The BBC is reporting that earlier this year, a two-year-old Thai girl became the youngest person ever to be cryogenically frozen, preserving her brain with the hope that one day, she will be brought back to life.
Matheryn or or Einz Naovaratpong as her family nicknamed her, died of a rare form of brain cancer just before she turned three. She developed the disease shortly after turning two, and spent most of that year in hospital.
“The first day Einz was sick, this idea came to my mind right away that we should do something scientifically for her, as much as is humanly possible at present,” her father, Sahatorn, is quoted as saying on the BBC website. “I felt a real conflict in my heart about this idea, but I also needed to hold onto it. So I explained my idea to my family.”
Cryogenics is the study of the production and behavior of materials at very low temperatures. Using this knowledge, a person’s body-or in Einz’s case just her brain-can be put into a deeply frozen state at the point of death, and kept that way until the future.
The hope is that at some point, extraordinary advances in medical technology will allow humans who are frozen to be revived.
In Einz’s case, since just her brain was frozen, there is the hope that a new body will be created for her, allowing her to live.
In 2011, it was reported by ABCNews that 200 people lay frozen in cryogenic institutes in the U.S.
Famous people who have chosen to be frozen immediately after death include baseball player Ted Williams, and Dick Clair.
Read more about the Naovaratpong family’s story here.
Photo credit: Minerva Studio/Shutterstock
