 Raymond Martinot and his wife were the toast of the world cryonics movement. For years they were France's best preserved corpses, lying in a freezer in a chateau in the Loire valley, in the hope that modern science could one day bring them back to life. But the French couple's journey into the future ended prematurely when, 22 years after his mother's body was put into cold storage, their son discovered the freezer unit had broken down and they had started to thaw.
| "Ewwwww .. what's that smell? Egad, it's Mum!" |
Yesterday Rémy Martinot said he had no choice but to cremate his parents' bodies after the technical fault had seen their temperatures rise above the constant level required of -65C. "I realised in February that after a technical incident their temperature had risen to -20C probably for several days. The alert system [on the freezer] had not worked and I decided at that point that it was not reasonable to continue," he told Agence France Presse.
| Freezers fail. Compressors have a definite life. To get to -65C you need at least two and maybe three. One goes out, stuff gets warm. |
"I don't feel any more bereaved today than I did when my parents died, I had already done my grieving. But I feel bitter that I could not respect my father's last wishes. Maybe the future would have shown that my father was right and that he was a pioneer."
Raymond Martinot, a doctor who once taught medicine in Paris, spent decades preparing for his demise in the belief that if he was frozen and preserved scientists would be able to bring him back to life by 2050. In the 1970s he bought a chateau near Samur in the Loire valley and began preparing a freezer unit for himself. But his wife, Monique Leroy, died first, of ovarian cancer, in 1984, and was the first to enter the intricate stainless steel freezer unit in the chateau's vaulted cellars.
In 2002 Dr Martinot died of a stroke, aged 84, and his son followed his orders to inject him with the same anti-coagulants and store him alongside.
| Next to his wife goes Pop .. sicle. |
David Pegg, who runs the medical cryobiology unit at the University of York, said a temperature rise to -20C would have been "disastrous" for the Martinots' corpses. "I would say even -65C was far too high," he added.
| Remember folks, liquid nitrogen, when it absolutely, positively has to stay doorknocker dead frozen. |
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