By Mike Darwin

Steven B. Harris, M.D.

In September of 1988, Steve Harris, M.D., published an essay entitled The Day the Earth Stood Still: Cryonics and the Resurrection of the Mythic Hero. It was one of his best in a formidable roster of insightful articles that he wrote dealing with the likely cultural requirements and cognitive limitations that inform humanity’s acceptance, or lack thereof, of cryonics.  I strongly recommend cryonicists read it. Steve’s articles had a great deal of influence on my thinking,  and both Steve and I were, in turn,  influenced by  the philosopher-mythologist-historian Joseph Campbell. I don’t know how Steve was introduced to him, but I first heard of Campbell as a result of the PBS series THE POWER OF MYTH WILL BILL MOYERS, (downloadable here)  which aired in the late 1980s.

I remember breaking out in goose bumps (I have them now) many times during Campbell’s program and, subsequently, when reading his books. His book of the same title as the series is an excellent introduction to his work. I had the same reaction when reading  Steve Harris’ brilliantly insightful articles dealing with issues critical to human perception of, and reaction to cryonics when I read them for the first time in manuscript form, before they were published in Cryonics And I had it again when I read them in “in print” as the final, published product. These works bear reading and rereading and reading again.

The Dead Ant Heap & Our Mechanical Society: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/DeadAntHeap.html

The Return of the Krell Machine: http://www.grg.org/charter/Krell2.htm

Will Cryonics Work?: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/probability.html

The Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/PersonsApparentlyDead.htm

Many are Cold But Few Are Frozen: http://www.cryocare.org/index.cgi?subdir=&url=humanist.html

Frankenstein and the Fear of Science (Lecture), VHS tape: http://www.worldcat.org/title/frankenstein-and-the-fear-of-science/oclc/043933281

There are very powerful ideas and insights in these essays which should be a source of influence and inspiration to many more cryonicists, than to those relatively few who have read them, to date.

One of my central points about the reason for the continued “failure” of cryonics, and for its very slow growth, both absolutely and relatively,  is the near total lack of any kind of memory of what has gone before, let alone a sorting out of what part of that history is vitally important to be remembered. It’s as if most cryonicists live only in the present, looking forward to a future exclusively of their own imagining, with just a dim halo of memory extending, perhaps 5 years back, at most.

A few days ago, I had my nth practical example of that. I was contacted by some people interested in establishing cryonics Elsewhere. One of the interesting (and depressing) things they had been told by “cryonics people in the US,” was that it was a “good idea to establish companion for profit and non-profit organizations” to carry out the various functions of the cryonics undertaking with minimal liability.

Really?

Maybe that is the best system, but if it is, there is no evidence I know of to support it, and substantial empirical evidence to refute it.

This is an edited version of my response t0 that recommendation:

“I can only tell you what I have observed here over and over again. Maybe you can figure a way around it, or maybe you won’t have the same problems in the first place, owing to cultural differences. I just don’t know.

You will notice that all of the cryonics organizations in the US consist of fully integrated providers. Suspended Animation is the (recent) exception. What’s remarkable about this situation is that it is the polar opposite of what all of us intended when we started cryonics operations here (myself included). There were always paired for profit and not for profit companies, and for just the reasons you’ve stated. CSNY & Cryo-Span, CSC & Cryonic Interment, BACS & Trans Time, IABS & Soma, Cryovita, Manrise & Alcor… And yet there are only single entities around today. Why?

I do not know about your local law, but in the US, it is forbidden for non-profit organizations (NPOs) and for-profit corporations (FPCs) to have interlocking directorates. In fact, it is generally prohibited for corporations related to, or doing business with each other to have interlocking directorates, unless one is mostly or wholly owned by the other, regardless of their status as FPCs, or NPOs. The reasons for this are many and are deeply rooted in corporate law, but mostly can they be reduced to “conflict of interest” issues. In the early days of cryonics, this ban on interlocking directorates was flagrantly disregarded. The inevitable result was that the FPCs completely dominated the NPOs. In fact, FPCs used the NPOs as a convenient shill for doing all the things that were unprofitable, risky, or otherwise not desirable, such as being stuck with the open-ended custody of the patient!

While the initial reason for this was the use of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) to accept the patients, the eventual reason for it became (obviously), proprietary interest. People in the FPCs got paid for their work (usually in shares in the FPC) and people in the NPO didn’t – couldn’t, in fact. Valuable work, work that would earn shares, got done by the FPCs, and everything else got shuffled off onto the NPOs. You can actually  see this happening at the time, if you take a look at the issues of “Life Extension”/”Long Life Magazine” on the CryoEuro Wiki, because people didn’t talk about BACS, they talked about Trans Time… And where the reward, or the potential for reward exists is also typically where all the time, attention and money will flow.

Eventually, as visibility increased, the state began to menace, and the directorates were fully separated. That’s when all hell broke loose! The people running the NPOs had to be disinterested directors, and they did not stand to make money (or shares), or gain in any way from giving advantage to the FPCs. Contracts, fee increases, and all the other “taken for granteds” between the FPCs and NPOs were now up for debate and consideration. And since they were now two truly separate organizations, jealousy, resentment, and plain old proprietary interest and territoriality took over.

I pretty much thought the FPCs would win, primarily because they did have that huge advantage of proprietary interest on their side. But what I hadn’t figured on was the patients! The NPOs had control of the patients; and it was with the patients that the real loyalties ultimately rested. TT and BACS pretty much destroyed each other. In the case of Alcor, Alcor prevailed, and in the case of CI, well, there was never an issue in the first place, since CI was always an integrated operation. And yet, why this happened remains a mystery to many, even to those who have put some effort into finding out what happened.

In a large, diverse and robust marketplace, commercial service providers servicing NPOs could possibly work. SA may be the first of these, but only time will tell.

However, while cryonics is small and not subject to normal market forces, the two organizations model has not been proven workable. It becomes particularly vicious when there is only one service provider and one NPO, but totally different directors (as the law here requires), because then it becomes like a long-married couple who hate each other, but because of children, fiances and other reasons, cannot divorce. Far from creating the checks and balances it was anticipated to, this set-up created a state of gridlock and animosity. Ultimately, it degenerated to people on both sides screaming that the other was trying to screw them. And since they couldn’t stop dealing with each other and go to the “competition,” it just ground on until there was little or nothing left. That is, in fact, in significant measure, how Alcor was reborn.

Finally, you will encounter this problem: the FPC will be absolutely essential to the NPO, because the FPC will hold all the assets for delivering the up-front (immediately legally riskiest) part of cryopreservation (CP). They will own the equipment, employ the people, own the vehicles…. So the NPO eventually finds itself not just held hostage to FPC , but at risk if the FPC screws up.

I’ll give you a highly personal example. I was a major shareholder in Cryovita, the service provider to Alcor, but Jerry Leaf held most of the shares. Alcor relied on Cryovita completely for rescue and perfusion and there were no alternative service providers available – none. Alcor didn’t own so much as a cannula, or a set of scrub clothes. Cryovita was a shares corporation and the shares were distributed in a complex and potentially problematic way. It seemed possible that if Jerry were to suddenly experience medico-legal death, that the continued smooth functioning of Cryovita could be at risk of being disrupted. That became one of several causes of a major split between Jerry and I, because I realized, as President of Alcor (which I was, at that time), that if Jerry dropped “dead,” Alcor’s ability to deliver CP could be at risk of disruption. Alcor didn’t have cash lying around to go buy all the required equipment in a hurry! It had taken Jerry and me many years to patiently accumulate it, and to do so at well below market rates.

But it was worse than that, because over the years, Cryovita had generated patents, made exclusive agreements, and otherwise done all kinds of normal business things that corporations do. The problem was, all that “stuff” was also needed and used by Alcor! So, I began acquiring those same capabilities for Alcor, which was, of course, a costly duplication of capital equipment and it caused a feeling of resentment in Jerry/Cryovita.

So, what actually happened when Jerry did have a heart attack and was CPed? Well, exactly what I thought might happen, but in a way I never could have imagined. Cryovita did split from Alcor (kindly selling Alcor some of the most critical assets Alcor needed to stay in business), but the people who took Cryovita away were Kathy Leaf (Jerry’s widow), Saul Kent, Paul Wakfer, Brenda Peters and myself – the very people who had been the most ardent advocates of Alcor for so hard and long.

What happened to Cryovita? Well, it morphed in various ways, but today it is known as 21st Century Medicine!

Naturally, this version of events will be strongly biased by my point of view, so I would suggest you ask others and check it out for yourself. Look at the back issues of “Life Extension” and “Long Life” magazine on the CryoEuro Wiki to get a feel for the “Trans Times” of the 1970s and ’80s. Jim Yount, John Day and especially Frank Rothacker of ACS, may also be able to provide you with valuable perspective.”

My guess is that almost all of the newcomers to cryonics over the past decade, or so, have not read any of Steve Harris’ essays. And they clearly know little of the actual history of cryonics, let alone have any distillation (regardless of the direction of its bias) of what is important in that history to remember and act upon.

If you Google “history of cryonics” this what comes up on the first page (and subsequent pages offer no greater resources). Ben Best’s article is actually the most popular (longitudinally). It’s a fine, bare-bones factual narrative. But it is bloodless and lesson-less; it provides no instruction for others striving to create cryonics without recreating our errors. [I want to be very clear here that this is not a criticism of Ben's article: it was not written to be a tutorial on the lessons to be learned from the history of cryonics.]

What makes history both “teachable” and “leanable” is the humanity of it. We are, as Campbell so eloquently said, “story creatures”; we learn through guided narrative informed by the power of the mythic. BACS, TT, CSNY, Cryo-Span, Alcor, Manrise, CI, these entities were created by individual people for very personal reasons, as well as for the visible and easily understood public ones. Most contemporary cryonicists seem to recoil from any consideration of the “messy” and “untidy” aspects of the personal motivations and dynamics that drove (and drive) organizations, in and out of cryonics. And yet, that’s where a lot of the most important reasons and answers are to be found that will lead on to successes, or doom us to repeated failures.

 

Credits: Ben Best, Andy Zawacki, Mike Darwin

Adapted from Source Document: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/88919930/Cryostat-Preparation—Cryonics-Institute

PURPOSE: To detail the procedures used for set-up and final preparation of Almax fiberglass-composite resin long-term patient care cryostats. This standard operating procedure (SOP) (aka Best Practices) details the vendors, materials and techniques used to prepare the Almax cryostats for full operational status after receipt from the manufacturer.

1.0. Detail of configuration and a brief overview of the manufacturing procedure used to produce cryostats.

Almax cryostats are cylindrical, double walled vessels that employ perlite and low vacuum (1-12 torr) insulation to facilitate highly efficient long-term liquid nitrogen refrigeration of cryopatients. Each unit has an overall height of 327.7 cm, an external diameter of 182.9 cm, an internal diameter of 121.9 cm and a useable internal height of 218.4 cm. The static liquid nitrogen capacity of Almax cryostats is approximately 2550 liters with a static boil-off rate in the range of 10.5 to 12.5 liters per day. Adult, human, whole body patient capacity is between 4 and 6 patients, depending upon patient diameter and the method of packaging used.

1.2.  Engineering details are presented Figure 1.1-1.2.

Figure 1.1: Detailed engineering specifications for the Almax long-term patient care Cryostats.

The cryostats are fabricated from a fibreglass mat-modified vinyl ester (Hetron 922, Ashland Chemical Co.) composite. The basic procedure for fabrication consists of building up layers of glass mat saturated with a resin monomer that is reinforced with carboxyl-terminated butadiene-acrylonitrile copolymer. The resin is polymerized (cured) using methyl ethyl ketone peroxide (2-butanone peroxide, or MEK-peroxide), which initiates free-radical cross-linkage of the monomer. This technique avoids incorporation of the MEK peroxide catalyst into the finished polymer, rendering it more stable, more corrosion resistant and less chemically reactive. Five millilitres of MEK peroxide are used per pound of Hetron 922. The inner vessel (can) of the cryostat is an open- topped cylinder with a concave bottom made from of vinyl ester resin and glass mat with a wall thickness of ~13 mm. The outer cylinder (can) is comprised of the same material, has a wall thickness of ~15 mm and is connected to the inner can only by a glue bond where the two are joined at the opening of the inner can on the top of the cryostat.

The opening of each cryostat is closed with a snug-fitting insulating neck-plug with an external cover of 14 gauge grade #2, 304 stainless steel. The insulating neck-plug is made from 22 layers of 2.5 cm thick Owens-Corning high density extruded polystyrene insulating foam board (~121.9 cm in diameter by 55.9 cm thick.) which are sandwiched between the stainless steel cover and an inner cover of painted chip board or marine plywood using 4 threaded nylon rods to compress and secure the foam to the inner and outer covers of the cryostat lid. A section of 5.1 cm diameter PVC plastic pipe penetrates the neck-plug and external cover in the center allowing access to the inside of the cryostat for temperature and liquid level monitoring.

Figure 1.2: Detailed engineering specifications for the Almax long-term patient care cryostats.

1.3.  Cryostats are manufactured under contract with Almax Products, a company owned and operated by Bruce Alter, located in Bearsville, New York:

Almax Products                    Mailing address:  Almax Products

363 Coldbrook Road                                            P.O. Box 441

Bearsville, NY 12409                                           Bearsville, NY 12409

Phone: 845-679-4615  FAX: 845-679-8620   email: Almax441@aol.com

Almax subcontracts the work of building the cryostats shells to Polymil Products, (contacts Sam Yacuzzo and Tammy Shultz) of LeRoy, NY:

Polymil Products, Inc                 585-768-8170

51 North Street

Leroy, NY 14482

Purchase price for 1 cryostat, ordered in May 2009 was $23,000 US, half payable on issuance of the purchase order and half payable by 45 days after delivery.

Perlite insulation is for the units is obtained from:

Noble Perlite                             405-872-5660

312 W Chestnut

Noble, OK 73068-8545

On average, 70 thirty-pound bags of perlite are used by Almax in a preliminary filling of the annular space prior to shipment of the cryostat. An additional 14 bags of perlite are shipped with the unit and used to top-up the annular space after shipping; the perlite settles en route due to handling and movement of the cryostat. Cost per bag as of 16 May, 2009 was ~ $20 US, per bag, including wrapping and palletizing, in preparation for shipment.

Currently shipment is being arranged by Almax and charges for the last load of perlite were $__________ US.

The stainless steel cover for the cryostat is manufactured by:

Beck Industries, Inc.

24462 Sorrentino Court,

Clinton Township,MI, United States, 48035
(586) 790-4060 PHONE
(586) 790-4982 FAX
EMAIL: mbeck6@sbcglobal.net

Figure 1.3: Stainless steel cryostat covers manufactured by Beck Industries, Clinton Township, MI.

The covers are 127 cm in diameter x 7.6 cm deep with a 20.3 cm circular central access port cover. The cover has 1/8″ diameter holes at 116.8 cm bolt circle, 22.9 cm bolt pattern with 1/8″ screw holes and 7.6 cm sides which are skip welded around the 127 diameter of the cover. The covers are fabricated from 14 gauge, grade #2, 304 stainless steel.

Price is $860.00 US per cover. Charge for palletizing and shipping to Bearsville, NY is $200.00 US.

TOTAL PRICE $_________ US

Figure 1.4: Removal of cryostat from shipping vehicle/container.

1.4  Atmospheric air is withdrawn from the annular space of the cryostat in order to create a vacuum in two stages. The first stage employs a roughing pump which is capable of reducing pressure in the annulus to ~ 5 x 10-2 torr, however it will only be necessary to achieve a stable vacuum of ~ 500 torr before switching to the polishing/ maintenance vacuum pump. The roughing pump used is  in an Alcatel ACP-15, 8.2 cubic ft/min with a peak pumping speed of 14 m3 /hr and a final vacuum capacity of 5 x 10-2 torr. The ACP-15 employs Roots blower technology. Roots pumps are positive displacement machines using two synchronized rotors rotating in opposite directions. The rotors feature profiles usually shaped like the figure 8.During the rotation, molecules of gas are isolated between the lobes and the stator and then led to the exhaust side of the pump without variation of volume.

 

Figure 1.5: Alcatel ACP-15 roughing pump.

The ACP-15 features a frictionless pumping module that is optimized for operation without internal lubrication. Complete technical specifications, operation and servicing instructions for the ACP-15 are present as Appendix 1 to this SOP.

Figure 1.6: Welch 1376C-03, DUOSEAL®, two-stage, belt drive high vacuum pump.

Final ‘polishing’ evacuation of the cryostat annulus as well as maintenance of the vacuum, is achieved using a Welch 1376C-03,DUOSEAL®, two-stage, belt drive high vacuum pump. The Welch pump has a peak pumping capacity of 300 LPM (10.6 CFM) with a final achievable vacuum of 1 x10-4 torr. The Welch pump motor is configured to operate on 220V, 50 Hz,1 PH and is supplied with Schuko plug which must be replaced with a ____________ plug prior to be being placed into service.

Complete technical specifications, operating and servicing instructions for the Welch Welch 1376C-03,DUOSEAL® pump are present as Appendix II to this SOP.

2.0.  Shipment and unloading of the cryostat.

2.1.  The cryostats is palletized and prepared for shipment via commercial freighter in a sea-land container. It is then shipped, either by semi-trailer, or by truck, within the sea-land container, on wooden skids (generally skids of very poor quality). Drag chains are placed around the skids and they are pulled to the end of the trailer. Then they are pulled out further with the forklift so that the rear end of the skid rests firmly on the trailer and the opposite end of the skid is then lowered to rest on a wooden support frame so that the pallet holding the cryostat can be can be picked-up from the side with the forklift, removed from the  truck and moved into the facility where the cryostat is placed on custom made steel frame castered trolley for additional preparation, prior to placement into service.

Figure 2.2: The forklift is repositioned at the side of the cryostat/pallet and the unit is removed from the vehicle and placed on the ground..

 Figure 2.3: The evacuation port cover plate used to hold perlite in place and prevent contamination of the perlite with moisture during shipping is unbolted and removed.

 Table 2.1: Equipment, Tools and Supplies Required to Remove Cryostats from Delivery Vehicle

Item Description Quantity & Specifications Steel drag chain Promac WD-113 or higher: http://www.promacusa.com/pdfs/PWStlDrag08.pdf S- hooks 2,500 kg load (minimum) Wooden support frame 10.2 cm x 10.2 cm x X cm X cm X cm Snug fitting pig skin leather work gloves Size required by personnel Forklift with long tines 5,000 kg load capacity Metal shears To cut securing tie bands

2.2.  The cryostat is shipped from the manufacturer with a resin-composite cover plate and sealing gasket secured to the evacuation port opening of the unit with 12 bolts (Figure 1.3). This cover plate serves both to contain the perlite insulation material and keep it dry during shipment. Perlite is moderately hygroscopic and will absorb water from the atmosphere in high humidity environments. Once the cryostat is in the storage facility, the cover plate is unbolted and the cover plate and the neoprene rubber gasket that seals it to the evacuation port flange are removed and set aside. The evacuation port opening is then immediately covered with a heavy-duty, 3 mil plastic refuse bag that is tightly secured in place with a ratchet-type nylon tie-down strap. It is important to immediately and tightly cover this opening to prevent moisture from entering the annular space and contaminating the perlite, since this would make subsequent evacuation of the annulus difficult, or impossible.

  Figure 2.4:  A custom built trolley fabricated from powder coated welded steel tube stock and high quality 3″ diameter urethane casters is used to safely move the  cryostat around the facility in the horizontal position during post -manufacturing preparation. Wooden skids are used to protect the cryostat from damage by the steel frame of the trolley.

 2.3.  The cryostat is transported to the work-area at the facility by placing it on a custom built metal trolley. The unit is left on the trolley until all preparative work (prior to hoisting the unit into the upright position) is completed.

3.0 Topping up the cryostat with perlite.

3.1 Protective clothing consisting of a heavy-duty, hooded Tyvek work coverall, fabric reinforced vinyl gloves and a full face N-100 respirator are donned. Duct tape is used to secure the hood opening of the of Tyvek suit to the edges of the respirator, the sleeves of the Tyvek suit to the work gloves and the tops of the work boots to the leggings of the Tyvek coverall, as shown in Figure 3.1, below. It is important to achieve a seal at all joints in the protective clothing in order to prevent the highly irritating perlite dust from contaminating the worker’s skin.

3.2  The plastic bag covering the evacuation port is removed and perlite is poured from the bags into the evacuation port opening as shown in Figure 3.2. The perlite is spread out inside the annular space and packed tight with wooden spreading and tamping paddles that are made in-house, as shown in Figure 3.3, below. Considerable force is required to tamp the perlite solidly into place, and typically the full weight of the worker must be brought to bear on the tamping paddle.

Figure 3.1: Duct tape is used to secure and seal the respirator, gloves and boots to the protective Tyvek coverall in order to prevent perlite dust from coming into contact with the workers’ skin. An full-face N-100 respirator is to provide respiratory protection from the perlite dust. Note perlite spreading and tamping tools resting on the cryostat at the middle left of the photo.

 Figure 3.2: Perlite is poured from the 20 lb bags into the cryostat annular space with the workman standing atop the cryostat.

Figure 3.3: A spreading and tamping tool are fabricated from plywood and a 24 x 24 x 61 cm piece of lumber (which serves as the handle). The spreading tool has the handle offset to one side of the plywood plate, while the tamping tool has the handle secured to the center of the plate allowing for stability and even distribution of load when compressing the perlite. The handles are secured to the plywood plates using  1/4″  by 3″ wood screws reinforced with quick-set epoxy adhesive.

 

Figure 3.5: Perlite is tamped into place in the annulus of the cryostat using the wooden tamping tool.

Figure 3.6: When the annular space is filled with packed perlite to the level of the bottom of the evacuation port no additional perlite is added and the top of the cryostat is brushed off with a household broom.

Figure 3.7: The evacuation port is again tightly covered with a plastic bag to prevent entry of water vapor into the annular space.

Figure 3.8: A jet of compressed air is used to clean the perlite dust off of the cryostat.

4.0.  Preparation of the evacuation port and evacuation valve assembly.

The first step in preparing the evacuation plumbing assembly is to sweat solder a 27 cm long x 3/4″ piece of copper onto a 3/4″ NPT Stainless Steel Ball Valve Full Port WOG1000 SS304 SUS304 0.75 .75 Female Ports.

Assemble the tools and supplies required for sweating the section of pipe into the valve. Prepare the copper pipe by sanding both ends using fine grit sand paper. Apply solder paste to the end to be sweated to the ball valve and insert the pipe into the 3/4″ copper T-connector. Don gloves and heat the copper pipe and connector with the torch for approximately 30 seconds. Apply solder by touching a J-shaped piece of solder to the joint 7 times; the solder will be drawn into the joint between the pipe and connector by capillary action. If the metal is not hot enough, reheat it with the torch as necessary. Allow the solder to cool and set-up for 60 seconds and then wipe the joint clean with a shop towel. Any remaining excess solder may be removed with a wire brush.

The threaded copper NPT to pipe slip fitting is then attached to the vacuum shut-off valve using Teflon thread sealing tape to insure a gas-tight seal.

Table 4.1 Tools and Supplies Required for Sweating Joints in Copper Pipe

 

Item Description Quantity Copper Pipe 1 ea  3/4″ x 27.9 cm Pipe cutter 1 ea Pipe cleaner & de-burrer 1 ea Solder paste 1 tube, 3 ounces Solder Silver solder (non rosin core) Mapp gas or propane gas torch 1 ea Gloves 1 pair, close-fitting work gloves Teflon plumber’s sealing tape 1 roll

 

Figure 4.1: A section of copper pipe is sweat-soldered into the female end of a brass NPT connector which is then screw threaded into a ball type shut off valve using Teflon pipe joint sealing tape.

 

 

The valve and pipe assembly are then attached to the evacuation port cover plate by drilling a hole just large enough to admit the copper pipe in the center of the 41.9 cm diameter cover plate. It is important that the hole be a tight fit to the valve and pipe assembly so that the pipe can be securely cemented into place without any possibility of leaks (there must be a gas-tight seal). The copper pipe is prepared for cementing into place by sanding with fine grit sand paper, after which it is degreased using acetone and a clean rag (or lint-less disposable shop towel). The end of the pipe to be attached to the evacuation port cover is then painted with Special Blend MFR-10 lb laminating resin (low volatile organ compound, mixed 100 to1 with methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) peroxide (supplied by Michigan Fiberglass Sales, St. Claire Shores, MI)  and the pipe is inserted into the previously drilled hole. Additional coats of laminating resin and glass mat, as needed, are used to secure the evacuation pipe in place, with care being taken to ensure that the pipe opening remains clean and unobstructed by resin. Each coat of applied resin is allowed to fully cure before the next coat is applied.

Figure 4.2: Top: the evacuation port cover plate with the stub of copper pipe to which the vacuum valve will be attached already in position. Bottom: schematic of the evacuation port, vacuum valve and T assembly housing the thermocouple vacuum gauge.

The back of evacuation port cover plate and the tip of the copper evacuation pipe assembly is then prepared for bonding to the flange of the evacuation port by being sanded with fine grit sandpaper. Once the plate has been “roughed-up” so that the adhesive epoxy will adhere, it is blown clean of particulates with a jet of compressed air, and then wiped with a clean rag dampened with acetone. Seven 6”x6” squares of cotton batting for filtration are painted with special blend MFR-10 lb laminating resin, low V.O.C. mixed  100/1 with MEK Peroxide (both from Michigan Fiber Glass Sales, St. Claire Shores) for hardening and adhesion.

Figure 4.3: Cotton batting filter pads are shown being cemented in place on back of evacuation port cover plate.

Figure 4.4.: The edges of the cotton bats are saturated with adhesive resin and smoothed onto the back of evacuation port cover plate.

The neoprene rubber gaskets that were between the evacuation port cover plates and the evacuation port flanges during shipment from Almax are used as templates for cutting the 3/4 ounce chopped strand FG-03438 fiberglass cloth rings.

Figure 4.5: The rubber sealing gaskets used to protect the annulus from the ingress of dirt and moisture during transport of the cryostat from the manufacturer are used as templates for cutting rings of fiberglass cloth which will act as the permanent sealing gasket.

Figure 4.6: It is important to wear respiratory protection whenever working with or around fiberglass. N-95 masks are suitable for such work, whereas a full-face N-100 respirator is required for work where perlite dust is being generated.

 

The fiberglass cloth rings are then applied to the cryostat evacuation plate flange using the same laminating resin that was used to adhere the cotton filter pads.

Figure 4.7: This illustrates proper preparation for cementing the fiberglass cloth rings to the evacuation port plate flange. Note the presence of a piece of protective (black) plastic to prevent damage or marring of the surface of the cryostat with the resin being used to cement the rings in place.

Figure 4.8: Household fiberglass building insulation (Owens-Corning) is used to plug the opening of the evacuation port. This prevents the perlite from migrating into the vacuum line, and it also serves as a coarse pre-filter for the larger particles of perlite dust, preventing them from entering the vacuum pumps.

Owens-Corning fiberglass “wool”  building insulating is packed against the perlite to prevent the perlite from plugging the filter.  The edges are then painted with laminating resin to facilitate adherence of the fiberglass cloth rings.

Figure 4.9: The edges of the evacuation port flange are carefully painted with resin to insure adhesion of the fiberglass cloth rings and to facilitate a thorough seal when the port cover is applied and clamped in place for final bonding to the flange.

 

 4.10: A small paint application roller is used to evenly apply (and assure saturation of) the fiberglass cloth rings to the flange.

A roller applicator is used to apply more laminating resin to the fiberglass cloth  rings. Three fiberglass “cloth” rings are applied in this manner to each cryostat. [The non-disposable parts of the roller may be cleaned up with acetone after use.] Once preparation of the fiberglass cloth rings is completed, the back surface of the evacuation port cover plate is painted with resin, taking care not to contaminate the cotton batting filters.

Figure 4.11: After the prep of the filter is completed and the final coat of adhesive has been applied, the back of the evacuation port cover plate is carefully and completely painted with adhesive resin taking care not to get resin on the cotton filter pads.

Figure 4.12: The evacuation port cover is then attached to the flange and held in place tightly with 4 equidistantly spaced C-clamps which are left in place until the resin has dried and fully hardened (~72 hours under normal working conditions).

The evacuation port cover with its integral filter (i.e., glued-on assembly of 3 cotton bats) is then clamped onto the flange opening and held in position for the adhesive resin to set up and cure.

5.0 Initial (rough) evacuation of the cryostat

 Initial evacuation of the cryostat is undertaken using the Alcatel ACP-15 roughing pump to a stable vacuum of ~ 500 torr. The Welch 1376C-03,DUOSEAL®, two-stage, belt drive high vacuum pump. must not be used for initial evacuation of the cryostat.  Failure to pre-evacuate the cryostat using a roughing pump will result in contamination of the oil in the two-stage pump with water and can damage the pump mechanism. Additionally, two-stage vacuum pumps are not designed to pump high density atmospheric gas – they are to be used only as “polishing” pumps to  harden and subsequently maintain the vacuum to ~ 1.0 torr.

Figure 5.1: Initial evacuation of the perlite filled annulus is accomplished using the Alcatel roughing pump. An inexpensive Bourdon tube vacuum  gauge (VG350-14CBM) is interposed in the vacuum line (mounted on a 3/4″ copper T-connector) to monitor the progress of the initial pump-out.

Figure 5.2: Once a vacuum of ~ 1.0 torr is achieved, the vacuum valve is closed, the roughing pump is removed, and the 2-stage vacuum pump is connected to the annulus. For this preliminary hardening of the vacuum a thermocouple vacuum gauge is used and is placed near the pump, for convenience.

