More than 50 years have passed, and everyone wants to know whether that man can be revived or not, and whether modern advanced human science can create miracles or not. Can humans possess the technology to revive a dead person? That is the question that many people want to have an answer to. And half a century ago, Dr. James Hiram Bedford also hoped so. With a strong desire to live, the man volunteered to freeze his body with a promise to be revived in 2017.
3 years have passed since that important milestone, everyone wants to know what happened to the man who was once considered the richest man in America…
James Hiram Bedford is a psychology professor at the University of California and a veteran of World War I. He lived a full life in the mid-20th century, married twice and set foot in many lands around the world. He hunted in Africa, went to the Amazon rainforest, and traveled throughout Greece, Türkiye, Spain, England, Scotland, Germany, and Switzerland. Bedford was also one of the first people to drive the Alcan Highway to northwest Canada and Alaska.
In 1967, James was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, the cancer had metastasized to his lungs and with the medical capabilities of that time, James had no choice but to accept the death sentence. Before that, James had read the idea in the book The Prospect of Immortality by Dr. Robert Ettinger – who is considered the father of body freezing experiments, founder of the Cryonics Institute – a unit specializing in providing body freezing services after death. Robert Nelson performed the first steps of cryonics on Professor James. He was injected with dimethyl sulfoxide after his death on the afternoon of January 12, 1967.
Previously, in April 1966, a woman was also frozen in Arizona, but only lasted a few months. There is speculation that because she was embalmed too late, her cells had partially decomposed and if she had been “resurrected”, her brain would have been severely damaged.
The story of James’s body freezing process was revealed in the Daily Telegraph (UK) in January 2017.