London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time, history time.
Today’s London story begins high in the Himalayas.
There are about 200 bodies on Mount Everest.
And there are more than 250 people in a remarkably similar state in a low building in the Arizona desert, 250 people whose custodians are doing deliberately, and rather better, what Everest does naturally.
They – those folks in Arizona – have some 600 fellow travellers around the world.
The difference?
Nobody expects the people on Everest ever to wake up.
The people in Arizona, and their fellow travellers elsewhere, are there because somebody believes they might.
Welcome to the strange world of cryonics.
And welcome to one of the strangest London stories I know.
Because this story doesn’t really begin on Mount Everest.
And it doesn’t really begin in Arizona.
It begins in London.
In Albemarle Street.
A perfectly ordinary turning off Piccadilly.
A street that always gives me a little shiver whenever I pass it.
Because at Number 21 stands one of the most remarkable scientific buildings in the world.
The Royal Institution.
Think of the people who worked there.
Humphry Davy.
Michael Faraday.
James Dewar.
One London building.
One London street.
Three scientific giants, each handing the baton to the next.
Davy dazzled London with chemistry.
Faraday transformed our understanding of electricity.
Dewar transformed our mastery of extreme cold.
Faraday spent decades in that building. He lived there as Superintendent of the Royal Institution. He performed experiment after experiment there. Thousands flocked to hear him lecture there. The modern electrical age owes more to Michael Faraday than to almost anyone else.
Then came James Dewar.
He inherited not just a laboratory but a tradition.
He lived in rooms at the Royal Institution.
He worked there.
And in 1923 he died there.
It’s a remarkable thought.
One London building.
One London street.
Two of the greatest experimental scientists who ever lived.
One exploring electricity.
The other exploring cold.
Neither of them had the faintest idea that, more than a century later, their work would converge in one of the strangest enterprises the human imagination has ever conceived.
In 1892 James Dewar invented something that almost everybody listening to this has used.
Not under its original name, perhaps.
But you’ve almost certainly held one in your hand.
The Thermos flask.
Except James Dewar didn’t call it a Thermos.
He invented what became known as the Dewar flask.
A double-walled vessel with a vacuum between the walls.
The vacuum is the secret.
Heat struggles to cross it.
Hot things stay hot.
Cold things stay cold.
Dewar devised it because he was trying to work with liquefied gases.
Hydrogen.
Oxygen.
Substances so cold they seemed almost impossible to tame.
He wasn’t trying to preserve human beings.
He wasn’t trying to cheat death.
He simply wanted a better laboratory vessel.
He never patented it.
Others saw its commercial possibilities.
The Thermos flask was born.
Another lovely word.
Thermos comes from the Greek word for hot.
Cryo comes from the Greek word for icy cold.
Cryogenics is the science of extremely low temperatures.
Cryonics is something altogether stranger.
Cryogenics is science.
Cryonics is science wandering into philosophy.
Or perhaps science fiction.
Depending on your point of view.
Cryonics is the preservation of people who have been declared legally dead. Preserving them at temperatures of about minus 196 degrees Celsius.
They’re well and truly chilling – chilling in the hope that future science will one day be able to repair whatever killed them, repair the damage caused by preservation itself and restore them to life.
Nobody has ever been revived.
Not one.
The whole enterprise is a wager on tomorrow.
And the people in those vessels are not called bodies.
They’re called patients.
Patients.
What a remarkable word.
Because if ever patients needed to be patient, these patients do.
Imagine making that decision.
You know you’re dying.
You know today’s medicine cannot save you.
But you decide that tomorrow’s medicine might.
Not tomorrow morning.
Not next year.
Perhaps two hundred years from now.
Perhaps five hundred.
Perhaps a million years.
You are making the biggest wager imaginable.
You are betting on the future.
Now here’s the thing.
Most people imagine those enormous stainless-steel vessels are gigantic electrically powered freezers.
They’re not.
The lights are electric.
The computers are electric.
The alarms are electric.
The monitoring systems are electric.
Faraday would recognise all of that.
But the patients themselves are kept cold by liquid nitrogen inside enormous vacuum-insulated vessels.
In other words, giant descendants of James Dewar’s invention.
A nineteenth-century laboratory flask is still quietly doing its work more than a century later.
History loves surprises like that.
An invention escapes its inventor.
A laboratory curiosity becomes the flask in your picnic basket.
And that same idea eventually becomes one of the technological foundations of cryonics.
Which brings us back to Everest.
The mountain preserves its dead by accident.
Arizona preserves its patients by design.
Everest says the journey is over.
Cryonics says the journey has merely been interrupted.
Maybe it’s fantasy.
Maybe it’s magnificent optimism.
Maybe it’s magnificent folly.
Nobody knows.
But I do know this.
The next time I turn off Piccadilly into Albemarle Street I won’t just see another London street sign.
I’ll think of Michael Faraday.
I’ll think of James Dewar.
I’ll think of one remarkable London building where generation after generation of scientists kept voyaging into the unknown.
I’ll think of one London street where electricity and extreme cold unexpectedly shook hands.
I’ll think of about 200 bodies on Mount Everest.
I’ll think of more than 250 people in that low building in the Arizona desert.
I’ll think of their 600 or so fellow travellers around the world.
And I’ll remember Wordsworth’s unforgettable description of Isaac Newton.
‘Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.’
Because surely cryonics is one of the strangest seas of thought humanity has ever ventured upon.
And, improbably, wonderfully, unexpectedly, one of the routes into that strange sea begins here.
In London.
In Albemarle Street.
The next time you pass that little turning off Piccadilly, glance at the street sign.
Think of Faraday.
Think of Dewar.
Think of Mount Everest.
Think of Arizona.
And remember that one of the strangest ideas humanity has ever had owes something to a man who spent his life in that building, trying to understand cold.
That’s London.
Layer upon layer.
One ordinary street.
One extraordinary story.
Albemarle Street. It always gives me a little frisson. A little shiver.
I think of those patients. Patiently waiting.
They say patience is a virtue. In cryonics, it’s practically a treatment plan.
And that’s your London fix for this warm day in August.
You want another one you’ll have to be patient. Wait until tomorrow.
See you then.
Maybe just add this little wisp of an afterthought – a stroll through London with a London Walks guide… makes for a jaw-dropping journey. They turn a clutch of ordinary streets into a patchwork of astonishments.