 6.0 Preparing the base of the cryostat prior to erection upright.

A five foot diameter circle of 3/4″ plywood is used to seal and secure the bottom of the cryostat. The plywood circle has three 5″diameter holes cut in it, arranged as shown in Figure 6.1, to allow for 2-part  urethane foam resin to be poured into the space between the plywood circles and the bottom of the cryostat. Once the urethane resin foams, expands and sets, it serves to stabilize and reinforce the plywood so the bottom of the cryostat and ensure that  it is well supported and stable on the floor when the unit is finally filled with liquid nitrogen.

Figure 6.1:Circles of 3/4″ plywood are cut so as to fit into the opening of the base of the cryostat’s outer cylinder. Three 5″ diameter holes, spaced equidistant from each other are cut into the plywood to allow for filling of the space between the plywood discs and the bottom of the cryostat with urethane foam. The discs are placed with the holes at the top of cryostat base so that the urethane resin-activator mixture does not leak out onto the floor during loading into the base of the cryostat.

 Figure 6.2: The plywood disc is initially held in place with duct tape until it can be firmly anchored with steel tube stock or metal bars to prevent it from being displaced by the expanding urethane foam.

The plywood disc is initially secured to the bottom of the cryostat with duct tape and then clamped firmly into place using rigid steel tube stock or metal bars and heavy-duty C-clamps, as shown in Figures 6.2 and 6.6

The  space between the plywood disc and the bottom of the cryostat can now be filled with supporting, rigid, closed-cell urethane foam. The foam used for this is MF-1002 1.2 lb density urethane foam (from Michigan Fiberglass Sales). The foam is prepared from a two component kit consisting of  urethane resin (part-A) and activator (Part-B) which are mixed in equal parts using a wooden paint mixing-type stick in disposable 2-gallon paper pails. The resin, activator, paper pails and wooden mixing paddle are included with each MF-1002  kit.

Figure 6.3: The two (A&B) components of the urethane foam are mixed in disposable paper pails using a wooden mixing paddle (also disposable). The foaming reaction begins almost immediately and is well underway within a minute.

Figure 6.4: Foaming action of the combined resin and activator less than a minute after being combined and thoroughly mixed in the mixing-dispensing pail.

Once the components are mixed, the activated urethane resin will expand to ten times its starting volume and will subsequently harden into dense foam. The foaming action begins within 60 seconds of the start of mixing of the resin and activator, so it is necessary to quickly pour the mixture into the holes in the plywood. The activated urethane resin is poured into the headspace using disposable funnels made from lightweight aluminum sheet metal (~22 gauge). The resulting urethane foam requires approximately an hour to set and  is fully cured in 24 hours.

Figure 6.5: Lightweight flexible aluminum sheet metal is formed into half-cones which are taped in place to form funnels. These disposable funnels are then used to facilitate pouring the mixture into the 5″ holes cut into the plywood discs, starting with the lower holes and finishing up with the top holes.

 

Figure 6.6:Once the urethane foam has filled the headspace and has stopped exhausting from the filling holes, the holes are covered with squares of plywood which are screwed into place. The plywood disc should then be primed and painted with a waterproof oil-based, or two-part epoxy concrete floor paint, to prevent subsequent water damage due to efflorescence from the concrete slab, or insect (termite) infestation.

Four to six 2-gallon pails of the activated resin mixture is typically enough for each cryostat. [ The density of the foam may be altered by changing the ratio of resin and activator: more part-B than part-A results in a larger final volume of foam with less density.]

The cryostat is now ready for movement to the patient storage area of the facility for erection to a vertical position, fire-retardant coating, final hardware outfitting, painting and placement into service.

_______________________________________________________

By  Mike Darwin

SPECIMEN PROPOSED INTERNATIONAL PURCHASE CONTRACT AS OF 2009

TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF CONTRACT FOR PURCHASE OF ALMAX LIQUID NITROGEN CRYOPATIENT STORAGE CRYOSTAT

These Conditions may only be varied with the written agreement of the Purchaser.. No terms or conditions put forward at any time by the Supplier (Almax)  shall form any part of the Contract unless specifically agreed in writing by the Purchaser.

1. DEFINITIONS

In these Conditions:

“Purchaser” means the Purchaser, a limited liability company located at OOO “Purchaser_______________________________________________, hereinafter referred to as ‘Purchaser.’

“Supplier” means Almax Products, 363 Coldbrook Road, P.O. Box 441, Bearsville, NY, United States of America, 12409, Phone: 845-679-4615, FAX: 845-679-8620   email: Almax441@aol.com hereinafter referred to as ‘Almax.’

“Goods” means any goods as are to be supplied to Purchaser by Almax Products (or by any of the Supplier’s subcontractors) pursuant to or in connection with this Contract, as detailed in the Purchase Order attached to this contract and in Section 2.4, below.

“Contract” means the Contract between Purchaser and the Almax consisting of the Purchase Order, these conditions and any other documents (or parts thereof) specified in the Purchase Order and in A.

“Purchase Order” means the document setting out Purchaser’ requirements for the Contract.

2. GOODS

2.1       The Goods shall be to the reasonable satisfaction of Purchaser and shall conform in all respects with any particulars specified in the Contract and in any variations thereto.

2.2       The Goods shall conform in all respects with the requirements of any statutes, orders, regulations or bye-laws from time to time in force.

2.3       The Goods shall be fit and sufficient for the purpose for which such Goods are ordinarily used and for any particular purpose by Almax in the supply of the Goods and the execution of the Contract.

2.4       Specifically, Almax agrees to provide the following goods and services:

2.4.1   A double walled, cylindrical, composite vinyl ester resin fiberglass, perlite and vacuum (10-3 mm Hg) insulated cryogenic liquid nitrogen biological specimen storage container (cryostat) based on the engineering drawings provided by Almax Products and attached to this Contract as Exhibit A. The inner vessel diameter is 1220 mm, and the inner vessel height is 2440 mm (tolerance ± 2 mm). The outer vessel diameter is 1830 mm, and the outer vessel height 2740 mm (without stand). With the stand the overall height of the cryostat is 3200 mm. The empty weight with the stand attached is 1814 kg. The inner cylinder wall thickness is a minimum of 12.7 thick. The approximate working volume for liquid nitrogen of the cryostat is 2142 liters.

All drawings are included in the price. Almax will send detailed drawings, blueprints and photos as requested, upon signing the contract.

Materials of construction for the cryostat are as follows:

Outer cylinder or shell: H-992  MEKP/COBALT STRUCT

Inner cylinder or shell:  H-992 MEKP/COBALT STRUCT

Heads:  H-992 MEKP/COBALT STRUCT

Flanges: H-992 MEKP/COBALT STRUCT

Nozzle necks: H-992  MEKP/COBALT STRUCT

External nuts/bolts: CS

CS Gaskets: 11 mm Neoprene rubber

Corrosion Barrier: 1-ply “C” backed W 2-ply chopped strand fiberglass laminate

Exterior: Five (5) coats of FireFree FF88 tumescent fire protective coating as supplied by FIREFREE Coatings, Inc., 580 Irwin Street, Suite 1, San Rafael, CA 94901, Phone: (888) 990-3388, USA and applied per the manufacturer’s specifications and instructions attached as Exhibit B to this Contract.

Design Pressure: (4′) + 15 PSIG, (6′) – 15 PSIG

Design standards: ASTM-D3299

2.4.2   A stand for the cryostat is provided equipped with 4 casters capable of easily rolling over finished concrete floors with the unit fully loaded with liquid nitrogen at  a gross weight of 2,430 kg including the cryostat stand, neck-plug and cover.

2.4.3   Cryostat will be loaded with perlite prior to shipment. Additional perlite will be furnished for “top off” as per 2.4.4, below. Price of cryostat inclusive of above: $25,000 with $3,000 discount on a second cryostat if ordered with 90 days of the receipt of the unit specified in this Contract.

2.4.4   Fourteen (14) bags Grefco Minerals HP-500 grade perlite as supplied Noble Perlite, 312 W Chestnut, Noble, OK 73068-8545 USA, phone:405-872-5660.@ $ 30 a bag (30 pound bag) plus a $15.00 pallet charge, price: $435.00

2.4.5   One (1) each resin kit to include: 2 ea: 10″ wide x 50 yards rolls of 1.5 oz FRP mat and 1 each 5-gallon drum of 411-400 resin, price: $545.00

2.4.6   Annular space vacuum burst disc to be provided by Purchaser or Purchaser’ designated vendor FOB to Almax.( Rupture disc set pressure: 15 psi rupture temp: ambient (-20 to +45 deg C) normal operating pressure: 2.5 x 10-5 torr (high vacuum) on one side, ambient pressure (1 atmosphere) Almax installation charge: $175.00

2.4.7   One (1) each extra 41.9 cm diameter evacuation port/filter cover plate to be supplied by Almax, price $245.00

2.4.8   One (1) each 41.9 cm diameter evacuation port/filter cover plate fully outfitted with 7-ply cotton filter and 3/4″ copper pipe and fittings, including Mueller brand 3/4″ ball brass ball valve (Home Depot part #06P115) sealed and assembled per the procedure detailed in Exhibit C, attached to this Contract, price included in base cryostat price.

2.4.9   Five (5) each: steel clevises for lifting cryostat capable of bearing a weight of at least 1,000 kg each, price: $148.50.

2.5.0   One (1) each R-06413-30 Tygon® vacuum tubing, 3/8″ID x 7/8″OD, 10 ft/pack, price $115.00

2.5.1   One (1) each 10 ft length Fischer Scientific red rubber vacuum tubing 9.5mm ID 22.3mm OD, 3/8″ ID 7/8″ OD., price: $69.90

2.5.2   Almax agrees to work with the subcontractor selected for the cryostat cover, Beck Industries of 24454 Sorrentino Court, Clinton Township,MI, 48035, USA, Phone number (586)790-4060, to ensure that the stainless steel cover fabricated by Beck Industries fits the cryostat supplied by Almax. In the event the cover does not fit due to incorrect specification supplied to Beck Industries by Almax, then Almax shall be fully liable for the replacement cost of said cover.

3. PRICE

3.1       The price of the Goods shall be as stated in the Contract and no increase will be accepted by Purchaser unless agreed by them in writing before the execution of the Contract.

3.2       Unless otherwise agreed in writing by Purchaser, Almax shall render a separate invoice in respect of each consignment delivered under the Contract. Payment shall be due 30 days after receipt of the Goods or the correct invoice therefore, whichever is the later.

3.3       Taxes, where applicable, shall be shown separately on all invoices as a strictly net extra charge.

3.4       The cost of palletizing and preparing the cryostat for shipment and for shipping the container is to be paid by Almax. Shall employ a licensed and bonded forwarder to handle the entire shipping procedure to include arranging the pick-up and delivery of Goods, filing and completing all required paperwork, and clearing of  the Goods through customs.

3.5       The total price is $27,733.34

3.6       The price shall be paid as follows:

•           1/3rd deposit upon initiation of this Contract and issuance of the Purchase Order

•           1/3rd upon completion of unit/system and or photo or inspection at factory

•           Final 1/3rd prior to ship and confirming positive test results done by Purchaser at its facility in Moscow, Russian federation

•           Prices are FOB shipping point.

•           All payments are in US dollars.

4. DELIVERY

4.1       The Goods shall be delivered to Purchaser, _________________________. Any access to premises and any labor and equipment that may be provided by Purchaser in connection with delivery shall be provided without acceptance by the Purchaser of any liability whatsoever and Almax shall indemnify Purchaser in respect of any actions, suits, claims, demands, losses, charges, costs and expenses which the Purchaser may suffer or incur as a result of or in connection with any damage or injury (whether fatal or otherwise) occurring in the course of delivery or installation to the extent that any such damage or injury is attributable to any act or omission of the Supplier or any of his subcontractors.

4.2       Where any access to the premises is necessary in connection with delivery or installation, the Supplier and his sub contractors shall at all times comply with the reasonable requirements of the Purchaser’ staff.

4.3       The time of delivery shall be of the essence and failure to deliver within eighty (80) days shall enable Purchaser (at its option) to release itself from any obligation to accept and pay for the Goods and/or to cancel all or part of the Contract therefore, in either case without prejudice to its other rights and remedies.

5. PROPERTY AND RISK

5.1       Property and risk in the Goods shall without prejudice to any of the rights or remedies of the Purchaser (including Purchaser’ rights and remedies under condition 7 hereof) pass to Almax at the time of delivery.

5.2       The property in the Goods shall pass to Purchaser upon payment for the Goods unless delivery of the Goods is made prior to payment, when it shall pass to Purchaser once the Goods have been delivered.

5.3       Any Goods for which the Supplier has received payment but which have not been delivered will, for the avoidance of doubt, remain the exclusive property of Purchaser and may be removed at any time by Purchaser or its representatives from wherever they are stored.

6. DAMAGE IN TRANSIT

6.1       On dispatch of any consignment of the Goods Almax shall send to Purchaser at the address for delivery of the Goods an advice note specifying the means of transport, the place and the date of dispatch, the number of packages and their weight and volume. Almax  shall free of charge and as quickly as possible either repair or replace (as the Purchaser  shall elect) such of the Goods as may either be damaged in transit or having been placed in transit fail to be delivered to Purchaser provided that: (a) in the case of damage to such goods in transit the purchaser shall within 30 days of delivery give notice to Purchaser that the Goods have been damaged, (b) in the case of non delivery Purchaser shall (provided that Almax has been advised of the dispatch of the Goods) within 10 days of the notified date of delivery give notice to the Supplier that the Goods have not been delivered.

7. INSPECTION, REJECTION AND GUARANTEE

7.1       Almax Products guarantees and warrants that the cryostat will maintain a vacuum of 10-3 mm Hg between inner and outer containers with no more than 24 hours of pumping (using a standard laboratory vacuum pump with a minimum of 20 LPM of free air displacement and capable of delivering an ultimate vacuum of 1 x10 -4) per 30 day period. Almax further warrants that the cryostat (inner and outer containers and joint  at the neck-tube) will retain their structural integrity without leaking or cracking at a pressure difference of one atmosphere while storing a full load of liquid nitrogen (at least 2142 liters) and that the cryostat will conform to the description and drawings attached hereto as exhibit

7.2       Almax shall permit Purchaser or his authorized representatives to make any inspections or tests they may reasonably require and Almax shall afford all reasonable facilities and assistance free of charge at his premises. No failure to make complaint at the time of such inspection or tests and no approval given during or after such tests or inspections shall constitute a waiver by Purchaser’ of any rights or remedies in respect of the Goods.

7.3       Purchaser may by written notice to Almax reject any of the Goods which fail to meet the requirements specified herein. Such notice shall be given within a reasonable time after delivery to Purchaser of Goods concerned. If Purchaser shall reject any of the Goods pursuant to this Condition, Purchaser shall be entitled (without prejudice to his other rights and remedies) either (a) to have the Goods concerned as quickly as possible either repaired by Almax or (as the Purchaser shall elect) replaced by Almax with Goods which comply in all respects with the requirements specified herein, or (b) to obtain a refund from Almax in respect of the Goods concerned with no charge, either in materials or labor, to Purchaser.

7.3       The guarantee period applicable to the cryostat shall be 3 years from putting into service or 3 years from delivery, whichever shall be the shorter (subject to any alternative guarantee arrangements agreed in writing between Purchaser and Almax). If Purchaser shall within such guarantee period, or within 30 days thereafter, give notice in writing to Almax of any defect in any of the Goods as may have arisen during such guarantee period under proper and normal use Almax shall (without prejudice to any other rights and remedies which Purchaser may have) as quickly as possible remedy such defects (whether by repair or replacement as the Purchaser may elect) without cost to Purchaser.

7.4       Prior to shipment of the cryostat Almax shall perform a successful vacuum confirmation and spark test and provide detailed results of these test to Purchaser.

7.5       Any Goods rejected or returned by Purchaser as described in paragraph 7.2 or 7.3 shall be returned to the Almax at Almax’s risk and expense.

8. LABELLING AND PACKAGING

8.1       The Goods shall be packed and marked in a proper manner and in accordance with the Purchaser’s instructions and any statutory requirements and any requirements of the carriers. In particular, the Goods shall be marked with the Purchase Order number, the net gross and tare weights, the name of the contents shall be clearly marked on each container and all containers of hazardous goods (and any documents relating thereto) shall bear prominent and adequate warnings. Almax shall indemnify Purchaser against all actions, suits, claims, demands, losses, charges, costs and expenses which Purchaser may suffer or incur as a result of, or in connection with, any breach of this Condition.

8.2       All packaging materials will be considered nonrefundable and will be destroyed unless Almax’s advice note states that such materials will be charged for unless returned. The Purchaser accepts no liability in respect of the non-arrival at the Supplier’s premises of empty packages returned by Purchaser unless Almax shall within 10 days of receiving notice from the Purchaser that the packages have been dispatched notify Purchaser of such non-arrival.

8.3       Almax agrees to accept for placement in the sea-land container transporting the Goods to Purchaser at ____________________________ such other accessory items and equipment as will reasonably fit in the container upon the mutual agreement of both parties at no additional charge to Purchaser.

9.0 CORRUPT GIFTS OR PAYMENTS

Almax shall not offer or give or agree to give, to any employee or representative of Purchaser any gift or consideration of any kind as an inducement or reward for doing or refraining from doing or having done or refrained from doing, any act in relation to the obtaining or execution of this or any other contract with Almax or showing or refraining from showing favor or disfavor to any person in relation to this or any such contract.

10. PATENTS AND INFORMATION

10.1    It shall be a condition of the Contract that the Goods are made up in accordance with designs furnished by Almax that none of the Goods will infringe any patent, trademark, registered design, copyright or other right in the nature of industrial property of any third party and Almax shall indemnify Purchaser against all actions, suits, claims, demands, losses, charges, costs and expenses which Purchaser may suffer or incur as a result of or in connection with any breach of this Condition.

10.2    All rights (including ownership and copyright) in any specifications, instructions, plans, drawings, patterns, models, designs or other materials (a) furnished to or made available to Almax Purchaser pursuant to the Contract, shall remain vested solely in Purchaser (b) prepared by or for Almax for use, or intended use, in relation to the performance of this Contract are hereby assigned to and shall be vested in the Purchaser solely and (without prejudice to condition 14.2). Almax shall not, and shall procure that his servants and agents shall not (except to the extent necessary for the implementation of the Contract) without the prior written consent of Purchaser, use or disclose any such specifications, instructions, plans, drawings, patterns, models, designs or other materials as aforesaid, or any other information (whether or not relevant to the Contract) which Purchaser may obtain pursuant to or by reason of this Contract, except information which is in the public domain, otherwise than by reason of a breach of this provision, and in particular (but without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing) Almax shall not refer to Purchaser or the Contract in any advertisement without Purchaser’ prior written agreement.

10.3    The provision of this Condition 10 shall apply during the continuance of this Contract and after its termination, howsoever arising.

11. HEALTH AND SAFETY

Almax represents and warrants to Purchaser that Purchaser has satisfied itself that all necessary tests and examinations have been made or will be made prior to delivery of the Goods to ensure that the Goods are designed and made so as to be safe and without risk to the health and safety of persons using the same, and that Almax has made available Purchaser adequate information about the use for which the Goods have been designed and which have been tested and about any Conditions necessary to ensure that when put to use the Goods will be safe and without risk to health. Almax shall indemnify Purchaser against all actions, suits, claims, demands, losses, charges, costs and expenses which Purchaser may suffer or incur as a result of or in connection with any breach of this Condition.

12. INDEMNITY AND INSURANCE

12.1    Without prejudice to any rights or remedies of Purchaser’ (including Purchaser’ rights and remedies under condition 7 hereof) Almax shall indemnify Purchaser, its agents and employees against all actions, suits, claims, demands, losses, charges, costs and expenses which Purchaser may suffer or incur as a result of or in connection with any damage to property or in respect of any injury (whether fatal or otherwise) to any person which may result directly or indirectly from any defect in the Goods or the negligent or wrongful act or omission of the Almax.

12.2    Purchaser shall have in force and shall require any sub-contractor of Almax to have in force; (a) employer’s liability insurance in accordance with any legal requirements for the time being in force, and (b) public liability insurance for such sum and range of cover as Almax deems to be appropriate but covering at least all matters which are the subject of indemnities or compensation obligations under these Conditions in the sum of not less than $1,000,000 for any one incident and unlimited in total, unless otherwise agreed by Almax in writing.

12.3    The policy or policies of insurance referred to in paragraph 12.2 shall be shown to Purchaser whenever it requests, together with satisfactory evidence of payment of premiums.

13. CONFIDENTIALITY

13.1    Almax’s shall take all reasonable steps to ensure that all persons engaged in any work in connection with this Contract have notice that the statutory provisions apply to them and will continue so to apply after the expiry or termination of this Contract.

13.2    Almax shall keep secret and not disclose and shall procure that his employees shall keep secret and do not disclose any information of a confidential nature obtained by him by reason of the Contract except information which is in the public domain otherwise than by reason of a breach of this Provision.

13.3    The provisions of paragraphs 14.1 and 14.2 shall apply during the continuance of this Contract and after its termination howsoever arising.

14. TERMINATION

14.1    Almax shall notify Purchaser in writing immediately upon the occurrence of any of the following events:

a) where Almax is an individual and if a petition is presented for Almax’s bankruptcy or the sequestration of its estate or a criminal bankruptcy order is made against Almax  or Almax is apparently insolvent or Almax  makes any conveyance or assignation for the benefit of creditors, or if an administrator is appointed to manage his affairs; or b) where Almax is not an individual but is a firm; or a number of persons acting together in any capacity, if any event in (a) or (c) of this Condition occurs in respect of any partner in the firm or any of those persons or a petition is presented for Almax to be wound up as an unincorporated company; or c) where the Almax is a company, if the company passes a resolution for a winding-up or dissolution (otherwise than for the purposes of and followed by an amalgamation or reconstruction) or the court makes an administration order or a winding-up order, or the company makes a composition or arrangement with its creditors, or an administrative receiver, receiver or manager is appointed by a creditor or by the court, or possession is taken of any of its property under the terms of a floating charge.

14.2    On the occurrence of any of the events described in paragraph 15.1, or if Almax shall have committed a material breach of this contract and (if such breach is capable of remedy) shall have failed to remedy such breach within 30 days of being required by Purchaser in writing to do so, or, where Almax is an individual, if he shall die or be adjudged incapable of managing his affairs by determination of a court of law, Purchaser shall be entitled to terminate this Contract by notice to Almax with immediate effect. Thereupon, without prejudice to another of its rights, Purchaser may itself complete the Services or have them completed by a third party using for that purpose (making a fair and proper allowance therefore in any payment subsequently made to Almax) all materials, plant and equipment on the Premises belonging to the Almax, and the Purchaser shall not be liable to make any further payment to Almax until the Services have been completed in accordance with the requirements of this Contract, and shall be entitled to deduct from any amount due to the Almax the costs thereof incurred by Purchaser (including the Purchaser’ own costs). If the total cost to the Purchaser exceeds the amount (if any) due to Almax, the difference shall be recoverable by the Purchaser from Almax.

14.3    In addition to his rights of termination under paragraph Purchaser shall be entitled to terminate this contract by giving to Almax  not less than 30 days’ notice to that effect. In the event of such termination Almax shall, if required to do so by Purchaser , prepare and submit to  Purchaser a report on the work done prior to the termination and making such recommendations as may be based on the work done prior to termination.

14.4    Termination under paragraphs 14.2 or 14.3 shall not prejudice or affect any right of action or remedy which shall have accrued or shall thereupon accrue to Purchaser and shall not affect the continued operation of Conditions 10 and 14.

15. RECOVERY OF SUMS DUE

Wherever under the Contract any sum of money is recoverable from or payable by Almax, that sum may be deducted from any sum then due, or which at any later time may become due, to the Supplier under this Contract or under any other agreement or contract with Purchaser

16. ASSIGNATION AND SUB CONTRACTING

16.1    Almax shall not assign or sub-contract any portion of the Contract without the prior written consent of Purchaser. Sub-contracting any part of the Contract shall not relieve Almax of any obligation or duty attributable to it under the Contract or these conditions.

16.2    Where Purchaser has consented to the placing of subcontracts, copies of each sub-contract shall be sent by the Supplier to the Purchaser immediately it is issued.

16.3    Where Almax enters a sub-contract with a supplier or contractor for the purpose of performing the Contract, Almax shall cause a term to be included in such sub-contract which requires payment to be made to the supplier or contractor within a specified period not exceeding 30 days from receipt of a valid invoice as defined by the sub-contract terms.

17. FORCE MAJEURE

17.1    For the purposes of this Contract the expression “force majeure” shall mean any cause affecting the performance by a party of its obligations arising from acts, events, omissions, happenings or non happenings beyond its reasonable control including (but without limiting the generality thereof) governmental regulations, fire, flood, or any disaster or an industrial dispute affecting a third party for which a substitute third party is not reasonably available. In the case of Almax, each cause will only be considered force majeure if it is not attributable to the willful act, neglect or failure to take reasonable precautions of Almax, its agents or employees.

17.2    Neither party shall, in any circumstances, be liable to the other for any loss of any kind whatsoever including, but not limited to, any damages or abatement of charges whether directly or indirectly caused to or incurred by the other party by reason of any failure or delay in the performance of its obligations hereunder which is due to force majeure.

17.3    If either of the parties shall become aware of circumstances of force majeure which give rise to or which are likely to give rise to any such failure or delay on its part, it shall forthwith notify the other by the most expeditious method then available and shall inform the other of the period which it is estimated that such failure or delay shall continue.

17.4    It is expressly agreed that any failure by Almax to perform or any delay by Almax in performing its obligations under this Contract which results from any failure or delay in the performance of its obligations by any person, firm or company with which Almax shall have entered into any contract, supply arrangement or sub-contract or otherwise shall be regarded as a failure or delay due to force majeure only in the event that such person, firm or company shall itself be prevented from or delayed in complying with its obligations under such contract, supply arrangement, subcontract or otherwise as a result of circumstances or force majeure.

17.5    For the avoidance of doubt, it is hereby expressly declared that the only events which shall afford relief from liability for failure or delay shall be any event qualifying for force majeure hereunder

18. REFERENCES

Almax shall provide details of two reference bodies including names and telephone numbers of contacts, for whom similar work has been, or is currently, undertaken.

19. WAIVER

19.1    The failure of either party to insist upon strict performance of any provision of the Contract, or the failure of either party to exercise any right or remedy to which it is entitled under the Contract, shall not constitute a waiver thereof and shall not cause a diminution of the obligations established by the agreement.

19.2    A waiver of any default shall not constitute a waiver of any subsequent default.

19.3    No waiver of any of the provisions of the Contract shall be effective unless it is expressly stated to be a waiver and communicated to the other party in writing.

20. SEVERABILITY

If any provision of the Contract is held invalid, illegal or unenforceable for any reason by any court of competent jurisdiction, such provision shall be severed and the remainder of the provisions hereof shall continue in full force and effect as if the Contract had been executed with the invalid, illegal or unenforceable provision eliminated. In the event of a holding of invalidity so fundamental as to prevent the accomplishment of the purpose of the agreement, the Purchaser and Almax shall immediately commence good faith negotiations to remedy such invalidity.

21. NOTICES

Any notice given under or pursuant to the Contract may be sent by hand or by post or by registered post or by the recorded delivery service or transmitted by telex, telemessage, facsimile transmission or other means of telecommunication resulting in the receipt of a written communication in permanent form and if so sent or transmitted to the address of the party shown in the Purchase Order, or to such other address as the party may by notice to the other have substituted therefore, shall be deemed effectively given on the day when in the ordinary course of the means of transmission it would first be received by the addressee in normal business hours.

22. ARBITRATION

Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to this Contract, or the breach thereof shall be settled by binding arbitration in accordance with the Commercial Arbitration Rules of the American Arbitration Association, and judgment upon the award entered by the arbitrator(s) may be entered and enforced by any court having jurisdiction thereof. Additionally, the parties intend that the arbitrators have power to issue any provisional relief appropriate to the circumstances, including but not limited to: temporary restraining orders, injunctions and attachments. The parties intend that this agreement to arbitrate be irrevocable and agree that either party is entitled to injunctive relief to quash litigation by the other part which breaches the agreement

21. HEADINGS

The headings to Conditions shall not affect their interpretation.

22. GOVERNING LAW

The Contract shall be governed by and construed in accordance with United States of America law and Almax hereby irrevocably submits to the jurisdiction of the US courts. The submission to such jurisdiction shall not (and shall not be construed so as to) limit the right of the Purchaser to take proceedings against Almax  in any other court of competent jurisdiction, nor shall the taking of proceedings in any one or more jurisdictions preclude the taking of proceedings in any other jurisdiction, whether concurrently or not.

 

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the parties hereto have executed this

Agreement as of the date and year indicated below.

______Month _______Day ___________Year

Purchaser

By : _____________________________

XXXXX X. XXXXXXX,

Title: General Director, “Purchaser”

Date__________________________

Almax Products, Inc.

_________________________________

Bruce Alter

Title: President, Chief Executive Officer

Date____________________________

—————————————————————————————–

PURCHASE ORDER

Almax Products agrees to supply

At this time Price for one (1) complete unit, per contract to include:

double wall fiberglass liquid nitrogen storage system complete with required load of perlite, fill/load service fitting installed and 4 extra bags of perlite for “toping off” system…

Lifting lugs (3) placed per details

Stand:

PRICE $ 25,000 USD

2 plus units:

@ $ 22,000  Each  USD

***IF A SECOND UNIT IS PURCHASED WITHIN 3 MONTHS OF THE FIRST P.O. THEN DEDUCT $ 3,000 USD…

***AGAIN, THESE PRICES WILL CHANGE IF RESIN IS NOT AVAILABLE AT OLD PRICE..

_____________________________________________________________________________________

 

Options:

55 gallons Hetron 922 Resin** @ $ 595  USD

** Catalyst can not be shipped due to regulations.

This can be obtained via web site or local hardware or DIY store.

