Putting Hall Of Famer On Ice?
Family Fights Over Whether to Freeze Ted Williams's Body
A few hours after he died, the body of Ted Williams was removed from a Florida funeral home and transported to Arizona, where family members said his son had arranged for the 83-year-old baseball Hall of Famer to be drained of blood, filled with a freezing solution and floated inside a container filled with unimaginably cold liquid nitrogen.
Williams's death and an angry quarrel that has broken out among his children over the disposal of his body have sparked a macabre collision between the newest frontier of technology and an old-fashioned family feud, raising ethical, scientific and legal questions. Williams's will may resolve whether his body will be thawed and cremated or will remain frozen. The executor of his estate is expected to file the will today or Wednesday in Florida.
While Williams, who played 19 seasons for the Boston Red Sox and missed three full seasons and most of two others because of military service, may be the biggest celebrity to be cryo-preserved, the Web site of the company that family members say has his body -- Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Scottsdale -- indicates that 49 people have been similarly preserved in its frozen crypts. Nationwide, about twice that number have been cryo-preserved and a thousand living people have signed up for the process at various companies who are charging anywhere from $28,000 to $120,000, which is Alcor's top price.
While the exact location and condition of Williams's body could not be confirmed by family members, this much is certain: There is a growing industry called cryonics whose leaders believe that frozen corpses could be thawed out one day and, with the help of technologies as yet unknown, revived from death, healed of afflictions and restored to youthful grace.
No human has been frozen so cold and thawed alive, leaving the freezing and revival of a body entirely in the realm of the fantastic. There is nothing in current science to suggest this will ever be possible. Still, Williams may join dozens who have been cryo-preserved -- and have paid the freezing companies thousands of dollars for being sealed intact.
Critics of the technique say that while the companies appear to sell gleaming containers of supercooled liquids, and futuristic cures for ancient diseases, what they are really selling is humanity's earliest hope: that death can be conquered, age reversed and time made to march backward.
"It's a bamboozle," said Herman Feifel, an emeritus professor of psychiatry and an expert on aging at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "They're milking the public. Hope never dies, I suppose. It's a bunch of baloney -- this is wishful thinking and will never occur."
Williams, the last major league baseball player to bat .400 in a season (.406 in 1941), died Friday at an Inverness, Fla., hospital near his home. The former manager of the Washington Senators (1969-71), Williams had been in failing health for several years from strokes and heart disease and his vision was failing.
It is unclear whether the freezing procedure was something that Williams had requested. His eldest daughter, Barbara Joyce Williams Ferrell, brought the procedure to light when she charged her half-brother, John Henry, with moving the corpse to Arizona to have it frozen.
Ferrell, who is Williams's daughter from his first marriage, contends that her father wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over his beloved Florida Keys. She contends that John Henry and Claudia, children from Williams's third marriage, are behind the Alcor move. In comments to the Boston Globe, Ferrell contends that the action goes against her father's wishes and is aimed at selling his DNA in the future.
"My father's body was put on a plane [Friday] with people from Alcor," Ferrell told the Associated Press. "I will rescue my father's body. Me and my attorney are working on that."
Eric Abel, a Williams family attorney, said that all preparations are in accordance with Williams's wishes. "Ted Williams was a private person in life and in death he wished to remain private," Abel said in a statement given to the Globe. "He did not wish to have any funeral or funeral services." A spokesman for Abel said he was not accepting calls from the media yesterday, and attempts to reach John Henry Williams, other family members and senior officials at Alcor were not successful.
Abel, who identified himself as a family spokesman, told the Globe that Ferrell has been estranged from her father for more than a year. Although he denied that John Henry planned to preserve his father's body in order to sell Williams's DNA, he did not deny that the body would be frozen at Alcor.
Abel and the Williams children did not return calls yesterday.
John Henry, whose parents divorced when he was 4, moved to Florida in 1991 to take over his father's business interests, with mixed results. He increasingly limited access to his father, drawing criticism from Williams's former teammates and friends.
