Becca Ziegler is only 24, but she already has her death planned out: Her corpse would be deep-frozen to minus-200°C with liquid nitrogen. Ziegler, a US tech firm worker based in Berlin, has signed up with Tomorrow Biostasis, a start-up in the German capital that offers to cryogenically freeze a person’s body after they die.
When the time comes, a team of medics would pump her full of a chemical solution to stop ice crystals from forming in her body and then transport her mortal remains to a storage facility in Switzerland.
The hope is that one day, medical technology might be advanced enough to bring her back to life. Many experts dismiss this gamble on the future as far-fetched, but Ziegler has decided to give it a shot.
Photo: Tomorrow Biostastis, via AFP
“I’m kind of curious to see what the future would be like and, in general, I like life,” said the Californian, who works in educational technology.
“So, if I could buy myself more time, that sounds really appealing,” she said.
Once a fringe pursuit reserved for eccentric billionaires, cryogenic freezing — also known as cryonics — has become more accessible over the past years.
Several companies offering cryopreservation have sprung up in the US and elsewhere, with about 500 people worldwide thought to have been frozen so far.
A persistent myth has it that Walt Disney, the creator of Mickey Mouse, is one of them, but this has been debunked, with BBC reporting in 2019 there is “zero evidence” for this.
Tomorrow Biostasis, founded in 2020, is thought to be the first such company offering the service in Europe. It offers to freeze your body after you die and store it for a membership fee of 50 euros (US$53) a month.
A lump-sum payment of 200,000 euros — or 75,000 euros if you opt to have just your brain frozen — is also due at the time of death, a cost that can be covered by a life insurance payout.
“One of the main goals of this company is to bring the cost down ... so that cryopreservation becomes available to whoever chooses to do it,” Tomorrow Biostasis cofounder Emil Kendziorra said.
Kendziorra, 38, from the western German city of Darmstadt, studied medicine and originally worked in cancer research, but said he became frustrated with the slow pace of developments in the field.
“The one big advantage of cryopreservation is that it is something that you can do right now,” he said.
When a client dies, Tomorrow Biostasis promises to dispatch a specially equipped ambulance and a medical team that starts cooling the body using ice and water as soon as possible.
The body is then infused with a “cryoprotectant” and transported to the facility in Switzerland where it is stored in a pod surrounded by liquid nitrogen and cooled to about minus-200°C.
Tomorrow Biostasis said it has about 700 paying members, and by the end of last year had cryopreserved four people.
The typical customer is aged 30 to 40, healthy, works in technology and is more likely to be male than female, Kendziorra said.
No one has ever been brought back to life after being cryopreserved, but proponents say recent advances in technology have made the prospect more plausible.
In an experiment almost a decade ago, scientists said they were able to cryopreserve the brain of a rabbit and recover it in near-perfect condition.
This year, researchers at China’s Fudan University reported using a new technique to freeze human brain tissue so that it regained normal function after thawing.
Nonetheless, some scientists voice deep skepticism about the bet on a future return to life.
Bringing a person back to life is still a remote prospect, said Holger Reinsch, head of the Cryo Competence Center at the ILK Dresden research institute for refrigeration technologies.
“We are rather critical of the concept of cryonics... I personally would advise you against such an endeavor,” he said. “The magic limit for the life-sustaining cryopreservation of tissue structures is a frog’s heart the size of a fingernail, and this has not changed since the 1970s.”
Even Kendziorra admitted that there are no guarantees.
“I think there’s a good chance for it, but do I know for sure? Absolutely not,” he said.
However, whatever happens in the future, Ziegler is confident she would not regret her decision.
“In some ways it’s weird,” she said. “But on the other hand, the alternative is to be put in a box in the ground and get eaten by worms.”
CAUTIOUS RECOVERY: While the manufacturing sector returned to growth amid the US-China trade truce, firms remain wary as uncertainty clouds the outlook, the CIER said The local manufacturing sector returned to expansion last month, as the official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose 2.1 points to 51.0, driven by a temporary easing in US-China trade tensions, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The PMI gauges the health of the manufacturing industry, with readings above 50 indicating expansion and those below 50 signaling contraction. “Firms are not as pessimistic as they were in April, but they remain far from optimistic,” CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said at a news conference. The full impact of US tariff decisions is unlikely to become clear until later this month
Popular vape brands such as Geek Bar might get more expensive in the US — if you can find them at all. Shipments of vapes from China to the US ground to a near halt last month from a year ago, official data showed, hit by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and a crackdown on unauthorized e-cigarettes in the world’s biggest market for smoking alternatives. That includes Geek Bar, a brand of flavored vapes that is not authorized to sell in the US, but which had been widely available due to porous import controls. One retailer, who asked not to be named, because
CHIP DUTIES: TSMC said it voiced its concerns to Washington about tariffs, telling the US commerce department that it wants ‘fair treatment’ to protect its competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reiterated robust business prospects for this year as strong artificial intelligence (AI) chip demand from Nvidia Corp and other customers would absorb the impacts of US tariffs. “The impact of tariffs would be indirect, as the custom tax is the importers’ responsibility, not the exporters,” TSMC chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at the chipmaker’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Hsinchu City. TSMC’s business could be affected if people become reluctant to buy electronics due to inflated prices, Wei said. In addition, the chipmaker has voiced its concern to the US Department of Commerce
STILL LOADED: Last year’s richest person, Quanta Computer Inc chairman Barry Lam, dropped to second place despite an 8 percent increase in his wealth to US$12.6 billion Staff writer, with CNA Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠) and Richard Tsai (蔡明興), the brothers who run Fubon Group (富邦集團), topped the Forbes list of Taiwan’s 50 richest people this year, released on Wednesday in New York. The magazine said that a stronger New Taiwan dollar pushed the combined wealth of Taiwan’s 50 richest people up 13 percent, from US$174 billion to US$197 billion, with 36 of the people on the list seeing their wealth increase. That came as Taiwan’s economy grew 4.6 percent last year, its fastest pace in three years, driven by the strong performance of the semiconductor industry, the magazine said. The Tsai
RSS