Would you want to be frozen when you die and brought back later? One in four doctors thinks it might actually work

Let’s start with the question, because there’s no point dancing around it.

Would you want to be frozen?

Not in the way your hands go numb waiting for the bus at Victor Harbor in July. Frozen as in: when you die, have your body or your brain preserved at extremely low temperatures or in chemical solution, in the hope that some future civilisation – smarter, more technically capable, presumably still speaking English – might be able to revive you, fix whatever killed you, and send you back out into the world blinking and confused and probably very hungry.

Would you want that?

Because a significant number of Australian doctors – people who went to medical school, passed exams, spent years in hospitals – apparently think it might work.

What the research actually found

Monash University researchers have published a study in the journal PLOS One this week surveying more than 300 physicians on their views about cryopreservation – which is the technical term for the process of preserving a human body or brain at death in the hope of future revival.

The headline finding: around one in four doctors surveyed said they thought it was “somewhat or very plausible” that a preserved person could be revived in the future. About half thought it unlikely. The average estimate of success across all doctors surveyed was – and this is a number that deserves a moment – roughly one in four.

One in four. That is not zero. One in four is the same odds as picking a random card from a standard deck and guessing its suit correctly. It is the same probability as rolling a one on a six-sided die and being pleasantly surprised. It is, in other words, not the raving of people who have lost their minds. It is, by medical standards, genuinely interesting.

Who’s doing this already

Here is the part of the story that tends to stop people mid-sentence. Current preservation organisations – they exist, they are operating right now, they have websites and membership fees and terms and conditions – report that several hundred people are already preserved globally. Thousands more have signed up for future preservation. They are in tanks. Waiting.

This is not science fiction. This is science that has not yet worked but that some people – including, apparently, a non-trivial number of doctors – believe has a reasonable chance of working eventually.

The technologies necessary to actually revive someone have not yet been developed. That is the rather significant caveat. You cannot currently be thawed out and fixed. The bet being made by people who sign up for preservation is essentially this: I will be dead anyway, I will authorise this to happen to me, and if the technology catches up in fifty or a hundred or five hundred years, perhaps someone will sort me out.

What the doctors think they could do right now

The survey asked doctors not just about plausibility but about whether they would consider accommodating patient requests for interventions that could improve preservation outcomes.

A majority said they would consider prescribing anticoagulants – blood-thinning medication – to dying patients who requested it, on the grounds that preventing blood clotting improves the quality of preservation. This is the relatively straightforward end of the ethical spectrum.

The more complicated end involves the question of whether a patient could, legally and ethically, elect medically assisted death and then be preserved before cardiac arrest – on the basis that the quality of preservation is significantly better if begun before the heart stops. Currently, this is, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, not legally permitted anywhere in the world. Around one in five doctors in the survey were concerned that decisions made to improve preservation outcomes could conflict with providing the best possible standard of care to a dying patient.

Neurosurgeons, by the way, were the most optimistic group about the possibility of revival. Which makes a grim kind of sense. These are people who spend their careers inside human brains and presumably have a higher tolerance than most for believing that the thing in your skull is more extraordinary than it appears.

The bigger question

Here is what the Monash team’s lead researcher, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, said, and it is worth quoting: “A lot of physician hesitancy may come from simple unfamiliarity with the scientific basis of modern preservation methods. The doctors who have actually thought about this – and who regularly sit with dying patients – tend to be more receptive, not less.”

Which is either the most reassuring thing you have read all week or the most alarming, depending entirely on your disposition.

The researchers are careful to note that the findings are speculative, that the ethical and legal frameworks are nowhere near ready for this conversation, and that nothing here should be taken as a clinical endorsement of preservation as a mainstream end-of-life option.

But they are also saying, clearly: this is a conversation we need to start having. Because some people are already making this choice. And doctors will increasingly be asked about it.

So. Would you?

Back to the question.

The Starts at 60 community sits, by definition, at a point in life where questions about what happens at the end are not purely academic. You have probably lost people. You have probably, at some quiet moment, thought about your own ending. You may have done the paperwork. Told people your wishes. Made decisions.

Is “please freeze me and see what happens in 200 years” a reasonable wish to add to that list?

One in four doctors think it might not be entirely mad.

We are genuinely curious what you think.