To Live Forever: Eat supplements, abhor soda and upon dying, head to Arizona and bathe in liquid nitrogen

Every day, Ray Kurzweil, an American writer and inventor, ingests 150-250 supplements and drinks 8-10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea.

He regularly measures the chemical composition of his bodily fluids, and on weekends, he receives intravenous transfusions of chemical cocktails he believes will “reprogram” his biochemistry. He abhors soda and coffee and eats mainly vegetables, lean meats, tofu, and organic foods with low glycemic loads. He claims he has not consumed sugar for years. Kurzweil is a futurist and believes that within the next couple of decades, microscopic machines will be able to travel through a person’s body and repair damaged cells, enabling people to live vastly longer lives. His rigid routine is an effort to ensure he lives to see the time when this technology has actually been developed. And just in case he dies beforehand, Kurzweil has made arrangements with a company called Alcor Life Extension Foundation to chemically preserve his body and freeze it in liquid nitrogen until a time when technology will be able to revive him so the micro-machines can heal him.

Alcor was founded in 1972 and is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company has 85 cryo patients and fewer than a dozen employees, all of whom have made arrangements to be cryopreserved themselves in the future. “At the present time, the technology required for the realization of our goal far exceeds current technical capabilities,” says the company’s website. “We expect to wait for decades to see this vision fulfilled.” But despite the uncertainty, the allure of living forever has led more and more people to consider the option.

The first human to be cryogenically preserved was a University of California psychology professor named James Bedford, who died of kidney cancer in 1967, at the age of 73. Just two years prior, the Life Extension Society, regarded as the first cryonics organization in the world, had offered to preserve a person free of charge—their advertisement read, “The Life Extension Society now has primitive facilities for emergency short term freezing and storing our friend the large homeotherm”. Bedford was offered as a candidate and accepted. His body was frozen a few hours after his death by a group of leading cryonics physicians and thinkers, including science fiction writer Robert Prehoda, author of the later book, Suspended Animation.

Bedford was injected with dimethyl sulfoxide, a colorless liquid said to have an oyster or garlic-like taste and has the distinctive property of penetrating the skin very readily. But the chemical is now considered a primitive cryoprotectant; Bedford’s brain may not actually have been protected. Presently, an anti-freeze is used, which prevents ice formation. Bedford’s body was stored at Edward Hope’s Cryo-Care facility in Phoenix, then moved to a facility in California called Geliso, then moved again to Trans Time, near Berkeley, California. In 1977, Bedford’s son, who lived in southern California, took over the body, which was still preserved in liquid nitrogen. Five years later, it was transferred to Alcor. Examiners concluded that despite all the moving about, Bedford’s external temperature had remained “at relatively low subzero temperatures throughout the storage interval.”

Baseball great Ted Williams may not have been so lucky. After he died on July 5 2002, his body was flown on a private jet to Alcor’s facility in Scottsdale. Doctors shaved his head, severed it then drilled a series of holes and stored it in a steel can filled with liquid nitrogen. A 2003 Sports Illustrated article reported that an Alcor worker who was present at the time said the head was cracked accidentally, in ten different places.

William’s body was stood upright in a nine-foot tall cylindrical steel tank filled with liquid nitrogen. A fight within the family soon followed. Williams’ eldest daughter, Bobby-Jo, had fought against the process, pointing out that her dad’s will stipulated he be cremated and his ashes scattered off the Florida coast. But a handwritten note dated three years after the will was signed indicates that Williams and his son John Henry and granddaughter Claudia formed a pact to all be cryogenically frozen after their deaths. “This is what we want,” read the document, “to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance.”