From The Cradle To The Vat, Russia's 'Temporarily Dead' Await Immortality

SERGIYEV POSAD, Russia -- In this sleepy, conservative town in the heartland of Russian Orthodoxy, an experiment aimed at resurrecting the dead is under way in a frigid backyard laboratory.

Bathed in the glow of a floodlight inside a white metal shed, two frosted vats tower before Danila Medvedev. They contain his patients: dozens of cadavers and brains cryogenically frozen at -196 degrees Celsius in the hope that they can one day be brought back to life.

"They are floating in liquid nitrogen, like a child in the mother's womb," Medvedev says, his freezing breath clouding in the air as he surveys his work.

Medvedev is a co-founder and ideologue at KrioRus, one of the world's three leading companies offering cryopreservation -- the deep-freezing of the dead so they can be reanimated when presumed breakthroughs in science and technology have consigned death to the history books.

More