The Business of Cryonics: Between Science, Hope and Speculation

Cryonics… This word immediately evokes science fiction universes, from Hibernatus to Futurama . But behind the fantasy of immortality, a veritable industry has developed, driven by the idea that it would be possible to "pause" death.

Today, around 600 people around the world are buried in large vats of liquid nitrogen, kept at –196°C. The idea: to consider death not as a definitive event, but as a process that could be interrupted... while waiting for science to find a way to repair or cure what is currently incurable.

In the United States, pioneering companies like Alcor and Cryonics Institute dominate the market. In Europe, Germany's Tomorrow Bio recently opened the continent's first cryogenics plant. The entry fee? Around €200,000.

Concretely, the protocol is chilling:

• on the day of death, a specialized ambulance arrives,
• the body is immediately plunged into ice,
• infusions of chemicals (cryopreservatives) are injected,
• then the deceased is placed in a tank of liquid nitrogen, at very low temperature.

And then... we wait. The idea is that, in some undetermined future, medicine will be able to "repair" the damage done to the body, cure the disease that caused death, and, why not, revive the individual.

Scientifically, there are immense doubts. Extreme cold severely damages cells, cryoprotectants are toxic, and there is no evidence that "reanimation" will ever be possible. For most researchers, cryonics remains, above all, a technological utopia.

In France, the practice is simply prohibited. The law recognizes only two methods of burial: burial and cremation. Several legal cases have made headlines, such as that of Dr. Martinot, who froze his wife's body in the 1980s and wanted the same for himself. In 2006, the Council of State ruled: post-mortem freezing is not a legal method of burial.

The business doesn't stop at humans. An American startup, Cryopets, now offers to cryogenize... pets. Cats, dogs, hamsters: all can be immersed in liquid nitrogen to "wait" for their owners in a hypothetical future.

The price varies depending on the size: around $10,000 for a cat and $40,000 for a Labrador. The company has even attracted prestigious Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel, famous for his obsession with longevity.

For its founder, a former believer turned atheist, cryonics is a way to replace the religious promise of eternity with a scientific one. Death, he argues, would be nothing more than "a technical problem to be solved."