Larry King’s announcement that he plans to freeze his dead body and then be resurrected when science finds a cure for what caused his death is not as wacky as it sounds, experts tell Newsmax Health.
Dr. Max More, president and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., says more and more people with the financial resources are having their bodies cryonically preserved. His organization now holds the frozen remains of baseball great Ted Williams.
“To me, it seems crazy not to do this,” said More.
David Ettinger, a spokesman for the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute, said that King is honest enough to announce publicly what many other stars are privately considering.
“A lot of famous people have flirted with it and haven’t done it because they are afraid they’ll be seen as having done something unusual,” said Ettinger, whose father Robert is considered “the father of cryonics.”
Cryonics is a procedure in which dead people are preserved under extremely cold temperatures, usually using liquid nitrogen. The hope is that future technology will someday be able to revive them and restore them to good health.
Although the term “freezing” is often used to describe cryonics, there is actually no ice formation.
On his recent Larry King: Dinner with King special on CNN, the 78-year-old King stated, “I wanna be frozen, on the hope that they’ll find whatever I died of and they’ll bring me back.” He added that his “biggest fear is death” because he doesn’t believe in an afterlife.
King is married to his eighth wife, Shawn, 50, and they have two young sons.
Given King’s remarkable career and legendary curiosity, his desire to be cryonically preserved makes sense to Jim Halperin, author of “The First Immortal,” a bestselling novel that focuses on cryonic preservation.
“Cryonic preservation strikes some people as a nutty idea, but can you imagine what people thought about heart transplants 100 years ago? I think Larry King is making a smart, logical decision because, really, what does he have to lose?” Halperin told Newsmax Health.
The author says he has spoken to Warren Buffett about the topic, and believes the legendary investor is intrigued by the idea.
Halperin, who has signed up to be cryopreserved, said he became less skeptical about the procedure while researching his book.
“I think there is a significant chance it will work, although whether that is 5 percent or 50 percent, I don’t know,” he said. But he noted that, with science advancing at such a fast rate, such a prospect does not seem unlikely in the future.
Besides King, other celebrities who have voiced a desire to be cryonically preserved include Simon Cowell and Paris Hilton. There is a long-standing rumor that Walt Disney was cryonically preserved, but he is actually buried in California.