Robert Ettinger

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger was shot in Germany during World War II, left for dead in the field, and spent several years recovering in a Michigan hospital. He survived. And then, for the rest of his life, he could not stop thinking about what happens when people do not.

  Ettinger was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on the 4th of December, 1918, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He earned two master's degrees from Wayne State University, one in physics and one in mathematics, and spent his working career teaching those subjects at Wayne State and at Highland Park Community College. He looked like a physics teacher. He sounded like one. But the idea that consumed him had nothing to do with a classroom.

  He called it cryonics: the practice of freezing a human body at the moment of legal death, preserving it until future medicine could revive and repair it. He laid out this argument in a 1962 book called The Prospect of Immortality. The book made him famous and made an entire movement possible. By the time he died on the 23rd of July, 2011, at the age of 92, his followers called him "the father of cryonics." His body, like the bodies of both his wives and his mother, was immediately frozen. He is still waiting.

• 2. A Story Read at Twelve

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  Ettinger grew up reading Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. When he was 12 years old, a story stopped him cold. The story was called "The Jameson Satellite," written by Neil R. Jones and published in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. In it, a Professor Jameson had his corpse launched into earth orbit, where the author believed it would remain frozen at near absolute zero indefinitely. Millions of years later, after humanity had vanished, a race of mechanical beings with organic brains discovered the body, repaired Jameson's brain, and installed it in a mechanical body.

  Ettinger took the story seriously in a way most readers would not. He assumed that biologists would soon discover the secret of eternal youth. As he moved through his teenage years in the 1930s, that optimism cooled. No scientists were working on such a project. But the core logic of the story stayed with him: if technologically advanced beings could revive a frozen corpse, then perhaps humanity's own future medicine could do the same.

  In 1948, Ettinger published his own short story, "The Penultimate Trump," in Startling Stories. It traced the development of a method for placing people in suspended animation until medicine could restore their health, and followed the first such person after revival. The story was fiction. The argument behind it was not, at least not to Ettinger.

• 3. The Reluctant Founder

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  By 1960, Ettinger was 42 years old and increasingly aware, as he put it, of his own mortality. He had been waiting for prominent scientists or physicians to make the public case for cryonics. None did. So he wrote a few pages summarizing the idea, framed it around life insurance, and mailed it to roughly 200 people he selected from Who's Who in America.

  The response was very small. Ettinger concluded that a far longer treatment was needed, mostly to counter cultural bias. He understood that even distinguished people would resist the idea that dying is usually gradual and could be reversible. He made what he described as an even more troubling discovery: that many people had to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, and that health is better than sickness.

  In 1962, he privately published a preliminary version of The Prospect of Immortality. It attracted the attention of a major publisher, which sent a copy to Isaac Asimov. Asimov said the science was sound, and the book was approved for a 1964 Doubleday hardcover. It became a selection of the Book of the Month Club and was published in nine languages.

  Ettinger was not the only person thinking along these lines. Also in 1962, a writer named Evan Cooper had authored a manuscript called "Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now" under the pseudonym Nathan Duhring. Cooper's book made the same argument. But it lacked scientific and technical rigor, and was not of publication quality.

• 4. Overnight Celebrity

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  The Prospect of Immortality landed Ettinger on television with David Frost, Johnny Carson, and Steve Allen. Coverage appeared in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, and Christian Century, among dozens of other periodicals. He also spoke on radio programs coast to coast.

  The media attention was a product of timing as much as argument. Ettinger had been characterized, with some irony, as experiencing a historically important mid-life crisis when he first wrote up the idea. But the publication made cryonics a real subject of public debate rather than a science fiction premise.

  Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute and the related Immortalist Society. He served as president of both groups until 2003. He also wrote a second book, Man Into Superman, which his second wife, Mae Junod, helped type and edit. Everyone active in cryonics today, according to the record, traces their involvement directly or indirectly to one or both of his books.

• 5. The People Around Him

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  Mae Junod first met Ettinger in 1962, when she enrolled in one of his adult education courses in basic physics. She typed and helped edit the manuscripts for both The Prospect of Immortality and Man Into Superman. She became active in the Cryonics Society of Michigan and edited its monthly newsletter, The Outlook, serving as production manager.

  In the 1970s, The Outlook was renamed The Immortalist, and Junod continued as editor until the mid-1990s. The Outlook holds the distinction of being the longest continuously published cryonics magazine. Junod was also an author, a feminist, and a marriage counselor.

  Ettinger married Junod in 1988, after the death of his first wife, Elaine. He described his years with Junod as among the most satisfying and tranquil of his life. The couple moved to Scottsdale, Arizona in 1995 and began easing out of more than 30 years of cryonics activism.

  Ettinger had two children with Elaine: David, born in 1951, and Shelley, born in 1954. David gave his first cryonics interview to journalists when he was 12 years old and later became an attorney, serving as legal counsel to the Cryonics Institute and the Immortalist Society. Shelley had no interest in cryonics and became a writer and revolutionary socialist.

  Mae Ettinger suffered a debilitating stroke in 1998 from which she never fully recovered. A second, lethal stroke followed in 2000. She was cryopreserved.

• 6. Faith, Doubt, and the Long Wait

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  Ettinger was raised Jewish, later attended Protestant Unitarian church services, and eventually became an atheist. That trajectory tracked something in the nature of his project: cryonics offered a secular version of what religions have long promised. Not resurrection through faith, but through future medicine.

  His thinking was deeply shaped by the Purple Heart he received after being severely wounded in Germany during World War II. He had already lived through the kind of near-death experience that changes a person's relationship to the idea of survival. The years he spent recovering in a Michigan hospital gave him time to think.

  He died on the 23rd of July, 2011, of natural causes in Detroit, Michigan. He was cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute he had founded, joining his mother and both wives in a state of suspended waiting. His son David, who had grown up giving interviews about cryonics at age 12, had spent his adult life working as the institute's legal counsel, making sure the organization his father built could outlast his father's body.