Reddit plea leads to funding for cryonic preservation of deceased neuroscience student

Kim Suozzi, a terminally-ill neuroscience student with brain cancer, died at the age of 23 on January 17th. Her one wish before she died was to have her body cryonically preserved, but she lacked the many thousands of dollars required to finance such a service. In an effort to raise the funds, Suozzi turned to Reddit in August of last year, imploring readers of the site to donate to her cause. That post led to a fund being set up by a group called Society for Venturism, a not-for-profit volunteer group that has raised funds for other cryopreservations in the past. That fund, in addition to the money raised directly from Reddit, was enough to pay for Suozzi's cryonic preservation with a firm called Alcor last week.

As pointed out by io9, cryonic preservations can cost anywhere from $28,000 to $200,000, depending on the options chosen. They are only performed on patients that are declared clinically dead, and are usually funded by secondary life insurance plans taken out by the patient before they have died.

"Our hope is that technology will continue to progress to the point that Kim may have a real chance of living again in the future," said Suozzi's boyfriend in a statement provided to Alcor. "Unfortunately, the development of the requisite technologies could be decades or centuries away. Since Kim is no longer with us to explore and innovate in the field of neuroscience, she is counting on all of us to push for the innovations she had hoped to see in her lifetime."

Now that she has been cryonically preserved, Suozzi joins the list of notables such as Ted Williams who have had their bodies preserved in the name of science.