Robert Ettinger, founder of a movement that advocates storing bodies at ultra-low temperatures after death until new technology allows them to be revived, has died and his body frozen at the institute he founded, according to his family.

Mr Ettinger died at his home in Clinton Township, Michigan and “has been frozen at the Institute”, a statement sent by Mr Ettinger’s son David said.

The Cryonics Institute, which Mr Ettinger founded in 1976 as a “non-profit organisation that could freeze and store patients at death” has more than 900 members around the world and “106 patients in storage”, the statement says.

Born in 1918, Mr Ettinger went public with his theory of cryonics in 1964 with the publication of his work The Prospect of Immortality.

In the book, he contends that “at very low temperatures it is possible, right now, to preserve dead people with essentially no deterioration, indefinitely.

“If civilisation endures, medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other cause of death,” he said in the book.