Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger (/ˈɛtɪŋər/; December 4, 1918[1] – July 23, 2011[2]) was an American academic, known as "the father of cryonics" because of the impact of his 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality.

Ettinger met his second wife, Mae Junod, in 1962 when she attended one of his adult education courses in basic physics.

Ettinger died on July 23, 2011, at the age of 92, in Detroit, Michigan of natural causes, and was cryopreserved with the hope of future revival.

And so it did, in the story, until millions of years later, when, with humanity extinct, a race of mechanical men with organic brains chanced upon it.

[12] If immortality is achievable through the ministrations of technologically advanced aliens repairing a frozen human corpse, then Ettinger thought everyone could be cryopreserved to await later rescue by our own medically more sophisticated descendants.

The story sets out the development of a method of putting people into "suspended animation" until medical science can restore their health, and the changes found by the first of those when he is revived.

[12] In what has been characterized as an historically important mid-life crisis,[12] Ettinger summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who's Who in America.

"[12] In 1962, Ettinger privately published a preliminary version of The Prospect of Immortality, in which he said that future technological advances could be used to bring people back to life.

In 1962, Evan Cooper had authored a manuscript entitled "Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now"[13] under the pseudonym Nathan Duhring.

[14] Cooper's book contained the same argument as did Ettinger's, but it lacked both scientific and technical rigor and was not of publication quality.