Obtain Immortality at Alcor

"We're a lot closer to the preservation process being reversible. And we're optimistic that it will work but even if it doesn't, I think that the experiment itself has value both for us and for the rest of society."
-Tanya Jones, chief operating officer, Alcor

Alcor Life Extension Foundation , a nonprofit organization, in Scottsdale is offering immortality using cryonics:

"the freezing of a seriously ill or recently deceased person to stop tissues from decomposing; the body is preserved until new medical cures are developed that might bring the person back to life" -wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Right now more average-income people are applying for this new technology using life insurance to pay for the process.

"We're seeing all of a sudden, as the science is catching up with what we hope to see happen," said Tanya Jones, chief operating officer for Alcor. "More people are taking it seriously as a means of protection for their entire families."

"We had one girl who was signed up on the very day she was born," Jones said. "Her mother had all of the paperwork ready to go, and the day that child was born, she was a member."

The process starts upon the death of an Alcor member, a medical team is deployed to pick up the body and deliver it to a hospital-like room.

Once there, blood is drained and replaced with cryopreservation fluid, which prevents ice crystals from forming and destroying the tissue.

The body is then strapped in a stainless steel tube of liquid nitrogen and cooled at a rate of 1 degree an hour until it reaches minus 196 degrees.

"We're a lot closer to the preservation process being reversible," Jones said. "And we're optimistic that it will work but even if it doesn't, I think that the experiment itself has value both for us and for the rest of society."

Alcor's cryonics process costs $150,000 for the whole body and $80,000 for the head.