High court allows British teenager to be first child to be cryogenically frozen

A British teenager who died of cancer has had her wish of being cryogenically frozen granted as a high court judge ruled that the practice was acceptable, opening up a new debate about the utilisation of the process.

The girl's divorced parents were not in agreement as to whether she should be allowed to go through the cryonics process, but in the end her mother was given the final say on what should be done with the girl's body.

The teenager was terminally ill with a rare form of cancer, and she wrote to the judge in an effort to convince him of the benefits of allowing her to be frozen, in the hope that a cure for her disease will be found in the future.

"I'm only 14 years old and I don't want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo‐preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years' time," the teenager, who is known only as JS for legal reasons, wrote.

"I don't want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish," JS added.

The details of the case have just been released, although the decision from judge Peter Jackson was taken over a month ago.

Justice Jackson said that it ws an exceptional case which had no precedent, which made it a difficult decision.

"I was moved by the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament," he said in a statement.

"It is no surprise that this application is the only one of its kind to have come before the courts in this country, and probably anywhere else. It is an example of the new questions that science poses to the law, perhaps most of all to family law," he added.

Cryonics is the process of preserving a human body with the hope that it may be able to be resucitated in the future, and the girl's family have paid £37,000 to a commercial company to hold her body for an infinite amount of time.