CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich. – Robert Ettinger, the founder of the cryonics movement and of the Cryonics Institute, died Saturday in his Michigan home. He was 92.
Ettinger also became the 106th patient to be frozen at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township.
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The cryonics movement advocates body storage at very low temperatures after death in the hope that future technology will permit revival and the cure of aging and disease.
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Ettinger's son, David, has taken over the family business and gave Local 4 a tour.
Tune in at 5 p.m. Monday to see inside the institute.
"My father was a remarkable man and has kind of an unusual story. He was badly injured in World War II at the Battle of the Bulge and spent several years in and out of hospitals after that," David Ettinger.
He said his father's legs were saved by an innovative bone graft surgery, which sparked his father's interest.
"He got the idea early on that as medical technology changes, people who might be seriously injured or even die as to today's technology, might do a lot better as tomorrow's technology," David Ettinger said. "He also during that period read some science fiction on freezing and thought, 'Why shouldn't this be real?'"
Ettinger's body is preserved with his mother and both his first and second wives. And, one day, his son's.
"If I'm buried, I'm not coming back. If I'm frozen, I've got a chance of coming back," David Ettinger said.
Ettinger wrote "The Prospect of Immortality" in 1964, a book advocating and explaining the cryonics thesis. He popularized the cryonics movement in the 1960s and 1970s through appearances on a wide variety of talk shows, including "The Tonight Show" and the David Frost, Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin programs.
Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute in 1976 in order to create a nonprofit organization that could freeze and store patients at death.
CI has over 900 members worldwide in addition to the 106 patients in storage.