"It hurts the whole image of everyone's thoughts about Ted when he was alive," said Haywood Sullivan, former owner and general manager of the Red Sox as well as a teammate of Williams. "He was flamboyant, he was controversial, yet down deep he was a good person. That's what hurts so much: to see all this right now. It's tainting the whole situation. . . . I'm just livid over what's going on right now."
While Alcor did not return calls seeking comment, the president of the next-largest company, the Cryonics Institute, based in Clinton Township just northeast of Detroit, said that the cryonics technique was growing in popularity.
Robert Ettinger said that his company had frozen -- or "suspended" -- 41 corpses that he called "patients." For a fee of $1,250, he said he has also signed up over 400 living people who have contracted with the company, mostly by making it the beneficiary of life insurance policies.
Ettinger said the company asked that corpses be packed in ice immediately after death and then brought to the facility or a morgue that was equipped for the procedure. Blood is drained from the body, and replaced with a liquid containing glycerin. Simultaneously the body is cooled, either with cold air, ice or crushed dry ice -- which is frozen carbon dioxide.
The body is then floated in a sleeping bag and immersed in liquid nitrogen, for as many years or decades as are necessary to develop techniques to revive the person. Ettinger said science would have to address three problems to make the technique work. Of these, he said, the easiest would be to revive the dead. More difficult would be finding cures for cancer or whatever killed the person, and most difficult of all would be finding ways to reverse the damage caused by the freezing operation itself.
"Dying is not something separate from trauma or disease -- it is simply the cessation of vital processes," he said in a telephone interview. "For example, if something like a nematode -- a little worm -- is frozen and then thawed, it was dead when it was frozen and when you thawed it, it was alive again. It changed from dead to alive when it warmed up -- if someone is dead because his heart stopped and if you put in a new heart he will automatically be alive again."
Not so, say most scientists. While human tissues have can be safely frozen and thawed, and while the process is used routinely for preserving embryos, sperm and blood, freezing and thawing an entire body involves preserving not just the organs and tissues but the connections between them, and the body's internal balance which makes life possible.
Family Fights Over Whether to Freeze Ted Williams's Body
A few hours after he died, the body of Ted Williams was removed from a Florida funeral home and transported to Arizona, where family members said his son had arranged for the 83-year-old baseball Hall of Famer to be drained of blood, filled with a freezing solution and floated inside a container filled with unimaginably cold liquid nitrogen.
Williams's death and an angry quarrel that has broken out among his children over the disposal of his body have sparked a macabre collision between the newest frontier of technology and an old-fashioned family feud, raising ethical, scientific and legal questions. Williams's will may resolve whether his body will be thawed and cremated or will remain frozen. The executor of his estate is expected to file the will today or Wednesday in Florida.
While Williams, who played 19 seasons for the Boston Red Sox and missed three full seasons and most of two others because of military service, may be the biggest celebrity to be cryo-preserved, the Web site of the company that family members say has his body -- Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Scottsdale -- indicates that 49 people have been similarly preserved in its frozen crypts. Nationwide, about twice that number have been cryo-preserved and a thousand living people have signed up for the process at various companies who are charging anywhere from $28,000 to $120,000, which is Alcor's top price.
While the exact location and condition of Williams's body could not be confirmed by family members, this much is certain: There is a growing industry called cryonics whose leaders believe that frozen corpses could be thawed out one day and, with the help of technologies as yet unknown, revived from death, healed of afflictions and restored to youthful grace.
No human has been frozen so cold and thawed alive, leaving the freezing and revival of a body entirely in the realm of the fantastic. There is nothing in current science to suggest this will ever be possible. Still, Williams may join dozens who have been cryo-preserved -- and have paid the freezing companies thousands of dollars for being sealed intact.
Critics of the technique say that while the companies appear to sell gleaming containers of supercooled liquids, and futuristic cures for ancient diseases, what they are really selling is humanity's earliest hope: that death can be conquered, age reversed and time made to march backward.
