According to the news, Ted Williams’ daughter is having her father’s head cryogenically frozen. Williams’ son is suing to get the head back, presumably so it can be buried with the rest of him. This reminds me of something I read in the news a few years ago. Supposedly, cryogenic suspension companies charge the next of kin exorbitant “maintenance fees,” and when the relatives finally run out of money, the remains are unthawed and disposed of. Is this the way that these groups work? If so, it sounds like something that should be shut down by the authorities IMO.
Why are they freezing only the head?
Alcor’s FAQ page discusses how members are kept frozen in perpetuity and how the costs are handled.
Zev Steinhardt
Cecil discusses cryogenics (and mentions people being thawed out when their estates ran out of money) in his column about Walt Disney’s death.
You have the facts backward Diceman.
News Story
Futurama is now going to have to work in a Ted Williams joke in the near future.
If the son thinks that scientists are going to extract a “hitters” gene of commercial value, he needs to go back to school for some up to date biology.
If the son is going against the wishes of his father (as stated in the will) would he be guilty of some crime?
I love the idea of waiting until some rare disease is cured and then defrosting the body and curing them…minor problem if the person is already dead.
Wouldn’t peforming an act that is in direct opposition to what is expressed in a legally made will merely be a civil matter. I.e., the daughter would have to sue.
I don’t think an actual criminal law was broken.
I guess I did get the son/daughter angle wrong. I love the idea of only storing the person’s head. What the heck are they going to do with just a head? The Alcor website speaks vaugely of cloned bodies and memory transfers. But cloning is just another form of reproduction. A clone of you would be a distinct person, with different memories and experiences. Presumably, this person would not want to have his or her identity wiped out and replaced with yours. Plus, we still don’t fully understand how memory works; we don’t know if it would even be possible to transfer memories from one person to another. Third, even if I could copy all of my memories to someone else, that doesn’t mean that I’ve changed bodies. If you copy the files on your computer’s harddrive to another computer, has that other computer somehow changed into the first one? No, it’s still a different computer. Even assuming that everything goes as hoped, the person who had themself frozen is still dead.
I’ll stick with Faith, Hope, and Love as the way to live forever 
Is it an issue of bringing him (and others cryogenically frozen) back to life, or simply preserving DNA for the possibilities of cloning?
Because if the later, wouldn’t a hair off the top of his head suffice?