CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich., July 26 (UPI) -- Robert Ettinger, who pioneered cryonics -- the idea of freezing people's bodies to be resurrected in the future, has died in Michigan at 92, his family said.
His son David told the Michigan news Web site MLive.com his father died Saturday at his home in Clinton Township. The Detroit News reported he died of respiratory failure.
Robert Ettinger was an early proponent of storing people's bodies at very low temperature after death in hopes that future technology would allow for revival and curing of aging and disease.
Appropriately, upon his death he became the 106th person to go through the process at the organization he founded, the Cryonics Institute, the News said.
Over a period of five days, Ettinger's body was being slowly cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, and by Thursday is expected to be ready to be submerged upside down in a tank filled with liquid nitrogen, his son said.
"He really has been viewed as the inspirational leader of the cryonics movement, and thousands of people around the world have looked up to him and will be upset that's [he's] gone but hopeful that he will be back," David Ettinger said.
Robert Ettinger had said he was inspired in his effort by reading the science fiction story "The Jameson Satellite" when he was 14 years old, the News said.
David Ettinger said his father, a former Wayne State University physics professor, believed in taking facts and logic "and see where it leads you," MLive.com said.
"Hopefully it leads us to see him again," he said.
