In a sense it already has been. There are currently more than a hundred people[3] whose bodies are not growing older–because they are frozen, held at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. All are legally dead. But their hope in arranging their current status was that it would not be permanent–that with sufficient medical progress it will some day be possible to revive them. If it begins to look as though they are going to win their bet, we will have to think seriously about adapting laws and institutions to a world where there is an intermediate state between alive and dead and quite a lot of people are in it.