Cultured magazine called a Swiss facility storing bodies in the hope of future revival “a kind of transhumanist cemetery”; Tomorrow Bio CEO Emil Kendziorra replied that clients choose cryopreservation as a treatment and that burial would be their worst outcome

Cultured magazine called a Swiss facility storing bodies in the hope of future revival “a kind of transhumanist cemetery”; Tomorrow Bio CEO Emil Kendziorra replied that clients choose cryopreservation as a treatment and that burial would be their worst outcome

On October 30, the art and design magazine published an essay by Andrew Pasquier about wealthy people investing in life extension instead of headstones. At the storage facility in Rafz, he saw “a tragedy of the cultural imagination.” Kendziorra challenged the author in conversation and returned to the dispute on X on November 1.

Pasquier opens in Rafz, where a facility beneath a building near the railway stores cryopreserved bodies at extremely low temperatures in the hope that future medicine will revive them. The European Biostasis Foundation operates the facility, and its affiliated company Tomorrow Bio sells the service. “Burial” in Rafz, Pasquier writes, is “scientifically advanced but aesthetically banal: steel tanks, tubes, sensors, and a generally dreary laboratory atmosphere.”

Pasquier compares the facility with Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Tourists go there for a history lesson, he observes, while traces of enduring affection remain among the graves, including lipstick on the plexiglass surrounding Wilde’s tomb. The cemetery “accepts biological death and resists social death”: its carved stones are “a collective gift to the art of remembering.” A nitrogen tank, he adds, cannot be visited. He links cryopreservation to individualism: death and its monuments are increasingly shaped by the dying person’s choices rather than shared rituals.

Kendziorra, a physician, disputed the description of what happens in Rafz as burial:

“Cryopreservation is the furthest thing from burial. In fact, burial would be the worst thing that could happen to my clients.”

People choose cryopreservation as a treatment, he said: it is “more a considered scientific choice than an emotional one tied to aesthetics.” Alongside the tanks, the foundation’s building contains a laboratory, a medical unit, and an ambulance garage, according to the description on its website.

On November 1, Kendziorra wrote on X that the essay’s author apparently preferred the “aesthetics” of a cemetery, but “fortunately, everyone can make that choice for themselves.” Commenter T. Theodorus Ibrahim called for a firmer challenge to the equation of cryopreservation with burial and explained in a subsequent reply:

“…because the patient is not dead (which, of course, is true). Once we concede that point or let it go unchallenged, the argument is lost, because we are then in the realm of the ‘religious, aesthetic, and other’ question of ‘what to do with dead bodies.’”

Beauty, ritual, and remembrance are the criteria Pasquier uses to assess the facility. There are grounds for calling it burial: those preserved there, he writes, have been officially declared dead, while the American organization Alcor, which cools people “immediately after legal death,” invites funeral homes to present its service as a “third way” alongside burial and cremation and promises them a fee for each client. Philosopher and cryonics advocate Max More defines death as the irreversible loss of the information that constitutes a person’s identity: as long as that information remains intact, the patient is not dead.

The image of a grave has also appeared among cryonics advocates. In 2010, a LessWrong forum participant using the name Roko proposed a “cryogenic grave”, a liquid nitrogen tank operating without human intervention, in case Alcor or the Cryonics Institute went bankrupt within the next hundred years. He argued that the taboo against disturbing the dead would make a grave in an uninhabited location far less vulnerable. Pasquier sees the tank’s inaccessibility as a flaw; Roko sees it as protection.