Extra Perlite: 14 bags Grefco Minerals HP-500 grade   @ $ 30 a bag ( 30 pound ) plus a $ 15 pallet charge

5-layers of Fire Flame 88 equal  Flame Control 20-20 A @ $ 1320  USD

1-Extra sealing Filter Plate Fiberglass @ $ 540 USD

1-Welch Model # 1376C-03  Vacuum pump wired for 220V, 50Hz 1 phase with Schuko Plug @ $ 4480 USD

5-clevises for lifting with a capacity 2,000 kg @ $ 29.70 each USD

 

 

 

Clockwise: Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Kirsten Wiig, Christopher Walken, with Errol Morris in the center.

By Mike Darwin

Sometime in the next few months, it seems likely that Director Errol Morris’ take on Bob Nelson’s account of the cryopreservation of James H. Bedford, We Froze the First Man (fulltext pdf), retitled Freezing People is Easy, will go into production. The title is at once sarcastic, brilliant, inspired and accurate, because, as readers of Chronosphere already (should) know, freezing people is anything but easy. While there have been many movies made that touch on cryonics, use it as a plot element, or even rely on it  as a major enabler of the story, this will be the first film about cryonics. It is, of course, quiet possible for a film about  cryonics to be good – even great – and still be bad for it. This film offers substantial possibilities for both of those elements to be in play.

Perhaps the most important thing to beware of is that the script is not based solely upon Nelson’s heavily (positively) biased and often inaccurate memoir, but also upon the searingly acerbic episode of Ira Glass‘ popular Public Radio International (PRI) radio show, This American Life (full program at this link). What’s more, Glass is also a co-producer of Freezing People is Easy. It is possible to listen to the This American Life episode, entitled Mistakes Were Made, and forget the context in which it was aired on PRI – as part of a series of pieces on scumbags in public life who refuse to take responsibility for their bad acts.To know that this so, one has only to read this excerpt from the review of that broadcast by cryonicist, author and social psychologist Ronald G. Havelock, published in the May, 2009 issue of  Long Life, the news organ of the Cryonics Institute/Immortalist Society:

“First of all, I think we should absolve Nelson of blame for what happened. This poor
man was struggling with a task which was way over his head. He deceived himself, as
others have before and since, with the notion that many people would flock to cryonics
once they realized that it had a real possibility of working. he greatly underestimated
the length of time it would take for cryonics to become popular. We are still
waiting. More importantly, he also greatly underestimated the basic requirements for
making it work, the first of which is to have an adequately funded and competently
staffed facility with the ability to maintain itself over long periods. I think he gambled
that, something like that mythical ball field, if he started it and had real capsules
filled with liquid nitrogen, they would come. Those who actually came, including the
famous Dr. Bedford, came with hope and desperation in their hearts but they came
empty-handed. How could they imagine that this service would be free? Simply put,
they took advantage of this man, and he returned the favor by promising much more
than he could possibly deliver.” [1]

It is also possible to forget that, first and foremost, Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Guardian, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara: center photo in montage above) is a documentarian with a clever, often indirect, but always ruthless approach to making film show the truth and expose hypocrisy.

Zach Hem authored the script and while his narrative talent might be questioned on the basis of his botched effort in Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, he also wrote the script for the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction, which is a surprisingly intellectual meditation on life, death and the power of the mundane to make life worth living. Helm’s take on Nelson and Chatsworth should be especially interesting, because his perspective in Stranger Than Fiction and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium suggest he may favor the intrinsic value of the individual life; the issue which makes or breaks a viable approach to a “cryonics friendly” perspective in any work of art.

 Somehow I doubt it though, and the casting of Paul Rudd (Clueless, Anchorman, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Dinner for Schmucks) to play Nelson does nothing to reassure me. It has also been reported that Owen Wilson and Christopher Walken are on-board – one wonders what their respective roles will be; Norman Bedford and Robert Prehoda?  Or perhaps Walken will play Bob Ettinger? If, as rumored, Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig also joins the cast, will she play Nelson’s then wife, or the author of We Froze the First Man, Sandra Stanley, to whom Nelson was confiding the details of Dr. Bedford’s cryopreservation and with whom he was reportedly having an affair at that time?

The book is rich in characters familiar to those with any history in cryonics: Saul Kent, Curtis Henderson, Bob Ettinger, Robert Prehoda, Dick Jones (aka Dick Clair), Dante Brunol, MD, Stella Gramer…and many more. It should be a fascinating exercise to see which, if any, of these supporting characters makes it into the film by name, or in a clearly recognizable way.

But will Freezing People is Easy get made, and if so, what will be its fate? Cryonics has been around for 50 years and attracting international attention for almost all of them. Thus, it should come as no surprise that there were two previous efforts to make movies where cryonics was the subject of the film, most notably, a film of Norman Spinrad’s darkly comedic and politically (left) loaded science fiction novel, Bug Jack Barron. For over 30 years, there were regular reports from the Hollywood intelligentsia (an oxymoron, I know) that Bug Jack Barron was to be made by Universal Studios, directed by Costa-Gavras, with the script written by Harlan Ellison. The story of why Bug Jack Barron never made it onto film has the same bizarre, cursed and insane quality to it as does the history of cryonics itself.

The story of why Thomas Berger’s (Little Big Man) novel Vital Parts never made it into production is even more tragic,  and the links with cryonics go deeper. The first go-round at Vital Parts the movie, was in 1971, with a when director Hal Ashby (Being There ,  Harold and Maude,  The Landlord and Let’s Spend the Night Together ), with Walter Matthau was slotted to play the principal character in the novel, Carlo Rheinhart (a long running character of Berger’s whose middle aged make over in this novel was reportedly inspired by Bob Nelson), the loser in the midst of a mid-life crisis who is seduced into involvement in the bizarre world of cryonics by the seemingly transtemporal Bob Sweet – a man from Rheinhart’s distant past who seemingly knows too much to be merely human.

Berger had visited the Cryonics Society of new York (CSNY) repeatedly to gather background information for his book, so it is no accident that a Mr. Softy ice cream  truck features prominently in the novel; Gillian Cummings (aka Beverly Greenberg), who was later to die tragically in the CSNY facility, drove a Jolly Tim’s ice cream truck to help pay the liquid nitrogen bills for her father, Herman Cummings (aka Herman Greenberg). And it is also probably no accident that the creepily mysterious bob Sweet shares the same last name with on the most prominent cryonics patients of the time; the liberal (“negro rights”) activist Marie Phelps Sweet, later lost at Chatsworth, along with the other Cryonics Society of California (CSC’s) patients who were also in the custody of Bob Nelson. Matthau’s son, and the apple of his eye, Charlie Matthau, was later to become a signed up, bracelet wearing cryonicist who was condemned to watch his father die by inches while doing everything in his power to both keep him alive (he kept portable defibrillators in his father’s home, car and work places) and unsuccessfully persuade him to make cryonics arrangements.

Left to Right: Walter Matthau, Charlie Matthau and Hal Ashby.

The next go round at turning Vital Parts into a movie was in 1987, with the irascible, reclusive and heavily drug abusing Ashby trying to make a comeback from his exile to television with another important, quirky film. This time Danny deVito had been recruited to play Rheinhart, and, in an inspired bit of casting, Gene Hackman had agreed to play Bob Sweet. During a meeting between Ashby and the producer Jerome Hellman to discuss finalization of the production of Vital Parts, Hellman became aware of what appeared to be “traveling phlebitis” in Ashby and shortly thereafter actor Warren Beatty became aware of Ashby’s symptoms, ultimately resulting in Ashby’s seeing an oncologist who diagnosed him with pancreatic cancer, from which he subsequently died in December of 1988.

The two other films which feature cryonics as cryonics (e.g., medical time travel) are screenwriter Mark Andrus’ and director W.D. Richter‘s  1991 Late For Dinner; a treacley, train wreck of a film which reviewer Owen Gleiberman aptly described as a film “so meticulously scrubbed of what we generally think of as entertainment value that the result is mostly a quirky, dawdling snooze,” and the truly, irredeemably awful 1985 film Stitches, starring the late Eddie Albert, Parker Stevenson, Geoffrey Lewis, and Brian Tochi. Oh yes, and I almost forgot to include the garbled and largely incoherent Vanilla Sky (starring Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz) by the otherwise brilliant director Cameron Crowe, of which Stephan Zacharek of Salon.com said: “Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It’s a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right….But the disheartening truth is that we can see Crowe taking all the right steps, the most Crowe-like steps, as he mounts a spectacle that overshoots boldness and ambition and idiosyncrasy and heads right for arrogance and pretension — and those last two are traits I never would have thought we’d have to ascribe to Crowe.” While I am no superstitious mystic, the ill fated bad luck attached to cryonics – in an out of film – makes me want to shout out a warning to all and sundry involved with Freezing People Is Easy, to “Run as far and as fast from the project as you can for both your personal and professional lives.“

Any way you look at it, the film promises to be a deep wallow in black comedy. That’s normally a genre I really appreciate, and often enjoy. This time, I’m not so sure. Robert F. Nelson (aka Frank Bucelli) is a bad man – a man who did enormous damage to cryonics, but more importantly, to the lives of the many people he defrauded and destroyed; not the least of which are the 10 cryonics patients whose loss were a direct or indirect result of his actions.  It is probably too much to hope that Helm’s and Morris’ effort could be as dark and well executed a black comedy as Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things, which Roger Ebert aptly summed up as not “a bad movie, just a reprehensible one. It presents as comedy things that are not amusing. If you think this movie is funny, that tells me things about you I don’t want to know.” That’s the movie that should be made about Nelson. The question is, should it be a movie, let alone the first movie, made about cryonics?

Footnote

[1] This statement is so wrongheadedly stupid on so many levels, it is hard to know where to begin in critiquing it. A good place to start would be by noting that Dr. Bedford hardly came “empty handed” to Nelson, or to cryonics. Instead, he came bearing $250,000 1967 US dollars ($1,714,832.83 in 2012 dollars) all of which was subsequently spent on his cryopreservation. It should also be pointed out that the majority of the families of the patients lost at Chatsworth, and at the Cryonic Interment facility on the East Coast (as well as some of the patients themselves), paid exactly what Nelson asked of them at the time: $10,000 to $15,000 in ~1973 US dollars, or $53,099.29 in 2012 dollars; substantially more than what the Cryonics Institute now charges for whole body cryopreservation today. Finally, this statement neglects the finding of the civil court that found Nelson guilty of fraud and for “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

When you give the answer to a question over and over again and it is not understood, perhaps not even perceived, and the question gets asked repeatedly, you know you’ve got a communication problem. I suppose the classic example is a friend, a family member or colleague who keep asking the same question repeatedly, but either can’t hear, or don’t want to hear the answer.

It’s a frustrating situation, because it raises another question that often has no answer; “How do I parse my answer or give the information in a way that will be understood?” The cliché answer to that question, and one my mother frequently gave is, “That’s something they’re just going to have to figure out for themselves; you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been doing an experiment. I confess that I’m surprised that the first part of that experiment has worked as well as it has. What the experiment consisted of was asking a cross section of people in cryonics to whom I have personal access (correspondents, queries for information, old cryonics friends…) to take something I call “The Cryonics Intelligence Test.” My expectation was that few, if any, would participate. I was thus gratified when 10 people out of 12 agreed to take the test. Of those, 9 completed it. The results were fascinating – at least to me – and they convinced me that, as a prelude to discharging another obligation I have relating to Chronosphere, that I should offer the test to all and sundry who are willing to take it.

You needn’t be concerned about  your “performance”; this is an instance where anonymity on Chronosphere is permitted. If you like, you can submit your answers using a pseudononymous name and email address. If someone out there knows how to format the test to Survey Monkey, or some similar anonymous data gathering engine, please contact me and I’ll work with you to set it up (contact me at m2darwin@aol.com).

The test itself consists to of two parts: a simple introductory letter with the two test questions and a file of resource materials which must be evaluated in order to answer the two questions. The answers will necessarily be essay style and expositive.

You can submit your answers to either the Comments section of this post (here on Chronosphere), or to me directly at m2darwin@aol.com. Obviously, if you submit to the Comments section, your answers will be published. If you submit to me, they will be held in confidence, unless permission is granted from you, in writing, to post them. Privately submitted answers, and the fact that the individual participated in the Test will not be circulated, either privately or publicly, without the prior written consent of the participant, although statistical data obtained as a result will be used at my discretion.

I will be commenting on the issues raised by the answers to the test extensively in the near future.

The test is below, and should you choose to take it, I offer both my thanks and good luck.

  Cryonics Intelligence Test

Dear ______,

If you can figure out the scientific take home message for cryonics in what is to follow, you will have demonstrated extraordinary insight into “thinking in a cryonics-medical context.”

You will also have the tool to be able to understand why I believe that cryonics must, on a purely scientific-medical basis, be pursued in a fundamentally different way, both biomedically and socially.

The Test: The test resource materials are available for download at http://www.yousendit.com/download/M3BsQndOR0ZsMHhjR05Vag , you will find a number of full text peer reviewed scientific papers. In addition, you will be sent several cryopatient case Hxs. Together, these resources contain data which should give a reasonably intelligent person with a properly prepared mind a fundamentally new insight into a major, indeed overwhelming flaw in how cryonics has been, and currently is practiced.

Your task is to:

a) identify the problem(s)

b) identify one or more possible solutions

You have 5 days to complete this task. Your response should be in the form of a succinct statement of the problem, and an itemization, and if you like, a discussion of possible solutions.

Thanks for your patience and cooperation.

Mike Darwin

 

 

By introduction, I am Dave Crippen, MD, Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Neurological Surgery at the UPMC Medical Center in Pittsburgh. Some of you may know me. I’m the moderator for 18 years duration of CCM-L, the International Critical Care Internet Group (~1000 members).  If you ask almost anyone in the in critical care medicine global village, they probably know me, or know of me.

 

I have followed the saga of Mike Darwin beginning back in the day of Usenet where Mike maintained a cryonics list. I came upon this list while “surfing the ‘net” and found his editorials interesting. I wrote him an idle question and he wrote back, initiating a sixteen-year roller coaster friendship.

Now in 2012, I hope to make some observations from one who knows him intimately (not too intimately).

18 or so years ago, none of us could have predicted where the miracle of the Internet would take us.  Would any of you have believed ago that many global health care providers would have embraced a hard-core cryonicist as an authoritative voice in medicine?  By “embraced”, I mean they all hang on his every word.  Back in about 2000 they all took up a collection to purchase him a new computer to keep him on-line. Small denomination money came in from all over the world.

Because of that miracle, Mike has most assuredly entered the arena of “legitimate” medicine more than any of you can imagine.  Certainly more than anyone in the self-limiting field of cryonics.  His writings enjoy wide readership among working physicians and health care providers. He has contributed to several articles in a world-class clinical journal “Critical Care” with a journal “impact rating” (lots of clinicians read it) near the top three Critical Care journals in the world.

But it wasn’t an easy task.  As most of you know, Mike is a very unusual person on almost every level. I’ve known him for a very long time and I’ve seen the patterns emerge and descend in his life and I think I know him better than most, if for no other reason than he doesn’t keep friends long.  Like many of the rest of us, Mike has very potent talents combined with demons that keep those talents from wide expression.

Mike’s passion is what most physicians consider the pseudoscience of Cryonics, and he lives for little else. It is his passion and his obsession. At some point years ago, he reached a point in his life where his demons fully expressed themselves and he burned many bridges to those doing administrative and research Cryonics. To this day, those factions exclude him from those activities.

So for a few years around the turn of the century, he didn’t have lot to do with his time. Mike decided that he liked conversing with the members of CCM-L because it allowed him to pontificate about science and other things in life, and all always enjoyed his missives. As time progressed, he got more involved in Cryonics again, and slowly withdrew from CCM-L.

As a practical matter, his baseline default is to be culturally and socially isolated and he seems to be at home there. He works hard to maintain that isolation. He has an extensive history of effectively burning bridges over issues that could probably be resolved with even rudimentary diplomacy; an alien concept to him.

Over the years I have tried to understand why former friends and colleagues so relentlessly exclude him.  Conversations with some of them wondering why his strengths cannot be mined as his (perceived) shortcomings managed. The universal answer is that his (perceived) shortcomings have the capability of being so malignant that they are either afraid of him or any potential benefit isn’t worth the effort.

But Mike is an authentic Genius in Aspic (my term).  He chose to pursue a course of science that: 1. Limited his colleagues to a relatively small culturally isolated group, and 2.  Almost completely excludes him from many of the goals in life he would like to have in a perfect world. He is a genius trapped in Aspic and the “Richest Man in Bogota” ( H.G Wells).  His formidable talents are trapped.  Had he chosen to pursue righteous scientific disciplines, he would be mentioned in the same breath as Feynman.

My role in all this was to try to keep him visible to (for want of a better term) “traditional” science by keeping doors open for him as a writer in the literature of and speaker at meetings attended by scientists of the real world that righteously excludes Cryonics. To some degree, I have been successful in that endeavor, but it hasn’t been easy. Mike’s boundless energy, enthusiasm and confidence is pretty much limited to Cryonics, for which he writes extensive blogs and argues endlessly with critics thereof. His interest in mainstream science has dwindled, and that includes the mainstream scientists of CCM-L, for which he hasn’t much time or energy or interest in being a part of.

I’ve seen this coming for a while which is Why I chose to compile a history of his contributions to CCM-L for posterity. His response was that this volume was a waste of time and of no value to anyone, which is completely in character. I find it curious that this volume is the only book ever written about him that is complimentary.  He rejected all this and quickly evolved attempts to divert or stop altogether any involvement in these projects.

OK, he can be hard to get along with and he can be abrasive and irritating and emotional. We deal with these types with surgeons all the time, but if their benefit exceeds their detriment, we simply manage them more effectively.  Darwin is an authentic genius with a passionate and encyclopedic knowledge of medicine and science. There isn’t enough gold in Ft. Knox to buy that. It’s a gift from God.

I will tell you that I continue to use my influence to get him further inducted into the global medical community because I sincerely believe he is a valuable resource. He’s honest to a fault, beyond intelligent, has impeccable scientific integrity, works hard and has uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts to an eclectic audience. For those reasons, he has the potential to get the ear of clinical medicine.  He has great potential as a writer for medical subjects, and speaker at international meeting. Mike sitting in a 2 X 4 shack in Arizona spending his days grooming the surrounding desert is a waste when his knowledge base and communication abilities have such potential benefit to science.

There is a window of opportunity here to re-think former misadventures in terms of the current needs of science and medicine. The world evolves and we all need to evolve with it, or we’ll become extinct. Mike needs to evolve to something other than lethal or self-limiting iterations.  Who knows, he may be the ticket infiltrating the legitimacy of Cryonics in the global medical community. Weirder things have happened. We, in clinical medicine, learned long ago that the mission transcends personal problems. We learn to manage them better to facilitate a greater good.

*If you are British, yes, he is related to that Crippen, and no, I’m not related to that Darwin.

 

 

THE CONSEQUENCES OF FAILURE

SLIDE 137

Alcor had achieved an exponential rate of membership growth by the time Jerry Leaf was cryopreserved. Since that time, there has been only modest growth of membership and in fact, in the years since 2007, membership growth has flattened.

SLIDE 138

The growth in the patient population has been similarly stunted with almost all increase being due to the cryopreservation of members, rather than at-need cases. The time when Alcor selected the highest quality at-need cases and delivered state-of-the-art care to those patients has now become a dim memory and, with one exception, the staff at Alcor has no experience with cases where immediate CPS, followed by prompt extracorporeal support, proceeded smoothly and without incident.

While it is easy to see the risks associated with at-need cases, particularly in the absence of careful vetting and strict adherence to predetermined (and protective) acceptance criteria, it is not so easy to see the even greater cost of foregoing them.

The quality of any complex procedure, medical or otherwise, is directly dependent upon the amount of experience staff have in doing it. Even highly trained and skilled personnel benefit from the experience gained by doing large numbers of cases. In fact, in medicine it has been a consistent finding that outcome in terms of morbidity and mortality in areas as diverse as open heart surgery, radiation oncology and HIV management improves steadily as a function of the number of procedures performed, or cases handled annually. The benefit of an increased case load is even more pronounced when the transition is made from a few cases per year to a few dozen per year, or more.

Absent a case load that keeps the cryopreservation team continuously busy, the only way to maintain even a semblance of competence is to carry out a program of animal research using a survival model that employs the same equipment, facilities and procedures that are employed in human cryopreservation cases. Absent this kind of day-in, day-out experience, it becomes impossible for staff to remember (or even know) where supplies are, how to calibrate, operate and troubleshoot equipment, and just as importantly, how to work together cohesively as a team.

SLIDE 139

The person leading that team and directing that research must be a competent and motivated „mountain climber‟ – otherwise the work will be a meaningless and gruesome exercise that achieves nothing but the demoralization of those participating in it.

 

SLIDE 139

Medical malpractice is a pretty common thing and as we have seen iatrogenic deaths are commonplace. That this is so, given the extensive training and mentoring physicians receive, should give us pause for thought. To become a General Practitioner in the UK or the US requires 12 years of postgraduate training. That is a huge commitment in terms of both time and money and it requires substantial motivation over and above the likely financial returns (in the UK or the US). This level of training and commitment act as a human filter – effectively removing many people who are not suited to the task of being physicians either as a result of „defects‟ in temperament or due to lack of intellect or skill.

However, this slide is misleading in that most of the real filtration has already taken place before a student enters medical school, or perhaps I should say more appropriately, is accepted to medical school. Roughly 95% of those who score well on the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) or the UKCAT (UK Clinical Aptitude Test) and are subsequently admitted to medical school will finish it! Most of the separation of the wheat from the chaff takes place as a result of the MCAT/UKCAT scores and during the admissions process when the complete academic and behavioral profile of the candidate is evaluated.

SLIDE 140

What this means is that in practice only about 0.01% of the ~12% of graduating secondary school students who say they want to become physicians actually do so. Yet despite this high degree of selection and the extensive and costly training that follows, iatrogenesis is still a leading cause of death in both the UK and the US!

The implications of this for cryonics are pretty straightforward, although still hard to comprehend. In fact, most cryonicists simply refuse to believe what is on the previous slide and the 5 slides that follow.

SLIDE 141

All of these errors have occurred in the period of 1991 thru the present. Some, such as reversing the arterial and venous bypass lines or pouring sterile perfusate into a feces soiled container before perfusing it through a patient defy understanding even when it is accepted that they actually took place.

SLIDE 142

As we’ve just seen, as is the case with iatrogenic errors in medicine, mistakes happen even when practitioners are highly trained and carefully vetted. Without exception all of the well respected and highly qualified critical care physicians and surgeons whom I’ve known well have told me that in the course of their careers they made errors that cost patients their lives or resulted in serious and lasting morbidity. Indeed, I’ve made mistakes in caring for patients – the most serious of which involved errors in judgment that resulted in extra minutes of exposure to warm ischemia. In hindsight, both of these errors were easily avoidable by the simple expedient of insisting that reliable, trained cryonics organization personnel stay with the patient continuously after the start of Standby – regardless of how uncomfortable or problematic that might be for the family so long as our ability to provide Standby for the patient was not compromised.

SLIDE 143

The issue here is not that errors were made, but rather the underlying reasons, the frequency and the repetitiveness of the errors. Because of the enormous surface tension of water any air bubbles present in blood that are larger in diameter than the capillaries act as obstructions, or emboli. Thus, any air introduced into the arterial circulation of a patient receiving extracorporeal treatment will result in blockage or embolization of the arteries supplying the tissues with blood. Depending upon the amount of air and the area it embolizes, “pumping air” will result in either serious injury or death.

There is an old saying amongst perfusionists: “There are two types of perfusionists: those who have pumped air (into a patient‟s circulatory system), and those who will.” Particularly in the days before microbubble detectors with automatic interrupts to shut down flow and clamp the line supplying blood to the patient were developed and put into universal use, it was typically only a matter of time until any given perfusionist made a mistake that resulted in air being perfused into a patient. This might happen once in the course of a 20 year career during which time thousands of patients would have been perfused for an aggregate of tens of thousands of clinical hours.

SLIDE 144

It should also be understood that this aphorism includes incidents where introduction of air into the patient‟s circulatory system was arguably unavoidable. Here I‟d like to speak from personal experience. For about 8 years I was a hemodialysis technician both in the outpatient and acute care (ITU) setting. During that time I „pumped air‟ once. In this photo you see me doing hemodialysis in 1978 in Indianapolis, IN.

Microbubble detection equipment was available at that time, but not used at the institution where I worked. If you look at the schematic of the extracorporeal circuit used in dialysis you‟ll note that the leg of tubing connecting the patient‟s arm (artery) to the pump will be under negative pressure with respect to the atmosphere. In order for ~250 ml/min of blood to be withdrawn from the small caliber radial artery it is necessary to “suck” on the vessel. A consequence of this is that if there are any holes – even ones too tiny to see – in the tubing between the artery and the pump raceway air will enter. The dialyzer is inverted to serve as a bubble trap and there is yet another bubble trap before the blood is returned to the patient.

However, in the event the breach in the tubing is very small the resulting bubbles are microscopic and remain suspended in the blood even as it passes through the dialyzer and the bubble trap. Fortunately, in dialysis, we are returning blood to the venous circulation as opposed to the arterial circulation and that means that we have another safety feature – an air bubble filter in the form of the lungs. In the case I‟m discussing here there was a manufacturing defect in the arterial tubing set such that where the blood conducting tubing from the patient was joined to the pump raceway there was an incomplete seal. While the defect was invisible to the eye it was of sufficient size to allow the creation of a steady stream of microbubbles.

Approximately an hour into the treatment my patient began to complain of back pain and shortly thereafter shortness of breath (SOB). I rechecked the composition of the dialysate (blood washing solution) and checked the integrity of the circuit and found nothing amiss. However, as the back pain and SOB increased in severity I became extremely concerned. I realized that these were symptoms of micro-air embolism and I got a flashlight and carefully examined the tubing carrying blood back to the patient.

There was a barely visible fine whitish line at the top of some of the tubing. This was an accumulation of microbubbles that had risen to the top of the blood flowing through the tubing. The patient was immediately removed from the machine and recovered uneventfully and with no lasting harm.

Interestingly, it took the deaths of two patients from air embolism at that institution before ultrasonic air bubble detectors were purchased and added to the dialysis machines.

SLIDE 145

At left is the Travenol RSP dialysis machine that I began my career with and at right is a contemporary, highly automated hemodialysis machine. There are bubble traps on both the arterial and venous legs of the circuit and, of course, sophisticated ultrasonic microbubble detectors which will shut down the pumps and clamp the lines in the event air in the blood is detected. Additionally, these machines mix the dialysate in real time and ensure it is safe, calculate and implement water removal from the patient and otherwise carry out a myriad of tasks we never dreamed would be possible to „automate‟ in 1978.

Most of these advances came at the price of injury or death to patients who were treated with earlier generations of less sophisticated equipment. In 1978 universal chronic hemodialysis was only 6 years old in the US and I worked in one of the pioneering units making the treatment available to hundreds of patients who previously would have died. While some of the errors and shortcomings of that program were avoidable – many were not – they came as part of the price tag for implementing a then new and demanding technology on a scale previously undreamed of.

SLIDE 146

I understand errors and I understand their increased frequency and probable severity when implementing any complicated new technology. However, that is not the kind of failure I‟m talking about here in cryonics. The errors listed in these slides are not occasional but rather have become routine. Many are so base that they rise to the level of uncaring negligence.

Consider, for example, the case where a patient frozen to dry ice temperature was removed from dry ice storage and packed in water ice for air shipment to the cryonics facility because of airline restrictions on the amount of dry ice that could be used to refrigerate the patient in transit. Obviously, the patient thawed out before arriving at the cryonics facility and had to be refrozen. That means that tissue ultrastructure that was compressed and fragmented by initial straight freezing (but ostensibly locked in place by ice) would be returned to an aqueous and diffusible state – indeed a state characterized by intense fluid turbulence and “stirring” as concentrated pools of electrolyte diffused and re-equilibrated with the large masses of nearly pure water created by melting ice crystals!

When “average” cryonicists with no technical background or training are told that an “experienced” cryopreservation team leader took a patient out of dry ice and packed him in water ice they are uniformly appalled. Most cannot even understand how or why such a decision would be made by anyone, let alone a highly experienced cryonics caregiver. The same is true of many of the other errors just discussed.

But what is perhaps most shocking and seemingly inexplicable is the complete absence of any visible emotional reaction to these errors. When I discovered microbubbles in the venous return line of the patient I was dialyzing I had an immediate and strong reaction of fear and anxiety bordering on terror. Was the patient going to be all right? Had any permanent harm been done? Next came a wave of dread and worry that I had not delivered good care. Was there something I could have or should have done to prevent the injury to the patient? Could I have detected the problem sooner and acted to prevent some of the pain the patient experienced? With years of experience in medicine I’ve come to understand that this kind of emotional response is both normal and healthy. Strong feelings of discomfort in such situations are an essential part of not repeating the error. This empathetic and self critical emotional response to iatrogenic events seems to be completely absent in an increasing number of cryonics caregivers.

THE POD PEOPLE

SLIDE 147

As it turns out, I was not alone in having noticed this phenomenon. Aschwin de Wolf, then employed at Suspended Animation, Inc. in South Florida, was observing the same kind of behavior in a range of settings within the cryonics community. We both found it puzzling to the point of incomprehensibility that people who were delivering care to cryonics patients, in some cases medically trained professionals, could be so indifferent to errors that would, in a conventional medical setting, be career ending or at very least result in costly and traumatic litigation.

