James Bedford was a psychology professor at the University of California. He died aged 73 in 1967. Well, perhaps he didn’t. He left $100,000 in his will to cover the costs of having his body ‘cryopreserved’ – frozen down to 196 degrees and stored in a liquid nitrogen tank –in the hope that he would, one day, be thawed and returned to life. It has not yet happened. In fact, in the 59 years since, nobody who has been subjected to cryopreservation has been raised from the dead.