The History of Cryonics

[Ponster]

From www.howstuffworks.com

By the late 1970s, there were about six cryonics companies in the United States. But to preserve and then maintain each body indefinitely was so expensive, many of these companies wound up closing shop by the following decade.

Does anyone know what they did with the heads and/or bodies when the companies closed down? Did others take up the accounts or would they have just been dumped?

[duality72]

Accoring to Wikipedia:

Two early organizations went bankrupt, allowing their patients to thaw out, …

I imagine at that point the remains were returned to the families for more traditional disposal.

[Whack-a-Mole]

One would think the families would have a chance to arrange for transfer to another Cryonics outfit. If they didn’t want to do that then I expect the remains would be returned to the families for burial (or whatever). If no relatives or estate managers were left then I guess the remains become so much medical waste and are disposed of.

I would also suppose the relatives/estate of the dead person might sue for breach of contract but they’d have to line up with all the other creditors to try and get money back from the failing firm. This would also depend on the contract signed and need an attorney to determine but seems a possibility if someone wanted to persue it.

[bonzer]

In the case of the Cryonics Society of California, it was all rather messy, in more ways than one:

CSC froze half-a-dozen people over the next few years. Some were “charity cases” while others were financed by relatives who agreed to pay storage costs on an indefinite basis. Almost unanimously, the relatives defaulted on their commitments, depriving Nelson of necessary cash-flow. Inexcusably (Nelson claims it was an accident), deliveries of liquid nitrogen were allowed to lapse, and the patients thawed in their tanks.
It wasn’t until 1978 that the scandal became public. An attorney for relatives of one of the patients led journalists to the Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth, California, where they opened an underground vault owned by CSC and saw for themselves that the patients had not been maintained. A law suit followed, and the same relatives who had failed to make maintenance payments accused Robert Nelson of causing them severe mental suffering. Nelson, and the mortician who had assisted him, were assessed substantial damages.

There’s also this account of the early years, though I suspect it’s obscuring the details about what happened to most of the bodies.