In 'Thawing Out Personhood, Unconscionability and Succession in Cryonics' in (2020) 17(1) Canberra Law Review 44-77 I commented
The adoption of cryonics poses fruitful questions about personhood, consumer protection, trusts, taxation, crime, human rights and other law. Cryonics involves the long term storage of human cadavers at subzero temperatures with an expectation that in the indefinite future the legally dead will be ‘reanimated’. The article discusses the culture and law of cryonics in relation to Australia. It draws on Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory to critique claims by proponents of cryonics, asking whether unsubstantiated claims regarding reanimation are unconscionable and necessitate a specific statutory prohibition. The article further considers the implications for health, welfare and other law if cryonics was practical.
Cryonics remains a matter of hope - in my opinion egregiously misplaced hope - over science, accompanied by inadequate regulation. Concerns regarding practice are evident in an item in today's Slate -
Two weeks ago, police in the Moscow region received a call about an unusual robbery and were ordered to stop a truck belonging to the suspect. On a platform attached to the vehicle, they found containers with frozen bodies. They belonged to people who agreed—and paid money—to be frozen after death in the hope of being revived in the future, a practice called cryonics. (It’s legal in Russia as well as in the U.S.; former baseball player Ted Williams’ head and body are each frozen, separately, at a cryonics facility in Arizona.) It’s unlikely cryonics will ever work. But for people who think there’s a chance, the safekeeping of the bodies can be seen as a life-or-death matter.
The woman who allegedly tried to steal bodies was Valeria Udalova, a former CEO of the cryonics company KrioRus, founded in 2006. The man who accused her of theft was her ex-husband, Danila Medvedev, also a former CEO of KrioRus. Both Udalova and Medvedev now own separate cryonics businesses and are in the midst of a battle over 81 bodies of KrioRus clients.
It came to a head on Sept. 7, when Udalova reportedly broke into the cryostorage near Moscow, which is now under the control of Medvedev (though Udalova claims that she rents this facility). According to the Medvedev`s team, Udalova and her partners cut through a metal wall at the lab, dumped liquid nitrogen from containers with dead bodies, and loaded the containers, known in the industry as “dewars,” on the truck. When workers lifted the heavy vats, the dewars were bending like they were going to fall and break, as a leaked video shows; meanwhile, liquid nitrogen was pouring out and spilling on people. “Even paying much for your death in Russia can’t save you from being a part of the criminal conflict,” wrote one Facebook user who had watched the video.
