Ted Williams was one of the great hitting baseball players to ever live — and may someday come back to life. At least that is what some are betting on. According to accounts, shortly after Williams drew his last breath, hospital officials filled his body with blood thinner and stuffed it into a bag filled with dry ice for transportation to the airport in Ocala, FL, where a plane chartered by a cryonics company was waiting on the tarmac to fly it to Arizona. The company was Alcor and it is in the business of freezing people in liquid nitrogen with the hopes that they will be resurrected one day, when the technology is available to unfreeze them without cellular damage and when whatever led to their death can be prevented. (It is rumored that Williams' head was detached from his body and that his head is in one tank of liquid nitrogen and his body is in another. The liquid nitrogen is at -321 degrees Fahrenheit.)

According to Alcor's website, cryonics is "a speculative life support technology that seeks to preserve human life in a state that will be viable and treatable by future medicine. It is expected that future medicine will include mature nanotechnology, and the ability to heal at the cellular and molecular levels."

Although not as extreme, those same principles are beginning to emerge as a new way of treating victims of cardiac arrest. It is called therapeutic hypothermia, or cooling therapy.

In 2002, two randomized studies were published that compared mild hypothermia with normal body temperatures in comatose survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. One study was conducted in Europe and the other in Australia. In the European study, a special mattress with a cover that blew air over the body and ice bags were used to cool the victims for 24 hours once they arrived at the critical care unit. In the Australian study, paramedics applied ice packs to a patient's head and torso, with ice applications continuing in the hospital for 12 more hours.

Both studies showed promising results. The idea is to cool the body, thus cooling the brain and helping brain cells to survive that would normally die in four to six minutes. The studies showed that even if the brain was cooled after the oxygen supply had been cut off, patients did better.

There are two theories of what happens when the brain is cooled with mild hypothermia. The first theory is that it reduces the cerebral metabolic rate for oxygen. The second theory is that mild hypothermia suppresses many of the chemical reactions associated with reperfusing the brain after a cardiac arrest.