"It's a bamboozle," said Herman Feifel, an emeritus professor of psychiatry and an expert on aging at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "They're milking the public. Hope never dies, I suppose. It's a bunch of baloney -- this is wishful thinking and will never occur."
Williams, the last major league baseball player to bat .400 in a season (.406 in 1941), died Friday at an Inverness, Fla., hospital near his home. The former manager of the Washington Senators (1969-71), Williams had been in failing health for several years from strokes and heart disease and his vision was failing.
It is unclear whether the freezing procedure was something that Williams had requested. His eldest daughter, Barbara Joyce Williams Ferrell, brought the procedure to light when she charged her half-brother, John Henry, with moving the corpse to Arizona to have it frozen.
Ferrell, who is Williams's daughter from his first marriage, contends that her father wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over his beloved Florida Keys. She contends that John Henry and Claudia, children from Williams's third marriage, are behind the Alcor move. In comments to the Boston Globe, Ferrell contends that the action goes against her father's wishes and is aimed at selling his DNA in the future.
"My father's body was put on a plane [Friday] with people from Alcor," Ferrell told the Associated Press. "I will rescue my father's body. Me and my attorney are working on that."
Eric Abel, a Williams family attorney, said that all preparations are in accordance with Williams's wishes. "Ted Williams was a private person in life and in death he wished to remain private," Abel said in a statement given to the Globe. "He did not wish to have any funeral or funeral services." A spokesman for Abel said he was not accepting calls from the media yesterday, and attempts to reach John Henry Williams, other family members and senior officials at Alcor were not successful.
Abel, who identified himself as a family spokesman, told the Globe that Ferrell has been estranged from her father for more than a year. Although he denied that John Henry planned to preserve his father's body in order to sell Williams's DNA, he did not deny that the body would be frozen at Alcor.
Abel and the Williams children did not return calls yesterday.
John Henry, whose parents divorced when he was 4, moved to Florida in 1991 to take over his father's business interests, with mixed results. He increasingly limited access to his father, drawing criticism from Williams's former teammates and friends.
"It hurts the whole image of everyone's thoughts about Ted when he was alive," said Haywood Sullivan, former owner and general manager of the Red Sox as well as a teammate of Williams. "He was flamboyant, he was controversial, yet down deep he was a good person. That's what hurts so much: to see all this right now. It's tainting the whole situation. . . . I'm just livid over what's going on right now."
While Alcor did not return calls seeking comment, the president of the next-largest company, the Cryonics Institute, based in Clinton Township just northeast of Detroit, said that the cryonics technique was growing in popularity.
Robert Ettinger said that his company had frozen -- or "suspended" -- 41 corpses that he called "patients." For a fee of $1,250, he said he has also signed up over 400 living people who have contracted with the company, mostly by making it the beneficiary of life insurance policies.
Ettinger said the company asked that corpses be packed in ice immediately after death and then brought to the facility or a morgue that was equipped for the procedure. Blood is drained from the body, and replaced with a liquid containing glycerin. Simultaneously the body is cooled, either with cold air, ice or crushed dry ice -- which is frozen carbon dioxide.
The body is then floated in a sleeping bag and immersed in liquid nitrogen, for as many years or decades as are necessary to develop techniques to revive the person. Ettinger said science would have to address three problems to make the technique work. Of these, he said, the easiest would be to revive the dead. More difficult would be finding cures for cancer or whatever killed the person, and most difficult of all would be finding ways to reverse the damage caused by the freezing operation itself.
"Dying is not something separate from trauma or disease -- it is simply the cessation of vital processes," he said in a telephone interview. "For example, if something like a nematode -- a little worm -- is frozen and then thawed, it was dead when it was frozen and when you thawed it, it was alive again. It changed from dead to alive when it warmed up -- if someone is dead because his heart stopped and if you put in a new heart he will automatically be alive again."
Not so, say most scientists. While human tissues have can be safely frozen and thawed, and while the process is used routinely for preserving embryos, sperm and blood, freezing and thawing an entire body involves preserving not just the organs and tissues but the connections between them, and the body's internal balance which makes life possible.