This phenomenon was most pronounced in non-cryonicist medical and technical professionals who had been hired to deliver care to cryonics patients. Superficially these individuals seemed to be competent and caring, but a closer examination revealed this to be anything but the case. This was especially surprising to me because I had hired and worked with non-cryonicist medical professionals in the past and had never encountered behavior even remotely like that which Aschwin first identified. In my correspondence with Aschwin I likened such individuals to the “Pod People” in the novel and films Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

SLIDE 148

While we speculated as to the possible motivation such people might have in becoming and remaining involved in delivering cryonics services (financial gain aside) we did not have to speculate as to what constituted a “Pod Person” in cryonics.

SLIDE 149

I want to credit Aschwin with first articulating most of these characteristics. He put into words things which I had observed myself, but had not fully understood and he identified a number of traits which I had not (at that time) observed myself. Since he was a cryonicist and he was in intimate contact with a culture of non-cryonicist “employee professionals” he was uniquely situated to observe and understand what was going on.

SLIDE 150

What he discovered was that people who are not cryonicists, and who are not selected and mentored to hold the values of people who are, behaved with uncaring indifference towards their patients. Not infrequently they actually held cryonicists in contempt considering them “chumps” or “fools” who are tilting at windmills while being consumed with an unnatural and cowardly fear of death.

It seems likely that these people are, in effect, recruited from and filtered out of the larger population of caring and empathetic health care providers and professionals. Absent a cohesive program of instruction and mentoring coupled with meaningful and results-driven day to day activity it would be difficult for anyone, cryonicist

or not, to remain engaged and committed to such a job. More to the point, few if any truly competent and caring persons (professional or otherwise) would accept and remain in a job where there was no “real” day-to-day work, no leadership, and no sense of mission or accomplishment. The kind of people who stay in such a position – especially given their active contempt for their employers and patients – are not psychologically healthy and are certainly lacking not only in compassion, but in work ethic.

Such “sterile” cryonics service operations led by people who lack vision, passion and commitment to cryonics themselves become highly efficient recruitment facilities for individuals who are, at best, borderline sociopaths.

SLIDE 151

In considering the history of cryonics it became all too apparent that the existence of Pod People was by no means a new phenomenon. As many people in cryonics over the years have observed, cryonics is a magnet for frauds and charlatans. Important extensions to that observation are that the majority of these individuals are also sociopaths and that they are routinely placed in positions of power by cryonicists and cryonics organizations.

This was true in 1966 when Robert Nelson arrived on scene and it has remained the case over the course of the subsequent four decades. The Olga Visser episode is only the most public of many, many other situations where deeply disturbed or frankly sociopathic individuals have been placed in positions of power and authority in cryonics, often within weeks or months of arriving on the scene!

Charles Platt chronicled the Visser saga very well:

http://www.cryocare.org/index.cgi?subdir=ccrpt10&url=visser.html, and I excerpt it only briefly here:

“On October 9th, 1995, readers of the sci.cryonics Usenet news group found themselves confronted with a strange report quoted from the South African Sunday Times. Supposedly, a 37-year-old cardiovascular perfusionist named Olga Visser had developed a new cryoprotectant that would enable human hearts to be frozen with virtually no damage, opening up exciting possibilities in the field of transplants, where organs usually have to be utilized within several hours after removal.

According to the Times Ms. Visser had started her cryoprotectant research two years previously when she helped to establish a heart-valve organ bank. Since valves can be cryopreserved using DMSO, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t be able to freeze whole hearts as well. Undeterred by her lack of knowledge of cryobiology, she consulted some experts, read some journals, and formulated her own cryoprotectant.

When she applied it to a pig heart, she reported “no damage” after the heart was rewarmed from liquid nitrogen. She described similar success with human heart tissue. Finally, “a rat heart was frozen, unfrozen, and then warmed by a special process–and started beating.

On September 8th an astonishing press release was issued jointly by Robert Ettinger, president of The Cryonics Institute (CI), and Steve Bridge, president of Alcor Foundation. Apparently Ettinger had been in discreet contact with Ms. Visser earlier in the year, had satisfied himself that her work was genuine, and then contacted Alcor.

The two groups formed an unprecedented secret alliance, contributing money to Ms. Visser’s research and ultimately flying her to Alcor’s facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. From August 30th through September 4th she demonstrated her experiment to Ettinger, Bridge, and several officers and directors of Alcor. She also gave CI and Alcor an exclusive license to use her present and future technology for cryonics applications.”

SLIDE 152

Ultimately, Visser was shown to be at best a misguided incompetent, and at worst a calculating con artist. When her „novel cryoprotectant‟ was put to an objective test at Alcor‟s facilities in February of 1997, it failed utterly to protect rat hearts against freezing. The net financial hit cryonics, including licensing fees paid to Visser, air fare, equipment purchases, and contributions to support her research was estimated by Alcor‟s then President Steve Bridge to be ~ $50K. Charles Platt sums it up aptly:

“Olga Visser’s brief passage through cryonics could still turn out to be a positive, salutary event if it reminds us to be more circumspect in the future. The next time a character out of a Heinlein novel turns up with a secret formula to fix our deepest fears, we may be a little less willing to pay cash for the recipe. We may even be a little more tolerant of the smart-asses who insist on reminding us that death is not an easy adversary, human biology is infernally delicate and difficult to preserve, and scientific rigor is a fundamental necessity, not a tiresome detail.”

SLIDE 153

Why this happens is not much of a mystery when it is examined in the context of other disciplines that command power over and control of peoples‟ lives. Medicine is not more overrun with psychopathic quacks than it is only because there is a profession of medicine, and there are also vast bodies of regulation and law with serious penalties attached, that govern its practice. Cryonics lacks all of these safeguards. Imagine, if you will, what the situation would be if such psychopaths were empowered to fly airplanes, captain ships, or design large, heavy structures such as multi-story buildings, bridges and dams? Indeed, when such people do succeed in occupying these positions disaster is the inevitable result.

Absent these controls, both internal and external, cryonics will continue to fall prey to quacks, frauds and most dangerously, sociopaths seeking positions of perceived psychological power and control with the bonus of being increasingly well paid for indefensibly careless and sloppy work.

SLIDE 154

Remember my example of repetitive iatrogenesis associated with ascites? Just a few weeks after I gave the first version of this lecture in 2008 it happened yet again, this time to cryonics pioneer (and my personal mentor), Curtis Henderson. See :

http://www.suspendedinc.com/cases/Stabilization%20and%20Transport%20Case%20Report%20CI95.pdf

and:

http://cryonics.org/reports/CI95.html.

I am a deeply committed and seasoned veteran of cryonics and I am telling you, without hesitation, that what happened to Curtis had a devastating impact on me. Anyone with medical sophistication who reads those two case reports will most likely just walk away and dismiss cryonics as perhaps an interesting idea with some potential – but clearly not one whose time has not yet come.

THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT

SLIDE 155

Finally, how do we explain the actions of people in cryonics who are sincere and committed cryonicists and yet who take on technical tasks that are beyond their knowledge and skill sets with terrible results? Much of what happened to Curtis Henderson, particularly with respect to the errors made which prevented him receiving effective cryoprotective perfusion, fall into this category.

I believe the explanation lies in something called the Dunning–Kruger Effect (DKE) The DKE was put forward in 1999 by Justin Kruger and David Dunning and it posits that unskilled people make poor decisions and reach

erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the meta-cognitive ability to realize their mistakes. Thus, the unskilled suffer from an illusion of superiority, rating their own abilities as above average and much higher than they actually are. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own abilities higher than more competent people.

SLIDE 156

It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence. Competent people often falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding and degree of skill or competence. A very simple and pithy way to sum up the DKE was put to me by a Russian cryonicist in an elevator at Birkbeck College: “We are so ignorant that we do not even know what we need to know, or what we don‟t know that we don‟t know – and that is a very dangerous situation indeed.”

SLIDE 157

The moment at which I first truly understood the role of the DKE in causing technical mayhem in cryonics was actually documented by a journalist doing a story on the Cryonics UK (CUK) group at one of their meetings, held in Brighton, in the fall of 2009. I had met the new leader of the group the year before, and was more than a little surprised to hear him dismiss the Alcor ATP in-field cardiopulmonary bypass system as being “simple to operate and something any mortician would be capable of immediately mastering.” When I incredulously asked if this young man had ever actually seen the ATP, he replied that he had and that it was “just a box with tubes going in and out of it.” I wasn’t the only one who was surprised at this assessment: there was a professional perfusionist in the room from a prestigious UK hospital, and he also (to put it mildly) took considerable issue with this assertion.

SLIDE 158

A year later I was having much the same discussion with what constituted virtually all of the technical people in the CUK group. After much heated and futile discussion, I proposed that rather than argue about it, they simply get the equipment and simulate putting a patient on bypass starting from the time pronouncement had occurred. At this point, I think it best to let the newspaper account pick up the narrative:

“Tim put any doubts to the back of his mind. He’s raring to go. “There’s a patient on the table dying. Hurry up, Darwin says.”

But, of course, the patient is imaginary. Tim takes the lead, explaining the ins and outs of the tubing to his less experienced fellow travellers. Meanwhile Mike Darwin watches, arms crossed reprovingly, his concern for the patient growing by the second.

“Right, I started timing you three minutes ago,” he says.

A good few minutes later Tim and his not-so-crack team are still working out where the red and blue bits plug into. “The only thing that goes wrong is if you switch it on without all the bits plugged in. It doesn’t like it and it has been known to go bang,” he says cheerily.

Darwin can’t contain himself. “If I had that kit here, I’d be scared shitless. Shitless. There are some critical things wrong with the setup of that circuit.” He tells the team they have made so many mistakes the patient would have suffered irreversible brain damage by now. Darwin suggests technology has regressed since he was in his cryonic prime 20 years ago.

But the water is pumping through the system, and Sinclair’s team are fully focused on saving their imaginary patient. Whatever Darwin tells them, they believe they are ahead of their time, not behind it.”

I will add one thing that the reporter didn‟t because he had left the room to photograph some of the other CUK members before he lost his light to the setting sun. And that is that the venous blood reservoir bag in the circuit of the ATP exploded due to a misplaced clamp. The reporter apparently missed the timid request made to the meeting‟s hostess, Sylvia Sinclair, for a mop and towels to clean up the water that was all over the kitchen.

While it is true that cryonicists often have no choice but to undertake to provide and deliver care for themselves, it is equally true that they should not attempt to do so in ways that make the situation worse for the patient than had they taken a simpler approach that was, in fact, within their ability to master.

I had spent most of that day at the meeting trying to convince the CUK group that rather than the ATP, what they really needed was to use a simple, inherently „safe‟ open circuit system open circuit system equipped with a microbubble detector and auto-line clamp, to start cryoprotective perfusion as soon as was logistically feasible and to follow that with cooling of the patient to dry ice.

My lack of success in persuading obviously sincere and concerned cryonicists to undertake a course of action that was at once simpler, easier, much less costly, and vastly more likely to benefit the patient speaks to the power of the DKE and to the over-optimism and lack of realism that is endemic to cryonicists, the same over-optimism and lack of realism that makes them easy prey for con men and sociopaths.

End of Inherent Failure Mechanisms and Risks and of Lecture 2

 

By Mike Darwin

CRYONICS’ THIRD ERA: 1981-1991

EVIDENCE-BASED, MEDICALLY- MODELED, RESEARCH- DRIVEN

SLIDE 119

In January of 1980 I had the good fortune to perform two human cryopreservations back-to-back with Jerry Leaf (then associated with Trans Time) in Southern California. Jerry and I quickly realized that we shared a common vision for cryonics. We undertook to establish that the use of best practice in relevant areas of medicine be applied to cryopreservation cases and we sought to validate and master each biomedical facet of cryonics stabilization and cryoprotective perfusion and cool down procedures.

SLIDE 120

We began a vigorous program of research to validate each step of the procedures we were applying to human patients, starting with cardiopulmonary support, blood washout and induction of ultraprofound hypothermia. We believed that by mastering these procedures and, where possible, mastering them reversibly (i.e., recovering the test animal alive and well) we would not only gain invaluable skills, but also uncover serious errors and shortcomings in our procedures – errors and shortcomings not possible to detect by armchair theorizing.

This proved to be the case in spades. It took many attempts before we could reliably recover dogs from 4-5 hours of asanguineous perfusion at 5oC. And it was to take the better part of a decade before we were able to recover dogs following ~16 minutes of global, normothermic ischemia. In fact, Jerry did not live to see this accomplished.

SLIDE 121

An unexpected result of this research work was that a core of highly skilled cryonics personnel was created. The complexity and long duration of the experiments forced people not only to hone their individual skills, but also to work together seamlessly as a team. Survival animal research also resulted in expanded documentation and training, as well as in the beginning of the establishment of an institutional culture of professionalism and competence.

SLIDE 122

Research was also undertaken to determine to what extent our protocols for cryoprotection and freezing were conferring protection and causing injury. This work definitively characterized the nature and extent of cryoinjury using 4 M glycerol as the CPA and uncovered the problem of fracturing in tissues and organs cooled to below the glass transition point [1] Tg of the cryoprotective solution: http:

//wp.me/p1sGcr-l7

http://wp.me/p1sGcr-lH

SLIDE 123

High quality promotional literature, educational materials, and scientific publications were consistently produced and the use of the words death and dead in reference to cryonics patients was abandoned, correcting the semantic imprecision that had so handicapped cryonics since its inception. And something else began happen that was quite remarkable. Despite the fact that Alcor was very low profile with respect to the media, we began to grow. In fact, cryonics began to grow again after over a decade of near total stagnation that was the legacy of the devastating hit its reputation had taken after Chatsworth.

SLIDE 124

Because of our professional and scientific approach to cryonics we attracted the interest of important scientists and theorists far removed from our own discipline. In March of 1984 a manuscript was sent to my attention at Alcor entitled, The Future by Design. That manuscript was to become the book the The Engines of Creation and the man who sent it to me and to others at Alcor for comment and review was its author, Eric Drexler.

SLIDE 125

The ideas of nanotechnological repair and rejuvenation, and of the information-theoretic criterion for death, were introduced and vigorously promoted via both in-house and media venues.

SLIDE 126

Immediate post-arrest, in-home stabilization and cooling of patients, coupled with pharmaco-protection of the brain against ischemia-reperfusion injury, followed by blood washout in a mortuary and rapid transport to CPA perfusion facilities became routine.

SLIDE 127

The feedback we received from ongoing systematic and broad bandwidth data collection yielded new insights, allowing us to vastly improve the quality of care we were delivering. By the simple expedient of monitoring patients‟ temperature descents we were able to more than triple the rate at which patients were being externally cooled during Stabilization and Transport.

SLIDE 128

In-home extracorporeal support followed by blood washout (with external CPS as a bridge to cardiopulmonary bypass) became routine in hospice cases. Along with this technology sophisticated mechanical CPS (active compression-decompression high impulse CPR (ACD-HI-CPR) coupled with cold fluid peritoneal lavage greatly improved the post arrest patient cooling rate and reduced ischemic injury.

SLIDE 129

By continuing to collect data and do research we were able to further increase patient cooling rates to ~0.5◦C min for the first 30 min of CPS!

SLIDE 130

We also discovered that we could detect when cerebral perfusion failed during CPS by continuously recording temperature descent data from multiple sites in the patient. The abrupt leveling-off of the tympanic cooling curve shown in this slide indicates the point where cerebral perfusion during closed chest (mechanical) CPS was lost. The blue arrow indicates the point where effective cerebral perfusion (and thus cooling) was re-established after the start of cardiopulmonary bypass.

DISASTER STRIKES

SLIDE 131

And then, on 10 July, 1991 Jerry Leaf experienced sudden cardiac arrest and was cryopreserved. Jerry was the lynchpin that held the diverse interests and personalities together that comprised Alcor.

One unappreciated consequence of his sudden and unexpected cryopreservation was the impact the absence of his quiet authority and enormously stabilizing influence would have on the various strong personalities in Alcor, and on their diverse interests and objectives towards Alcor in particular, and on cryonics as a whole. Additionally, Jerry‟s control over the medical and surgical service delivery component to Alcor, via his Cryovita Laboratories, Inc., provided a powerful balancing check on internal power politics.

Thus, Jerry‟s absence critically destabilized the leadership dynamics of the organization.

SLIDE 132

The final blow to the third era of cryonics was the coming of the “tyranny” of Nanotechnology (NT) and the Singularity about which I‟ll have more to say later in these lectures.

SLIDE 133

How and why did this happen? How did Alcor go from in-home cardiopulmonary bypass to a state where patients count themselves lucky if they even receive prompt heart-lung resuscitator (HLR) support and get packed in ice?

SLIDE 134

It happened because small organizations are shaped by the personalities of the 2 or 3 people who found and operate them and because creation of a viable institutional culture requires at least one generation (~21 years) of stable, uninterrupted mentoring, and a solid base of practitioners (6-12 people).

If death or loss of emerging professionals destroys the developing culture of professionalism, then the whole system collapses, and usually any effort to recover lost quality and competence must originate outside the failed system (and away from the hard core of the well entrenched institutional cultural paradigm that will have developed in its absence).

SLIDE 135

It is important to understand that the practice of a scientific and medical model based approach to cryonics cannot be achieved by the simple expedient of finding and recruiting medical professionals or medically qualified technical specialists such as paramedics, perfusionists, physicians or nurses to “do the job” of delivering cryonics patient care. Few of you here today would presume that a General Practitioner could competently perform as a neurosurgeon – or even that a psychiatrist could pinch hit for one – even though both of latter are specialists in treating the same organ – the brain.

While the professional practice of cryonics requires a deep and interdisciplinary knowledge of medicine that is not enough. It requires much additional knowledge and training which is not available at university, nor unfortunately, in any structured form at this time. Perhaps more importantly it requires the skill-set and mindset of a highly motivated researcher knowledgeable about cryonics and capable of both asking and answering the right questions. These kinds of individuals are almost always produced by an institutional culture that mentors and motivates, as well as teaches and instructs. Absent that, they are very rare in any discipline and have been especially scarce in cryonics due to its small size and its historically bad public image and scientific reputation.

Professionalism is, at its core, a result of people who care deeply about what they are doing and genuinely believe that their art and science is making a difference and is in some way deeply transformative (or even revolutionary) with respect to the world as a whole. I suppose the most direct, if not the most elegant way to put this, is that to do cryonics well you must love cryonics – love the practice of it – not just the idea of it. That alone is not sufficient, but when coupled with capability and competence, it is the minimum that is required.

SLIDE 136

This is a very hard concept to communicate. Perhaps it can best be conveyed by analogy. The business of climbing a mountain is deceptively simple and consists of walking, climbing and crawling all of which are basic if not intrinsic human skills. However, if we consider what is required to climb a very tall peak, such as Mount Everest, we will soon realize that a great deal more is required than the basic motor skills I’ve just listed. The extremes of temperature and the scarcity of oxygen make it a formidable technical challenge, and what‟s more, a truly awesome biomedical one. All kinds of knowledge and skills both sophisticated and subtle are necessary.

But beyond the purely technical, anyone who would summit Everest must have an astonishing emotional

commitment to the task as well as incredible fortitude and strength of will. It is a horrendous effort and it is not only not for the faint of heart, it is not for anyone who lacks deep commitment to the task. A profession is very much like the sport of mountain climbing. Most of its practitioners will spend all of their professional lives summiting well trod and fairly mundane peaks and guiding others to do the same. A few will summit difficult peaks and in so doing add some small measure of knowledge to the craft. Only a very few will try to go where no others have gone before and do so under the most dangerous and demanding conditions. These individuals are extraordinarily rare and they invariably found or define the professions they practice.

So, while it is possible to train many people to climb mountains, and even to teach them the technical skills required to summit Everest or k2, it is not possible to give them the drive, the stamina and the passionate desire that are also required (at least at this time and with currently available technology).

End of  Inherent Failure Mechanisms and Risks, Part 2

Footnotes

[1] The glass transition point is the temperature at which a liquid becomes a glass – or in other words – become a solid by getting thicker and thicker as it is cooled without undergoing freezing. Frozen tissues impregnated with glass forming cryoprotectants such as DMSO or glycerol will be part ice and part glass. The more of the tissue in the glassy or vitrified state the more it will be crack or fracture when cooled below its glass transition point.

By Mike Darwin

1972-1991

AWAKENING TO REALITY

SLIDE 96

As I said in the previous lecture, the literature produced by CSNY created an impression of competence and of the presence of a solid organization.

After I had been involved in cryonics for a little over a year I began to hear rumors that CSNY was not being run honestly and that, in particular, the patients were not being
stored submerged in liquid nitrogen and that their heads and upper bodies were well above dry ice temperature.

There were other rumors and accusations as well. The source of these turned out to be Robert Nelson, and after a great deal of difficulty I managed to speak with him by phone.

GOOD ADVICE

Nelson.s charges prompted me to call Curtis Henderson and to confront. him with Nelson’s accusations. Henderson.s response was simply to invite me to come and see for myself. He explained that it was impossible to answer accusations of the kind Nelson was
making in any meaningful way short of seeing first-hand what conditions were and spending time with the people to whom I had entrusted my life. I was 14 years old at that
time and I doubt very much if Curtis expected me to take him up on his offer – even though it was clearly sincere.

SLIDE 97

However, that is exactly what I did. I took a part time job to pay for my plane ticket and I showed up on CSNY’s  doorstep the summer after that phone call.

SLIDE 98

The image of solidity and professionalism projected by CSNY.s literature was tempered substantially by my having visited CSNY during the summers of my 14th and 15th years (yes, I went back). I was well aware that the storage facility was small and that the resources of the organization were minimal. For that reason, and because of the geographical distance, I began to accumulate the equipment and supplies required to carry out cryoprotective perfusion and cooling to dry ice temperature. I also began efforts to recruit others into cryonics.

By late 1971 I had acquired all the equipment and chemicals I believed were needed to carry out the pre-liquid nitrogen phases of cryopreservation. One of the most costly items, and one which I had to purchase new, was a thermocouple thermometer, pictured sitting atop cases of Ringer.s solution and indicated by a red arrow.

By 1972 the war of words between CSC and CSNY had reached fever pitch. One of the charges being made by CSC was that Curtis Henderson was storing patients improperly and that their heads and upper bodies were, in fact, well above dry ice temperature most of the time.

In December of 1972, Corey Noble and I journeyed from my home in Indianapolis. Indiana to visit CSNY and actually measure the temperature at the top of the MVE dewars, as well as at various points on the patient then in storage and so the TC meter in this picture was taken along on the trip.

Note the character and quantity of the equipment and supplies I had accumulated in Indianapolis: at left the Westinghouse Iron Heart; center, a dry ice box; upper right,
roller and centrifugal pumps; lower right, Ringer.s solution, DMSO, stainless steel heat exchanger, bubble trap, formaldehyde for sterilizing the perfusion circuit, perfusion
circuit, pH paper, liquid measuring equipment…

SLIDE 99

The morning after Corey and I had arrived at the CSNY facility, we were awakened by Saul Kent, who informed us that a CSNY member, a woman named Clara Dostal, had just been pronounced legally dead and that, since we were “experts” in the area of cryoprotection and perfusion, we should take charge of the case and perfuse the patient. This was the beginning of a period of agonizing cognitive dissonance for me (I cannot speak for Corey Noble).

SLIDE 100

Prior to this, perfusion and cool down as practiced by CSNY had been a black box to both Corey and me. We assumed that this procedure was carried out in a “scientific” manner and that the CSNY mortician Fred Horn, working with their biologist Paul Segall, were implementing some kind of reasonably professional and standardized care – even if it was not very sophisticated. In this we were sadly mistaken. To my horror I discovered that not only was I better prepared to perfuse and freeze patients in Indianapolis, but CSNY neither owned nor had access to a graduated cylinder for measuring out the volume of
cryoprotective agent to be added to the Ringer.s carrier solution! We were forced to measure out the glycerol to be added to the Ringer.s carrier solution by using an empty
Ringer.s solution bottle. The approximate liquid volumes molded into the glass of these IV bottles had to serve in place of an accurate measuring cylinder.

SLIDE 101

Even more surprisingly, we discovered that CSNY had no way of measuring temperature. The only thermometers at our disposal were the ones we had brought with us. There was no established protocol, no dedicated equipment, no data collection and no monitoring or observation of the patient at all. I was appalled and deeply shaken. For the first time I realized on both an emotional and intellectual level that cryonics had truly failed. Certainly, in the form I found it, it had no chance of success.

SLIDE 102

Corey and I did what we could. We carefully measured every parameter it was possible for us to measure on site, such as patient and perfusate temperature, perfusate glycerol concentration, arterial flow rate, patient cooling rate, and so on. We also collected effluent samples from the patient and divided them such that one set would remain with the patient (bottles seen at lower left in the next slide) and the other set would be taken back with us for physical and biochemical analysis (CPA concentration, pH, electrolytes, tissue specific enzymes, etc.).

The TC thermometer we had brought with us from Indianapolis proved essential for monitoring the patient’s internal temperature during perfusion as well as her temperature as she cooled to dry ice temperature. The objective was to thoroughly document her care and make recommendations for changes in the future. We both felt strongly that future patients should benefit from the knowledge and experience gained from this (and every)
case.

SLIDE 103

The paper we produced appeared in the March, 1973 issue of Manrise Technical Review, a publication produced by Alcor.s brother for-profit organization, Manrise Corporation, which was edited by Fred and Linda Chamberlain.

SLIDE 104

My experience perfusing and freezing Clara Dostal left me deeply anxious and profoundly dispirited. It took several weeks before anger replaced fear, and a relentless commitment to rapidly improve conditions replaced a near total paralysis of will. In no small measure this experience led to me seek out others who shared my vision of cryonics as a competent, well run undertaking based on a scientific and medical model in the context of good business practices.

CRYONICS’ SECOND ERA: 1972-1981

SLIDE 105

This led me to connect with Fred and Linda Chamberlain in Southern California. Following my trips to CSNY, I set out, again with Greg Fahy, to try to determine
the state of cryonics on the West Coast. What we found there, or more precisely what we didn’t find, was even more disturbing than what we had seen and experienced at CSNY. While Corey did not share my opinion, let alone my conviction, the trip to Southern California had convinced me that CSC’s patients had been badly mishandled and that
in all likelihood they had been thawed out and buried or cremated. This conviction was shared by Fred and Linda, with whom I formed strong and immediate bonds.

Fred and Linda, like me, had come to realize that cryonics was an abject failure and, with painful slowness, they had begun the process of creating facilities to provide for rescue, stabilization, perfusion and storage with two new organizations: the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and Manrise Corporation.

SLIDE 106

We began to scour the scientific literature for information to allow for development of a rational cryobiological approach to care, and where possible experts in medicine and cryobiology were consulted. A technical publication was launched and organized research was begun into developing scientifically sound procedures and equipment – and to document them openly and in as much detail as possible.

THE BIRTH OF SCIENTIFIC CRYONICS

SLIDE 107

A modest research and patient cryopreservation facility was set up and preliminary small animal research was undertaken to evaluate then current human cryoprotection strategies.

SLIDE 108

Since we could not be assured of being able to afford permanent facilities long term, a decision was made to modularize capability and a mobile operating room was constructed using an old laundry van (lorry). Refinements were made to in-house fabricated perfusion and heat exchange equipment and testing of these systems was undertaken to establish reliability and gain familiarity with their operation. Business plans were generated and necessary equipment and consumables were acquired. Cost analysis and financial and legal issues were extensively addressed. A comprehensive program of marketing (Trans Time) coupled with financial incentives for success was undertaken. Inter-organizational cooperation began and an attempt was made establishing minimum standards of care and self-regulation.

SLIDE 109

At about the same time, a graduate student in mathematics who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, Art Quaife, along with an electrical engineer (John Day) and several other interested cryonicists, including Paul Segall, who had relocated to the Bay Area, founded Trans Time, Inc. (TT). TT was similarly focused on “rebooting” cryonics as a proper scientific undertaking run on sound business principles. TT purchased the technological platform developed by Manrise Corporation for cryoprotective perfusion (including the Manrise perfusion machine, heat exchanger, and procedure manual) and focused primarily on producing the first truly comprehensive business analysis of cryonics. They also did much to clarify nettlesome financial and legal issues.

TT launched the first comprehensive program of marketing cryonics coupled with financial incentives for success, and they also aggressively marketed their stock to
educated investors within the cryonics community.

SLIDE 110

Dedicated (leased) storage and perfusion facilities were put in place in by TT in Northern California in 1974.

SLIDE 111

On 09 February, 1974 a decade after The Prospect of Immortality was published and seven years after Dr. Bedford was cryopreserved, Trans Time accepted its first two patients and the first human cryopreservation conducted under something approaching „controlled
conditions. took place. [The Dostal case technically qualifies but it was an ad hoc effort, not a planned undertaking.]

Despite two years of preparation there were many problems with both of these cases. As you can see in this photo, many practical details, such as how to position and anchor the perfusion tubing had not been worked out and improvised solutions were employed. Note the plastic embalming fluid bottle being used as a prop and the tubing connecting the arterial line to the patient being supported by a length of ligature twine.

Much more seriously, take a good look at the patient. This photo was taken at the end of CPA perfusion (decannulation is underway and some of the refrigerating ice has been removed). Unlike Mrs. Dostal, this patient has become markedly edematous as a consequence of CPA perfusion. This happened because what seemed best in a review of the literature did not work when applied clinically. In this case, a decision had been made to use DMSO instead of glycerol because of the former.s superior cellular permeability. Unfortunately, DMSO is quite toxic to the vascular endothelium and this effect is greatly
amplified in patients with prolonged ischemic injury. This patient received no cardiopulmonary support and had suffered well over 24 hours of cold ischemic injury.

The obvious (but unheeded) lesson was that techniques used on humans must first be evaluated in a suitable animal model under conditions as close to those that are encountered clinically as possible.

