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Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis, Viking,
pp 308, £16.99

What is a great mambo chicken? Well, it’s what you get when you spin
a chicken around in a centrifuge so it lives its life at two-and-a-half
times the Earth’s gravitational pull. Because they have a greater amount
of gravity to work against, the chickens develop stronger and larger muscles
and bones. Why would anyone do this to a chicken? To find out what would
happen to humansif they lived at greater-than-earth gravity, of course.

Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition is full of stories
like this: it’s the Tom Wolfe version of science, quirky, fun, and just
plain weird. This isn’t like William Hartston’s Drunken Goldfish and Other
Irrelevant Scientific Research, which recounted the layman’s view of what
scientists get up to alone in their labs, like studying whether rats are
attracted to tennis balls. Instead, this is an account of what Regis calls
‘fin-de-siecle hubris’, scientists who genuinely believe that nothing is
impossible.

The story opens with a murder case. When California resident Dora Kent
‘deanimated’, local cryonicists froze her head without, unfortunately, waiting
for the required signature on the death certificate so attracting the attention
of the police. And then it turns out that some of the people involved in
the cryonics movement are also people who were, at one time or another,
involved in the space movement. The way Regis tells it, the underlying thinking
is much the same: why accept what nature has given us if we can improve
on it?

Take gravity, for instance. Do we really need it? It makes it harder
to fly out into space, for one thing, and even if you say, well, we need
it to hold the atmosphere in place, there are better methods for doing that.
We could deconstruct one of the planets, and rebuild it into a shell, for
example.

Or what about our brains? Is ‘wetware’ really the best way of storing
our personalities and the memories that help make them up? Mightn’t we be
better off ‘downloading’ them into computer media? Then we could make backup
copies. Think how fragile we are, roaming the Earth with no backups. We
may laugh at cryonics, but does death really have anything better to offer?
At least getting frozen is a chance, no matter how small, of survival.

Some of these people are amateurs, like the Hensons, the Arizona couple
whose idea of a good time was to go out in the canyon and set off fire-bombs.
They were the guiding force behind a movement to create space settlements.
Keith Henson later went on to become a force in the cryonics movement; he
was the one who proposed a party at the end of the Universe, to be attended
by all the recalled cryonicists and their backup copies.

Others became accepted as professionals. For example, Bob Truax, who
built rockets in his garage out of odds and ends from local junk heaps until
one day NASA, which had laughed at him for years, bought one of his rockets,
made, ironically enough, out of its own junked spare parts, for $750 million.
Nanotechnology enters the story, too: if we can generate tiny machines,
much like bacteria, which can create anything we want, atom by atom, we
can use those machines to repair the damage to cryonically frozen bodies,
ruptured cell by ruptured cell.

If there is a criticism to make of Regis’ book, it is that it rambles
unnecessarily. Yes, this is quirky, sprawling material, interrelating the
fringes of scientific research. But Regis periodically loses some of the
threads of his story and us with them. We never hear satisfactorily, for
example, just what happened in the matter of Dora Kent’s missing head.

Wendy Grossman is founder and former editor of The Skeptic magazine,
and a freelance writer and folksinger.