What are the essentials for eternal life? Judging by the items removed from Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Riverside, California, a word processor, floppy disks and 0.45-calibre carbine are high on the list: the foundation is a cryogenics laboratory, and currently has in inventory six human heads and a body, but the coroner’s office is demanding an investigation of the lab because it is not convinced that one Dora Kent, 83, whose head was surgically removed, was dead when she was decapitated; the lab, insists she died of natural causes, but has refused to turn over the head, saying an autopsy would so harm the skull and brain that she could never be returned to life – cryonics adherents believe that bodies frozen now may be thawed and revived when science has advanced sufficiently, and often they freeze only heads in the belief that science will discover a way to clone new bodies; now a judge has ruled that the head of Dora Kent need not be thawed but can rest in nitrogen.
