Dying Teen Wins Right to Have Body Frozen

'I don't want to be buried underground,' she told judge before death
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 18, 2016 4:19 AM CST
Dying Teen Wins Right to Have Body Frozen
A US company promised to preserve the girl "in perpetuity" for $45,000.   (Getty Images/Isaac74)

"I'm only 14 years old and I don't want to die, but I know I am going to," a girl dying of cancer wrote to a judge in Britain, asking to be allowed to have her body cryogenically frozen in the hope of being "cured and woken up—even in hundreds of years' time." The case was in court because her wish had been supported by her mother but not by her estranged father, who hadn't seen her since 2008, the Guardian reports. "I don't want to be buried underground," she wrote. "I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish."

The judge, Justice Peter Jackson, ruled in the girl's favor, and she died peacefully last month, the BBC reports. She was too sick to attend court, but Jackson visited her in the hospital, where he said he was "moved by the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament." The judge, who ruled that the case should be kept out of the news while the girl was alive, described it as "an example of the new questions that science poses to the law," and the first of its kind dealt with by a British court. The girl, who had started researching cryonics in the months before her death, was preserved after death and her body is now in the US, with a firm that promised to freeze her indefinitely for around $45,000. (This young neuroscientist had her brain cryogenically frozen.)

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