Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger was an American academic, known as "the father of cryonics" because of the impact of his 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality.

Cryonics is the low-temperature freezing and storage of human remains, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future. Cryonics is regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community. It is generally viewed as a pseudoscience, and its practice has been characterized as quackery.