SLIDE 112

While the party line to the media had always been that patient stabilization was begun immediately upon pronouncement, it was not until Fred Chamberlain, Sr., arrested on 16 July, 1976, that this was actually done. The next such case, shown in this slide, took place under the auspices of Trans Time three years later in January of 1979. At the bottom center of the slide a blue plastic case with a small speaker next to it contains an electronic stethoscope with amplifier so that the patient could be monitored continuously and the moment of cardiac arrest determined with precision. This instrument was developed by Fred Chamberlain and me and was first used (successfully) on his father, Fred Jr.

SLIDE 113

At this point, cryonics as practiced by Alcor and Trans Time had become professionalized to the extent that there was control over and documentation of perfusion temperature, pressure, and flow. The volume of perfusate used was based upon complex mathematical modelling of CPA uptake and there was frequent and consistent measurement of the concentration of CPA in the venous effluent. Finally, in-house trained and skilled personnel were available in conjunction with an effective emergency response system (ERS).

SLIDE 114

Cooling to -79oC and -196oC were also documented and brought under some measure of control. Packing of patients in dry ice to achieve freezing was abandoned and an isopropanol bath was used in conjunction with the measured addition of dry ice in order to reduce the patient’s temperature in a controlled manner.

PAYING THE PIPER

SLIDE 115

Then, in 1979 the years of deceit and lies which had dogged cryonics from the start came to the fore. The nearly completely decomposed bodies of ten cryonics patients were discovered by an investigative reporter in the facilities of CSC in Oakwood Cemetery in Chatsworth, CA. As I have previously stated, the consequences of this scandal were devastating for cryonics. The story of the initial discovery and the subsequent civil trial that resulted remained an item in the national press well into the 1980s.

SLIDE 116

Cryonics became synonymous with “thawed bodies” and there were countless cartoons and gruesome humor pieces in magazines and newspapers. The loss of credibility and
the specter of failure resulting from Chatsworth extend into the humor, as well into the more serious criticism of cryonics today, as evidenced by this still from the animated
series Futurama. Futurama.s creator Matt Groening followed the Chatsworth scandal as a boy and some of his most successful cartoons early in his career satirized the Dora Kent debacle.

SLIDE 117

In 1980 the grotesque scene at Chatsworth was again played out, this time, mercifully, absent any media coverage. The victims were Ann DeBlasio and a woman from Beverly Hills, California, both of whom had been placed in an inadequate facility, absent any alarms or monitoring, in Mount Holiness Cemetery in Butler, New Jersey (NJ).

That facility was a duplicate of the one Nelson had constructed in Oakwood Cemetery in Chatsworth. And yes, Nelson, along with Nick DeBlasio, had built the Butler, NJ facility as well.

SLIDE 118

Eleven years after she had been cryopreserved at CSNY, this is what had become of Ann DeBlasio. After the expenditure of tens of thousands of 1970 dollars and countless hours of labor any chance these two women had of returning to life was gone.

So ended the second era in cryonics.

 End of Inherent Failure Mechanisms and Risks, Part 1

By Mike Darwin

THE PROBLEM OF NO FEEDBACK

SLIDE 87

How did these things happen? How did sincere, hard working, committed people who desperately wanted cryonics for themselves allow the situations I’ve just described – the woefully inadequate perfusion capabilities (or more properly, lack thereof) and the madness of racking patients head-up in their storage dewars?

And what about Dr. Bedford? How was it possible for his care to have been so botched while the media, and the overwhelming majority of cryonicists, remained convinced that he had been cryopreserved under seemingly good conditions?

Even more incredibly, let‘s stop and reconsider Chatsworth with greater care. Yes, Robert Nelson was a fraud and sociopath – no question about that.

But the rest of CSC‘s membership was neither sociopathic nor fraudulent. They were very sincere and deeply committed cryonicists. Marie Sweet, Helen Kline, Russ Stanley, and the father of 8 year old Genivieve de la Poteri, were all CSC members who were involved with the organization for months or years before they themselves were cryopreserved and ended up as skeletal remains at Chatsworth.

Virtually all of the other CSC members were decent people. Several of them had put tens of thousands of (1968-9) dollars of their savings into the CSC facility. All of these people refused to believe that anything was amiss at the Chatsworth facility until the press broke the story in 1979! On average CSC members were intelligent professionals, entrepreneurs, small business people and, above all, independent thinkers. How was it possible that, even as evidence accumulated that “things just didn‘t add up” with CSC‘s storage operation, they continued to have confidence in CSC?

In fact, of the 30 or so “signed up” CSC members at the time, only two became suspicious, investigated, and left the organization; Fred and Linda Chamberlain. And in the cryonics community at large, only three people were likewise deeply suspicious (or virtually certain) that something was amiss with CSC: Curtis Henderson, Saul Kent and me.

SLIDE 88

In 1986 I wrote an article entitled the “Myth of the Golden Scalpel” which first delineated the problem of “no feedback” in cryonics. The article was a response to intense criticism of the application of an evidence based, medical model to cryonics and the associated increase in costs and, perhaps just as importantly, the accompanying disempowerment of “amateurs.” Prior to the entry of professionals – or people working to create professionalism in cryonics – cryonics was a “do it yourself” (DIY) undertaking and anybody could (and did) undertake to cryopreserve people. A corollary of this was that anyone‘s opinions about how cryonics should be practiced were as good and as valued as anyone else‘s. Much of this criticism came from members of the Bay Area Cryonics Society (BACS) and the Cryonics Institute (CI).

In the next part of this lecture, I will show you images of the cryoprotective perfusion of a CSNY patient from 1972. That is very close to how CI carried out their perfusions at that time, and indeed, it was not until Ben Best arrived at CI that even the simplest and most basic parameters of patient care were monitored or recorded. And even now, CPA perfusion at CI more closely resembles what you will see in the slides from 1972 than it does what you will see still later when the Chamberlains, Jerry Leaf and I began changing cryonics.

The kind of procedures being used before the application of an evidence based medical model to cryonics are best described as ritual, not science. There were no truly meaningful tests, measurements or evaluations performed to inform the people carrying out cryopreservation procedures whether things went poorly or well and whether the “standard” procedure (or a modified one) was good or bad for a given patient.

For instance, should patients with long ischemic times get a different treatment than patients with short or very little ischemic times? Perhaps a more rapid increase in CPA concentration should be used, or even no CPA perfusion at all under some circumstances? How and why such decisions are to be made should be documented and have a scientific basis which is continually being informed by ongoing research.

SLIDE 89

In conventional medicine, where personnel at all levels are extensively trained, those who control the discipline are highly educated and skilled professionals; there is licensing and government oversight, and extensive documentation of procedures and record keeping. Lethal and morbid injuries are surprisingly common. As you can see, in the US alone, there are over three quarters of a million deaths each year due to medical error (iatrogenesis).

This is a staggering number of deaths and the associated cost is an estimated $282 billion! And keep in mind this does not include the patients who are injured and do not die, or the many patients whose death or injury is either not detected, or not reported.

 SLIDE 90

As bad as the problem is, it would be much worse if it were not for the fact that in medicine the patients being treated provide feedback. If you injure a patient delivering medical care, the odds are good that the patient will show both symptoms and signs of your error. He may suffer pain, become gravely ill, behave abnormally, lose sensory or motor function, be disfigured, or die.

The image at the right of this slide is of a decubitus ulcer – a bedsore or pressure sore, in common parlance – due to failure to properly position and turn the patient. Bedsores are surprisingly common because the patient does not feel the discomfort until after the injury at the pressure point(s) has occurred. Patients in extended care facilities are also often effectively “voiceless objects” who are frequently demented and are often unable to speak articulately for themselves even when compos mente. All too often they are also being warehoused and cared for by under-trained or under-motivated personnel.

Medicine also benefits from diagnostic modalities, such as the x-ray image at right, which allows for errors to be uncovered more effectively – and thus be corrected or mitigated – where it‘s possible to do so.

Unfortunately, the cryonics patient can provide none of the feedback a living patient does and as I have often said before, a patient who is straight frozen invariably looks far better and far more lifelike and at peace than a patient who has received the best available care.

LACK OF PROFESSIONALISM

SLIDE 91

If the cryonics patient was not in a bad enough position as a result of the no feedback problem, the situation becomes even worse when he is being cared for by personnel who have no extensive real-world experience in biomedicine (both in clinical and research environments) IN ADDITION to specialized training to integrate that experience into the context of cryonics as medicine.

Here I would like to use an example which is incredibly frustrating to me because it has recurred, even with people delivering care to cryonics patients who have been told about this problem and given a clear explanation as to how to avoid it.

It‘s a “mechanical” problem that I think is easily understood, so I‘m using it as an example. There are many, many other more complex and subtle problems that would be much more difficult to communicate in the available time.

When blood washout and extracorporeal support are performed in the field it is necessary to access the circulatory system by cannulating the femoral artery and vein in the groin. When cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) is carried out in this fashion the blood flows through the blood vessels in a retrograde fashion – in other words, in the opposite direction from which it normally flows.

Because the blood being pumped from the circuit into the patient is being pumped under pressure into the femoral artery, a short cannula of modest diameter may be used. However, the venous blood, flowing from the body and into the bypass circuit, is flowing at very low pressure, typically at 5-10 mm Hg and its flow into the circuit reservoir is due to gravity.

As a result, a larger diameter cannula which is much longer must be used. Ideally, we would like to position the tip of that cannula at the level of the right heart, where the blue arrow is on this schematic. However, that is not possible to do in the field without x-ray (fluoroscopic) assistance. Thus, the cannula tip is usually in the inferior vena cava somewhere below the level of the diaphragm where the white arrow is pointing. This barely allows for enough venous blood flow out of the patient – even under the best conditions.

SLIDE 92

Now, if the patient has a large volume of fluid in his abdomen, a condition called ascites, or is very obese, what happens is that the pressure from all the fluid or fat compresses the very thin and flexible walls of the vena cava and prevents adequate venous return. In fact, it‘s a wonder that any flow can proceed under ‗normal‘ circumstances.

The MRI at right shows a typical ascitic abdomen in cross section. Contrast media has been given intravenously so that the blood vessels show up distinctly. You can see the aorta clearly, but the inferior vena cava, which is normally twice the diameter of the aorta, appears as a small white dot, compressed as it is by the large volume of intra-abdominal fluid.

Ascites is not uncommon in cryonics patients since it occurs in cases of liver failure, cancer which has invaded the liver, congestive heart failure, cirrhosis, ovarian cancer and a number of other conditions. If a cryopatient presents with ascites one of two things must be done before femoral-femoral CPB is undertaken. The ascites may be drained by the simple expedient of making a stab wound through the body wall and placing a drainage tube in the peritoneal cavity, or an alternative venous drainage site must be selected, such as the internal jugular vein.

Failure to do one or the other of these things will result in either no venous return, or inadequate venous return. In the latter case the effect will be the very rapid development of massive system and cerebral edema due to the increased pressure in the venous circulation.

SLIDE 93

This problem has occurred at least five times in cryonics cases that I know of, and in four of those five cases, it happened to personnel who had experienced the same problem before. And yet, the problem was not addressed and the same rote procedure was followed despite the fact that problems were evident. I will say that in the two cases where there was no venous return they did eventually stop perfusion because they realized that ‗something was wrong.‘

The solutions to this problem are not easy because they demand the acquisition of professionalism, knowledge, and skill in the context of cryonics as medicine. We came very close to doing that in the decade between 1981 and 1991. But we failed. Why we failed I‘ll discuss later. Suffice it to say that the problem of maintaining professionalism is a nettlesome one in medicine, engineering and other demanding disciples, and there will be no quick fixes. In cryonics, where almost all the feedback we get from our patients must be artificially generated, the problem will be much more difficult to solve.

As we’ve already seen, patients can even have completely decomposed – and the cryonics organization can continue to operate, not just for weeks or months, but for years after this has occurred – all the while continuing to accept more patients!

I selected the image for this slide with special care, because it points up one of the many serious problems lack of professionalism in cryonics has caused. Repeatedly in the history of cryonics those in leadership positions within cryonics organizations have hired and placed in positions of power family members, close friends and cronies, with little (and usually no) respect to their qualifications. The most glaring recent example of this was when a former CEO of a cryonics organization hired his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law as paid full and part time staff. Professionalism is anathema to nepotism. Professionalism is first and foremost a meritocracy.

SLIDE 94

What is cryonics professionalism? The short answer is that it does not yet exist, per se. If and when it does, the short definition is that cryonics professionalism is adherence to a set of values comprising both a formally agreed-upon code of conduct and the informal expectations of colleagues, clients and the cryonics community.

The key values include acting in a patient’s interest, striving to improve the quality and length of a patient‘s pre-cryopreservation life, and maintaining the highest standards of excellence in the practice of cryonics and in the generation and dissemination of knowledge. In addition to scientific, medical, technical knowledge and skills, cryonics professionals should present psychosocial and humane qualities such as caring, empathy, humility and compassion, as well as deep commitment to assisting the individual patient and the community of cryonicists as a whole in their pursuit of indefinitely extended life and health. All these qualities are expected of members of highly trained cryonics professionals. I believe that, at a minimum, these things must be present in the cryonics professional:

Professional Commitment to Patient Welfare constitutes the essence of professionalism and is based on the rule that the best interest of patients and not self-interest is the professional obligation. Professional Accountability is an important element of professionalism which is required of cryonics professionals at several levels: to their patients for fulfilling the implied contract governing the patient/professional relationship, to the cryonics community for addressing their health needs, and to their profession for adhering to cryonics‘ ethical precepts.

Professional Duty can be expressed by the free acceptance of a commitment to service, availability and responsiveness when “on call,” accepting inconvenience to meet the needs of patients, by enduring unavoidable risks to oneself when a patient’s welfare is at stake, and by advocating the best possible care regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. It is a willingness to seek an active role in professional organizations and volunteering ones skills and expertise for the welfare of cryonics as a discipline and a way of life, and of the cryonics community.

Professional Excellence entails a conscientious effort to exceed ordinary expectations. Commitment to excellence is an acknowledged goal for all cryonics professionals and includes a commitment to life-long learning.

Professional Honor and Integrity implies being fair, being truthful, keeping one’s word, meeting commitments, and being straightforward. It also requires recognition of the possibility of conflict of interest and avoiding any situation in which the interest of the cryonics professional is placed above that of the patient or allowing personal gain to supersede the best interest of the patient. This is an integral part of professionalism. The importance of professionalism in the patient/cryonics professional relationship cannot be overstated.

Professional Respect for Others is reflected in the respect towards the patients and their families, other cryonics professionals and professional colleagues such as physicians, nurses, perfusionists, paramedics, and health sciences technicians and therapists. It is the essence of basic, decent conduct and is both central to professionalism and fundamental to enhancing collegiality among cryonics professionals.

SLIDE 95

Until a solid professional base is created in cryonics there can be no enduring success. What you see here are the elements of a mature professionalism, in this case in medicine. You will note that at the left that formal (written) standards and practices, a code of conduct and governance for implementing these things, are among the first elements of professionalism.

It is not necessary for cryonics, in its current microscopic and flawed implementation to create all of the elements shown here – nor is it possible. But what we must do is to begin at the beginning and create standards and practices for every element of the program and both follow and enforce them diligently.

 End of Initialization Failure, Part 4

By Mike Darwin

 A Brief History of Attempts to Create and Implement Minimum Standards in Cryonics

INTRODUCTION

First Era 1964-1972

The first attempt to create formal minimum standards for cryonics organizations in the form of the Cryonics Societies of America (CSA) was initiated by in 1968 and was implemented largely through the efforts of the Cryonics Society of New York. The CSA was to be a national standards and enforcement organization, comprised of representatives elected by the individual, member cryonics societies.

Figure 1: Requirements for membership in the Cryonics Societies of America.

Creation of the CSA, and the terms of its incorporation were agreed to by the Officers/Directors of the then extant cryonics organizations: Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY), Cryonics Society of Michigan (CSM) and Cryonics Society of California (CSC). CSA was incorporated late in 1969.

The CSA called for basic accountability in matters such as public communications, information inquiries, membership rolls, financial and member/patient record keeping (submission of quarterly financial records), documentation of cryopreservations (including at least one “confidential” photo), uniformity of letterhead and logos, submission of regular progress reports and investigation of all persons or corporations offering cryonics services or promoting cryonics. Basic requirements were maintenance  of a phone and book listing under the heading “cryonics”, updated list of Officers & Directors, valid addresses for organization and Officers,  and subscription to “Cryonics Reports” for all local group members and a complete log of all written and telephonic information inquiries.

Ironically, one of the driving forces behind CSA was Robert Nelson who, in particular, wanted a standardized procedure generated to administer cryopreservation, particularly with respect to perfusion. A committee consisting of Ettinger, Nelson and Saul Kent was created in April of 1968 to do this, however, according to Kent and Henderson, there was no progress on this, the committee never met, and Nelson did not answer correspondence nor generate the promised liaison with Dante Brunol, M.D., and the CSC mortician Jeff Hicks. Despite misgivings, CSNY committed to be the central body and administration for CSA, and the artist Vaugn Bode generated a logo. Letterhead for national organization was created and standards for regional letterheads were created and implemented.

Figure 2: Vaughn Bode’s CSA logo of a side-view of a Phoenix in flight.

Another critical function of the CSA, and the one which may have motivated its initiation, was the creation of a Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) to the CSA. This Board was to have provided scientific and technical advice related to patient care, evaluated research proposals and recommended funding, and lastly and most importantly, serve to improve the public and professional credibility of cryonics. By 1968, resistance in the scientific community at large was hardening and the cryobiological community was well on its way to becoming highly polarized against cryonics. By this time the mother of cryobiology, Audrey Smith, had already made her public statement calling Ettinger “that horrible man” and Robert W. Prehoda was writing his virulently anti-cryonics book chapters in Suspended Animation: “The Night of January 12, 1967 and “The Lunatic Fringe.” There is some indication that Saul Kent, and perhaps others, may have either seen a precis of these chapters, or otherwise been appraised of their tone, if not their content (CSNY Correspondence Log, 1968).

Figure 2: The 28 April, 1969 letter from Saul Kent laying out the basic parameters required for a national cryonics standards organization to operate.

The SAC was formed on 05 August, 1968 and the relevant documents as well as its composition were published in Cryonics Reports in September, 1968:

Figure 3: The charter of the Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) to the Cryonics Societies of America (CSA). The SAC was to provide the scientific oversight and vetting that would be needed to determine which cryopreservation procedures were applied clinically, and to help direct research to improve them.

There is little known surviving historical documentation of the activities of SAC. According to both Saul Kent and Curtis Henderson, the SAC was not very active and not very responsive to requests for help, although, as they both noted, the areas in which help were most urgently needed either required speculation and expertise (expert speculation from a cryonics perspective, as it were) that the SAC scientists did not have (e.g., formulating perfusion, cooling and storage protocols) or required resources neither the CSA nor its member organizations had available (financing for research). It is clear from correspondence and conversations with some of the principals (Henderson, Kent, Barner and Gouras) that the major obstacle to the SAC’s long term viability was the inability of the CSA to provide anticipated funds for research to be generated by the CSA. There is no evidence that the CSA, acting as unit, provided any input or material support, scientific or technical. The list of the SAC members was used extensively to lend credibility to cryonics for promotional purposes and the list was reprinted as a full page of Cryonics Reports magazine until the SAC gradually disintegrated due to members resigning.

The CSA did remain modestly active for perhaps a year after its inception. There is documentation of essentially complete compliance with the CSA’s requirements in the archival files of CSNY, and much of this material survives and is being digitized. There is evidence that CSM provided substantial compliance, including providing membership rolls, records of information requests, and at least semi-annual bookkeeping summaries. CSC did not provide membership lists, patient records, or financial data. They did provide photographic evidence of the cryopreservation of Marie Phelps Sweet, under substantial pressure and amid allegations (untrue as it turned out) that Ms. Sweet‘s cryopreservation may have been a hoax used to raise money for CSC or Robert Nelson, and those photographs have survived and been digitized.

Figure 4: Robert F. Nelson, President of the Cryonics Society of California

While the CSA was neither very active nor effective, it did continue to exist, at least in name, until serious concerns about the operations of CSC, Cryonic Interment and the integrity of Robert F. Nelson were raised, and finally aired publicly by Saul Kent in an editorial in Cryonics Reports entitled “Trouble in Southern California?” which questioned the integrity of CSC’s patient storage operations (Cryonics Reports: 4(12) 1969; p 2) as noted in this quote from that article:

“At last years’ national cryonics conference in Ann Arbor, Mich. [actually held in April 1969, 8 months before--MP], and Marshall Neel’s presentation concerned a new cryonic storage facility which, according to Mr. Neel, was close to completion. Slides showing the process of construction were offered, and it was stated that within a short time there would be a grand opening before the media, at which several bodies then in individual cryonic storage would be placed into a large multiple-body unit. Cryonic Interment Inc. was the name of the company that was said to own the facility; Mr. Neel was announced as President.

 Since the conference there have been continual statements emanating from the leadership of the Los Angeles based company about the imminence of the opening of the facility.

 As of December, 1969, the facility has not been opened and there is no evidence to indicate that it will.

 We don’t know what has been going on in Southern California because the entire operation has been veiled in secrecy. It is just this air of secrecy that troubles us.”

 The CSA probably became legally defunct within a year or so thereafter since there are unpaid bills for corporation taxes and no evidence of disbursements for these from, either the CSNY or CSC financial archives which are complete for this period. Unless the fees were paid by CSM or by an individual(s) the CSA would have legally ceased to exist sometime in 1970.

 Second Era 1972-1976

Figure 5: Fred and Linda Chamberlain began a second round of unsuccessful efforts in the early 1970s to create a minimum standards  and compliance self- regulatory framework for cryonics. This effort, as had the previous one in the form of the CSA, proved unsuccessful.

The next attempt to establish industry-wide binding standards was initiated by Fred and Linda Chamberlain of the Alcor Foundation in 1972. The effort had, if I recall correctly, the acronym DOMSAC which stood for ” Document of Minimum Standards and Compliance” (DOMSAC). The core requirement of the DOMSAC were to:

“Set minimum standards for all technical aspects of perfusion and cool-down, including data collection formats, parameters to be logged, frequency of data acquisition, minimum equipment and chemical to kept on hand at all times, and so on.” The objectives of the DOMSAC were to:

• Established a basic standard for organization, reporting and public disclosure of patient case data.
• Required continuous public accountability (address, identification, a.k.a. and d.b.a. history on all Officers and Directors).
• Established minimum requirements for emergency notification and communication systems.
• Limited the scope and nature of claims that could be made to the public or prospective members/clients about cryonics.
• Impose substantial administrative requirements, as well as mechanics for handling non-compliance and provisions for punitive measures if necessary.

Figure 6: Former President of the Cryonics Society of California, Robert F. Nelson (aka Frank Bucelli) being warmly received by Robert C. W. Ettinger, one of the two originators of the cryonics movement in 20

This document provoked extended haggling and arguments from Trans Time (TT) and the Bay Area Cryonics Society (BACS). (BACS and TT were essentially run by the same management at that time), and to a lesser extent from the Cryonics Society of Michigan (CSM).  The was concern expressed on the part of TT/BACS that the DOMSAC constituted an unacceptable step towards the surrender of autonomy, even if it was in the form of mutual oversight.” To what extent these sentiments were justified it is impossible to know. It certainly has been the case that getting cryonicists, even within their own organizations, to submit to oversight and regulation has so far proven impossible. For instance, Robert F. Nelson was in no way punished for his misdeeds at Chatsworth within the cryonics community, and he is welcomed at both CI and other cryonics functions, where he is treated cordially and has indicated he might reenter the cryonics business in the future.

What was clearly not understood then, or now, is that this “issue” inside cryonics is not a drawing room matter, or even a dirty political backroom matter. It stopped being either of those things when the first patient decomposed at Chatsworth or, more accurately, when Bedford was mishandled by Cryonics Society of California personnel on 12 January, 1967, with the knowledge and complicity of other key people in the cryonics movement.

 

Specimen Standards for Human Cryopreservation Organizations Draft 2.4

Core Objectives and Related Considerations

The objective of these specimen standards is to return cryonics to the paradigm that was developed initially by the Cryonics Society of New York (i.e., fairness, openness, use of the scientific method, Evidence Based Cryonics (EBC) and diligent communication of comprehensive and accurate information to cryonics organization members or clients), and greatly elaborated by Alcor under the influence of Jerry Leaf and Mike Darwin in the 1980s. This paradigm can be articulated by the following points:

Organizational (Corporate) Structure & Governance

The organizational structure considered here will be that of the non-profit corporation United States corporation,  either charitable (501(c)3) or non-charitable.

The cryonics organization shall be a legally incorporated entity which complies with all applicable federal laws and regulations, as well as applicable laws and regulations of the states and the local jurisdictions in which it is based or operates. If the organization conducts programs outside the United States, it must also abide by applicable international laws, regulations and conventions that are legally binding on the United States.

The organization shall have a formally adopted, written code of ethics with which all of its directors or trustees, staff and volunteers are familiar and to which they adhere and they will adopt and implement policies and procedures to ensure that all conflicts of interest, or the appearance thereof, within the organization and the board are appropriately managed through disclosure, recusal, or other means. This Code of Ethics shall cover accountability, finances, openness, client/member rights, patient rights, confidentiality of medical and cryopreservation records, conduct of staff, and basic procedures for filing and adjudicating grievances within the organization by clients/patients and professional employees.

The cryonics organization shall establish and implement policies and procedures that enable individuals to come forward with information on illegal practices or violations of organizational policies. This “whistle blower” policy should specify that the organization will not retaliate against, and will protect the confidentiality of, individuals who make good-faith reports.

The organization shall have in place policies and procedures to protect and preserve the organization’s important documents and business records.

The organization’s board must ensure that the organization has adequate plans to protect its assets—its property, financial and human resources, programmatic content and material, and its integrity and reputation—against damage or loss. The board should review regularly the organization’s need for general liability and directors’ and officers’ liability insurance, as well as take other actions necessary to mitigate risks.

The organization must have a detailed, written plan of action to protects its patients in cryopreservation against legal or legislative attack, economic instability, insurgent attack by anti-cryonics individuals or entities, as well as plans to cope with and prevail over known existential risks to which its patients may be subject (i.e., hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, blizzards, etc.).

Figure 1: Cryonics organizations must maintain transparency with respect to administrative, financial, scientific, technical and patient care procedures.

The organization must  make information about its operations, including its governance, finances, programs and activities, widely available to the public. Charitable (501(c)3) organizations shall make information available on the methods they use to evaluate the outcomes of their work and must share the results of those evaluations with members.

The cryonics organization must have a governing body that is responsible for reviewing and approving the organization’s mission and strategic direction, annual budget and key financial transactions, compensation practices and policies, and fiscal and governance policies.

Figure 2: The board of directors of the cryonics organization are elected by the cryopreservation members or clients of the organization who have been cryopreservation members or clients of the cryonics organization for at least 3 consecutive years. Directors’ terms may not exceed 4 years.

The board of directors shall be elected by the cryopreservation members or clients of the organization who have been cryopreservation members or clients of the cryonics organization for at least 3 consecutive years. Cryopreservation members with 10 or more years of consecutive cryopreservation arrangements may, at the organization’s discretion, be granted 2 votes in electing directors.

Candidates for the board shall be examined for psychosocial and fiscal suitability by a thorough, objective and written set of standards and examinations.

Directors term limits, order of service (staggered or otherwise) are that the discretion of the cryonics organization. However the length of any director’s term in office cannot exceed 4 years.

The organization must meet regularly enough to conduct its business and fulfill its duties. Directors’ meetings shall be held monthly and combined directors and membership meeting shall be held no less than annually.

The board of organization should establish its own size and structure and review these periodically. The board should have enough members to allow for full deliberation and diversity of thinking on governance and other organizational matters. Except for very small organizations, this generally means that the board should have at least five members.

The board of the  organization must include members with the diverse background (including, but not limited to, ethnic, racial and gender perspectives), experience, and organizational and financial skills necessary to advance the organization’s mission. All directors and officers must be have been cryopreservation members or clients of the organization for a minimum of 3 consecutive years before becoming eligible to serve as a director or officer. In the case of newly forming cryonics organizations, officers and directors must have been members or clients of another cryonics organization for a minimum of 3 consecutive years.

At least two-thirds of the board members, should be independent. Independent members should not: (1) be compensated by the organization as employees or independent contractors; (2) have their compensation determined by individuals who are compensated by the organization; (3) receive, directly or indirectly, material financial benefits from the organization except as a member of the charitable class served by the organization; or (4) be related to anyone described above (as a spouse, sibling, parent or child), or reside with any person so described.

The board shall hire, oversee, and biannually evaluate the performance of the chief executive officer of the organization, and should conduct such an evaluation prior to any change in that officer’s compensation, unless there is a multi-year contract in force or the change consists solely of routine adjustments for inflation or cost of living.

The board of any cryonics organization that has paid staff should ensure that the positions of chief staff officer, board chair, and board treasurer are held by separate individuals. Organizations without paid staff should ensure that the positions of board chair and treasurer are held by separate individuals.

The board shall establish an effective, systematic process for educating and communicating with board members to ensure that they are aware of their legal and ethical responsibilities, are knowledgeable about the programs and activities of the organization, and can carry out their oversight functions effectively.

Board members should evaluate their performance as a group and as individuals no less frequently than every 2 years, and should have clear, written  procedures for removing board members who are unable to fulfill their responsibilities.

Beyond the requirement of 3 consecutive years as a cryopreservation member or client, the board shall establish clear policies and procedures setting the length of terms and the number of consecutive terms a board member may serve.

The board should review organizational and governing instruments no less frequently than every 3 years.

The board shall establish and review regularly the organization’s mission and goals and should evaluate, no less frequently than every five years, the organization’s programs, goals and activities to be sure they advance its mission and make prudent use of its resources.

