14-year-old who died of cancer has body cryogenically frozen

Screengrab from Cryonics.org

A 14-year-old teenager whose life was cut short due to a rare form of cancer won a legal battle to have her remains cryogenically frozen.

In hopes that she could be “woken up” and cured in the future, a girl who can’t be identified and is referred to only as “JS” has been granted clearance by the London high court to have her body preserved in a facility in the US.

According to The Telegraph, her parents disagreed over fulfilling her dying wish, causing the high court to intervene.

In a heartbreaking letter read to the court, JS said: “I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time. I don’t want to be buried underground.”

The sick teen passed away last month, but details of the case were not allowed to be made public.

She is one of only 10 Britons to have been frozen, and the only British child.

Her parents, meanwhile, could not afford to pay for the cryonic process, which approximately costs £37,000 (P22 million), but her maternal grandparents raised enough money needed for her body to be frozen and taken to a storage facility in the state of Michigan.

Cryonic preservation is a controversial and costly process that involves the freezing of a dead body in the hope that resuscitation and a cure may one day be possible.

Willing subjects are stored in a metal cylinder where living cells, tissues, organs or entire bodies are protected from decay by storing them at extremely low temperatures.  Khristian Ibarrola