A man who stiffened: a brave attempt to live forever

For many years, rumors have turned into secret experiments that could change the course of human history.

A man who was desperate to live signed up to freeze his body. He was told that he would be brought back to life in 2017.

James Hiram Bedford was a professor of psychology at the University of California and a veteran of the First World War. In the middle of the 20th century, he lived his whole life, married twice, and traveled worldwide. He went on hunting trips in Africa, explored the Amazon rainforest, and traveled through Greece, Turkey, Spain, England, Scotland, Germany, and Switzerland. He was among the first to drive the Alcan Highway to Alaska and Canada.

In 1967, he received devastating news – he was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, which had already spread to his lungs.

On 12 January 1967, after Bedford’s death, Robert Nelson, who pioneered cryonics, supervised the procedure. His body was injected with a chemical designed to keep his organs alive before being put into a chamber of liquid nitrogen at -196 °C. He became the first person to be cryogenically frozen.

However, he was not the first person to receive this treatment. In April 1966, a woman in Arizona underwent a similar process, but her protection failed. Experts thought this was because her body had not been appropriately prepared in time, which led to the cells decomposing. If they were revived, their brains would be significantly damaged.

Alcor investigated Bedford’s frozen state in 1991, almost 24 years after his body was first preserved. When the technicians opened the cryogenic chamber, they found that his body was wrapped in a blue sleeping bag secured by nylon straps. His face looked surprisingly young, although some parts of his skin had color.

Despite this, three years after the planned date of revival in 2017, Bedford remains in frozen sleep, stacked next to 145 others waiting for the same fate. Science still has to find a way to bring people back to life from the dead, but the question remains: will humanity ever unlock the secrets of the resurrection?

Before he died, Bedford gave more than $100,000 (more than 2 billion VNDs today) to pay for cryonic protection. The story of James Hiram Bedford is one of the most interesting experiments in cryonics – a brave attempt to overcome the limits of human mortality. More than 50 years have passed since his body, but the technology that brought him back to life still hasn’t been realized. Although there has been a lot of progress in medical science, the question of whether cryonics can bring someone back to life remains unanswered.