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KrioRus, a Russian cryogenics firm, wants to freeze people before they die to (hopefully) bring them back to life later.
In the procedure, the body is placed into an ice bath to gradually reduce its temperature. Experts then drain the blood and replace it with an antifreeze fluid to keep ice crystals from forming in the body.
The company is looking for investors in hopes of opening a lab in Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal, to start rolling out the controversial procedure, Newsweek reports.
By freezing a body before the person actually dies, the company’s scientists believe they can avoid extensive brain damage, increasing the chance that the body can someday be brought back to life.
If all goes as planned, this would be the first time a company would freeze a body before the human is pronounced dead. Currently, cryopreservation has only been performed after someone has deceased.
KrioRus currently has 50 human bodies or heads and 20 animals frozen in tanks in Russia, but these were all frozen after their respective deaths. They are reportedly located inside an unheated warehouse in a snowy village some 47 miles northeast of the Kremlin, according to the Daily Mail.