The First Immortal

On Jan­u­ary 12, 1967, in Glen­dale, CA, Dr. James Bed­ford, a 73-year old retired psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor and writer, was the first per­son to undergo cry­onic sus­pen­sion¹. Bed­ford had been diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal renal can­cer and had decided that he wished to be cry­on­i­cally frozen in the hopes that he would later be able to be revived and cured of his ail­ment. At the time, Bed­ford paid out $4200 for a steel cap­sule and liq­uid nitro­gen to keep his body frozen at about 328°F. He cur­rently resides at Alcor Life Exten­sion Foundation’s facil­ity in Scotts­dale, Ari­zona.²

1. Cry­onic sus­pen­sion, most com­monly, but incor­rectly, called cryo­gen­ics, is the process where a sub­ject is flash frozen to the boil­ing point of liq­uid nitro­gen, or –320.5°F. [↩]
2. Large por­tions of this story came from Time Mag­a­zine, Feb. 3, 1967. [↩]