11 replies to this topic

[celindra]

Cryonics center's income soars

Craig Harris and Peter Corbett
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 12, 2003 12:00 AM


Revenue nearly tripled for the Alcor Life Extension Foundation last year when the Scottsdale facility froze baseball legend Ted Williams, but a spokesman said Thursday there was no correlation.

Instead, annual revenue hit a record $2.39 million because three other Alcor members died, were placed in cryonic suspension and left large sums of money to the non-profit foundation, said Carlos Mondragon, an Alcor director and former president.

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I don't particularly care for Alcor's business model (make money when the customer dies), but if it works, it works.

Question is: is it sustainable?

[Bruce Klein]

Thanks Celendra,

Good news, and I think this will pertend future success for Alcor granted they find good leadership.

[80srich]

The whole point is it isnt sustainable - once the technology to reanimate is available there will be no more need for cryonics. I like how alcor admits being frozen is the second worst thing that can happen to you.

[John Doe]

[Utnapishtim]

80srich

Cryonics doesn't exist for its own sake in order to continue to perpetuate itself. Cryonics exists in order to save lives.

I fail to see how the fact that cryonics is 'unsustainable' invalidates it.

What alternative do you suggest for people dying today?

[80srich]

You misinterpreted what i meant. Obviously that level of funding will one day be unsustainable as the suspended people are reanimated and therefore at that time medical science should have no more need to freeze people. At that point funding drops to zero. If cryonics was a sustainable industry it would be like saying they wont ever be able to unfreeze you and hence keep taking your money.

Naturally i agree that cryonics is the best way for people dying today to survive, in fact it worries me that i might have accident without being covered myself.

[patrick]

Cryogenic suspension is more than just freezing the dying and recently dead for reanimation when the technology is available. It has a host of applications: space travel, emergency medical intervention.

Also, it seems likely to me that while we are flesh there will always be borderline cases: where medical technology, however advanced, needs more time to catch up to the specific needs of badly damaged individuals.

As for your worry that you won't be covered: work with it. Your worry is telling you something important, so listen to it. Get covered.

Patrick

[80srich]

Cryogenic suspension is more than just freezing the dying and recently dead for reanimation when the technology is available. It has a host of applications: space travel, emergency medical intervention.
Patrick

Guess i should confess ignorance on this one only ever really considered cryonics as a way of getting to nanomedicine intact. Time i hit the books i think.

As for whether i should get covered or not i really doubt i could i could afford it. At 19 its unlikely ill die from 'natural' causes, but the fear of accident always remains...maybe i should look into it, at least life insurance would be cheap at my age...

[patrick]

As for whether i should get covered or not i really doubt i could i could afford it. At 19 its unlikely ill die from 'natural' causes, but the fear of accident always remains...maybe i should look into it, at least life insurance would be cheap at my age...

Very cheap, generally speaking.

Alcor has some information about this online. http://www.alcor.org...nding/index.htm This includes contact information for insurers who have experience doing exactly that.

Patrick

[Bruce Klein]

Scottsdale cryonics group thriving despite controversy

Craig Harris and Peter Corbett
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 19, 2003 12:00 AM

http://www.azcentral...cor-main19.html

Forty-three heads. Eighteen bodies. Eleven dogs. Eleven cats. One monkey.

In the back of a quiet, nondescript office complex near the Scottsdale Airpark, heads and bodies of humans and animals are frozen, upside down, in massive 9-foot-tall steel tanks at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

The humans and pets are being retained in a liquid nitrogen bath at minus 320-degrees Fahrenheit with the hope that scientific advances will someday bring them back.

It's a lofty goal and one that Alcor has quietly pursued for much of its 31-year history. But the company's low profile was catapulted into the limelight the past few months.

Alcor has been accused of mishandling the body of baseball legend Ted Williams, its chief executive is stepping down following internal strife and a criminal inquiry is under way in Los Angeles.

Alcor has thrived, nonetheless.

Membership stands at an all-time high. Donations hit a record last year. And the organization has $5.4 million in accumulated net assets, even though its scientific premises are widely dismissed.

"Financially, we bubbled in the last year," said Carlos Mondragon, Alcor's spokesman and a longtime board member. "We certainly can't complain."

Still, the small organization, named after a star in the Big Dipper, remains highly controversial. The Arizona Republic has learned:

• Alcor was given tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service three decades ago as a scientific research and education organization, but one official acknowledges little research is being done.

• Although Alcor officials have vigorously denied engaging in cloning, records show Alcor's founders set up a business in Scottsdale in 1998 to work on potential cloning.

• The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating a 1992 death of an Alcor member as a homicide after an ex-employee alleged the death was hastened.

• A former Alcor executive disclosed documents and tape recordings that could be used to try to prove that Alcor and Williams' youngest children sidestepped the baseball great's wish to be cremated, as stated in his 1996 will.

Dr. Jerry Lemler, Alcor's CEO, who will relinquish the job Dec. 31 following blistering allegations of mismanagement by another member, said he could not comment about the police investigation.

Lemler, who is fighting lymphoma, reiterated that Alcor is not involved in cloning and said that the organization is meeting its tax-exempt requirements by educating the public about cryonics: preserving body parts after death with the hope that future science will bring them back to life.

Charles Platt, a former executive, accused Lemler this summer of overspending, nepotism and ineffectiveness, but the organization has never been healthier financially.

Under Lemler, Alcor raised a record $2.4 million last year, thanks to three large gifts and a record eight members dying and being cryonically stored at Alcor. Membership has increased 21 percent, to 656, since Lemler became president/chief executive officer in September 2001.

