On the afternoon of May 30, 2015, a 60-year-old woman stopped her heartbeat in a hospice hospital on the outskirts of Beijing.
Two doctors from the United States injected anticoagulants, antibacterial drugs, antithrombotic drugs into the woman's body, and pressed the heart with special equipment to ensure that the blood continued to circulate.
An hour later, the woman was transferred to a specific operating table, where brain tissue was removed and placed in an ultra-low temperature container below minus 100 degrees Celsius.
Such an ultra-low temperature environment can keep the brain in a dormant state.
According to the convention, her brain will be thawed in 50 years, in 2065.
Maybe at that time, we will have more advanced science and technology to revive the frozen dormant brain and regain an artificial body...
This woman, before her death, was a writer and a special editor of Liu Cixin's "Three-Body Problem" series.
She was the first female writer in China to take the initiative to become a "frozen person" after suffering from a terminal illness and use her body to conduct cutting-edge experiments.
This female writer is named Du Hong.
1, the child's heart is not old
Du Hong was born in Chongqing in 1955, his mother was a teacher, and he was also a scholar.
In her early years, she used to live on a farm with her father, and also worked as a salesman after graduating from high school.
In that era when the whole people were fanatical and abandoned knowledge, Du Hong taught himself cultural knowledge outside of work.
She firmly believes that knowledge is beautiful.
In 1977, the state resumed the college entrance examination, and Du Hong was admitted to Chongqing Normal University as a correspondence student.
After graduation, she also became a teacher, using her spare time to engage in literary creation.
Many of her works are full of childlike fun.
One of her masterpieces is her prose poem "Can I Only Be a Little Child", which is as follows:
"Mom, can I only be a little child?"
"If I were a little bird, I would fly from the sea to the snowy mountains and give you a wave and a snowflake to you."
"If I were a small tree, I would grow into the sky with a whimper, and pluck a wisp of color for you, and a star for you."
"If I were a calendula, I would open it at your desk all year round, leave a beam of sunshine for you, and leave a spring for you."
"But I can only be a little child!" I can only say to you every day: Mom, I love you. ”
In addition, she also wrote children's literature works such as "The God of Spring" and "Don't Eat Ice Cream", which were recited for a while.
These works, included in the collection of prose poems "Planting a Secret", were first published by Jieli Publishing House in 1993.
In 1987, her daughter Zhang Siyao was born.
When Zhang Siyao was growing up, the mother and daughter created together, and some of their works were included in the 2003 "Writer's Children's Three-in-The-Middle School Volume" "All is the Past".
During this period, Du Hong worked in a publishing house.
Under her impetus, she published a number of local original children's literature works, including Fu Tianlin's children's poetry collection "Sunday Mountain Grows Tall" and "Lemon Leaves", which were well received by all walks of life.
In various social occasions, Du Hong rarely talks about her works, and if asked, she often humbly says: "I write about pediatrics..."
However, she often publicly recommends the works of others, especially the new works of newcomers in China.
"When it comes to the pieces she loves, the way her eyebrows flutter, it's like a child who accidentally picked up a baby."
Here are some friends, memories of her.
— Du Hong's rewritten children's literature
2. Advanced concepts
In the eyes of many acquaintances, relatives and friends, Du Hong is a person with a clear thinking and many concepts that are ahead of the times.
In the mid-1990s, the traditional concept of family returned, and some young women took pride in giving up their careers and becoming housewives.
But Du Hong is adamantly opposed to this trend.
In 1995, she wrote an essay titled "A Good Husband Is a Triangular Body," in which she openly expressed her views on marriage and gender.
In this text, Du Hong said:
I refuse to be a wife in the traditional sense, and I will not allow my life after marriage to be limited to the norm of "good wife and good mother".
And men, especially married husbands, should not be just a single "big man" temperament, but should have multiple aspects of rigidity and softness, including taking on housework and taking care of children.
