CURR 238-240

FREEZING OF BODIES (CRYOBIOLOGY)

According to a newly developed scientific technique, cryobiology, it seems possible to freeze a human body and after considerable time, perhaps months or years, thaw out the body and revive the person. The question asked is: Is it permissible by Jewish law and Jewish legal tradition to take the body of a person dying of a disease at present incurable and freeze it for a long time, even years, and then to revive him when a cure for his sickness will have been discovered? The suggestion involves many difficulties in the law, as the questioner correctly points out, namely, has a person the right to consent to such a procedure with regard to himself? What is the status of his wife and children? Are they in mourning as if the person were dead? When shall he be revived? Who will decide, etc.? (From Rabbi Joshua D. Haberman, Trenton, New Jersey.)

I believe that we may assume that these wider questions involving cryobiology are for the present largely theoretical. Most of the questions raised involve freezing the body for years and then reviving it when some cure will have been found for the sick person’s disease. It is hard to believe that it would be possible to freeze a body for five or ten years and then revive it without the body having deteriorated at all. In other words, in the case of all strange remedies discussed in the law, the question is always asked how provable a remedy it is, and whether there are not dangers involved in it.

But the basic question here is another one entirely. The proposal is to freeze such bodies in cases only of people already dying or virtually dying of an incurable disease. So it amounts to the delaying of the death of a dying person. This is clearly prohibited by Jewish law. While one may not do anything at all to hasten the death of a dying person, one may also not do anything at all to prevent his dying. Such a person has the right to die. Please see Reform Responsa, pp. 119-122. Of all the material quoted there, I quote from page 120:

Roughly contemporary with this Spanish scholar is the famous German mystic-legal work “The Book of the Pious,” from which many customs and laws are often cited. In this book (p. 100, 315-18) it says: “If a man is sick and in pain and dying and asks another man to kill him mercifully, this request must not be fulfilled, nor may the man take his own life. Still, you may not put salt on his tongue to keep him alive longer.” Then it continues: “Ecclesiastes says, There is a time to live and a time to die.'” Why does the author need to add this obvious fact? The answer is that he has in mind the following situation: “If a man is dying, do not pray too hard that his soul return, that is, that he revive from the coma. He can at best live only a few days and in those days he will endure great suffering. So, ‘there is a time to die.'” (See also the long note, 4, in “Sefer Chasidim,” ed. Margolies, p. 34; also note to 723.)

In other words, the answer would be that if there were a trustworthy remedy already available for the disease but the remedy involved freezing, it would all be permitted. But if there is only speculation that some day a remedy might be discovered and on the basis of that speculation the process of dying is prevented, that is contrary to the spirit of Jewish law.