Robert Nelson, The TV Repairman Who Was Obsessed With Cryonics
J. R. Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesBob Nelson (left) and biophysicist Dr. Dante Brunol cryonically freezing a patient in 1967.
Robert Nelson was a television repairman and a high school dropout with no scientific background. What he did have, however, was a deep obsession with cryonics, the idea that humans could be posthumously frozen and then revived in the distant future after scientists found a cure for aging.
Nelson told Los Angeles Magazine in 2014 that his obsession began after reading Dr. Robert Ettinger’s 1962 book, The Prospect of Immortality, in which Ettinger theorized that death was not an inevitable part of life but rather a disease that could one day be cured. He also theorized that a man could be frozen in the present and thawed out in the future when the technology required to achieve immortality had been discovered.
Nelson was infatuated with the idea, and he even met Ettinger before the author died — and was subsequently cryonically frozen.
Despite lacking the credentials, Nelson attended the first meeting of the Suspended Animation Group, which was dedicated to the idea of cryonic freezing. His passion must have preceded him, because he was voted president. With Nelson at the helm, the group then formed the Cryonics Society of California, a non-profit largely made up of believers who dreamed of being cryonically frozen.
Unfortunately, it was also largely made up of non-scientists. Still, in 1967, they found a volunteer willing to undergo cryonic preservation: 73-year-old psychology professor Dr. James Bedford. Bedford was dying of kidney cancer and had agreed to let the Cryonics Society freeze his body.
Bedford passed away on Jan. 12, 1967. After days of quite literally being put on ice, his cryonic coffin was completed. Nelson and a few “pothead friends” he had enlisted for help loaded the dead man in, injected what was essentially antifreeze into his veins, and surrounded him with dry ice.
Over the next decade, Nelson’s organization continued to grow, though it always struggled with funding and suffered from a lack of expertise. He ultimately walked away from the venture in 1979.
