A fourteen-year-old girl had her final wish to be frozen instead of buried after her death granted by a judge.
The young girl, known only as JS, was suffering from a rare form of cancer and died on October 17th. In what is thought to be the first case of its kind in the UK (and possibly the world) the dying teenager wrote movingly to High Court Judge Peter Jackson:
“I want to live and live longer, and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. Being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time.”
Despite the fact that the girl was too young to write a legally binding will, she made her final wishes clear to Judge Jackson:
“I don’t want to be buried underground. I want to have this chance. This is my wish.”
The girl’s parents, who have not been named, are divorced and disagreed about their daughter’s desire to be cryogenically preserved. Although the teenager’s mother was in favour of the procedure going ahead, the girl’s father was said to be against the unusual move. Aware of the disagreement between her parents, the cancer victim asked Mr Justice Peter Jackson to rule that her mum should be the only person allowed to make decisions regarding her bodily remains.
Cryopreservation, a process where cells, tissues and organs are preserved by cooling to very low temperatures (typically -80°C using carbon dioxide or -196°C using liquid nitrogen), is regarded with widespread scepticism by most medical professionals. Judge Jackson called the case “an example of the new questions that science poses to the law”. Although he made the ruling last month, the unusual case has only come to light now as the High Court imposed restrictions on media coverage while the girl was still alive.
Although the teenage girl was too unwell to attend the court hearing, the Judge reportedly visited the brave youngster in hospital, where she apparently spent the final months of her life researching cryopreservation. Making the ruling, Judge Jackson said he was impressed by the young girl’s bravery in battling her rare disease and stated that while his decision was based on resolving conflict between the teenager’s parents, it did not represent a finding on cryogenic preservation.
In the UK, The Telegraph has reported that JS’s parents could not afford to pay for the freezing process (costing around £37,000) but her maternal grandparents raised the money for her body to moved to a storage facility in the US. America is one of only two countries in the world, along with Russia, that has facilities for storing frozen bodies.
