Cryogenics: The Opinions... February 7th, 2011

          I think it is pretty obvious that there are many, many opinions on cryogenics.  All the way from if it is a religious issue, to the expense,to if it should be legal before death for people with a terminal illness.  If you do not already know this I am doing this blog for a Research and Media Study class where I was assigned to select a topic of choice, write a paper, create a survey, create a video, and select to do a: community service project and blog about it, write a public service announcement, or create a feature video.  We also had to come up with a topic question to ask and answer, my topic question was: Should people with a terminal illness be allowed to be cryogenically frozen before they are medically considered brain dead?  I obviously selected to do community service and blog about it, although I ran out of community service things to blog about pretty quickly so I decided to just talk about some of the key points of cryogenics. 

            I created my survey and published it to 25 family and friends from November 31, 2010 thru December 7, 2011.  I received 19 responses to my survey; which was 10 questions multiple choice that asked about the survey taker’s opinion on cryogenics, if they have had/ or known someone who has had cryogenics etcetera.  Questions 9 and 10 of the survey were long answers which both got a generous 18 responses each.  The last two questions asked were, “What are your opinions about people cryogenically freezing themselves before they are medically considered brain dead?”  And also, “What do you think cryogenics could do for the world if it worked effectively?”  In this blog post I am only going to talk about question 9.

            I am going to share some of the survey responses with you so that you can see how many diverse and intense opinions were given.  For question 9, “What are your opinions about people cryogenically freezing themselves before they are medically considered brain dead?”  Out of the 18 responses that were received 3 out of those 18 (16%) think that it should be okay for another person to be cryogenically frozen before they are medically brain dead if they have a terminal illness.  5 out of the 18 people (28%) said something that meant they basically were not in favor of it at all.  And doubling the number of people completely opposed to it, 10 of the 18 people (56%) said something along the lines of “it is a person’s choice to do what they wish”.     

           

       People that were okay with cryogenics for a person that is not yet medically brain dead but with some conditions said things like: “I think it should be allowed once the technology exists to safely bring them back,” or, “It is up to them, but not their relatives.”  Now the people that are completely against cryogenics answered this question with things like, “First of all, we are all terminal. We all die. If we freeze ourselves, we only prolong the end. Hardly seems worth it. If there is only so much time left, let's have fun and not freeze ourselves,” and another reply was, “This would be self-serving. We are here to serve GOD and others until he decides to take us home. Sure we live longer due to science but the time comes when we let go. Besides, say in twenty years a cure is found, the rest of the world will have changed drastically from what it was so you probably would wish you had gone the first time.”  Some comments from the 10 people that said it would be okay if another person could be cryogenically frozen before they are legally declared brain dead said things like, “I believe that an individual should have the right to cryogenically freeze themselves if they want to. It should be an individual right to do so,” and one woman said, “They have a right to do with themselves and their money as they wish as long as it does not infringe on the rights of someone else.”  These are some of the many opinions on cryogenics tell me yours in the comment box below.  Thanks for reading!