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TOM ZUCCOA cryonics facility planned for Boca Raton will put your body in a deep freeze for $120,000. But there's no guarantee you'll ever wake up.
The city already had a reputation as the tabloid capital of America and ground zero for the anthrax attacks. Then a London newspaper did a study and found it is also home to 40 of the world's 200 most prolific spam operations.
And that name.
Boca Raton.
Mouth of the Mice.
Just when the tabloid/anthrax/spam heat was beginning to die, along comes Suspended Animation Inc. The company asked the city of Boca Raton last week for permission to open Florida's first cryonics facility.
The ultimate stopover to the great beyond, cryonics is the process by which a person's body is frozen after death and stored, in the hope technology will exist to revive the body and restore life at some later date.
Some people believe it will work; most scientists, physicians and a large segment of the general public, to put it kindly, have yet to be convinced.
To date, about 1,000 people have signed up to be "cryosuspended" in the name of science, and about 100 bodies already are on ice.
The news about the Boca Raton facility came, of course, as Sports Illustrated reported that baseball legend Ted Williams had been decapitated by surgeons at the Arizona cryonics company where his body is suspended in liquid nitrogen and that several samples of his DNA are missing.
"Perfect timing," said Boca Raton Mayor Steven L. Abrams.
Suspended Animation would be the nation's fourth cryonics facility. According to paperwork filed at Boca Raton's planning and zoning office, about 90 percent of the company's business will be research. But it will be staffed by medical professionals able to deep freeze anyone who pays the $120,000 fee.
The permits are expected to be granted.
"They'll be located on an industrial site and have a lot of liquid nitrogen around; I don't have much of a problem with that," said Boca Raton City Council member Dave Freudenberg, who has a degree in chemistry from Xavier University.
Whether it will work is another matter.
"You have to understand molecular chemistry," Freudenberg said. "You're dealing with an organism that has so much water, and water has a habit of expanding when it's frozen.
"Ever seen what happens to a bottle of milk that's frozen? No wonder Mr. Williams' head had cracks in it.
"But," he added wearily, "we have a lot of people who do crackpot things in Boca."
David Shumaker, the president of Suspended Animation, is one of those 1,000 people headed for the big chill.
"Our primary function is research," he said in a telephone interview from his office, which is just a few blocks from the building where anthrax was first discovered. "What we do is not about bringing people back from the dead. It's about buying time."
The key, Shumaker said, is a process called vitrification, which allows cells to be frozen without being destroyed by crystallization.
"It leaves the tissue perfectly alive when its thawed out," Shumaker said. "You may have short-term memory loss, but there's no reason to believe memory isn't still there."
Shumaker is a physicist who has been interested in freezing things since he was 16 and saw a science experiment where a live gold fish was dropped into a vat of liquid nitrogen, frozen solid and then placed in a bowl of water. The fish thawed and moved. Then it didn't move anymore.
"Once I saw that," he said, "I was hooked."
Shumaker said he chose Boca Raton because the city will allow his research while other communities had balked.
Bodies would be recovered immediately after death, frozen in Boca Raton and shipped for storage in either the Cryonics Institute outside Detroit or alongside Teddy Ballgame at the Alcor Life Extension in Scottsdale, Ariz., he said.
"We are very similar to organ harvesting," Shumaker said. "It's a mechanism of getting the use of future medicine. It does not ensure immortality.
"There is a logic to it."
There are those who would question that logic.
"It's free enterprise, not science," said Ken Goodman, director of the University of Miami's Bioethics Program. "There's a lot we don't know, but I doubt the technology 100-million years from now will be able to reanimate the dead cells in a human brain so that memory will still be there. When you die, the biochemical damage to cells is irreparable.
"Western history is full of stories about time travel and immortality. But for $120,000, you might as well buy a ticket to Hogwarts."
There is, Goodman said, a bright side. "If you lived in California, you could wake up 1,000 years from now and run for governor."
Abrams, the city's mayor, said he won't oppose the facility and hasn't gotten any calls from residents who are against it. As for the city's reputation, "Ultimately, Boca will be known for its quality of life, its beaches and its shopping," he said.
If he had an extra $120,000, would he be cryosuspended?
"It would depend on whether our local term limits would apply," he answered. "If I can't come back and be mayor again, no.
"But maybe we can freeze the spammers."