Who owns you?

The standard answer of the individualist will be, "No one!," or maybe, "I own myself!" This proud assertion is less obvious than it may seem. If you own yourself, then presumably you also have the right to kill yourself. However, in most states and most countries, suicide is a crime - the one crime for which the successful criminal can never be prosecuted.

Rather than looking at the contentious issue of your right to die when you chose, I want to concentrate on your rights not while you are alive, but once you are dead.

Again, most countries offer legal measures to make sure that certain of our last requests are honored. We call them wills. These can be extremely simple, or they can contain clauses which almost guarantee trouble. Not to the deceased, who is beyond all such difficulties, but to the survivors. I am the executor of an estate which is to be divided equally among four children, all adults. Fair enough. The trouble arises because the father does not consider his heirs all equally responsible when it comes to handling money. His will therefore specifies that certain of his children inherit at once upon his death, while others must wait up to fifteen more years to receive in full what was bequeathed to them. At best, this guarantees a difficult time to the person with the job of explaining the terms of the will to certain of the heirs; at worst, it leads to litigation.

These potential legal problems may seem bad enough, but they are nothing compared with those that may arise when the subject at issue is not a deceased's persons assets, but the person himself. Who owns your body when you are dead?

Again, you can specify in your will what is to be done with your remains, though your options are limited. You can be buried, though not exactly anywhere you chose; you can be cremated; or you can be frozen.

A person who chooses the last option does so with the optimistic assumption that his or her re-animation may one day take place. This will certainly not be the case if you wait too long before starting the process. The brain begins to deteriorate within minutes of death, so you need to have someone standing by as you take that last breath. Also, even if they act immediately, it will not suffice simply to stick your corpse inside a freezer. The human body is composed mostly of water, and as temperatures drop, ice crystals will rupture the cells. Preservative materials - antifreeze, in essence - must be introduced into all the cells of the body. Add to this the fact that if all processes of decay are to be halted for a long time, the body must be kept very cold indeed, preferably no warmer than liquid nitrogen at 77 degrees above absolute zero. Finally, although freezing can certainly be achieved today, there is no guarantee that it can be done in such a way as to be reversible, bringing the frozen corpse first back to room temperature and then to consciousness.

Personally, I think that the chances of all this being done successfully with today's technology are negligible. You can certainly be frozen, but you and King Tut will be about equally difficult to re-animate. Despite all these difficulties, some people are ready to make the bet. On the face of it the odds seem reasonable: the possible waste of money which in any case you can't take with you, versus a possible awakening in the future and an enormously extended life.

If you want to go this route you can do so, with at least two organizations willing to freeze and store you for a fee of a little more than $100,000. For a lesser amount just your head can be treated. This seems to me like false economy. A human is much more than a brain. As Woody Allen remarked in "Sleeper," when they proposed to remove his brain: "Not my brain. It's my second favorite organ."

Having yourself preserved in this way introduces new legal issues. You may feel that you will be coming back to reclaim your property and possessions, but the State does not agree. Once you are frozen, at that point you are legally dead. If you return you will likely own nothing, even when you stand up in court and point out that you are clearly alive. The test case resolving this should be fascinating. I would like to be there. I don't think I will be.

If this seems like hassles enough, a novel variation was provided very recently. The son of baseball great Ted Williams wants to have the body frozen, despite his father's clearly-stated desire to be cremated. Does this display filial devotion, a son hoping to see his father returned to life and presumably health (not many us would relish the prospect of returning in the condition in which we spend our final hours)? Not exactly. Ted Williams' body is to be frozen with the stated intention of harvesting his DNA. This is technically a much less demanding task than bringing a frozen person back to life, but it again raises the question, who owns you? Who owns you before you die, and you owns you after you die? Beyond death, do you have any real rights at all? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the chance of a second life?

I want to end with a question of a different nature. Suppose you die, and are frozen. What would be the motives for someone in the future restoring you to consciousness? I suppose that a historian, wanting to hear at first-hand of life in our times, might want to do it. Would anyone else?

Well, I could imagine only one other reason for thawing our frozen contemporaries, and it takes an extremely gloomy view of the future. Today's frozen will be thawed, I suggest, only if and when the world returns to barbarism, and our descendants are extremely short of animal protein.

I think I'll stay dead.