Board members are generally expected to serve without compensation, other than reimbursement for expenses incurred to fulfill their board duties. A charitable organization that provides compensation to its board members should use appropriate comparability data to determine the amount to be paid, document the decision and provide full disclosure to anyone, upon request, of the amount and rationale for the compensation.

The cryonics organization must keep complete, current, and accurate financial records. Its board should receive and review timely reports of the organization’s financial activities and should have a qualified, independent financial expert audit or review these statements annually in a manner appropriate to the organization’s size and scale of operations. For cryonics organizations with more than $500,000 U.S. in assets the independent financial expert must be certified public accountant (CPA).

Cryonics organizations with assets of $1 million U.S., shall have an audit committee composed of independent board members with appropriate financial expertise. By reducing possible conflicts of interest between outside auditors and the organization’s paid staff, an audit committee can provide the board greater assurance that the audit has been conducted appropriately. If state law permits, the board may appoint non-voting, non-staff advisers, rather than board members, to the audit committee.

The board of the organization must institute policies and procedures to ensure that the organization (and, if applicable, its subsidiaries) manages and invests its funds responsibly, in accordance with all legal requirements. The full board should review and approve the organization’s annual budget and should monitor actual performance against the budget.

The cryonics organization should not provide loans (or the equivalent, such as loan guarantees, purchasing or transferring ownership of a residence or office, or relieving a debt or lease obligation) to directors, officers, or trustees.

The organization shall spend at least 30% of its annual budget on programs that pursue its mission. The budget should also provide sufficient resources for effective administration of the organization, and, if it solicits contributions, for appropriate fundraising activities.

Figure 3:  Reimbursement for expenses, as well as compensation for services for directors must be unambiguous and in written form.

The  cryonics organization shall establish clear, written policies for paying or reimbursing expenses incurred by anyone conducting business or traveling on behalf of the organization, including the types of expenses that can be paid for or reimbursed and the documentation required. Such policies should require that travel on behalf of the organization is to be undertaken in a cost-effective manner.

The organization shall neither pay for nor reimburse travel expenditures for spouses, dependents or others who are accompanying someone conducting business for the organization unless they, too, are conducting such business.

Solicitation materials and other communications addressed to donors and the public must clearly identify the organization and be accurate and truthful.

Without exception, contributions must be used for purposes consistent with the donor’s intent, whether as described in the relevant solicitation materials or as specifically directed by the donor.

The organization, if a 501(c)3, must provide donors with specific acknowledgments of charitable contributions, in accordance with IRS requirements, as well as information to facilitate the donors’ compliance with tax law requirements.

The organization must have clear, written policies, based on its purpose as a cryonics organization to determine whether accepting a gift would compromise its ethics, financial circumstances, program focus or the well-being of the patients in its care.

The cryonics organization should provide appropriate training and supervision of the people soliciting funds on its behalf to ensure that they understand their responsibilities and applicable federal, state and local laws, and do not employ techniques that are coercive, intimidating, or intended to harass potential donors.

The organization shall not compensate internal or external fundraisers based on a commission or a percentage of the amount raised.

The cryonics organization shall respect the privacy of individual donors and, except where disclosure is required by law, shall not sell or otherwise make available the names and contact information of its donors without providing them an opportunity at least once a year to opt out of the use of their names.

The board shall prepare a written job description for individual board members as well as prepare an annual schedule of meetings, determined a year in advance.

The board she see to it its members receive clear and thorough information materials, including an agenda, to all members two to three weeks before each meeting.

Figure 4: The comprehensive and complete minutes of every directors’ meeting must be recorded on paper, as well as electronically and must be c9ompiled into readily accessible books or volumes for inspection by cryopreservation members or clients at any reasonable time. Similarly, electronic copies of minutes shall also be available so that members distant from the organization’s headquarters may have access to the minutes.

The cryonics organization shall maintain complete and accurate minutes of all meetings which shall be gathered into volumes organized by month and year. These minutes shall be kept at the cryonics organization’s principal place of business and be available for inspection upon the request of any  cryopreservation member or client. Additionally, multiple electronic copies  shall be kept in discrete separate locations to prevent loss due to existential or other disasters and so that they can be made available to members or clients who are far distant from the organization’s principal place of business.

Each board member shall serve on at least one board committee or task force. (For new members, one committee assignment is sufficient.)

The board shall prepare written statements of committee and task force responsibilities, guidelines and goals. These organizational documents, which should be approved by the board chair, are to be reviewed annually, and revised if necessary. The CEO shall assign an appropriate staff member to work with each committee

The board shall create a written system of checks and balances to monitor committee members’ work and assure that tasks are completed on schedule.

Nondiscrimination

The medical model of cryonics as an emergency room (Accident & Emergency) where all comers able to meet the publicly specified requirements of the organization are competently and equally treated, regardless of age, religion, politics, criminal history, gender, sexual orientation, community influence, or celebrity. “Equally” is understood to mean here that all clients will receive the same minimum standards of care set out as being available upon meeting the specified minimum requirements of the organization. It does not imply that higher standards of care may not be paid for by clients able to afford them.  However, it does mean that if such higher standards are offered, or are available for an added fee or other considerations, that all clients shall be apprised of the availability of such non-standard services, as soon as such options are made available.

Figure 5: Cryonics organizations must not discriminate on the basis of age, religion, politics, criminal history, gender, sexual orientation, community influence, or celebrity.

Additionally, the cryonics organization shall adopt the following non-discrimination policy:

The cryonics organization believes that every person has a right to choose and arrange for his or her own cryopreservation and to enjoy its possible benefits of greatly extended lifespan. To this end, the cryonics organization does not discriminate against any person on the basis of race, religion, color, creed, age, marital status, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation or preference, medical condition, or handicap.

However, nothing in this statement prevents the cryonics organization from avoiding any situation that genuinely threatens the health or safety of cryonics organization employees, volunteers, patients in cryopreservation, or the public, or from requiring reasonable medical evaluations in some instances where a genuine threat to health or safety may be suspected to exist, or where the legal status of an individual with regard to mental competency may be in question.

Feedback, Quality Assurance & Quality Control

Quality control measures which provide feedback about the nature and effectiveness of all of the organization’s procedures will be publicly disclosed in an open and timely fashion. This is understood to include not only medical, cryobiological, patient care, or other technical and scientific procedures, but also financial, administrative and business procedures as well. Both classes of disclosure, technical and administrative, will be discussed with varying level of detail in this document. In administrative areas where there are long established and demonstrably workable resources, the discussion will be more superficial. In technical, ethical and other areas where there is little or no precedent, the discussion will be exhaustive and often accompanied by detailed examples of the required work product.

The clear message of this point is that a culture of openness and accountability is perhaps the most important ingredient to the long term success of any cryonics organization or, for that matter, any quality scientific, technical, or medical institution.

It is important to digress briefly here and discuss the problematic nature of such a high degree of accountability with respect to cryonics organizations, in particular. All human institutions, whether cryonics organizations or otherwise, find this level of accountability difficult to achieve. There are many reasons for this; however these two are by far the most significant: the basic human desire to avoid owning failure, error or misdeeds, and the ammunition public knowledge of failure, error, or misdeeds provides an enemy[1] — which segues into the next point.

Need for a Defensive Organization (a.k.a. Cryonics Defense League)

Cryonics as a whole has become fear-driven and in nearly constant crisis mode. Crises driven operation is necessarily mostly reactive rather than proactive. This is not how any successful organization advances scientifically or financially. Indeed, it is not how success is achieved in any area of organizational operations, even in successfully defending the organization in the long run. Because of this situation it is especially difficult for cryonics organizations to have a high level of accountability, even about seemingly harmless facts pertaining to their procedures and policies, because cryonics is not an established business institution, has an (arguably) increasing number of serious enemies, is widely misunderstood, has been subject to unjustified distortion and sensationalism, has been subjected to repeated rounds of invasive and destructive media siege, and is increasingly coming under governmental scrutiny. Under such circumstances it is completely understandable for a “bunker mentality” to develop.

Further, in order to protect its human cryopatients, a cryonics organization may have to develop not only a bunker mentality, but very aggressive and covert means to defend the well being of its patients. The author has spent the past several years reading extensively the history of emerging medical, social, political and religious movements. In no case was social acceptance or tolerance of any major paradigm changing movement achieved without the use of force and fraud. I even include Darwin’s theory of evolution in this analysis since, as Stephen Jay Gould noted just a few years ago in his book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Evolution is neither widely understood nor accepted – this, more than a hundred years after it was publicly espoused.

Cryonics organizations need a separate, defensive organization which can act semi-covertly or covertly as needed to deal with lethal threats, which all conventional approaches have failed to stop. Separating defensive capability from other operations would allow accountability to continue in every area of operations except the last and most desperate measures needed for defense of patients and members. This would allow some measure of psychological tranquility to exist in the organization as a whole, even in the midst of extreme threats, and thus for business as usual to continue and a high degree of experimentation and openness to be maintained even under difficult circumstances.  The most immediate analogy is one of the intelligence and military apparatus of a nation-state. Because these assets exist in a hostile world it is not necessary for citizens, businesses, churches, or charities to anguish over every threat to their existence. Yes, in times of severe crises, or all out attack, all of these entities may divert some or all of their efforts, attention, and support to the crisis, but on a daily basis, it is not necessary that they be consumed with the problems of their own defense. However, more relevant analogies would the Jewish Defense League (JDL) or the Worldwide Guardian Office employed by Scientology.

Until cryonics organizations can rely on a defense force which is competent and properly equipped to deal with even the worst crises, the organization as a whole will be drained of energy and other resources, and most importantly, will be paralyzed by anxiety, and become increasingly afraid to take any actions which expose more of its flank to attack. This is a response characteristic of most life forms more complex than viruses, and is one which must be dealt with. Every organization charged with protecting the survival of its members has such defensive mechanisms, from the amoebae to the U.S. Federal Government.  This is a critical need, which has heretofore been unappreciated in cryonics. The absence of such a defensive mechanism in cryonics is the principal cause of the increasing risk-averseness, and willingness to surrender authority over patients to the regulatory bodies of nation-states.

End of Part 1

 

Many years ago in The Immortalist (now Long Life), there was a column authored by one Robert Brakeman.  If you’re a fan of Seinfeld (and I’m not) then Brakeman was a genius, because he did in print what Seinfeld did on TV; wrote a column about nothing that a lot of people found entertaining.

Brakeman’s column was not controversial, or technical, or sentimental, or political, or artistic; it was just a well written column about, well, about nothing. Except that every year or two he would casually discuss how he and Bruce Springsteen had decided that cryonics was a really good idea. Or it might be some other, equally legendary celebrity. The first couple of times this happened I didn’t pay it much mind. Cryonics is a quirky business, after all. However, after the third or fourth time, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Immortalist, Mae Ettinger (then Mae Junod) and I asked her if anyone there had ever met, or even spoken with Robert Brakemen, or otherwise vetted him?

Mae Ettinger did not normally refer to me by name, preferring instead to use the moniker “Evil Genius,” when not calling me the “Great Satan.” The subsequent correspondence between us was neither cordial nor long.  Brakemen continued to write in The Immortalist until, eventually, I, or someone else (I really don’t remember the particulars) called Mae out in public over who Brakeman was and whether it was really true  that all these celebrities were, in fact, true-believing cryonicists, as claimed by Brakemen in the pages of The Immortalist. After that,  there were no more columns by Robert Brakeman.  I never did find out who he was, but I would not be surprised to find out today if people were accusing me of being him. If so, I’ll happily take the credit: that guy was one hell of a writer.

In the history of cryonics there have been many pseudononymous individuals and nom de plumes. This is to be expected in any area of endeavor where there is controversy and risk to one’s career and reputation. However, in the early days of cryonics and up until the advent of the Internet, the presence of anonymous actors was extraordinarily rare. To be sure, people changed their names; I’m one of them. But that is very different than being an anonymous actor (IA). There is nothing sneaky about being Mike Darwin or Max More or Bette Davis, for that matter. People get to pick their own names as long as they stay people; discrete, identifiable beings who are responsible and accountable for their actions. People who don’t like that are entitled to their opinion, but the act of adopting another name isn’t illegal, so long as you don’t adopt another identity in the bargain.

Sometimes, rarely, the use of another name to create an AA is, arguably, justifiable. The Lone Ranger, “V,” the Three Musketeers, the list of anonymous heroes created in response to tyranny is endless. In cryonics, it could be argued that Corey Noble, PhD., once served that role in response to the tyrannical actions of the Society of Cryobiology. But the need for anonymous actors in daily life is pretty rare. Today, as far as cryonics is concerned herein the US, it is virtually over.

And yet, the reverse has happened. Whereas until the advent of the Internet in the 1980s there were almost no  AAs in cryonics, now, that is almost all there are! What gives? The list is endless and I can’t begin to catalog them all: unperson, Finance Department, Desert Rat, and the more distant past, Clarissa Wells…  Most of these names are  “handles” and this practice has its origin in a related technology: radio.  An important difference is that radio, unlike the Internet, operated in the realm of limited bandwidth. The electromagnetic spectrum is inherently limited by physical law. That meant regulation and licensing. And that meant that “handles” were ultimately, at least in theory, traceable back to real, responsible people. With the Internet this is not the case at all.

Of the list of anonymous actors I’ve just given, I’ve been accused of being Clarissa Wells, Finance Department (FD) and unperson. I eventually found out who Clarissa Wells was (and it wasn’t me) and I have had extensive correspondence with FD (I’m not that crazy), so I suppose that still leaves unperson as a possibility. But the fact of the matter is, other than as a one-time prank, I’ve never used a pseudonymous person or an anonymous actor, on or off the Internet.  I find it deeply offensive: so offensive I’ve even turned down significant sums of money to do it for hire.

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking big thoughts about the ‘how and why’ of the recent emergence of this phenomenon. Finally, today, I realized that there is no big philosophical reason for it. People do it for a single, simple reason: BECAUSE THEY CAN. It is a whole hell of a lot easier to be able to say and do whatever you want and not be accountable for it. It turns out that even if you are bright, talented, and have a great deal to offer and be rewarded for, it still easier and more rewarding to act outside your primary sphere of professional and personal action in an anonymous way than it is to jump through the hoops all over again and gain recognition in a small pond the hard way, just as you did in the big one. And to that, I have the following response: fuck you and the fish you swam in on.

So, from now on, the following rules pertain here in the Chronosphere pond. No handles are allowed. Only  real people can post or comment here. Maybe Eugen Leitl can help me figure out how to implement that. I’m not looking for something elaborate – just something as “real” as a letter used to be.  No more wackywackys from the ether.  If that’s the end of Chronosphere, or comments on Chronophere, so be it. I respect peoples’ rights to geographical privacy. I’m not trying (no do I want) to know where any person is at any point in time or space. I just want to know I am dealing with a real, accountable, person, not a cyberphantom.

Mike Darwin,  Ash Fork, AZ

by Mike Darwin

I can remember, with unfortunate precision, when I ceased to believe in God. Please note the emphasis on the “I” and the capitalization of God.

I was seven years old and being prepared for my First Communion in the Roman Catholic Church. I do not know what this entails today, but at that time, being enrolled in a Parochial school before the advent of Vatican II, it was an elaborate, 9-month long process of indoctrination and ritual. The church I attended was dark, Gothic, aromatic and overawing.  The nun who instructed me and my class was kind and compassionate, but also knowledgeable, stern in her faith and firm in her convictions.

Sister Mary Ephraim (Right)

Amidst the endless rote memorization of the articles of the faith of the church and the various moral absolutes and injunctions, were told often, and in hushed tones, about the sacred transformation that was about to occur in us. The Holy Ghost was about to enter our bodies and sanctify and purify us, and we when the priest put the Host upon our tongues, the Body of Christ would enter into us and we would be filled with the Spirit of the Lord. This was to be a a transformative moment. In retrospect, it seems very strange that out of that first grade class of 30 or so children, not one ever asked a question along the lines of, “What does it feel like to have the Holy Ghost enter your body?” or “What does it feel like to have Jesus inside you?”

To my knowledge, no one asked those questions there in class, or at home of their parents, or to each other during recess, or after school, or at any other time. Remarkable!

And so the time came and I had my First Communion and the celebratory breakfast at a local restaurant afterwards. I’m smiling in the photos taken at that event and seemingly enjoying my gifts. But inside, I am already desperately unhappy, because whatever  magical feeling was supposed to have happened; it didn’t happen to me. Again, strangely, I didn’t discuss this non-event, and neither did anyone else, if indeed, it was a non-event for them.  And so, from that day forth I knew that for me, at least, there was no god. The capital came off the g and, gradually, as time wore on and my intellectual horizons began to grow, I realized that probably most of the other kids in my class had had a pretty similar experience to mine. There had been no hallelujah moment, no inward whoosh of the Holy Ghost, and urgent need for temporary immunity with a sanctifying jolt from Jesus that had to be renewed once a week with Holy Communion.

Grade School Graduating Cohorts: 1969. How many felt the rapture?

Their belief had become not a direct belief in that tangible supernatural experience, but rather a belief in the belief of the goodness and the rightness and the necessity of that experience, and as a side effect, of all the dogma, doctrine, ritual and machinery of the church that was tied to it. Of course, I did not understand why they believed that and  why they needed to believe it; so I kept my mouth shut and went along with it until cryonics entered my life.

Cryonics changed everything, because it was the key to understanding the fundamental reason for the need to believe in religion and that was in turn the need to deal with the central and most pressing problem of human existence (which is not, as most philosophers would have you believe “man’s purpose in the universe,” but rather, the problem of DEATH. A writer who particularly influenced me (via cryonics) was Alan Harrington. with his radical manifesto The Immortalist. Once I read The Immortalist the key turned in the lock and the door opened. Religion was a coping mechanism it was a sanity mountainous device that had no more basis in reality than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.  From Harrington I learned of Miguel d’Unnamuno and then, in my Sophomore year of High School I read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death which frames the whole proposition from a more rigorous cognitive perspective.

In more recent years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that religion, religious thought, religious beliefs and mystical experiences are likely rooted in our evolutionary biology and that, as opposed to being merely a social tool for coping with the terrible reality of death, religion may have an evolutionary-biological basis, as well.

The implications of that, if true, are powerful and staggering, because it means that as we outgrow the need for such ancient and irrational coping mechanisms, it will be difficult to set them aside – more difficult than we may have previously imagined. As a consequence, we will need all the tools of logic and reason at our disposal to demolish the infrastructure of religious thought.

Growing up, as I did, in a religious environment, and being both an atheist and a cryonicist, I was confronted with many religion-based arguments against cryonics and immortalism. This was also a time of stunning advances in biomedicine and cryonics was all about the promise of more to come. At that time, and even more so now, the party line within the cryonics community was one of strict appeasement with respect to any conflict with religion. “Don’t antagonize them. We need the members. Keep your mouth shut.” Those were the bylines. Mostly, I held my tongue. But I from time to time I would mumble, under my breath, the thought I often had after the shame  of not feeling the rapture of the Holy Ghost (nee’ Holy Spirit) pouring into me or Jesus not suffusing my being after Holy Communion: Well, you know, the only thing that would have lent real credibility to Christianity is if, when Jesus, God’s beloved only son, exsanguinating on a rough hewn cross of wood, cried out, “E’-Li, E’-Li la’-ma sa-bach’-tha- ni?[1]” there was absolutely no answer, and that was really the end of it. No resurrection 3-days later. No atonement for mankind’s sins. Just oblivion. No backroom deals, no escape clause, no abracadabra, no miracle.

I mean, honestly, how scary is obliteration if it lasts only as long as a 3-day bender, or an especially bad bank holiday weekend? How big a deal is death, if it really isn’t forever? I was coming of age in a time when people were recovering from comas that lasted for weeks for or months – and in rare cases even for years! Three days? Give me a break! On a purely logical basis, Christianity doesn’t make any sense. As we cryonicists are quick to point out, there is a serious logical fallacy if the definition of death is the irreversible loss of life, and yet dead people can supposedly come back to life, get married have children, grow old and die again, ‘cmon!. Where’s the sting in that? So Jesus died?

OK, so lots of people “die” nowadays. They suffer and “die.” They exsanguinate slowly, they suffer injuries so terrible that they make Jesus’ brief tenure on the cross and his march down the Via Dolorosa look like happy hour on Folsom Street in San Francisco. And what’s more, they live – and they live long, satisfying and productive lives, including people like the one in the photo above. And they do so, not because of anantiquated coping mechanism for death and mayhem, but because of rational, scientific inquiry and its application to medicine by courageous and dedicated men who value life and want to preserve and extend it.

One good thing I can say about Roman Catholicism is that a central tenet of the faith is that it must be accepted willingly – not through coercion.  As a consequence, the adherent is asked at numerous junctures if he is he is indeed a believer. Me being me, I said no, early and often. My parents’ response to this was to force me to observe the rituals of the church. I was made to attend Mass. However, to their considerable credit, the priests and nuns would and  did not cooperate in any way with my parents’ attempts to force further participation. So, while my parents sat and stood and keeled and spoke as the ritual dictated, I merely sat. And so it went until this ordeal became too embarrassing for them.

My parents never interfered with my intellectual autonomy. They never even attempted to interfere with my signing up for cryonics at the age of 15, with embrace of Darwinian evolution, or with any other of my beliefs or ideas. Somehow, they knew and respected that cryonics, in particular, was absolutely critical to my person-hood and to my dignity – indeed that it was central to my integrity as a human being. I could then only imagine what it must have cost them to do that.

When I saw that my mother was developing Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), a number of doable scenarios crossed my mind that would have allowed me to cryopreserve her, or to otherwise render her brain into a fixed, unchanging state. I have done this before in very different situations for very different reasons. How is not material to what I have to say here. The fact is, I would have done almost anything to have saved my mother. I would have stolen or killed  to have saved my mother.

The one thing I would not have done is to have defiled her autonomy. And therein lies a terrible irony, because, at the very cost of her own life, the values she, and her logically bankrupt religion taught me, stayed my hands.

Will she and all the other dead be recoverable some day in some way in an infinite universe or multiverse? Perhaps. That’s what the theoretical physicists tell us this week. Maybe in 13 billion years we will all be united end of the space-time continuum.  Does 13 billion years matter? Hell yes! Three days? No so much. We aren’t gods and the fact is, we are so far from it we can’t even approach that throne, look upon it, or begin to understand it. So for all practical purposes, 13 billion years is forever and for now, dead is dead. We need to keep that in mind as we reason our way forward day by day and make the decisions that shape our lives and the lives of those we love.

[1] “My God, My God, why hath Thou forsaken Me?”

By CryoX

{This is a work of fiction  {or is it?}

Mirror mirror hanging on the wall
You don’t have to tell me who’s the biggest fool of all
Mirror mirror I wish you could lie to me
And bring my baby back, bring my baby back to me – m2m

My frequent flier card isn’t a card at all, it’s Parthenocissus tricuspidata (some would argue it’ the Roman numeral IV, instead). Whatever. For me it’s the magic weed that evaporates the financial distance between the coasts three or four time a year. Most of my frat buddies have their business junkets, we academics have our conferences. Alcor and Mike Darwin. Both on the West Coast, as  was my upcoming conference. Doable.

I hadn’t seen Max More since my undergraduate days, which I realized were rapidly becoming, no pun intended, a chillingly long time ago. My girlfriend (at the time) and I had attended some cryo/extro/CR get-together’s, and I met Max and his wife Natasha several times.  Max was this earnest, muscular, ginger, intellectual type who tried just a little too hard, was just a little too rehearsed and was more than a little too rigid. His wife Natasha? In some slightly different AU, Kurzweil has his Ramona. To me there is something artificial, slightly off and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d t-a-u-t about her.  The only time I met Max without her around, I noticed a big difference in him; he was visibly insecure.

Now, Max More is President of Alcor.

I should have called to be sure Max was going to be there instead of just booking for the tour. Stupid. My flight was delayed out of LAX, and with the crazy delay from the limo, I barely made it from Sky Harbor to the Alcor building in time to meet the rest of the group. Unbelievably, the traffic in Phoenix is worse than it is in L.A.

The Alcor building is drab and unimpressive which, because of the idiodyssey of my limo driver, I really don’t understand. There are two Acoma Drives in Scottsdale and the moron (or his company) driving me from the airport had no GPS. We spent half an hour cruising around the Scottsdale Air Park before I finally became desperate enough to shove my Droid in his face and demand he call someone for instructions (shame on me for not having my GPS enabled for travel). The Air Park has lots of architecturally attractive buildings – some quite stylish if you like that Frank Lloyd Desert Look. The Alcor building is Brutalist Bad; plain-ugly-anywhere.

As soon as we were admitted to the lobby/reception area, a bomb went off in my head: Natasha! I don’t know if she had anything to do with it, but that was my reaction.  That kind of space is, by definition, supposed to welcome and draw you in. Instead, there is this big, cold, crystalline blob in the form of an “Infinity Mirror” almost immediately inside the door on the wall to your right, as you walk in.

There are all kinds of problems with this. First, it causes a distraction. The visitors aren’t interacting or socializing with each other, or the Alcor staffer (who should be a scantily clad voluptuous blonde). Instead, they are looking at the “pretty” on the wall, and some of them are even ape-touching it. One Merkeley woman in the group poked me in the ribs and said in an excited whisper, “Oh look into it, look into it.” That was my undoing. Fun-house mirrors, looking down tall glass buildings, certain angles at the Las Vegas  strip: all provoke intense, uncontrollable vertigo and nausea. Instantly, I was an undergrad in a dorm room staring up at an empty case of Dos Equis from the floor.  In one direction was the door to the outside, which the lady who had let us in had locked with a key. In the other direction was a mass of sharp angled stainless steel and glass furniture which I could see myself impaled upon and dying in a pool of my own blood and vomit.  I was paralyzed in front of the magic mirror. All I could do was shut my eyes and think of cool sea breezes. It worked.

The Alcor reception area is done up in grays, icy whites and shiny metals. This is a cryonics company. Its two most obvious and predominant negative images to overcome are death and the cold.  I didn’t really need the rest of the tour because even before the nausea had fully subsided, I realized that the special expertise Max had been hired to ply on Alcor was a new, high technology “preservative” skill called techsodermy, which is the cryonics equivalent for “dead” high technology companies. It was invented in the 1980s in Silicon Valley, and while I just made the analogy to cryonics, it really owes it origins more to taxidermy, because it was invented in order to fill dead tech companies with fluff in the hopes of convincing someone to buy them. (When we were waiting for our rides, the Merkeley Lady said the lobby reminded her of Benihana, and that she expected an “Oriental gentleman” with sizzling liquid nitrogen and  steak and shrimp to come out and start “chopping our meal” with a Ginzu knife at any moment. At least, she hoped it was steak and shrimp.)

My Old Man is all about money. In fact, he is money. He makes money appear and disappear. He moves money. He cleans it, he packages it, he inventories it, he “handles” it. That means that his clients are, mostly, people who rarely, if ever touch the filthy stuff. Some of them don’t even want to touch the little pieces of plastic that serve as markers for it. It’s an irony that the people who have the most money are the most visibly invisible of the super rich. If there is anyone reading this who knows what a Smythsons Diary is, I’d be very surprised. Perhaps a few more would know how to assess a man’s station by looking at his shoes, or his writing utensil? Today, casual dress is so commonplace and so comfortable…and if you want to be somewhere reasonably economically and you have commonsense and a lot of money, you book first class and you dress sensibly and comfortably. But, if you are in the know – then you know who’s who, and you don’t need a ledger book to tell you.

If you want peace and privacy, then you don’t travel by commercial means at all. That’s for the peasants. You use Flight Centres and privates jets, and there is no security screening. And if you want a blow job or a massage, or both en route, that can be arranged for a few hundred dollars more; a small part of the cost of coach ticket the flying public pays, and that after taking off their shoes and belts and switching planes in Houston and Dallas.

The people at Alcor are clueless about how to get the customers that matter. Not just the rich and the super rich (the people my Old Man services day-in and day-out), but the “good-judgment” segment of every demographic of the population. You may be a working class stiff from Boston in a cloth coat, but you know what the genuine trappings of quality, durability and class are, regardless of the style. Warmth, wealth, style, elegance, quality; whether understated or overstated, they always come through. So does Costco warehouse gray.

My Old Man wanted me to get an M.B.A. But he wasn’t altogether disappointed that instead of the usual frequent flier card I got that Mark IV. He’s interested in cryonics and he thinks it has a technical and (less so) a financial chance of working. But Alcor? I may be that desperate, but unfortunately for me (and him), he’s not.

By CryoX

Illustrations by Mike Darwin

This is a work of fiction  {or is it?}

We Froze the First Fly.

Great title.

I could have written it.

I should have written it.

I’m an insect endocrinologist.

This futon in the lab lounge is so hard and lumpy I’d’ rather crash on the floor. But it’s nearly as sticky-gray as the table cum journal holder, cum lamp stand at the end of it. I am waiting on some gel tracks to finish. I wearily sit up, grab the ratted copy of PNASty on the coffee-juice soaked table next to the fridge. It comes away from the faux wood-grain surface with a stickysssssss.  The journal opens, on cue to,  ”Conversion of the chill susceptible fruit fly larva (Drosophila melanogaster) to a freeze-tolerant organism.”

Did I mention I’m also a cryonicist?

My middle name is Drosophila.

Humiliation.

Embarrassment.

Feelings of worthlessness.

Should I call GOD (Grand Old (Mike) Darwin) when I get home? That’s a conversation I can’t have here, or at Starbucks across the street.

GOD knows everything, well, almost everything.

Yeah, I should call him.

He hates it when I call him that, so I guess I should call him Darwin here, or maybe just “him”, when it’s grammatically correct.

I started phoning him after I got turned onto the history of the interaction between scientists and cryonics by something Chris Hayworth wrote.

Then I was pulled into his blog.

This place (where I work) is close to one of the Great Libraries. Periodicals. Films. There’s maybe two places  you can go to find out about the history of cryonics and science as it happened: Mike Darwin, and the Library of Congress.  When I started, I didn’t know to start with Mike Darwin. I’d have saved a lot of time. But I think it would’ve warped my perspective .

