Dissident Chinese Academic Gets His Brain FROZEN in the US with Strict Last Wish to Thaw It Only 'After 500 Years'
A dissident Chinese philosopher has had his brain frozen, per his will, so that it can be used for science in the future.
It was Li Zehou's dying wish to have his brain frozen and thawed within 500 years, a friend of the academic has revealed.
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Widely regarded as an important modern scholar of Chinese history and culture, in which Li died Colorado in November 2021, 91 years old.
He graduated from Peking University in 1954 with a degree in philosophy and worked at various research institutes around the world throughout his life, including China And Paris.
Ma Qunlin, who befriended Li in his later years and edited several of his books booksreportedly learned in December that his family contacted a cryonics company the day he died — meaning his brain had been in the refrigerator for more than two years.
The academic made his final wishes public in a 2010 interview with Chinese publication Southern People Weekly.
Shortly before his 80th birthday, he said: 'I don't want an epitaph. But I leave my brain frozen. Take it out after 300 or 500 years.
'I told my wife and child. Some people want to come back to life this way, but I don't think resurrection is possible.
“I am trying to prove whether culture affects the brain, and whether it is possible to find remnants of Chinese culture in my brain after a few hundred years, to prove my ji dian (sedimentation) theory.”
Li's Yidian theory he referred to was one he developed in the 1960s; it states that a person's exposure to history and culture can leave a mark on the physical structure of their brain.
In 2020, before Li's 90th birthday, he again mentioned his unusual request, telling the same magazine that he had donated $80,000 (£63,000) to a foundation that freezes human remains.
He said he wanted his brain “to be preserved as long as possible until the brain science is advanced enough” to study it, adding that he knew there was “a 95 percent chance that his wish would not come true.”
Others, including Li's friends, are also said to be skeptical about what could happen to Li's brain, as his request goes against the traditional Chinese belief that the physical integrity of corpses should be preserved.
According to Ma, Li's brain was frozen by the Arizona-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit organization that specializes in cryonic preservation of human remains.
Li's work had a significant impact on Chinese academia in the 1980s.
Historian Yu Ying-shih of Princeton University said of his role in Chinese culture: “Through (his) books, he emancipated an entire generation of young Chinese intellectuals from communist ideology.”
The academic was once placed under house arrest for three years after criticizing the Chinese government's response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, and his books were banned on the mainland.
Li moved to the US in 1992 and taught at Colorado College until his retirement in 1999.
He is said to have closely followed developments in brain sciences, especially during his later life, and had hoped for advances that would aid philosophical research.
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