The woman who has been frozen for nearly 50 years and is waiting for a second life

Rhea Ettinger was the first person to be suspended at the Cryonics Institute in the hope of a future awakening (Picture: Cryonics Institute/Metro.co.uk)

She is the unlikely pioneer who took the first gamble on a second life.  

Five decades after her legal death, Rhea Chaloff Ettinger’s body remains in a liquid nitrogen-filled cylinder resembling a space station pod. 

For around a decade, she was the only ‘patient’ stored at a cryo-preservation centre run by the Cryonics Institute (CI). 

Her ‘de-animation’, which involved her body being encased in dry ice, took place on September 23, 1977 in accordance with Rhea’s wishes and those of her son, Robert, considered the founding father of the cryonics movement. 

Rhea would not be disheartened to reawaken to a world with a considerable share of ills, even compared to the war years she lived through, CI president Dennis Kowalksi tells Metro.co.uk.

‘I think Rhea would be amazed and in wonder and awe at what’s become of this great world,’ he says.

‘She would look at the doomsayers and naysayers and tell them to quit their whining as they didn’t know how bad things were in her time.  

‘Like all cryonicists, she would be an optimist who cares about her family and friends.’ 

Cryo tanks hold bodies of people who signed up for a second chance at life before their medical deaths (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)

Rhea owes her ‘suspension’ to Robert, whose interest in science fiction while growing up led him to the idea of clinically dead humans being stored for future revival, pending radical leaps in medical science. 

The cryonics pioneer was wounded in combat while serving in the US Army during World War Two, which led to a long period of recovery.

Delving back into the theme of eternal life while convalescing, he would eventually write a book entitled ‘The Prospect of Immortality’, considered a landmark text in the movement’s quest to overcome death.

‘Rhea’s son, Robert, was in the artillery in the Second World War and fought in the Battle of the Bulge,’ Kowalksi explains. ‘He was severely injured in an incoming artillery blast which killed everyone around him.

‘When he was in the military hospital a then brand new technology called bone grafting saved his legs and he realised just how quickly medicine can advance. Being that he was a physics professor and a reader of science fiction he took what he knew and wrote a book called “The Prospect of Immortality” setting out the concept of cryonics.

‘A lot of what he did in the 1960s was philosophical and it wasn’t until the 1970s when his mother died that he took up the practical and set up the Cryonics Institute and had her frozen.

‘After all, who better to look after his mum than himself?’ 

Rhea Ettinger was the first patient to have their body frozen at the Cryonics Institute (Picture: Cryonics Wiki)

Rhea’s family came to the US from Odessa when it was still part of Russia.

She married a German-born man, Alfred, and gave birth to Robert in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1918 before the family moved to Detroit, where her husband ran a furniture store.

Albums belonging to Rhea containing sepia pictures of Robert’s babyhood and images of other family members are still kept at the institute, according to the New Yorker.

She now represents the theoretical being put into practice, with Robert’s first wife, Elaine, becoming the CI’s second patient a decade later in 1987.  

The decorated veteran’s second wife, Mae, would also go into cryo-suspension and the pioneer himself would follow immediately after his legal death in 2011, aged 92.  

‘By working hard and saving my money, I intend to become an immortal superman,’ he once wrote.

Robert Ettinger was instrumental in founding what is now a global cryonics movement (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)

Rhea’s odds of revival are longer than her sons, due to the fact that preservation methods were at an early stage 47 years ago.

The 78-year-old’s body was placed in dry ice for around a decade until the CI began using liquid nitrogen, according to life-extensionist Ben Best.

At present, bodies, body parts and pets are stored at –196C in liquid nitrogen, awaiting the arrival of revolutionary science to not only restore life but in many cases cure the condition that caused death.

The mum is now among around 250 patients inside the CI’s main, hanger-like facility in Clinton Township, a suburb north-east of Detroit.  

The growing list of people who have paid for an outside shot at a second life shows that time has done nothing to cool interest in what British CI member Alan Sinclair describes as a gamble worth taking. 

One of the latest patients is a 50-year-old Englishman whose body was transported 3,750 miles between London and Michigan after his death.

‘Since then we have reached the cusp of artificial general intelligence and things that decades ago seemed impossible, such as having a world of knowledge at your fingertips or talking to someone on the other side of the Earth in real time, are now possible,’ Kowalski says of the timespan since Rhea’s suspension. 

The Cryonics Institute has members around the world who have placed their faith in future technology to revive them (Picture: Cryonics Institute, cryonics.org)

‘Organ transplants and re-starting someone’s heart were once unthought of.

‘Go back centuries and there were kings and queens who didn’t have it as good as we have it.’ 

Critics of cryonics view the process as fanciful pseudoscience, with Dr Miriam Stoppard, a journalist and doctor, previously saying the process ‘robs the dying of their dignity’.   

However the future-proofers believe that the march of science is travelling in the general direction of Robert’s ideal of ‘physical immortality’.  

Nanoscience and artificial intelligence are viewed as especially promising. 

Life-restoration is still a far leap, however.

And one fact is clear; if Rhea does re-awaken to tell her story, none of today’s mortals will be around to hear it.  

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