Digging through the stacks of magazines and newspapers from the 1960s and the 1970s, ordering up 35 mm film, kinescopes, and videotapes that were the size of hard drives from 1980′s, was like opening old tombs. That stuff smells. It feels ancient. Dead. Gone.

Darwin is alive. Electric. Now. He ruins the past by making it present.

The gels are done.

I’m done.

Gone.

Home.

The bugdust can wait till tomorrow.

I get Darwin on the Droid and start pouring out my woes about the missed opportunity with frozen flies. He is only mildly moved. “It’s good work,” he says, “not so much because it’s great science, but because it shows people straining to do something, to try, to be clever. I know this will sound impossibly, prickishly arrogant, but this is work that could have been done, and should have been done by a kid in high school, or middle school as a Science Fair project 10, or even 15 years ago. No, no, not the DSC (differential scanning calorimetry), and all the sophisticated science, but the basic work of trying to successfully introduce cryoprotectants into flies, or other larger organisms, and then freeze them successfully. Planaria would be a great model for that!”

“Really?” I replied with some skepticism.

The image of a Justin Bieber, working studiously at my bench,  just didn’t crystallize in my mind?

“Hell yes!”

“In the 1970s, students, children,  were freezing mammals – reproducing Smith’s work – and Greg Fahy and I had both done experiments with invertebrates (and me with vertebrates) before the Science Fair banned such work. In fact, you can introduce 6% DMSO into gold fish. I never tried to see how much additional ice that lets them tolerate. Now, because all such biological “hacking ” is banned, no kid is going to try things like introducing combinations of molecules like perhaps a  membrane protecting sugar such as trehalose,  a protective amino acid such as proline,  and a small amount of a colligative agent, such as glycerol, DMSO or ethylene glycol into a common pest, like the California garden snail. Can’t be done. They’d send the poor bastard off  for a psych referral and counseling.  “Tsk, tsk, you maladjusted, mean little bugger,” they’d say.  ”Why, the next thing you know, you’ll be pulling the wings off song birds and sniffing your mates’ jockstraps in the locker room.”

“I had to admit, he had a point. ”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t feel so bad that I didn’t do this  experiment 10 years ago?”

“No, I’m saying that as far as your likelihood of  brilliant scientific contributions to cryobiology goes, you’re fucked.  In my opinion, that window probably closed when you were a graduate student, and it certainly closed after you were a post doc. Any mark you make scientifically now in cryobiology/cryonics will be along the lines of what Donaldson did, and Donaldson was a fucking genius.”

“And I’m guessing you think I’m not?” I replied.

“Who do people always put words in my mouth, and then get royally pissed off at me? I’m glad you’re recording these calls, and I hope you not only save them, but that you actually listen to them some day. Because when you do, you’re going find that, to your considerable surprise,  after 20 or 30 years of telling people that “Mike Darwin called you a fucking moron,” in fact, what I really said  was nothing at all. Literally, nothing at all. Please, try and remember that.

People have this remarkable tendency to substitute their own dire adjectives at junctures like this when they are forced to confront the hard reality that they are not geniuses, or millionaires, or movies stars, or any other of those nearly impossible ideals and that, at least during  this life cycle, they are not going to be.  That is one of the most important reasons why we are tangled up in cryonics in the first place! Because, if you stop and think about it even a little, not even George Clooney, or Bill Gates, or Barac Obama, or anybody gets it all. They only get a teeny tiny bit of it: and then they die. Whitney Houston. Fantastic, angelic voice. Beautiful woman. Rich, rich rich! Miserable life. Dead. Great stuff, huh? ” Cryonics isn’t just about any of those things, it’s about all of those things, minus death, and infinitely more,  and that’s what makes its transcendent.  That’s why the prefix trans keeps popping up spontaneously in cryonics (and everywhere else in human culture).”

“So what do you think I should do?” I ask.

“If you mean what specifically, the answer is, ‘I don’t know.’ And that’s because you are not a PFC and I’m not a general. You’re not a grunt with an IQ of 90, under the authority of a nation-state, that I can order about at my pleasure. If I try to do that, you’ll turn on me like a cornered rat. In fact, odds are, you’ll do that no matter how I choose to interact with you. It’s just that the odds are a lot better that it will happen later, rather than sooner.

So I can’t give you orders. I can’t even really give you specific suggestions, because as soon as I do, you’ll start returning with all kinds of ‘well but’s', because again, it will rapidly degenerate into my planning your life. That won’t work.”

“So what does work?”

“The nature of an insurgency is that, in its early stages, it is self organizing.  Still, it must reach a critical mass. How it does that is still a mystery to me. I think it is part chance, part timing, part the presence of the right individual – the nucleating individual.”

“Do you think you’re that nucleator?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.  At any one time there are a thousand, ten thousand, maybe a million guys who think they are the nucleators. I was in the UK at the baths and all the action had stopped. All the men had gathered around the telly  to watch this ghastly, absolutely ghastly woman with Asperger’s from Scotland sing.[i] There was no sex to be had anywhere; these men had paid good money to get laid and they’re watching this ghastly woman on TV! She sang. Objectively, her voice was good. Not great, not fantastic. Definitely the kind of voice that can make a meager living for you at the low end of the industry if you have a good personality and a great manager; clearly neither of which she had. Good singing voices are common. Great singing voices, truly great singing voices, are not. Now this, on the telly, commanding the attention of gay men in a city where you can hear the most magnificent voices in the world at St. Martin’s in the Field for fucking free (if you can read)!

As it turned out, she became a sensation, went onto fame in the U.S., sold millions of albums! It was mad, absolutely mad! And I assure you, it had nothing to do with her raw talent. She was one of millions and millions of would-be nucleating agents trying for that peculiar niche, and she was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Did she think she was going to be a multimillionaire hit recording star? It doesn’t really matter, because she is. It’s very much like the lottery if you are poor , disenfranchised, have no other options and desperately want to get hold of millions. Well it’s really your only chance, and if you don’t play, you can’t win.

I’d also hasten to add that you’d best be careful what you wish for and be damn sure you have the tools and the talent to handle it if you get it, because most people who  win the lottery are destroyed by it. And the results of winning for most insurgents and insurgencies are disastrous for them.”

“But back to me? Where do I fit in?”

“You say you’ve become ‘obsessed’ with the war between the cryobiologists and us. What have you learned?”

“That you single-handedly squashed those Cacks . Reading that history, the history that you wrote of the battle royale between the cryobiologists and the cryonicists,  between them and us, I mean, that was the catalyst. When I began looking at the source material, it didn’t compute. ”

“Why not?”

“They caved too quickly. It was all over as if they’d been hit in the taint with a sledge hammer. That didn’t make sense. Cacks don’t wage a 20 year war, invest their reputations and take the time to go on TV and talk to journalists, and then just stop. Not. Doesn’t happen.”

“So?”

“So I wanted to know what did happen. I know that you threatened to sue them. They’re herd animals.  But some of them are mavericks. And some of them are stupid, too. ”

“Like Dr. Arthur Rowe, who, in fact, is still alive, and recently, like a frozen Woolly Mammoth in some bad B-movie, has come back to life, eons later, and is making TV appearances again, trashing cryonics.”

“Yeah, like  Arthur Rowe.”

“There are colleagues of mine here who won’t talk to any journalist, but if someone from Wired or Scientific American comes sniffing around, they can’t help themselves. Greed and ego, ego and greed.”

“Exactly.”

“So, I wanted to know what happened and that’s when I started digging. I guess that’s when I began to understand your message on Chronosphere and to understand what the word insurgency meant. I think it’s Chris Hayworth who mentions that you threatened to sue the Society for Cryobiology.

When your name comes up in cryonics, everybody thinks they know you, and everyone has a story to tell about you. In a small group of people who’ve been involved for a while, I’m usually the only one that hasn’t got anything to say. Listening to that kind of talk is funny. I sit and think about the letters written to those scientists’ bosses. And to the bosses of those scientists’ bosses. About the phone calls, probably hundreds of phone calls made to university chancellors, blood bank officials, trustee members, university board members, grant committee remembers. About all the letters, hundreds and hundreds of letters on different letter heads, on no letter heads; letters written and mailed to the same types of people complaining about the unscientific, unethical, overreaching and improper behavior of their scientist employees.  Courteous letters and not so courteous letters.

And I have to wonder what kinds of letters some of those scientists, or their families, the ones who didn’t stop their unscientific and irrational attacks on cryonics, might have received?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

“You know, a few of the secretaries and support staff who worked for some of the most outspoken scientific critics of cryonics are still around. They offer an interesting peek into that time. You ground those people down. In fact, you sacred the crap out of them.”

“I had help.”

“I’m sure you did. But it was you. It was your idea. It was your leadership. It was your insurgency, as you would put it.”

“Yes.”

“Melody Maxim?”

“What about her?”

“She was not merely annoying, she was becoming dangerously destructive. Not because of the true things she was saying. Had she spoke the truth – no matter how malignantly or viciously, no matter with what calls for regulation and policing, I would have remained silent. But she began to lie, to defame good men who were cryopreserved and who could not defend themselves; to threaten the lives of innocent people, and to try to destroy cryonics on the basis of fraud and force. Interestingly, the response of the cryonics organizations (and their members) twenty years after the cryobiologists’ attacks on cryonics organizations that were now orders of magnitude bigger in size and with assets larger still, was to revert to type. It was exactly the same as it had been before 1980. They simply argued with these creeps in their own forums, were picked off one by one, took it, watched the opposition grow dangerously and did nothing. And in the bargain, they fought with each other!

I was stunned. Frankly, I was more stunned than I am today, having just been informed that both my parents have  been dead for four months and that I was deliberately not informed about it. It shook me to core.  I realized, as I read over that traffic, that cryonics was in no way going to work. It wasn’t an opinion, or a guess, or a hunch, it was a simple fact. It was like turning on the TV on 9/11 and seeing those people falling from one of the Twin Towers. There could be absolutely no question in your mind that whilst those people were alive, they were absolutely certain to be dead within a (short) and quantifiable period of time.

You have to realize that I was not following any of that traffic in real-time. I was busy doing all kinds of other things. In fact, during that immediate time interval, I was in London,  soaking up art, music, food, culture and having more sex than any one person should ever have. It was only because of the persistence of this fellow with the handle of Finance Director (FD), who kept intruding into my life to tell me how I was being slandered by this Melody Maxim person, that I even began to read that pap.

And then it took awhile , a long while, to deal with the shock of that “cryonics 9/11.” At least credit me with a lot more sense than George W. Bush. My measured response was to write the “Failure Analysis Lectures” which have been, I must say, a spectacular failure.

But I also began Chronosphere, and I began efforts to squelch the attacks on cryonics. I believe those were successful. Of course, Alcor was also suing Larry Johnson, and I think that that was enormously useful in that it sent the clear message that lies, even if mixed with the truth, will be very costly. They can and will cost you your home, your job, your reputation.

Unfortunately, it is in the nature of the U.S. tort system, and of insurgencies, that they  have an inherent dark side. It’s in the nature of any force, of any weapon or technology that there is the capability for harm equal to or greater than that which is present for good. Insurgencies are more like projectile weapons, than, say,  bladed weapons, such as knives or swords. As such, they are more suited for warfare and they are mostly of use for killing and mayhem. This is also the difference between the National Guard and the Army, and between the Police and the Army, and it is why you never use the Army in place of the Police. Never. The problem with the Johnson victory is that while most of the book is lies, there is still a meta-truth to it. The “victory”, which was also a shallow one, is thus further diluted, because it was not a completely just one.

There is so little second guessing the fight against the Nazi/Axis ~70 years later because:

the Nazis were  kooks,

they behaved with abominable aggressiveness,

their European allies were kooks,

they behaved with disgusting barbarity,

they left the concentration camps to be filmed and photographed,

they were utterly and completely defeated and humiliated,

it was all beautifully documented.

What you witnessed in the ultimate response to Maxim was the rekindling of a mini-insurgency. I gave no orders. Before I came on the scene, Alcor was already prosecuting Johnson, albeit neglecting their flanks with Maxim and Arnold. However, that was not enough then and it is not enough now.

It’s not just about “enemies.” It ‘s about not making progress, about not doing science. It’s about not being excited, planning, thinking, innovating and being obsessed with, and in love with cryonics. The failure to defend ourselves; that’s a symptom of all those other things being absent. Only  the sick, the weak, the distracted or the demented fail to defend themselves.”

[i] Susan Boyle

by Mike Darwin

Michael B. Federowicz and Ella A. Rorhman circa 1954

Yesterday, I learned my parents, both of them, had died a little over 4 months ago. The call came from a staffer at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Alcor had been contacted by the attorney handing probate for my parents’ estate. My parents had died within a day of each other. My mother passed on 1 November, my father on 2 November of 2011.

It was not unexpected news. My mother had developed Alzheimer’s disease some years ago and had been frankly demented for the past several years – unable to recognize me or hold meaningful conversations for the past two years. About 8 months ago, my father, 90 years old, informed me, during one of our increasingly infrequent and unpleasant phone calls, that he was not going to call me when my mother died. My response was to inform him that I had no plans for further phone calls to him. It was the end of what had been a sharply deteriorating relationship since my mother’s illness eliminated her role as a buffer between us – a role I had not even understood existed, let alone previously appreciated was necessary.

I had no bad blood with my few other remaining relatives in Indiana, but they apparently chose not to notify me, either. To be fair, I found it difficult to communicate with them  and I’m sure the same was true for them. Neither of our phones or mailboxes were often, dare I say ever, burdened with communications.

Mike Darwin and his parents, April, 1955

My parents lived long, happy and productive lives. They gave me a great childhood, free of cares and worries, and afforded me every opportunity for education, knowledge and personal growth. My youth was a time of warmth and loving security. My parents worked hard, earned and enjoyed financial security, and enjoyed a long and happy retirement; free from worry or want. Their “golden years” were spent in remarkably good health. My father, despite being a 3-pack a day smoker since age 13, was lucky to escape with only an aortic replacement, a carotid endarterectomy and a coronary angioplasty, all of which he made rapid and astonishingly complete recoveries from. Aside from a few months of morbidity associated with these illnesses, his retirement years were active and free from any significant cognitive impairment. My mother also remained active and cognitively functional into her late 80s. Both my parents enjoyed active social lives diminished only by the relentless and ever accelerating loss of dear friends, most of whom they had the good (or mis-) fortune to outlive, depending upon your point of view. By the time they reached their mid-80s, they had outlived almost all of their cohorts. This took an especially heavy toll on my mother, who defined herself to a far greater extent than did my father, through her social relationships and through her shared memories with her girlhood friends.

One of the many backyard social gatherings with friends and neighbors my parents held. My mothers is the lady in the big sunglasses. Photo is circa mid-to early 1970s.

My Mother and my good grade school friend, Hubert Holman, preparing a package containing a red eared slider turtle for launch into the upper atmosphere, circa 1968.

How many parents would let their 13 year old kid freeze a veritable zoo of animals, or send turtles careening off into the stratosphere? And how many loving parents (and they were loving parents) would their 14 year old son go off to spend summers with a mad body freezer on Long Island, and, a scant 3 years later, run off to “freeze dead bodies” in the same place – and take a week of his senior year in high school to do so in the bargain?

Me at the Cryonics Society of New York in the summer of 1972.

 

 

 

 

Me freezing “dead” people in 1973 at age 17.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My parents gave me a great childhood. They offered me every opportunity for education and personal growth any boy could want and as only child they and I had the economic opportunity for both toys in an abundance that many children in larger families don’t enjoy. I’d like to think that both they and I took full advantage of that opportunity.

Clockwise: Christmas, 1956, Halloweenwith my dad, 1957, a von Braun rocket set with “grandma” looking on circa 1962, playing with rabbit in the early 1960s, summer in New York city in 1962. 

In looking over the hundreds of photos that now constitute almost all that is left of my parents’ past, I am struck by the evidence therein, or rather lack of evidence, of my integration into their lives after the onset of puberty. This reflects the deep sense of alienation that I felt, as well the visible absence reflected in the photographic record. Not only was I was sexually alienated from the lives they were leading by the biological accident of being homosexual – I was morally and intellectually alienated, as well. For it was at this time that I realized that religion was a farce, that death was both a great evil and personally unacceptable, and that the social and moral constructs on which the civilization I was embedded in were based were, at best, a pastiche of make believe and brutal pragmatism held together with spit and sealing wax.

Thus, intellectually, I had very little attachment to my parents. And as time went on, that meant that increasingly I had less and less emotional attachment, as well. Being home with them for visits was awkward under the best of circumstances, and had been for many years. Gratitude isn’t the same thing as genuine intimacy. My mother’s love and longing for me – the me she remembered – was tragic and pitiful – in large measure because it could not be returned – that person had long ago ceased to exist – and there was no possibility of the easy, spontaneous interaction that been there as a child. In its place was a forced simulacrum that had to be called up mechanically.

And then, she ceased to exist – which was both terrible and terrifying.

When I spoke with the probate attorney’s secretary, I was also not surprised to find that my father had replaced me as the executor and the beneficiary of the estate. My parents loathed cryonics. That is why, in no small measure, I have such high praise for them as parents for in allowing me the autonomy they did, and especially at such a young age to pursue it (cryonics). My mother, in particular, was continually nervous that I was going to “freeze her” and in fact, during her last days “semi-compos mente” whist hospitalized and gravely ill, she grasped my hand and earnestly pleaded with me, “not freeze me – or my brain!” What goes around comes around, and I had far too much love and respect for the autonomy they had shown me, so many years before, and at such a high emotional cost to themselves, to betray them in that way. They should have had no worries – and they should have known that that was the case.

My mother clearly loved me very much and she showed that in countless ways, small and large over the years, right up until she became demented. However, from the time I left Indianapolis in 1981, my parents never came to visit me in California, nor did they call me more than once or twice. When the Alcor facility opened in Riverside, I pleaded with them to come to the Grand Opening. They declined. They came to Las Vegas several times to vacation and they visited friends and family elsewhere on the West Coast – but never me. I never asked them to accept or to believe in cryonics, let alone my homosexuality. But I did ask them to accept a moment of what I considered genuine triumph in my life – the building of Alcor into a respectable place and organization that was not a seedy back-room garage operation. All they had to do was to show up – they could even have come afterwards, and just walked through the place. That rejection was incredibly wounding and, unlike my sexuality, it was not necessary and it was not rooted in religion or morality. Later, with the success of 21st Century Medicine I had another triumph, the successful recovery of dogs with no neurological deficit after 15+ minutes of complete cardiac arrest at 37°C. Again, I asked that they come. Again, they refused. That time, cryonics was not at issue. For me, that was, I think (in hindsight) the final divide between me and them, between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It was then that I realized that symmetry. Just as I had, many years before as a boy becoming man, felt alienated from and unable to participate in their lives and in their world, so too had they been alienated from and unable to participate in mine. At last, the circle was complete. As I remarked to a dear friend later: “I’m not sure about us cryonicists and the rest of the world. Are they ants that gave birth to giants, or are we giants that gave birth to ants?” His, answer was as true as it was wise: “Both.”

Over the subsequent years, and especially after the full maturation of my bipolar disorder and my breakdown in early 2003, my father became increasingly venomous about cryonics and about me, losing no chance to denigrate or deride either of us – pointing out that I was an abject failure, an impoverished “nut case” that his tax dollars were supporting; and that if my mother had anything to say about it, his money would probably keep supporting me after he was dead – and most likely even after I was dead. I suppose there is truth in what he said. But it was very wounding.

However, the ultimate truth, which I remain convinced of, is that he was wrong about cryonics. Certainly, he was wrong about his money supporting me, either after his death, or mine.That was a simple matter his own actions quite simply, and quite righteously saw to.

The day after I got the news about my parents death, Dr. Brian Wowk kindly offered his condolences and in so doing he used the term “disinherited.” That shocked me, because I in no way feel (or felt) disinherited. This so because I never considered my parents’ money mine. I told them this often, and for many, many years when they were alive. Starting from when I was a teenager, actually.  I didn’t earn that money – they did. I told them to spend it on themselves. And as they lived into old age in good health, I cautioned them to save for “spend down” and for the quality nursing home and assisted living care they would very likely need. As it was, they both had and were able to pay for very good nursing home and assisted living care until the day they died. I never wanted nor expected their money. So, I suffered no hurt at all about being “disinherited.” If my father wanted the money to go elsewhere, then I’m happy he was able to see, or at least know, it would do so.

One of the things my parents had no way of knowing I would learn  as a teenager banging around the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY),was the utter contempt I would learn for inheritance – for the very concept of it – and for its fundamental incompatibility with a cryonicist/immortalist existence. My days as a kid at CSNY made me sick to the core at the avarice of children for the unearned money of their dead parents. Seeing that contemptible greed in action sickened me on inheritances at an early age; and nothing in my subsequent experience – right on through to fantastic grab for the wealth of Dick Jones, did anything to improve my opinion of it. I still wince every time I think of, or look at a picture of Clara Dostal – and that is often, since one of she and I hangs on the wall next to where I am sitting now, as I write this. Inheritance is based on the FACT of and the INEVITABILITY of death. And that fact is anathema to us. It is also based on the concept of the unearned at the expense of the lives of the others. And that concept ought to be anathema to everyone.

No, the only things that distresses me about the way my parents passing was handled were that I wasn’t told about their deaths until four month later, and about the obituary my father prepared for submission to the local paper. I would be dishonest if I said I was not relieved about being freed from the socially expected obligations, (and the attendant  financial and psychological/emotional ones), of attending the funeral/burial. I said my goodbyes to my mom several years ago, when she was still barely oriented enough to understand. Burials and funeral Masses are rituals for them, not us. They are things for us only when we fail. When they are things of conscious choice made by others, they are unnecessary horrors, and we are under no obligation to participate.

As long as I live, I will not forget my parents, nor will I ever cease to be grateful to them. But they chose, quite consciously, to die. I respected their right to that decision and to their autonomy in making it. But it is a terrible and forever isolating thing to do. It is a thing that starts isolating and alienating years before death actually occurs, because once you accept death and decide to die, you must, inevitably, begin surrendering the struggle to stay involved with life and living, and thus to stay current and a part of the world of today.

This was something that both of them did increasingly, quite independent of their involuntary, age-associated deteriorating cognitive reserves. And that is one huge difference I’m increasingly noticing with experience between cryonicists and non-cryonicists. Even those cryonicists who are sorely neurocognitively challenged struggle mightily to stay involved with, and in love with life and the technologies that drive it. Men like Curtis Henderson and Bob Krueger come to mind. I am humbled and in awe of the nobility of their struggles, and of their courage in confronting the debilities of old age.

I would never call my parents cowards, but there is something terrible, small and lacking in their resignation to death and in their lack of vision. They are in a graveyard now, side by side. It is for that, and for their very conscious choice to be there, that I grieve for them.

No doubt much of the pain I am now feeling is socially programmed. Some of it is genuine sorrow at the loss of what was and what can never be again – brought to the forefront of consciousness by the reality of their deaths. Some of it is, no doubt, the realization of the loathing that my father had for me – a loathing so great that he chose not to even acknowledge me as his son in the obituary he prepared for the mortuary to submit to the local paper.

Ella and Michael Federowicz

Ella A. Federowicz

Michael B. Federowicz

Ella A. Federowicz, 90, Indianapolis, passed away Tuesday November 1, 2011 and her husband Michael B. Federowicz, 90, Indianapolis, passed away Wednesday November 2, 2011. Ella was born in Indianapolis on August 6, 1921 to William and Carrie Forway Rohrman. She retired in 1981 as the supervisor of data entry from Dow Chemical after working there for 25 years. Michael was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 1, 1921 to Benjamin and Constance Jakuc Federowicz. He retired from the Indianapolis Police Department with the rank of Sergeant in 1985 after 31 years of service. Michael also served in the U.S. Army for over 10 years during WWII and the Korean War. He was a member of the Knights of Columbus Council 3660, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 86, IPD Retired Officers and the Ernie Pyle Post VFW. Ella was preceded in death by her brothers, Virgil and Irvin Rohrman and Michael was preceded by his sister, Anna Kraska. They are survived by a sister-in-law, Janis Rohrman and several nieces and nephews.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated for Ella and Michael on Tuesday November 8, 2011 at 11 a.m. at St. Barnabas Catholic Church where they were members. Visitation will be Tuesday from 10 a.m. until 11 a.m. at the church. Burial will be in Calvary Cemetery. Online condolences may be shared at: orileyfuneralhome.com

Published in the The Indianapolis Star on November 4, 2011

By Mike Darwin

Left: Science Fiction writer Fred Pohl, with friend.

Predicting the future is a tough business. It is an especially tough business when it is proposed  that the prediction be highly specific and technically accurate. Say, akin to predicting the iPhone with Siri in 1965. It’s often been noted that none of the Golden Age of Science Fiction writers like Heinlein, Clarke, or Asimov predicted the PC, let alone the laptop. And most didn’t have a clue about the emerging developments in biology. So, the odds that one of those esteemed gentlemen would have conjured up a hand-held device that you could ask just about any question to (and get a useful answer), pay your bills through, order your meals with, get directions from, do your banking over, get reminders, entertainment or voice mail from and have a conversation with…well, the odds of that were just about nil. Just about, but not, as it turns out, quite nil.

In his 1965 cryonics novel, The Age Of The Pussyfoot, that Golden Age Science fiction writer, co-contemporary and friend of Bob Ettinger, Fred Pohl posited the existence of a device called the Joymaker, which every civilized person would necessarily have to have. The Joymaker incorporated the following features and uses:

• Access to sophisticated computing for money management, scientific calculations, etc.
• Access to planetary libraries at any time and any place.
• The education of children each of whom have their own Joymakers.
• Health Maintenance: the Joymaker monitors vitals, administers life saving or mood altering medications, summons emergency medical help and summons cryopreservation services in the event of cardiac  arrest.
• The Joymaker offers voice mail which is the core of interpersonal interaction in the novel.
• Orders all food and beverages and arranges payment, both in the home and in public.
• Orders all other goods for delivery and since payment is automatic, the expense of items is not always apparent to the buyers. Thus, the protagonist rapidly depletes his “fortune.”
• Replaces the public address system allowing any group of people to hear a public announcement on their Joymakers thus eliminating the need for loudspeakers in public places or interruption of entertainment programming.
• Locating people. The central computer can track the position of any Joymaker, and by extension, its owner. This information can be made available at the owner’s discretion.
• Jobs not requiring physical presence. One character is a “Reacter,” someone who samples new products and reports her reactions using the Joymaker. The central computer analyzes her reactions in the light of her known psychological makeup and is able to statistically predict how well the product will sell.

Left: Robert C. W. Ettinger, the father of cryonics.

The Age Of The Pussyfoot was set in the year 2527. However, in his Afterword to the novel, Pohl noted that he thought many of the functions of the Joymaker would be realized not in five centuries, but more likely in five decades.  Forty seven years after Pussyfoot, the iPhone with Siri is here, and most of Pohl’s predictions are  indeed a reality.  And, at age 93, Fred Pohl has survived long enough to see his predictions become reality. His friend and fellow science fiction writer Bob Ettinger was cryopreserved late last year and Pohl has been intimately aware of cryonics for ~50 years. He was one of the first people Ettinger contacted about the idea and over the ensuing five decades Ettinger never ceased to nag Pohl to make cryonics arrangements. The two were good friends and stayed in touch in writing – the last letter Ettinger wrote to Pohl shortly before his cryopreservation, admonished him, yet again, to get signed up for cryonics.

I too had tried to persuade Pohl to make cryonics arrangements, even offering him a “free freeze” in 1978. When Ettinger entered cryopreservation on July 23, 2011, Pohl wrote a moving tribute him on his blog “The way of the Future” and this prompted me to take up where Bob necessarily left off in urging Fred to make cryonics arrangements:

Mike Darwin says: Hello, Fred, this is from Mike Darwin, the guy who made you the offer of a “free freeze” after dinner that night in Louisville, KY in our suite in the Galt House hotel. You were the Guest of Honor at the American Science Fiction Convention in 1978, and we took you to dinner and made you an offer that, as it turned out, you easily could refuse! If you want to read an account of that meeting from the perspective of the cryonics people present at that time, it’s up on line, here: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8301.txt and is entitled, “When You Can’t Even Give it Away – Cryonics and Fred Pohl.

When you write about Bob Ettinger, “He wrote me one more letter, good-naturedly urging me to change my mind. That was the end,” I would say in response, “Uh, uh, it is much more likely, on the basis of probability alone, that was the end not for Bob, but for you.

Bob and I talked and corresponded about you a number of times over the years. Unlike you, I was not close to Bob, and we were often at odds. Interestingly, one of the few things that ever resulted in a genuine emotional connection between us was the offer we made to cryopreserve you for free. While he was too reserved and diplomatic to say so, your given reason for turning cryonics down, well, to be frank, I think it pissed him off a little. It was apparent that he genuinely liked and admired you and that, maybe just as importantly, he shared a common past with you. You and he grew up in the Golden Age of Science Fiction and you both shared the common narrative and heritage of what is now being called “The Greatest Generation.” The last time I saw Bob, was over dinner a few years ago in Michigan. He was quite frail, but wickedly lucid. I asked him if you were still compos mente and if he was still in touch with you. He sighed, “Yes,” and a “Yes.” And then he momentarily lost his temper, which is something I almost never saw him do. I don’t remember his exact words, but they were pretty to close to this: “I guess he doesn’t think that much of me or of the rest us, because he’s so worried about being alone and displaced from the people he knows and loves now. Doesn’t he think I’ll be there? Doesn’t he think any of the hundred or so others from our generation will be there? And if he does, and he is so worried about loneliness and social isolation, then dammit why doesn’t he come along to keep us company?”

