UNFULFILLED DESIRE

UNFULFILLED DESIRE Life Eternal T HE British national daily newspaper The Guardian published a news report that was later republished in The Times of India on 19 Nov, 2016, under the title Dying girl gets wish to have her body frozen. LONDON: The teenager's instructions were explicit: she didn't want to be buried, but to be frozen—with the hope that she could continue her life in the future when cancer was curable. "I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up," the 14-year-old wrote to a British judge before her recent death. She said "being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up—even in hundreds of years' time.” Her plaintive words convinced high court judge Peter Jackson to grant her final wishes in what he called the first case of its kind in England, and possibly the world. The judge said the girl had chosen the most basic preservation option at a cost of about £37,000 ($46,000) after extensive research. Cryonics is the practice or technique of deepfreezing the bodies of those who have died of an incurable disease, in the hope of a future cure. The girl's parents disagreed about the procedure, with the mother favouring it and the father initially saying no, though he softened his stance as his daughter's death neared. The girl, who, along with her parents, can't be named for legal reasons, asked the court to designate that only her mother could dispose of her remains so that she could be cryogenically preserved, an unproven technique that some people believe may allow frozen bodies to be brought back to life in the future. The concept is regarded with scepticism by many in the medical community because it has not yet been proven to be effective. Barry Fuller, a specialist in low-temperature medicine at University College London, said the technology of preserving cells at ultra-low temperatures is promising but cannot yet be applied to large structures The desire for eternal life is innate in every human being consciously or unconsciously. But it is also a fact that no one has been able to realize this desire. Everyone is destined to die.