It seems doubly bizarre, then, that Mr. Williams's body has been shipped to Alcor to hang upside down, frozen, until science comes up with a cure for old age.
Since 2010, when the Treasury froze the science budget disbursed annually to universities and research institutes by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), inflation, cuts to capital spending on facilities and reductions in research spending by other government departments have clearly taken a serious toll.
"This sudden halt on new starts will freeze American science in place while the rest of the world races forward, and it will knock a generation of young scientists off their stride, ultimately costing billions of dollars in missed future opportunities," Dr. Isaacs wrote.
Soon after its election in 2010, the governing coalition froze the science budget and slashed capital spending on research infrastructure.
Over the past several rather tense weeks, the federal government froze all science grants while seeking to balance the nation's budget.
Walport, a physician specializing in immunology who was a professor of medicine at Imperial College London, will assume the role at a challenging time, as the U.K. government has frozen its science budget for 4 years.
In September, a report from Case showed that British researchers faced a £1.5bn funding cut over the next four years despite government claims of "freezing" spending on science.
The public research funders of Europe's poorest countries such as Portugal, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, and Slovenia, have hardly any room for manoeuvre, whereas countries such as the UK – which has a strong university and R&D sector to build on – have decided that freezing investments in science is somehow essential to overcome the debt crisis.
Miller believes in cryonics, the science of freezing bodies to restore life later on, and supports the cryonics-focused Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
To avoid excessive contaminations by embedding material (Tissue freezing medium, Electron Microscopy Sciences, Hatfield, USA), the lyophilized root pieces were arranged on the top of a frozen embedding material block and glued by a short touch of the embedding block with a finger.
