Wow, this is a new one. A do-it-yourselfer who froze his grandfather in
dry ice. The article says gramps was at room temp for 72 hrs because
Norway has a law against freezing bodies! Owww, remind me never
to go there. spike
http://www.nandotimes.com/healthscience/story/208195p-2008465c.html
By ANN CARNAHAN Scripps Howard News Service
NEDERLAND, Colo. (December 31, 2001 1:17 p.m. EST) - It's 1:30 on
a Wednesday
afternoon, and iceman Bo Shaffer is about to earn a couple hundred
bucks to pack
1,500 pounds of dry ice on the body of a dead man.
"This isn't a bad job," says Shaffer, an environmental consultant
who comes to
this hillside every month to ice up the corpse.
Shaffer unlocks the Tuff Shed door to reveal a tall wooden crate.
Inside the crate
is an aluminum casket, home of Bredo Morstoel, who died in 1989.
Shaffer and an
assistant remove the crate's lid and lift off a piece of blue
insulation.
Lying atop the casket is a dime-store thermometer, which Shaffer
picks up and
reads. "Minus 75 degrees," he says, obviously pleased.
Still frozen after all these years.
More than 12 years after Bredo Morstoel died of heart failure in
his native Norway,
his body is preserved in a backyard cryogenics lab overlooking the
Continental
Divide.
His grandson, Trygve Bauge, formerly of Nederland, hopes medical
technology will
eventually be able to revive his grandfather or genetically
recreate him by copying
the DNA in his cells.
"I applaud the company that recently had a breakthrough with
cloning in the U.S.,"
said Bauge by telephone from Oslo, where he now lives. "So far,
they've been able
to clone animals. The next step is to clone DNA from dead
animals."
In Norway, Bauge organizes health retreats, where participants
take ice baths. A
self-described entrepreneur, he hopes to launch "various
life-extension centers"
that focus on health and cryogenics.
Bauge was deported from the United States in 1994 after a
seven-year fight with
the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He wires Shaffer $674
every month to
pay for the ice and labor.
To date, it's cost $130,000 to keep Morstoel frozen.
Some of the money came from Bauge's inheritance from his
grandfather. Most is
paid by Aud Morstoel, who is Bredo's daughter and Bauge's mother.
Aud Morstoel,
who lives with Bauge, was once head of Norway's largest pharmacy.
She vows to
continue paying for the ice deliveries "as long as it is needed."
Much of the $130,000 was spent soon after Morstoel died to fly his
body from
Norway to a cryogenics facility in California, where it was
initially stored in liquid
nitrogen. The body remained there until January 1994, when Bauge
brought it to
Nederland.
Bauge, 44, stored the remains at his unfinished home in Nederland
along with the
body of Al Campbell, a Chicago man.
Soon after, exasperated town leaders tried to force Bauge to
remove the bodies,
but it was determined there was no health hazard and Bauge
prevailed.
But Campbell's friend got "cold feet" and decided to bring
Campbell's body back to
Chicago, Bauge said. "I think he was thawed out and buried
regularly," Bauge says.
Scientists have long been skeptical that Morstoel could be
revived. Morstoel's
body was left putrefying at room temperature for 72 hours after
his death because
Norway has a law against freezing newly dead bodies. That resulted
in the death
of cells. Also, the dry ice surrounding Morstoel's body is
primitive compared to the
techniques used by established cryogenics facilities.
Morstoel was set to be cremated after he died, but Bauge
intervened. Bauge said
he never asked his grandfather whether he wanted to be frozen.
"I never had a chance to ask him," Bauge said. "I didn't expect
him to die. It came
as a surprise."
Morstoel was 89 when he died in his sleep. He had been to Colorado
twice before
it became his final, or nearly final, resting place.
Every month, Shaffer packs in the new ice. He keeps a bottle of
Old Granddad on
a shelf in the Tuff Shed. Some months, he takes a swig in honor of
Morstoel.
The casket is wrapped in chains so "he can't get out," Shaffer
jokes.
Every month, Shaffer e-mails Bauge. He tells him the amount of ice
he packed on
and whether the shed needs any repairs.
And eight time zones away, Bauge vows to continue his
grandfather's
preservation.
"Lots of religious groups say, 'Come follow me and you'll have
eternal life,'" Bauge
says. "They end up as rotten corpses in the graveyard. They are
deceived."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:33 MDT