In Du Hong's view, men and women should equally assume diversified family responsibilities, and traditional gender roles such as "male and female" should be questioned and challenged.
This view, which until now is not outdated, was very advanced at the time.
Du Hong was also one of the first writers to defend his rights through legal means.
At the end of the century, when she found that her original work "Successful Lawyer, Failed Mother" had been plagiarized by Sun Min, she took to court.
The lawsuit took two years. In 2000, when the defendant refused to appear in court, the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court ruled in favor of Du Hong.
In the new century, Du Hong, as a retired re-employed person of Chongqing Publishing House, served as the editor and reviewer of Liu Cixin's "Three-Body Problem" series, and did a lot of text editing work for this work.
"The Three-Body Problem" involves sensitive content such as the Cultural Revolution, and its world view setting is grand and strange, which is very rare in the domestic literary world and has a great controversy in the publishing industry.
In 2008, "The Three-Body Problem" was first published by Chongqing Publishing House, which also included Du Hong's strong support.
Facts have proved that Du Hong's vision is not wrong, and after the advent of "The Three-Body Problem", it has become a model of contemporary Chinese science fiction works and one of the highest-selling works of Chongqing Publishing House.
3. Born to die
At the end of 2013, Du Hong went to the hospital for a comprehensive physical examination, and the report showed that everything was normal.
However, only 10 months later, she went to the hospital again for stomach pain, and the color ultrasound results showed "pancreatic mass".
Since then, Du Hong has gone to the hospital for review almost every quarter, but the results show that "no abnormalities have been seen".
Until the Spring Festival of 2015, she still accompanied her friends to visit the Chongqing Flower Market, and her spirit was very good.
But in March of that year, Du Hong was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
It was a thunderbolt of news on a sunny day. Pancreatic cancer is recognized as the king of cancers, with a mortality rate of nearly 100%.
On April 25, Du Hong sent the last circle of friends message:
"It is better to live than to die, to live to death, to break the cocoon into a butterfly, phoenix nirvana!"
At this time, her condition is already very serious, and the current medical technology has also lost its power to return to heaven.
However, Du Hong is still full of hope.
As early as a few years ago, Du Hong learned that the United States has a cutting-edge technology that is in the experimental stage:
The brain tissue of terminally ill patients is "preserved" by freezing at ultra-low temperature; in this way, brain tissue cells can survive for a long time.
This freezing technology, in theory, can "extend" a person's life for more than fifty years.
Fifty years later, many of today's incurable diseases may no longer be difficult problems and can be successfully cured; and the relocation of an artificial body to thaw the revived brain tissue is also expected to become a reality.
Du Hong, who was on the sickbed, got in touch with her family and friends, and through the scientific research team working on the above projects in the United States.
She volunteered to become an experimenter on this cutting-edge technology.
In this regard, Liu Cixin, the author of "The Three-Body Problem", was deeply shocked after learning about it, but also admired Du Hong's courage and publicly expressed his blessings to Du Hong:
I sincerely hope that in 50 years, human science and technology will really reach the step she hopes for. I'm also very much looking forward to it, and she'll really be "resurrected" 50 years from now. I wish her dearly and look forward to the moment when I will be alive to witness that moment.
On the occasion of his death, Du Hong said to his daughter, who was unable to cry:
"See you again after 50 years! By then, you were almost eighty years old, and I was rejuvenated again. Over the years, thank you for taking care of me, and at that time, I will also take care of you tenderly and thoughtfully. ”
In this way, Du Hong closed his eyes hopefully.
Her brain tissue and remains, frozen, were sent to Alcor's headquarters in Los Angeles, USA (one of the world's largest cryo-human research institutes), where they were stored in special containers for liquid nitrogen environments at -196°C, scheduled for thawing and resuscitation in 2065.
In the future 50 years from now, maybe a miracle will really happen...
Du Hong's main works, including "Naughty Girl Dandan", "Lotus Girl", "Waiting for Guests", etc., most of them belong to children's literature and youth literature.