Death in the deep freeze.

This programme looks at cryonics - a process in which individuals are suspended in liquid nitrogen after their death in the hopes that at some point in the future they will be brought back to life. Tanya Jones works for Alcor in Arizona, one of the two cryonics institutions currently available. She talks about the process and the ethical and emotional aspects of cryonic preservation. Central to the programme are the Riskins, Michael and Anita, both of whom have signed up with Alcor. This decision has become particularly poignant for them as Anita has become terminally ill with multiple cancerous tumours around her body. She records a video diary of her last weeks and we see footage of her dead body undergoing the cryonic process. We also hear from Gregory Fahy who is working at Cambridge University at the cutting edge of cryobiology who has successfully freezed a rabbits kidney and then re-implanted it. Arthur W. Rowe, a professor of Forensic Medicine is extremely sceptical about cryonics both in terms of its ethical and actual possibilities. While Ralph Merkle, a leading scientist in nanomedicine, describes how the reanimation of cryonically suspended bodies might be made successful with the improvement in the future of molecular machines.