Simone M. Müller a and Heidi JS Tworek b arachel carson center for environment and society, ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, germany; bdepartment of History, University of British columbia, Vancouver, canada

On the outskirts of Moscow, the Russian company KrioRus is freezing people–dead people, to be precise, together with a number of equally dead animals. KrioRus is Russia’s first cryonics company. Its founders believe that if cooled to− 196 C at the exact moment of clinical death, people can later be resuscitated. Later is defined as ‘a time when science had advanced sufficiently to cure [those people] of old age or illness’ that had caused their death. One founder of KrioRus, Danila Medvedev, drew inspiration mainly from science fiction and especially books by Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. Science fiction informed a scientific business. More than that, KrioRus relies fundamentally on imagined uses of cryonic technology. Since the 1960s, this imagined use of technology, or rather the imagined future purpose of cryonics, has led Russians and Americans to spend millions of dollars on freezing dead bodies today. After two American companies, KrioRus is the world’s third largest cryonics company with up to 140 frozen ‘patients’. 1 Members of the cryonics’‘weird world’, as the Financial Times called it, are united by their vision of how the technology of freezing people might prolong life.