Cryonics

Cryonics is a low-temperature and chemical process for preserving a legally dead body or brain, in the hopes that future technology can repair the damage of preservation, cure whatever caused death, and restore the person to life. The preservation technology exists and is sold today by providers such as Alcor. The resuscitation technology does not exist and remains hypothetical.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken no official position on cryonics. Its General Handbook addresses neighboring questions. Members should not feel obligated to extend mortal life by extreme means, and such decisions rest with the individual or the family, made with competent medical advice and prayer. Since 2020, the Handbook has also left the choice between burial and cremation to the family.

These policies treat the disposition of the body as a matter of conscience. Cryopreservation falls within that latitude as a personal decision, open to members who choose it and required of no one.

The Scriptural Case

Mormon transhumanists read scripture as placing resuscitation among the works disciples are commanded to perform. Jesus sent the Twelve out with instructions to heal the sick and "raise the dead" (Matthew 10:8). The Book of Mormon records that Nephi, ministering in the years before the Savior's visit, raised his brother from death (3 Nephi 7:19). Neither text specifies a method. Emergency medicine already restarts hearts that have stopped, and cryonics attempts the same recovery across a much longer interval.

Vitrification is the current method, replacing water with cryoprotectant so that tissue cools to a glassy state instead of shredding itself on ice crystals. The same chemistry already preserves embryos, gametes, and the germplasm of endangered species, and work on organ banking advances alongside it. Repair of the remaining damage, if it comes, will likely require molecular manufacturing of a kind not yet built.

Objections to Cryonics

Critics complain that the procedure is fatal. So are burial and cremation, which are likewise performed after legal death, and cryonics begins exactly where they begin. The objection acquires real force only on matters of consent and sequence, as when Nectome tied its aldehyde fixation method to physician-assisted death, a coupling that established providers have avoided while still managing the deterioration problem.

Marketing deserves scrutiny of its own. Cryonics sold as guaranteed immortality is dishonest, and cryonics sold as a chance is not. Nothing in the practice amounts to a flight from the body, which is the usual charge against it. The entire expense goes toward keeping a body, which puts cryonics closer to Mormon materialism than to any doctrine that treats flesh as a phase to be shed.

Insufficient, and Still Worth Doing

Mormon scripture describes resurrection as universal, reaching everyone regardless of when or how they lived, and as a prolonged process rather than a single event. The vast majority of the dead were never preserved. Anyone serious about that mandate therefore has to look past cryonics, toward increasingly detailed family history and the reconstruction of persons from the evidence they left behind. Cryonics expedites a fraction of the work for a few people.

It also falls short of resurrection in the full sense. A body restored to life by any means is resurrected in one sense, but the promise describes bodies far more robust than these, immortal and incorruptible, and cryonics at best returns someone to mortality. Lazarus died twice, and his first raising was still worth the trouble.

The prophecy of resurrection reads better as forthtelling than as forecast, announced to provoke the work it describes rather than to excuse waiting for it. Latter-day revelation is blunt about the alternative, condemning those who must be commanded in all things and do nothing until they are (D&C 58:26-27). Whatever the odds of resuscitation, cryonics gives concrete form to a conviction the Saints already hold: the dead remain within reach of those who love them, and the work of raising them is shared between God and his children.