Dead means dead: get used to it

Last week it was revealed a dying 14 year old girl was granted her dying wish to be cryogenically preserved until such time as 1. A cure could be found for her fatal brain tumour and 2. A way could be found to bring the dead back to life. Good luck with that girlie. And good luck to the thousands of others, mainly Americans, who have gone down the same road.
The technology for this technique is pretty simple. After death the body is essentially freeze-dried, reducing its bulk by 90%, as 90% of us is water. The remainder is then kept as -196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Then we wait.

Of course this isn't cheap, in a variety of ways. It cost the girl's parents a one-off fee of $37,000. But then, the costs of keeping something in a very deep freeze should be accounted for. It's an energy-expensive process to do this, especially as they will have to keep doing it for hundreds, thousands of years, or even, if my suspicions are correct, forever.

At the moment we can freeze cells, embryos, say, or sperm. But that's it. It would be tremendously valuable if we could freeze whole organs, like kidneys or hearts, but we can't. In fact we are a long way off achieving it. As for whole human bodies (or heads: I understand some people in the US are freezing only their heads, waiting for a time when they can be a) be re-vivified and b) be attached to some sort of android body), that lies a long way into the future.

Next, bring the dead back to life. Tricky. Impossible at present, ands to be honest, I believe it always will be. A proponent of the freezing industry recently said that we are constantly re-defining what death actually means. CPR, defibrillation and so on has changed the game for everyone, and that's a recent invention. People who have died of hypothermia can be brought back as long as an hour after their heart has stopped. True. But all that means is that they didn't actually die. Death has a very clear definition attached to it, and once a line is crossed, the human body can't go back. And I think we'd all be a lot better off getting our heads round that and concentrating on the important bits, i.e. Living, instead of hoping against hope we can find some sort of escape clause. Dead means dead, folks, and there's no way round it. No matter how rich we are.