Cryonics contracts

The mistake almost everyone makes about cryonics is to treat it as an instruction in a will. It is not, and it cannot be, for a reason that has nothing to do with science: a will is not read until after the moment when anything could be done. Probate takes weeks. Cryopreservation is a procedure measured in hours.

So the industry built something else. A cryonics arrangement in the United States is a bundle of three documents, executed while the member is alive and healthy, and none of them is a testamentary instrument.

First, a membership and cryopreservation agreement with the organisation — a contract, signed by a competent adult, setting out what will be attempted, what is not promised, and what happens if the organisation cannot perform. Second, a funding instrument, in practice almost always a life insurance policy naming the organisation as beneficiary, or prepayment. Third, a long-term care fund — Alcor holds it in a Patient Care Trust — because the storage obligation runs indefinitely and cannot be paid for out of a one-time procedure fee.

For the story of what happens when a family disagrees after the fact, the archive has a separate entry: Ted Williams. This one is about the documents.

What the two American organisations actually charge

The two long-established US organisations publish their requirements, and the difference between them is instructive.

• Alcor Life Extension Foundation (Scottsdale, Arizona) sets minimum funding of $200,000 for whole-body cryopreservation — allocated as $60,000 to the procedure, $25,000 to its CMS fund, and $115,000 to the Patient Care Trust — and $80,000 for neurocryopreservation, allocated $30,000, $25,000, and $25,000 respectively. Membership dues are age-based, calculated for 2025 by multiplying the member's age by an annual multiplier of $15. Alcor states that minimum funding requirements may change on 90 days' written notice.
• The Cryonics Institute (Michigan) offers lifetime membership at a $1,250 one-time fee with a cryopreservation cost of $28,000, or annual membership at a $200 initiation fee plus $120 a year with a cryopreservation cost of $35,000. A non-member post-mortem arrangement is $1,250 plus $45,000.
• Neither price includes getting there. The Cryonics Institute notes separately that its prices exclude local funeral director and shipping costs, ranging from nothing in Michigan to around $3,000 on the US west coast and more overseas, and that standby assistance ranges from $500 to $100,000 depending on distance and options.
• Both are funded the same way. The Cryonics Institute states plainly that fees and additional costs “are usually paid by life insurance policies that make the Cryonics Institute the beneficiary.”

The allocation is the part worth noticing. More than half of Alcor's whole-body minimum goes not to the procedure but into a trust for indefinite storage. That is an honest structure for an obligation with no end date, and it is the same problem — how do you fund a promise that outlives everyone who made it — that perpetual charitable trusts and pet trusts run into. It is a trust law question wearing a laboratory coat.

Has anyone ever enforced one?

The reported litigation has not been about compelling a reluctant family to honour a signed agreement. It has been about permits and permission, which turns out to be where the friction actually is.

Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Inc. v. Mitchell, 7 Cal. App. 4th 1287, decided June 10, 1992, is the case to know. The California Department of Health Services had refused to issue death certificates and disposition permits for bodies passing to Alcor under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act. California's Health and Safety Code identified three permissible dispositions for permit purposes — interment in a cemetery, cremation, and burial at sea — and the department had recognised “scientific use” under the UAGA as a fourth. It then issued a handbook instructing local registrars that cryonic suspension does not constitute “scientific use” within the meaning of the Act. The Court of Appeal affirmed an injunction against the department and compelled it to issue the certificates.

That is the whole American legal foundation, and it is narrower than it sounds: a state agency was told it could not, by handbook, write cryonics out of a statute. It is not a holding that a cryonics contract is specifically enforceable.

Re JS (Disposal of Body) [2016] EWHC 2859 (Fam), decided 10 November 2016 by Mr Justice Peter Jackson, is the other landmark and comes from England. JS was a 14-year-old girl with a terminal illness who wished to be cryopreserved. Her parents were divorced; her mother supported her wish, and her father — who had not had face-to-face contact with her since 2008 — initially opposed it and later agreed subject to conditions. Because a child cannot make a will, and because the dispute was between the people who would otherwise decide, the court used a specific issue order under the Children Act to determine who could make arrangements for the disposal of her body. The court made the order in favour of the mother. JS died shortly afterwards.

Peter Jackson J was careful to say what the court was and was not deciding: not whether cryonics works, and not whether it should be permitted, but who decides. That framing is exactly right and is the one American probate courts would use as well.

Regulation, meanwhile, has arrived sideways rather than by statute. Michigan ultimately licensed and regulated the Cryonics Institute as a cemetery — a category that fits imperfectly, and which exists because there was no better one.

What a Florida resident would actually have to do

Florida has no cryonics statute. It has a disposition-of-remains hierarchy, a licensing chapter for everyone who handles a body, a permit requirement for moving one, and an anatomical gift act — and a Florida arrangement has to satisfy all four, in the right order, in the first day.

The single most important provision is §497.005, which defines the legally authorized person who may direct the disposition of remains. The decedent's own written directions rank first. That is the sentence a Florida cryonics member is relying on, and it is the reason the paperwork must be signed, findable, and unambiguous — not stored in a safe deposit box that opens after a court order.

Then the practical chain. Under §382.006, a burial-transit permit is issued by the department or the local registrar of the district where the death occurred, must generally be obtained before final disposition, and must accompany the body when it is transported to a point outside the state. It cannot issue until a complete and satisfactory death certificate is filed, with narrow hardship exceptions. Since neither American cryonics organisation is in Florida, every Florida case is an out-of-state transport case.

Layer on Chapter 406 where it applies: if the death falls within a category requiring the district medical examiner's involvement, the examiner's jurisdiction comes first and nothing moves until it is released. And Chapter 497 licenses funeral establishments, direct disposers, and removal services — so the person who takes custody in Florida is a licensee, whoever the member has contracted with elsewhere.