was brought to court for the first time on September 26 and the judge made his decision on October 6.
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 -130 degrees Celsius) – but not in the UK.
The cost of preserving the body for an infinite amount of time in this case was £37,000, which was paid by the girl’s mother’s family.
Simon Woods, an expert in medical ethics from Newcastle University, thinks the whole idea is science fiction.
He said: “The diagnosis of death is that death is irreversible, and for people who seek cryopreservation, they’ve died of a serious disease, in this case it’s cancer.
“The person is in a pretty bad state of health to begin with, and there’s absolutely no scientific evidence that the person could be brought back to life.”
The judge said the girl’s application was the only one of its kind to have come before a court in England and Wales – and probably anywhere else.
The case has highlighted the fact that the UK has no regulations to cover cryonic preservation. This is because no one thought they might be needed, according to the judge who heard the dispute.
Justice Peter Jackson called for a new law to prevent abuse of those whose bodies are frozen.He suggested that ministers should consider “proper regulation” of cryonic preservation for the future.
