So, I thought I would bring up something that I had not thought about for probably a dozen years but the issue surfaced when I did a search to find out about the dispositions of Presidents and Vice-Presidents as a result of President George H.W. Bush’s death.

When I searched for different methods of dispositions there were the ones we all know about — earth burial, cremation, burial at sea, and even alkaline hydrolysis.  One that I had almost forgot about. . and was brought to my attention in the search was Cryogenics or a freezing of the body using liquid nitrogen.  What popped up with that was the controversy that the family of Hall of Fame baseball player Ted Williams endured when they reportedly chose cryogenics for their father.

Now, I’m a baseball fan and Ted Williams, known as the “Splendid Splinter” to many,  is arguably the greatest hitter to ever play the game of baseball.  He was the last Major League Baseball player to have a batting average percentage of over .400 for an entire season.  That means that he gets a base hit in 4 out of every 10 times at bat.  The MLB average is closer to, maybe, 2.5 hits out of every 10 at bats, and players have even won the “Batting Championship” for the year with an average of .301 (barely 3 hits out of 10 at bats) like Carl Yastrzemski did in 1968.

Williams feat, when he hit .406 in 1941, is so remarkable that nobody has come close to reaching .400 again over the course of the season in the last 77 years.

It was also rumored at the time of his death that the Williams family supposedly chose cryogenics so that at a time in the future they would be able to clone his athletic genes.

This article, however, is not about baseball, but about cryogenics and the idea that was what the family chose for Williams after his death in 2002.  From what I can gather from the following articles, it appears that Williams body is still on ice (liquid nitrogen) at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Here is the web-site for Alcor.

I’ve also found a couple of articles about the family’s decision that I have provided if you would like to know more about it.  This one is from ABC News and this one if from a 2003 article in Sports Illustrated.

According to the Alcor web-site the company was founded as a non-profit foundation in 1972 and performed its first cryopreservation of a human in 1976.  The web-site also mentions that they have 1,214 members, who are described as people who have fulfilled the legal and financial obligations of the procedure and as of September 30, 2018, they have 162 patients.