If you work with high-net-worth individuals, chances are you have worked with a member of Alcor, a foundation dedicated to bringing new life to the dead has claimed.

That was the word from Alcor Life Extension Foundation co-chief executive officer James Arrowood, speaking at the recent Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners Bermuda International Conference.

The Arizona-based foundation, which freezes people at the point of death, with the hope of bringing them back to life when medical science has advanced enough to save them, has 1,500 members worldwide, most of them well known and wealthy.

When you ask Mr Arrowood who Alcor’s members are, he says coyly: “I will neither confirm nor deny”.

Celebrities such as Larry King, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have publicly revealed they want to be cryonically preserved at death.

“In the last six months to a year, I have been in the homes of probably six to ten multibillionaires, or they have been in my rooms,” Mr Arrowood said.

Alcor charges membership fees and a one-time charge of $200,000 for whole-body preservation or $80,000 for head-only preservation.

A lawyer by trade, Mr Arrowood started working with Alcor in 2015 as general counsel and became co-chief executive in 2022.

In terms of head-only preservation, he told The Royal Gazette, assuming your brain has not been damaged, you could survive having it transplanted on to someone else’s shoulders.

The problem sits in fusing one person’s brainstem to some else’s spinal cord.

“You would be a quadriplegic,” Mr Arrowood explained.

He says his researchers are close to bridging the spinal cord gap, perhaps with stem cells.

Alcor, founded in 1972, has done about 222 human preservations. It has also done a number of pets.

Mr Arrowood calls successful future defrosting and reanimation an “aspirational goal”. So far, it has never been done.

During his talk at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, he complained that the media always want to “fixate” on the life preservation part of the foundation.

Alcor’s own website opens with: “Cryonics is one of the world’s most ambitious scientific experiments — a bold attempt to preserve human life once current medicine has reached its limits. By preserving the physical structures that store our memories, personality and identity, cryonics aims to safeguard each patient until future medical progress overcomes today’s limitations.”

Alcor’s more immediate and perhaps more attainable goal is to improve the science of organ transplant.

Researchers work with pig kidneys, freezing and then unfreezing them in an effort to discover how to extend the life of donated organs before transplant.

At the moment, a donated kidney lasts only 24 to 36 hours outside the body before it must be transplanted, with its viability decreasing with every minute that passes.

Mr Arrowood said the equivalent of a jet full of people die daily waiting for a transplant.

“It is a mass casualty event that is preventable,” he said. “My job is to solve that.”

Cryopreservation works by cooling the body to very low temperatures to stop decay and preserve cells and tissues. Before cooling, Alcor uses special protective solutions to prevent ice crystals from forming.

Ice crystals are highly destructive and act like a knife to the body’s cells.

Alcor does the cryopreservation when the client is declared legally dead.

Mr Arrowood attends every cryonic preservation, which happens in regular hospitals all over the world.

“We start quickly, placing the body in an ice water bath to cool it down,” he said. “We do what looks like cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but it is not CPR. We are keeping the circulatory system open so that the heart is pumping and oxygenating the brain.”

Not everyone in the hospitals they go to are welcoming.

“It is about 50-50,” he said. “You never know what you are going to get. There are hospitals that are rural and you think they would not be so welcoming. They are fine with it. There are other places in the big city that will try to impede you. The problem is you have hours to do this.”