Robert Ettinger, 1918–2011

Robert Ettinger spent his life championing the benefits of what he called cryonics: quick-freezing the newly dead in the hope that science will one day bring them back to life, thawed and cured of all ills. After Ettinger died at home last week, his body was rushed to his Cryonics Institute outside Detroit and placed headfirst in a vat of liquid nitrogen. “We were able to freeze him under optimum conditions,” said his son, David. “So he’s got another chance.”

Ettinger started musing on mortality after being wounded by a German mortar round during World War II. His shrapnel-shredded legs were saved by experimental bone-graft surgery, convincing Ettinger that medicine might someday be able “to fix anything, even death,” said The New York Times. While recuperating, he wrote science-fiction stories on immortality and sent letters to scores of scientists and influential Americans asking them to get behind cryonics. When he got no response, Ettinger wrote The Prospect of Immortality. Published in 1964, the book proclaimed the arrival of the Freezer Era and declared that mankind would become nobler and more responsible once “confronted with the reality of living forever,” said The Washington Post.

His manifesto inspired several groups to put cadavers on ice, and in 1976 Ettinger founded his nonprofit institute. “The price for preservation at the institute is about $30,000,” said The Wall Street Journal, “including perpetual care.” It now houses more than 100 bodies, including Ettinger’s mother and his two wives. “If both my wives are revived,” he said last year, “that will be a high-class problem.”