Bob Nelson

That nobody try.

Not yet.

They wanted to take things slow, conduct research, publish papers.

And that was fine with Bob.

Until he got a call from the son of a psychology professor who was dying of cancer.

A man who couldn't wait for the research to pan out.

His name was James Bedford.

Dr. Bedford wanted to be frozen, and he wondered if the Cryonics Society could help him.

So Bob says he got on the phone with the godfather of the movement.

So Bob assembled a team of doctors to carry out the freezing.

Though when Dr. Bedford died on January 12, 1967, they were all caught off guard.

Dr. Bedford's nurse had to run up and down the block collecting ice from the home freezers of neighbors.

Cryonics was still just a theory, and the proceedings had the slightly manic quality of a local theater production forced to open a couple of weeks early.

A half a year later, when a member of their own group turned up at the morgue wearing a medical bracelet saying she was supposed to be frozen, Bob wasn't much better prepared.

Her name was Marie Sweet.

And among the things she left when she died, there was a photograph someone had taken of her 27 years earlier, along with a handwritten message.

It said, This is as I wish to be restored.

Bob called a couple student embalmers with access to equipment at the mortuary college, and they performed the freezing the only place they could, in the Cryonic Society office, on two desks, pushed together and covered with a sheet.

One challenge with cryonics is that the freezing process itself can do a lot of damage to the body.

Living cells are full of water, and when water freezes, it expands, like a house in winter where the pipes burst.