On January 12, 1967, James Bedford, a psychology professor from California, passed away following a battle with kidney cancer and was promptly frozen using liquid nitrogen, becoming the first person to be intentionally cryonically preserved. Cryonics, a word created in the 1960’s to describe the practice of freezing the recently dead for later resuscitation, was undergoing a popularity surge around the time of Bedford’s death due to a number of books published on the subject. The theory was that while the ailments people died of were incurable now, in the future, advanced technologies would be able to reverse the damage of disease. But the hope extended even further than the science, as those frozen even today rely on the the wager that not only will technology advance far enough to cure their disease, but also to bring them out of a frozen state and back to life, something beyond our grasp now.
The fact that Bedford remains successfully frozen today is an aberration from the typical cryonics cases that occurred in the 1960’s and 70’s. At this time it was largely fringe science, and many operations weren’t even carried out by people with scientific training. The company that performed Bedford’s freezing had been founded by a wigmaker who was mostly interested in cryonics as a money-making venture. Bodies were stored either in liquid nitrogen or on dry ice, and were sometimes placed together in cramped quarters (one account describes how arranging the bodies in a single container was like “putting together a Chinese puzzle.”) Because of the ongoing requirement to pay for liquid nitrogen and other maintenance to the storage chambers, many bodies in this early period thawed either intentionally or accidentally after families refused to keep footing the bills. Often times the bodies would be returned to the family, who would either construct ad hoc freezing apparatuses of their own, or give up on the exercise altogether and simply bury their loved one. Of the more than nine bodies frozen in this early period of Cryonics, Bedford is the only one still on ice.
Bedford’s story is different largely because his family was as interested in his post-mortem preservation as he had been. As these flimsily funded cryonic companies failed over the years, Bedford’s son took great care to ensure his preservation continued by shuffling his body around the country. By 1982, Bedford’s body was in care at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, what has become the gold standard company for cryonic preservation. Ultimately, Bedford’s fate is unknown as he was crudely frozen at a time when the process involved little more than just sticking the body in some liquid nitrogen. The science of cryonics has advanced as it has become understood that the freezing process must be exacting and methodical if the patient is to have hope of ever being resuscitated. Bedford’s final fate remains to be seen, but it can at least be said that he has better hopes of revival than those interred in the ground.