The father of a London teenager who won a legal battle to be frozen after she died from cancer has slammed companies offering the technique for “selling false hope”.
The 14-year-old terminally-ill girl’s remains were cryogenically frozen in the hope she could be revived in the future.
Her wishes, which were supported by her mother, had sparked a legal dispute with her father who went to court to try and stop her plan. She won a landmark High Court case shortly before she died on October 17.
But her grieving dad – who claimed he had not seen his daughter for nine years before her death - has now publicly hit out at firms which practise the cryogenically frozen technique.
In an interview with the Mail on Sunday he heavily criticised the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, where the girl is being stored.
He said: “I believe they are selling false hope to those who are frightened of dying - taking advantage of vulnerable people.
"When I asked if there was even a one in a million chance of my daughter being brought back to life, they could not say there was.
"I think it would be doubly impossible to both bring her back from the dead and cure her cancer, and companies should not hold out some false hope."
The cryonics technique sees scientists preserve the person’s body at a very low temperature by replacing all their blood with a special solution before placing the body into a container of liquid nitrogen at -196C.
Clive Coen, a neuroscience professor at King's College London, said cryogenics companies should not be allowed to advertise because there is no evidence the technique works in humans.
He told the Guardian: "There is no evidence outside amphibia and tissue slices that any of this works. We're not at a point where regulation is appropriate. The whole body is just ridiculous and the whole brain is only slightly less ridiculous."
The judge's ruling was made in October but could not be revealed until after her death. The girl could not be named for legal reasons.
