New Scientist - USA (2020-09-26)

30 | New Scientist | 26 September 2020

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THE world – including this

magazine – hasn’t shied away

from expressing opinions

about the Alcor Life Extension

Foundation, the US non-profit

founded by Fred and Linda

Chamberlain in 1972 to freeze

corpses and body parts in the hope

of one day resurrecting the dead.

Most observers are content

with interrogating Alcor’s bizarre

mission by asking if technologies

for resurrection will ever be viable.

This, of course, is a non-question:

who knows what is around the

corner? The successful freezing

and thawing of a whole rabbit brain

in 2016 shows how careful we

must be in dismissing such ideas.

Mark O’Connell’s approach in

To Be a Machine was more fruitful:

he asked why people would want

to freeze themselves or their loved

ones at all. Hope Frozen, filmed

in Thailand at around the time

O’Connell was writing his book,

goes some way towards an answer.

Matheryn, nicknamed Einz, was

born in 2013 to parents Nareerat

and Sahatorn Naovaratpon. For

more than two years, they and

their besotted son, Matrix, filmed

hour after hour of the little girl’s

life. She was – and is still, in Pailin

Wendel’s ravishing, painful

documentary – captivating.

Just before her third birthday,

Einz died of ependymoblastoma.

After 10 surgical operations,

12 bouts of chemotherapy and

20 rounds of radiation therapy,

her family and the doctors knew

it was coming: this highly

aggressive brain cancer is a killer.

At the eleventh hour, Sahatorn

persuaded his family that on

her death, her brain and some of

her tissue should be frozen and

transferred to Alcor’s Arizona

facility. Einz became the youngest

person to be cryonically preserved.

The story created a media storm in

Thailand. In the film, some critics

in this mostly Buddhist country

complained that her family had

prevented Einz’s reincarnation

Deathlessness isn’t the same as life Hope Frozen is a painful documentary

that asks deep questions about life and death technologies through the

story of Einz, a terminally ill baby girl, and her family, says Simon Ings

“ Some critics in

Thailand, a mostly

Buddhist country, felt

the family had thwarted

Einz’s reincarnation”

Film

Hope Frozen:

A quest to live twice

Pailin Wedel

Netflix

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Be Right Back

Owen Harris

Bereaved and pregnant,

Martha (Hayley Atwell)

receives a robot replacement

for her late boyfriend in

a devastating episode

of Black Mirror, Charlie

Brooker’s sci-fi anthology.

Film

Marjorie Prime

Michael Almereyda

Jon Hamm plays an AI

bringing comfort to Marjorie

(Lois Smith), a woman

with Alzheimer’s. The film,

based on Jordan Harrison’s

play, manages to be both

mind-bending and touching.

and consigned her to limbo.

Sahatorn and Nareerat,

meanwhile, are both working

engineers, and Sahatorn says

they have put their faith in

science. Matrix, caught in the

middle as a novice monk and

a gifted student of science,

carries the weight of this dilemma

with admirable fortitude. At the

end of the film, my strongest

wish was that he would one day

escape these competing pressures

and live his own life.

Yet anyone hoping for a

uniquely Buddhist take on the

transhumanist promise will be

disappointed. There is very little

to distinguish Buddhist objections

from wider unease about not

leaving the dead to rest in peace.

Wedel lets the family speak for

themselves. Inevitably, they come

close to revealing the faultlines in

their choices, especially Sahatorn.

“I don’t care that people say I can’t

move on,” he says. “I don’t care

because it’s true.” When the

family visits Alcor, Sahatorn loses

himself in the technical details

while Nareerat weeps quietly.

Hope Frozen leaves me worrying

that by denying themselves some

form of spiritual afterlife for Einz,

her relatives have lost her twice

over. They have lost her physical

form and now they can’t even

animate her spirit in their

imaginations. “For sure, we are

headed towards deathlessness,”

says Sahatorn, proselyting for

the strange scientistic faith that

is his defence against grief.

He isn’t wrong: from cryonics

to CRISPR gene editing, there is

no shortage of effort going into

avoiding death. As Wedel’s

upsetting film reveals, however,

deathlessness isn’t life.  ❚

NE

TFL

IX

Einz’s mother

remembering her

2-year-old daughter

The film column

Simon Ings is a novelist and
science writer. Follow him on
Instagram at @simon_ings