(April 17, 2024) Saul Kent, who died in May of 2023 at the age of 84, was probably the second most important person in Cryonics, the belief that freezing the body or head after death gives the hope of being resurrected by some more advanced future society. Kent devoted his last twenty-five years trying to find some scientific evidence that cryonics could possibly work. A year before his death, Saul Kent confessed to a longtime cryonics protege: “I no longer think it’s going to work.”
It’s like Saint Paul confessing on his deathbed that he no longer believe in Jesus’ resurrection. And since Jesus did not rise from the grave, neither would there be any resurrection for St. Paul or any other Christian.
In an eulogy of Saul Kent on Biostasis.com, a cryonics site, Charles Platt, a lieutenant of Saul Kent at Alcor, one of the two U.S. cryonics freezers, wrote: “When I asked if he (Saul Kent) still hoped to be cryopreserved, he shrugged. “I no longer think it’s going to work…but I’m going to do it anyway.”
Trying to Make Cryonics Work
Saul Kent was a true believer. But unlike most of the few cryonics true believers on this planet, Kent was also a man of action. He tried his best to give some scientific credibility to his belief. Having gotten rich in the lucrative niche in the vitamins and supplements business called “mega-dosing,” Kent had the financial means to do so.
In his last decades, Saul Kent doggedly funded and managed research to try to show that Cryonics has some scientific plausibility of success.
Losing His Faith
So for Saul Kent to admit at the end of his life that Cryonics is not going to work is absolutely devastating for Cryonics. If anyone should know that Cryonics doesn’t work, it’s Saul Kent. No one had tried harder to make it work. And Kent had the money to set up his own research venture, with its own laboratory and credible scientists to make it happen. But it did not.
Whatever one may think of Saul Kent, at the end, he was not delusional. Facing his own demise, he was sober and clear-eyed. After fervently believing it for most of his adult life, after trying for so long and so hard to make it work, Saul Kent had lost his faith in Cryonics. He saw that Cryonics does not work, and is never going to. xxxx
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