Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger was born Dec. 4, 1918, in Atlantic City. He was a boy when he moved to Detroit and read a short story that sparked his interest in immortality.
“The Jameson Satellite,” by Neil Jones, told of a dying professor who launched himself into space — where he was found millions of years later by aliens who brought him back to life by transplanting his brain into a mechanical body.
“Why wait for aliens?” Mr. Ettinger later told a reporter. “Why not do it ourselves?”
He became further interested in the possibilities of medical technology during World War II, when he was badly injured by German mortar while fighting in Europe in the days before the Battle of the Bulge.
He attended Wayne State University under the G.I. bill and graduated with a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees, in math and physics. He penned his cryonics manifesto after being inspired by a French scientist who found that frog sperm was viable even after being frozen.
His other books included “Man Into Superman: The Startling Potential of Human Evolution — and How to Be Part of It.” Published in 1972, it has been described as an important book among transhumanists, who believe new technologies will allow humans to radically overhaul their bodies and extend their lives.
Mr. Ettinger remained most closely identified with cryonics, however. His first patient was his mother Rhea, who died in 1977. “I don’t know if she was very enthusiastic about it,” he said of his mother’s freezing, “but she was willing.”
A decade later, he froze his second patient — his wife Elaine, who died in 1987 and with whom he had two surviving children, David and Shelley.
The next year he married his second wife, Mae. When she died in 2000, she was the institute’s 34th patient.
“If both of my wives are revived,” Mr. Ettinger told the Detroit News last year, “that will be a high class problem.”
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