Cryonics Founder Robert Ettinger Dead ... for Now

After a lifetime pushing the benefits of freezing dead people in the hope that they can someday be revived by medical science, Robert Ettinger has died—and been frozen. The 92-year-old father of the cryonics movement has joined 105 other people—including his mother and two wives—frozen in liquid nitrogen at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan he founded in 1976, AP reports.

Ettinger, a professor of physics, was seriously wounded in World War II and got the idea for preserving life through technology after receiving bone graft surgery to save his legs. "He did what he thought was necessary and appropriate and didn't worry much about what people thought," his son says, describing his father as a "reluctant prophet" who was unafraid of ridicule. (More Robert Ettinger dead stories.)