Bob Nelson

It was the 1960s, the decade of the first heart transplant and the first working laser.

New antibiotics gave the Surgeon General such a jolt of confidence, he announced to Congress that the time had come, and I quote, to close the book on infectious diseases.

It was against this backdrop of high-flying optimism that a Michigan college professor named Robert Ettinger wrote a book posing a simple question.

What if death itself was just another disease, generally fatal but not necessarily incurable?

His theory went like this.

If you could freeze somebody at the exact moment of clinical death, maybe, just maybe, in 50 years or 100 years or 1,000, the doctors of the future could bring him back to life.

This was cryonics, or cryonic suspension.

And groups of enthusiasts began to spring up here and there, which is how Bob Nelson got involved.

Bob had no medical or scientific training whatsoever, hadn't even finished high school.

He was a 30-year-old TV repairman with a wife and three kids.

But he was charming, the kind of charm where you like him because he lets you know in a hundred ways that he likes you.

After a few hours with him, he's hugging you goodbye.

And Bob sincerely believed that cryonics was going to save millions of lives, and that belief was infectious.

He did some press, local TV and radio.

Turned out he was a really good salesman.

The members of Bob's group weren't experts.

They were just fans of an idea.

As you'd expect, many were older people, some of them sick and thinking about their own deaths.

They set up a nonprofit, the Cryonic Society of California, and before long they drafted a lineup of scientific advisors.

At this point, nobody had actually been frozen yet, and the scientists set one condition for their participation.