I thought that was an extraordinarily good question. But logical and emotional arguments aside, it was painfully clear to me that HE WANTED YOU ALONG FOR THE RIDE. I had a hard time holding back the tears, and I had to excuse myself to the men’s room.

When most men die, their probability for any future goes to zero; in effect, their event horizon collapses. That’s about to happen to you (and to me, and to everyone else). Say what you will, Bob Ettinger now confronts two possibilities – oblivion, or one hell of a really interesting future. A future far more fantastic than anything you or he ever dreamed of, or wrote about. If nothing else, just to have come that far and to be in that position, well, it’s a hell of an accomplishment. And I am very grateful to Bob Ettinger for achieving it, because it opens that possibility to me, as well.

So, Fred, here’s the deal. Your friend is waiting for you: he damn sure wanted you to embark on the adventure (good or bad) that he has now begun. In fact, he kept at you to go until, literally, almost his last breath for this life cycle. He can’t do it anymore, so I guess it is my turn, once again, to ask you to reconsider and to join your friend and colleague on his journey into the land you both dreamed of when you were young, and in your salad days. Please, reconsider your arguments. It is now for sure you won’t be without a friend and cohort, and I can pretty much guarantee you that your revival won’t take place unless you have a use.
Finally, I can tell you for a fact that the best use you have is continue living and growing and telling stories. At our core, we humans are ‘store creatures,’ and we will remain so as long we *are* human. It goes without saying that story creatures need storytellers; your job is thus secure.

August 2, 2011, 11:47 pm

To which Fred replied:

Declining Immortality Twice

Mike Darwin’s response to my piece on the loss of that very good man, Bob Ettinger, caught me completely unaware. I am grateful to you for repeating the offer of a free freeze, Mike, just as I am grateful to the people who sometimes tell me that they’re going to pray for me. Even though I can’t accept your offer, it’s a kind thought.

Let me quote from a poem that was written long ago by John Dryden, in an attempt to sum up the teachings on this subject of the even longer ago Roman philosopher Lucretius. The last six lines say it all, but I’ll give you the whole thing. It goes like this:

So, when our mortal forms shall be disjoin’d.
The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind,
From sense of grief and pain we shall be free,
We shall not feel, because we shall not be.

Though earth in seas, and seas in heaven were lost
We should not move, we should only be toss’d.
Nay, e’en suppose when we have suffer’d fate
The soul should feel in her divided state,
What’s that to us? For we are only we
While souls and bodies in one frame agree.

Nay, though our atoms should revolve by chance,
And matter leap into the former dance,
Though time our life and motion should restore.
And make our bodies what they were before,
What gain to us would all this bustle bring?
The new-made man would be another thing.

But I do appreciate the offer.

This entry was posted on September 9, 2011 at 12:30 am at http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2011/09/declining-immortality-twice/

Fred Pohl may be the first man in the history of the world to have declined a shot at immortality not once, but twice! I would argue that the really amazing thing about Pussyfoot is not just that Pohl got the technology of the Joymaker right, but that he also got the biotechnology of the future more or less right – granted in no small measure due to that “good man” and good friend of his, Bob Ettinger.  Fred Pohl knew a sound and reasonable idea when he saw one , biological or otherwise,  and 50 years later cryonics has endured and the biological basis for it has grown steadily better. Lucky patients cryopreserved with little or no ischemia, using the best available vitrification techniques today, will have intact connectomes and minimal neuronal molecular damage. Such fortunate patients will suffer virtually no freezing damage.

Above: The Connectome.

 Any yet, Pohl is having none of it.

Right: Viktor Frankel.

I used to find this a mystery. To be surprised by it. To marvel at it. However, that time has long past. The first insight that offered a partial answer to that mystery came from Viktor Frankel’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  Frankel noted that there were two basic types of people in the concentration camps – those who drew their sense of identity and purpose from their social/societal position; husband, father, lawyer, doctor, mother, grandmother… and those who drew it from some other source, independent of their social context, or how they were labeled. For some, the origin of that sense of identity was religious, for others, it existed independent of any institutional or religious thoughts or beliefs. Those few people saw themselves as unique and worthwhile individuals deserving of and entitled to life and survival at all costs, independent of any external factors or forces.

Much later I realized that another component in the will to survive that is often material in making the choice for cryonics is the yearning to be transcendent. It is not enough to be able to see the future with accuracy and precision, it is necessary to yearn to be it. To quote Nietzsche:

 ”I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape…. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth…. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

H. G. Wells said it far more beautifully:

“We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries…It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening; out of our lineage, minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.”

But Wells spoke of not of achieving that greatness personally, but rather of the species achieving it  – of our descendants achieving it.

To want it, to need it, to ache for it personally – that is a rare thing. It is the motive force that has driven biological evolution – and it is the motive force that has driven every human innovation and every human conquest – for good or evil.

Recently, a friend of mine asked, in wonder, why I was preparing for the contingency that technological civilization might collapse. “There would be no cryonics if that happened.” he noted, correctly.

“Yes, I know.” I replied.

“And it would be really horrible. A terrible, terrible undoing of the world.” he added.

“Yes, yes it would.” I agreed.

“Then why on earth would you want to be around to see that?”

“I can’t imagine missing the last act! I mean, honestly, I’ve had the chance to read up on all that happened before, I’ve trotted all over the planet, read the thoughts of the best minds of every known culture and civilization, and you propose I should wimp out and miss the denouement? I’m plenty savvy enough to keep redundant assets for a quick and painless exit at should I find myself in unbearable agony and no hope of survival. However, absent that, I can’t even conceive of betraying the intense curiosity I’d have about any apocalypse, even if my own survival were impossible.”

Frankel comes close to summing up my feelings on this matter when he says:  ”Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” There is an implied qualification not present in Frankel’s quote:  “Man at his best is that…” The cryonicist is thus that being who chooses life, inquiry, knowledge and understanding of the universe as his personal and moral imperatives. He chooses to feel and to be these things – not just to think about them, or talk about them. He chooses action over contemplation, life over death.

The origins of that choice? Well, that is still a mystery, but one which, in the fullness of time, may we may hope to unravel.

 

By Mike Darwin

I think every cryonicist carries in his head his own unique model of the “future of cryonics.” Furthermore, I think that each individual cryonicist carries around a largely arbitrary and unique set of standards, rules and regulations concerning what constitutes “proper,” “moral,” “ethical,” or even “reasonable” behavior for both “rank and file” and “professional” cryonicists.

We cryonicists often use the words “movement” or “industry” to describe our undertaking. However, it is a commonplace to all real movements, industries (and, I would add professions) that they share at least a broad world view and a basic, common vision of the future; as well a reasonably well developed set of rules, regulations, guidelines and ethics for carrying out day to day operations. A corollary of such a basic self-regulatory framework is a “judiciary” to enforce these obligations and injunctions.

Medicine, the law,  other professions, and even academia, the trades and trade unions have such value-driven enforcement mechanisms in place. In all these examples, senior and respected members of the profession, trade, or ideological movement[i] serve as appointed adjudicators to both fairly and responsibly enforce both the objective and subjective codes of behavior that have been put in place over time.

In the case of medicine, there are both private, professional organizations and state-sponsored, or state-informed organizations, such as the state medical boards, whose job it is to set and enforce a minimum standard of “right” conduct, which is understood to include moral, ethical and legal behavior. These entities do not function in a “black or white,” “all or none,” “guilty or innocent” manner. Rather, they consider the totality of the cases that come before them and attempt to reach a just resolution. For instance, under most conditions, it is unethical for a physician to engage in sexual congress with a patient. However, depending upon the circumstances, including the prior professional history of the physician, such a transgression may be handled by a simple reprimand, or alternatively, by being struck out of the profession for life.

In any mature ideological movement, religious, political, social, or otherwise, there are similar “rules and regulations” and a well defined world view and vision of the future. There may well be (and usually are) both conservatives and radicals in any given organization with respect to this world view and vision (and usually many more who are “moderates”). However, this does not prevent or preclude there being clearly and objectively stated rules. There are members of the American Medical Association who support active euthanasia and more than a few Roman Catholics who support (and use) birth control.

What does this have to do with the “future of cryonics”? Quite a lot, really, because the expectations of members and leaders within cryonics organizations will shape the actions taken by the cryonics organization as a whole – even if that “shaping” is to effectively preclude coordinated action.

 

For instance, cryonicists who envision rapid and largely unimpeded technological progress sufficient to make cryonics “successful” (i.e., to achieve perfected suspended animation, or to resuscitate today’s cryopatients) will likely find conflict in the brass tacks of dealing with cryonicists who have a contrary view of the future – who see the future as a difficult and dangerous place and believe that cryonics must largely make its own way and forge its own advances – and if necessary, alter the course and values of the global culture to facilitate the survival of cryonicists (both living and cryopreserved).

It is also the case that any enterprise operating completely sans written minimum standards, rules, regulations, obligations and moral and ethical expectations for its leadership and its membership will function chaotically and ultimately, will fail.

This is most evident in the case of Alcor, where the proof of such a standard-less or “lawless” operation can be found in the high turnover of management and staff.[ii] Some years ago, I was riding in a car with then Alcor President Steven Van Sickle. He remarked that he wanted to have T-shirts made up for all the Alcor Presidents, past and present, with a bull’s eye printed on them along with words to the effect of “shoot here” and “invite them to attend the next Alcor Conference to wear the shirts.” The sentiment he was expressing was that no matter what you do, you will eventually be found summarily guilty and shot. That is a true and sure sign of an organization without standards that lurches from decision to decision based on the expediency of the moment, whether it be cash flow, number of cryopreservations per year, membership growth, or avoiding a “catastrophe” of one sort or another (justified or unjustified).

Even where there are standards that are well known and written down (somewhere), such as the conditions under which at-need cases should be accepted, they are violated (as in the case of Ted Williams) – usually because those making the decisions had no mentoring and no inculturation in such rules. People do not learn “right” or “proper” behavior by being once “told the rules,” or by being given a stack of papers where they are written down (or engraved on stone, for that matter); any more than they learn moral or ethical behavior in daily life in that fashion. Such behavior, and the values that underlie them, are inculcated more than educated. No one even learns the mechanics of driving a car from reading the state-provided operator’s manual – sans lots of practice and mentoring during the actual business of operating a motor vehicle. And this is doubly true for the large body of mostly unwritten behavior that constitutes being a courteous driver! That can only be acquired from mentoring and from repetition and observation of the good conduct of others who are vastly more experienced, and for whom there is genuine respect.

The fatal flaw in Ettinger’s vision of cryonics was that cryonics itself was to come from them and not from us. In his world view, large corporations and the government would become involved almost from the beginning, as well as the trades and professions, and  they would then work out all the details of what constituted right and proper conduct in every sphere of action – from rescue – through storage and “reanimation.” Clearly, that didn’t happen. And, by the way, there was no great sin in imagining that it might. The world is a wild, crazy and unpredictable place and it seems eminently possible to me that in some universe somewhere there is indeed the “freezer centered society” that Ettinger envisioned in 1962-4.

Rather, the sin is that 50+ years later, we still have not awakened to the reality that this culture and this civilization are, at best, monumentally indifferent to our undertaking and worst in deadly opposition to it.

We have a profound responsibility to arrive at a world view, a morality and code of conduct of for cryonics. That these should be reasonably inclusive and flexible there can be no doubt.

And there can be no doubt that we will neither survive as individuals nor endure as organizations if we fail to take these most basic and necessary of steps.

 Footnotes

[i] Organizations as diverse as the Communist Party, GreenPeace , the Catholic Church and the Tea Party all have such mechanisms as well a written ideology and accompanying rules and regulations.

[ii] The Cryonics Institute (CI) has historically operated on a the “strong leader” paradigm wherein a single individual, or at most a few individuals, determine the proper course for the organization and make decisions about what is just, ethical and moral on case by case or ad hoc basis.

IV. EFFECTS OF CRYOPRESERVATION ON THE HISTOLOGY OF SELECTED TISSUES (Left Ventricle and Cerebral Cortex)

Left Ventricle

Figure 43: The myofibrils of each cardiac muscle cell are branched and contain a single nucleus. The branches interlock with those of adjacent fibers by adherens junctions which act to prevent scission of the cardiomycytes during the high-shear, forceful contractions of the heart. The muscle is richly supplied with mitochondria which are largely confined to the spaces between the fibrils. The fibrils are covered with a membrane, the Sarcolemma, which is frequently invaginated to form the Transverse tubules. These invaginations of the plasma membrane or sarcolemma, are called transverse tubules and they reach deep into the myofibrils and  bring the action potential deep into the fibers. Specialized intercellular junctions, the Intercalated discs, facilitate rapid transmission of the electrical signals which initiate myocyte contraction. The myofibrils are formed by myosin and actin fibers aligned in a distinct pattern which is visible under light microscopy as the A-, H- and I- bands.

      Yajima stain was used to prepare the Control (Figure 44), FGP  and FIG cardiac tissue for light microscopy. The FGP cardiac muscle showed increased interstitial space, probably indicative of interstitial edema. In many areas the sarcolemma appeared to be separated from the cytoplasm of the myocyte and, occasionally, appeared to have disintegrated into debris in the interstitial spaces (Figure 45). The myofilaments appeared maximally relaxed with widened I-bands . The mitochondria were grossly swollen and contained numerous amorphous matrix densities. The sarcolemma was fragmented beneath an intact basement membrane and there was increased space between the capillary endothelium/basement membrane and intact areas of the sarcolemma of the cardiomyocytes. The cell nuclei  were unremarkable.

Figure 44: Control-1, Left  Ventricle, Yajima, 100x. Control cardiac muscle demonstrated crisp, well defined membranes and the normal density and pattern of myofibril structure. Capillary endothelium appeared intact and the capillary basement membrane was well anchored to adjacent myocytes and appeared intact.

 

Figure 45: FGP-1 Left Ventricle, Yajima, 100x. In the FGP animals the myocardium exhibited increased interstitial space (IIS) as well as the presence of debris in the IIS which appeared to be disrupted sarcolemma (yellow arrows). The capillary basement membrane was often observed to be separated from the sarcolemma of the adjacent myocytes and endothelial cell nuclei were sometimes observed devoid of plasma membranes or cytoplasm (red arrow).The occasional naked myocyte nucleus could also be observed (green arrow).

The same changes were also present in the FIG group with the added presence of a “ragged” or rough appearance of the myofibrils where they were silhouetted against interstitial space (Figure 46). There also appeared to be holes or spaces, possibly as a result of edema, in the fabric of the myofibrils that were not present in the myocardium of either the control, or the FGP animals.

Most surprising was the general absence of contraction band necrosis in the FIG group, possibly as a consequence of the protective effect of reasonably prompt post-cardiac arrest refrigeration. No microscopic evidence of fracturing, either gross or microscopic, was noted in the myocardium of either the FGP, or  the FIG groups.

Figure 46: FIG-2 Left Ventricle, Yajima, 100x. Separation and fragmentation of the sarcolemma were observed in the FIG myocardium to a greater extent than that seen the in myocardium from the FGP animals (yellow arrow). Additionally, the fibers of myofibrils had a more ragged appearance and consistently displayed open spaces in the bands which were not seen in the myocardium of either the Control or the FGP animals (red arrows).

 Figure 47: The myofibrils of both the FGP and FIG animals appeared maximally relaxed with a marked increase in the thickness of the I-band. Intact red blood cells (RBCs) were observed in the FIG animals and represent incomplete blood washout (red cell trapping) despite perfusion with large volumes of washout, cryoprotectant and fixative solution (~8-10 L) over a time course of ~140 minutes of perfusion.

Cerebral Cortex

 Figure 48: The cerebral cortex consists of six distinct layers, beginning with the first layer, the Molecular Layer (Stratum zonale), which consists of finely branched medullated and non-medullated nerve fibers. The molecular layer is largely devoid of neuronal cell bodies. Those neuronal cell bodies which are present are the cells of Cajal which possess irregular cell bodies and typically have four or five  dendrite that terminate within the molecular layer and a long nerve fiber process, or neuraxon, which runs parallel to the surface of the cortical convolutions.

 The second layer of the cortex consists of a layer of small Pyramidal cells with the apices of the pyramids being directed towards the surface of the cortex. The apex of the small Pyramidal cells terminates in a dendron, which reaches into the molecular layer, giving off several collateral horizontal branches. The final branches in the molecular layer take a direction parallel to the surface. Smaller dendrites arise from the lateral and basal surfaces of these cells, but do not extend far from the body of the cell. The neuronal axon (neuraxon) always arises from the base of the small Pyramidal cells and passes towards the central white matter, thus forming one of the nerve-fibers of the white matter. In its path, the neuraxon gives off a number of collaterals at right angles, which are distributed to the adjacent grey matter.

The third cortical layer consists of Pyramidal neurons which are characterized by the presence of cells of the same type as those of the preceding layer, but of a larger size. The nerve-fiber process becomes a medullated  fiber of the white matter.

 The fourth layer is comprised of  Polymorphous neurons which  are irregular in outline and give off several dendrites which branch into the surrounding grey matter. The neuraxons of the Polymorphous neurons give off a number of collaterals, and then become a nerve-fiber of the central white matter. Scattered through these three layers are the cells of Golgi, whose neuraxon divides immediately with the divisions terminating in the immediate vicinity of the Polymorphous neuron cell-bodies. Some cells are also found in which the neuraxon, instead of extending into the white matter of the brain, passes towards the surface of the cortex; these are called cells of Martinotti.

 The fifth cortical layer contains the largest pyramidal neurons which send outputs to the brain stem and spinal cord and comprise the the pyramidal tract. Layer 5 is particularly well-developed in the motor cortex.

 Layer 6 consists of pyramidal neurons and neurons with spindle-shaped cell bodies. Most cortical outputs leading to the thalamus originate in layer 6, whereas most outputs to other subcortical nuclei originate in layer 5.

The cortical blood supply is via the pia mater which overlies the cerebral hemispheres.

Bodian stain was used to prepare the control, FGP, and FIG brain tissue  samples for light microscopy. Three striking changes were apparent in FGP cerebral cortex histology: 1) marked  dehydration of both cells and cell nuclei, 2) the presence of  tears or cuts at intervals of 10 to 30 microns throughout the tissue on a variable basis (some areas were spared while others were heavily lesioned), and 3) the increased presence (over Control) of irregular, empty spaces in the neuropil as well as the occasional presence of large peri-capillary spaces (Figures 54,56, and 57). These  changes were fairly uniform throughout both the molecular layer and the second layer of the cerebral cortex. Changes in the white matter paralleled those in the cortex, with the notable exception that dehydration appeared to be more pronounced (Figure 55).

Other than the  above changes, both gray and white matter histology appeared remarkably intact, and only careful inspection could distinguish it  from control (Figures 52, 58, 59 and 60). The  neuropil appeared normal (aside from the aforementioned holes and tears) and many long  axons and collaterals could be observed traversing the field. Cell membranes appeared crisp, and apart from appearing dehydrated, neuronal architecture  appeared comparable to control. Similarly, staining was comparable to that observed in Control  cerebral  cortex. Cell-to-cell connections appeared largely intact.

The histological appearance of FIG brain differed from that  of FGP animals in that ischemic changes such as the presence of pyknotic and fractured nuclei were much in evidence and cavities and tears in the neuropil appeared somewhat more frequently. The white matter of the FIG animals presented a macerated appearance, in addition to exhibiting the rips or tears observed in the white matter of the FGP brains (Figure 61).

Both FGP and FIG brains  presented occasional  evidence of microscopic fractures.

Figure 49: Control-1, 1st (molecular) cell layer, cerebral cortex, Bodian, 40x. Cells of Cajal (N) and a dense weave of axons (A) are visible. The tissue is perforated by numerous capillaries (C) and a  small venue containing many red blood cells (RBCs).

Figure 50: Control-1, 2nd cell layer, cerebral cortex, Bodian, 40x, showing a pyramidal neuron (N, lower left) multiple capillaries (C) and the interwoven connections of dendrites that comprise the neuropil.

Figure 51: Control-1, white matter, cerebral cortex, Bodian, 40x. Myelinated axons (MA) appear both in cross section (yellow arrows) and laterally (green arrows). Unmyelinated axons are present inside the black circle. Glial cell nuclei (GN) are scattered throughout the tissue.

 Figure 52: FGP-1, Cerebral Cortex, 1st cell layer, Bodian, 40x. Two large capillaries (LC) are present, one with a red blood cell present (right). Neurons (N, cells of Cajal) are present in normal density and the neuropil appears intact. This section appears indistinguishable from that of the Control animal.

Figure 53: FGP-1, Cerebral Cortex, 2nd cell layer, Bodian, 40x. This area of FGP cerebral cortex shows injury typical of that seen in both FGP and FIG animals. There are a number of large tears in the neuropil (red arrows) approximately 10 to 30 microns across. A pyramidal neuron is present in the lower left of the micrograph and it appears somewhat dehydrated. There are a number of naked glial cell nuclei (yellow arrows), as well some nuclei with what appears to adherent cytoplasm visible at the margins of the tears in the neuropil.  

Figure 54: FGP-1, Cerebral Cortex, 2nd cell layer, Bodian, 40x. In this area of the 2nd layer of the cerebral cortex the neuropil presents a somewhat “moth eaten” appearance, with numerous tears and vacuoles in evidence (red arrows). One large tear appears to be a pericapillary ice hole (yellow arrow).

Figure 55: FGP-3, Cerebral Cortex, white matter, Bodian, 100x. There are numerous open spaces in the white matter that appear to be ice holes (red arrows). The density of the tissue appears markedly increased over that of the Control white matter, possibly as a result of glycerol-induced dehydration. This apparent dehydration is also evident in the increased density of the axoplasm seen in the myelinated axons (green arrows).

Figure 56: FIG-3, Cerebral Cortex, 1st cell layer, Bodian, 40x. Extraordinarily normal appearing Molecular layer of the FIG cerebral cortex. The neuropil appears intact with the exception of what appear to be scattered tears or ice holes (red arrows).

Figure 57: FIG-2, Cerebral Cortex, 1st cell layer, Bodian, 40x. Large tears are evident (red arrows) and naked glial cell nuclei and fragmented cytoplasm are apparent (nn). Several intact capillaries are in evidence (C) as well as what appears to be two capillaries that have been separated from the neuropil and appear largely surrounded by open (pericapillary) space (green arrows). A mass of debris appears to occupy some of the luminal space of what appears to have been a capillary (Cd).

Figure 58: FIG-2, Cerebral Cortex, 2nd cell layer, Bodian, 40x. Remarkably intact neuropil with several capillaries, including several capillaries sectioned oblique to the plane of the tissue (OC). A neuron (N) with what appears to be a crisp plasma membrane is present at the upper right of the micrograph.

Figure 59: FIG-2, Cerebral Cortex, 2nd cell layer, Bodian, 40x.Normal appearing cerebral cortex in an FIG animal. There are multiple intact neurons with normal appearing dendrites (D) and axons (A). An intact large capillary (LC) is present and appears free of red cells.

Figure 60: FIG-2, Cerebral Cortex, 2nd cell layer, neuropil, Bodian, 100x. Normal appearing layer 2 of the cerebral cortex with intact neurons (N), axons (A), and neuropil. A capillary (C)with intact endothelial cells and an endothelial cell nucleus (EN) is also visible (left, center).

Figure 61: FIG-2, Cerebral Cortex, white matter, Bodian, 40x. Severely injured white matter typical of that seen in FIG animals. The tissue presents a macerated appearance (black circles) with numerous rips and tears, possibly as a result of ice formation (red arrows). The capillaries (C) are separated from the tissue parenchyma (yellow arrow) and what appears to be a naked endothelial cell nuclei projected into the intraluminal space of one capillary (green arrow).

END OF PART 3

I have been traveling, or here at Krell House in Northern Arizona, since 24 December of 2011, and have had virtually no access to the Internet, or to long distance telephony during that time. Additionally, communicating with the world via Chronosphere or email have been comparatively low priorities.

The extreme daily hysteresis in the ambient temperature and humidity in Northern Arizona rapidly degrades coatings and causes the underlying structures to fall to ruin. One example of what I am doing to defend against this is to protect high damage areas of buildings with FRP (fiberglass reinforced paneling) treated with a UV protective coating (photo above). I might also add that these conditions make the use of nails in wood construction inadvisable. Within the space of a year nails, even under painted surfaces, will be extruded ~2-3 mm from the lumber they are embedded in. After ~5 years, they may have backed out of the wood so much as  a result of the relentless daily cycles of expansion and contraction (of the wood) that they simply fall out! Screws and glues are the only way to build here.

I arrived in Arizona to find serious damage to the roof of my home, as well as a large number of deferred maintenance tasks crying out for completion.  I also discovered that the phone/internet access cable to my home, as well as the fiber optic trunk, had been accidentally attacked by a neighbor’s backhoe. In fact, over 100 ft of phone cable had been uprooted from the ground and requires reburial – a task I’m attending to now.

The telephone cable to my home was uprooted from a point on the adjacent property right up the junction box where it enters the house.

Added food, emergency lighting, and other reserves (above).

An additional 1,000 gallons of water has been brought on line and connected to the house pumping system (above) for a total capacity of 3,000 gallons.

As the world economic and political situation continues its decline I am also increasingly working to prepare for the likelihood of even harder time ahead.  I have increased long term food reserves, added an additional 1,000 gallons of water storage capacity and implemented a crude rainwater collection system.

Generator,house power interface (above).

I’ve also completed installation of the back up generator switchover system which allows a seamless (and safe) transition of the house from grid to 5 kw of generator power. I am currently working on the support systems for a small (~ 250 watt) solar panel/battery bank system (battery house, charge controller and inverter)

Heavily insulated and heated battery shed.

Another high priority has been to create the infrastructure required to allow year round cultivation of greens and root vegetables. As a child, I was responsible for maintaining our two “hotbeds” which provided our family with Bibb lettuce, Musclun, bunching onions and salad lettuce for most of the winter. That system relied on fermenting manure in a glass covered wooden frame that was largely buried in the ground to provide both heat and fertilizer.

Unfortunately, the large hysteresis in daily temperature here, coupled with the presence of abundant sunlight, creates real problems for that system of cultivation absent nearly constant attention.  Ambient temperature typically fluctuates between 50 to 60 degrees F during the day, to as low as the teens or low 20s at night. Days are often cloudless and bright which means that the temperature in any kind of glassed-in enclosure could easily and rapidly exceed  120 degrees F! Thus, such an enclosure would have to be opened and closed at least twice a day; with any failure to do so likely resulting in the loss of the crops.

Initial excavation and stone-laying of the cultivation chamber. The tank visible in the background is a 1,000 gallon propane tank.

Nearly completed stonework with finished grading.

Until very recently, scrap Kaibab stone was available free here. Even now, it is only $20.00 for a level pick-up truck bed full. This has allowed me to construct a large, well insulated, earth sheltered and heat-sink protected cultivation chamber.

 Construction is well underway on the sunlight admitting glass and environmental module that will be bolted to the stonework.  The cross members seen  in the photo above will soon be decorated with an automatic, solar powered climate control system. When the internal temperature exceeds the safe limit, a muffin fan is activated to bring in cooler air from the outside. In the summer, cool, moist air is generated and delivered via an underground network of pipes that also uses evaporative cooling. Watering is also automatically controlled. The entire set up was built to be resistant to penetration by radionuclides. This is a far more difficult challenge than keeping a stock of soil protected (which can be done quite simply by using earth covered tarps).

This project has been an especially high priority for me because it is no longer economically possible for me to have access to fresh greens, or similar, highly perishable vegetables. I live an hour’s drive from any affordable shopping of this kind, and the prices of these items has also skyrocketed. With consumer petrol prices predicted to be near $5.00 per gallon by this summer, I will have to reduce resupply trips from every two weeks to once a month – and possibly longer. I believe that the prolonged absence of this kind of food from the diet is a serious health risk – as well as being an added misery.

Another food related project is the construction of a  chicken enclosure…

Heat wasting windows have been “replaced” with high grade insulation and firewood stores have been increased (above). The porch light is a high output, high efficiency LED bulb (60K hour life) brought back from Europe along with a suitcase full of others! The yellow coating was done by me.

Wood, like stone, is abundant here, and for a small fee to the Forrest Service it is possible to cut a great deal for the cost of the time, gasoline and wear and tear on the chain saw. I have thus increased my firewood reserves, and plan to increase them further. Sometime ago I “eliminated” all the windows in my home, or more properly, heavily insulated them with expanded polystyrene and fiberglass faced with a double sided, multilayer reflective heat barrier. This has reduced heating and cooling costs by over 90%. I am staggered at the massive amount of heat leak that occurs through so called “energy efficient” double pane windows.  Most people aren’t in their homes during the daytime and when they are they are usually watching TV or on the computer. LED lighting is now so cheap (in Europe) that it is vastly more economical to light your home with electricity and dispense with energy gobbling windows altogether.  If you need to look outside – well, that’s what cameras are for – and they can see in the infrared too, which means you can see what’s going on in the dark.

Chronospohere, at least as it has been pursued so far, has failed to gain traction. I will explore what I think are the reasons for this at a later date.

For the present, I am busy and productive and working within my (small) resource constraints. Progress is slow because almost everything I do is on a no cash basis using items recovered from the waste stream, bartered for, or purchased as scrap for one cent on the dollar (or less). It is also slow, since I am doing it myself and learning as I go along. I am blessed with a good library of books on everything from electrical wiring to woodworking. The only books thrown out more consistently in the UK and the US than the Bible are ‘self help’ and ‘how to’ books. I am becoming increasingly convinced that many people buy such books with the expectation that merely owning them will somehow magically confer mastery of their contents. Probably the same is also true of the Bible.

I am attending to the large backlog of personal correspondence that has accumulated during my period of enforced isolation from the Internet, so, if you have written me, I apologize for the tardiness of my response in advance.  — Mike Darwin