A US man is suing a cryonics organisation and demanding the return of his father's frozen head.
Kurt Pilgeram has accused the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of the largest cryonics organisations in the world, of removing his father Laurence’s head, wrongly cremating his body, then sending the ashes to the family, while also claiming that the company is now refusing to return the head for a respectable cremation.
“They chopped his head off, burned his body, put it in a box and sent it to my house,” he said to AZCentral.
“Mutilation is basically what they did.”
Mr Pilgeram is pursing a $1 million (£788,000) reimbursement after receiving his scientist father’s remains from the facility.
The case began following Pilgeram’s sudden death at the age of 90 in 2015, collapsing on the sidewalk outside his home in California from a heart attack. The researcher had been an advocate of cryonics and even spoke on the subject in an academic setting.
Cryonics companies provide this particular service to a few immortality-seeking customers, but no one knows for certain if it is possible to bring frozen bodies back from the dead.
His brother Jim claimed that “He believed in cryonics, but he didn’t believe in mutilation. He made it awful plain to them people that he did not want to be just a head.”
"The twist in this case is that Laurence Pilgeram was one of the early scientists making his career out of the science of cryonics,” said James Arrowood, a lawyer for Alcor, speaking to The Telegraph.
"The notion that he was unaware of the possibility of having just his head preserved is just completely false."
"I think a lot of people don't know that there's actually a logical basis for just saving the head. In this particular case, Laurence Pilgeram was absolutely aware of that."
"People in cryonics look at the brain as the centre of what's being preserved. If your body is diseased or very old, many in cryonics feel that it's just more efficient to save just the brain."
He also argued that it was possible for the family to reach Alcor on the weekend immediately after Pilgeram’s death. The company are adamant that it was unable to preserve the whole body as it was not informed within the necessary timeframe.
Court filings have directed the blame towards Pilgeram “or others besides Alcor" for causing the alleged damages, including a failure to use reasonable diligence on Pilgeram's part.
Pilgeram argues that Alcor promised to preserve a full body and they "arbitrarily, fraudulently, and in bad faith" decapitated his father's and cremated the rest rather than deliver the remains to the family whole.
According to the lawsuit, "inconclusive" tests may reveal that what was delivered to the family was not entirely his father's remains.
Elder abuse, infliction of emotional distress, breach of contract, unfair business practices, and intentional misrepresentation on the part of Alcor are among the particular allegations made by Pilgeram toward the company.
Arrowood explained that the science for preserving a head is the same as for a full body preservation. Alcor charges $200,000 to freeze an entire body, but just freezing your head costs significantly less: $80,000.
Since its founding in 1972, Alcor has become home to 170 frozen human corpses and 33 pets.
While cryonics companies are a point of media interest, very few people have actually opted for the procedure. Dr Pilgeram was only the 135th in the world to be cryogenically frozen.
Dr Pilgeram’s head remains preserved in liquid nitrogen at Alcor.