Lemler, who will become Alcor's medical director and spokesman after giving up the top job, said most members are highly educated adults with a background in science and math. Men dominate the membership 3-1.

Platt, a science-fiction writer who has a home near Ashfork, said that the memo he wrote is now a "dead issue" and that it's typical for Alcor members to get emotional.

"The purpose of cryonics is to address the problem of death. Whether or not it's successful, we don't know. But when you have people who are united by that common bond, they tend to live at a more intense level," Platt said.

"You are looking at a bunch of people who are trying to beat death."

Frozen storage

In its 20,000-square-foot warehouse, Alcor stores 58 humans, with 43 being "neuros" (heads only) and 18 being whole bodies. Three of the clients' heads were removed, but their bodies also were frozen.

The last suspension, Alcor's term for cryonic storage, was in March. The bodies come from all over the United States, Australia and Britain.

In addition to preserving animals, Alcor stores frozen sperm and ovaries in the tanks. No state laws prohibit any of the storage.

But that could change. The Arizona State Board of Funeral Directors is pushing for legislation in the next session to regulate cryonics labs, said Randy Bunker, board president.

"We need some oversight and accountability in order to protect consumers and the integrity of human remains," Bunker said.

Matthew Sullivan, Alcor's director of suspension readiness, said it would be "inappropriate for funeral directors to regulate cryonics, a field completely outside their experience or expertise."

But Lemler said if Alcor was regulated by some state agency, it would help legitimize the company's practices in the minds of the public.

When neuropreservation occurs, the heads are placed in blue "sleeping bags," or specially made pillowcases that are placed in large canisters that resemble soup pots. Bodies are placed in Dacron wool sleeping bags and stored upside down and strapped to an aluminum storage container.

Sullivan said bodies are kept upside down in case there is a failure in the storage tanks.

"We don't believe our identities rest in our toes. Instead, it's our brains. We prefer to keep that cold for as long as possible," Sullivan said.

Alcor's most famous client, Ted Williams, is stored in two containers, his severed head in one, the rest of his body in another.

His presence at Alcor sparked a bitter legal dispute last year among his children over their father's wishes for his remains.

John Henry Williams and Claudia Williams, his youngest children, produced a note that said their father wanted to be cryonically preserved. Their half sister, Bobby Jo Ferrell, believes her father wanted to be cremated, as stated in his 1996 will.

Now, documents copied by former Alcor executive Larry Johnson show that Ted never signed an Alcor consent form. That could open the door to new legal action to get Williams' remains out of cold storage.

Financial benefit

In 1972, the IRS gave Alcor non-profit, tax-exempt status when it was founded as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia in California. Since then, it has not paid taxes on any income raised, and it has built a strong financial base, thanks to generous donors and its members, most of whom pay annual dues of $398.

When a client dies, Alcor charges $50,000 for neurosuspension or $120,000 for the entire body. Clients wear silver bracelets to inform medical personnel that their bodies are to be shipped to Alcor, though arrangements usually are made before death.

About 95 percent of the members take out life insurance policies that name Alcor as the beneficiary to pay for their preservation and operate the foundation.

Major donors, who make annual gifts ranging from $10,000 to $120,000, are Saul Kent, a board member; Future Electronics, a Canadian company operated by billionaire Robert Miller; Laughlin, Nev., casino owner Don Laughlin; and the estate of TV writer-producer Dick Clair of The Carol Burnett Show.

When Alcor was formed, officials said its purpose was to "conduct, promote, encourage and further research and study the field of cryobiology."

But today, Sullivan said, little research is being done.

"We have enough to do with cryonics," Sullivan said. "We would love to do more research, but we need more money and staff."

Sullivan said the "only research going on, if you want to call it that," is a study of cracking in frozen skulls.

But Lemler said Alcor, which has nine employees, is "absolutely" meeting its tax-exempt requirements, and it is educating the public about cryonics. He also said Alcor's "whole project is research."

The IRS would not comment on Alcor's non-profit status.

No regulation

Until about 1997, Alcor members with no formal medical training assisted or performed the surgeries. Since then, state-certified surgeons do the operations, Lemler said.

Alcor's practices fall under no state regulatory agency. Lemler said Alcor is much like a medical school that is covered under the federal and state Uniform Anatomical Gift Act.

"Various organizations have attempted to regulate us, (like) the funeral board and health commission," Lemler said. "Now we are under the radar screen."

Although Alcor has had few problems here, a competing cryonics company, the Cryonics Institute outside Detroit, has been temporarily shut down by Michigan for operating as an unlicensed mortuary-science establishment and a non-registered cemetery.

Another cryonics company called Suspended Animation, which started last year in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., has moved to Boca Raton, Fla.

Lemler said advances in stem cell research and nanotechnology lend credibility to Alcor's efforts, even if most people don't embrace Alcor's beliefs in future reanimation.

Nanotechnology is a hybrid science of engineering and chemistry whose goal is to manipulate atoms for a desired purpose, like battling diseases. Ultimately, Alcor hopes to use nanotechnology to bring people back.

"We tend to agitate people," Lemler said. "But as more of the public becomes aware of future life, the less discomfort they will have."

Run at cloning

Although Alcor believes its dead clients could someday return, officials often have said the firm was not involved in cloning.

But in 1999, Alcor board member Kent's Life Extension Foundation in Florida made a $100,000 grant to a Scottsdale-based start-up called BioTransport, which would assist in cloning research, according to Life Extension records.

Foundation records said some of the research involved "the removal of human skin cells, culturing them (inducing them to divide) for several weeks . . . and then reanimating them for possible cloning."

Arizona Corporation Commission records show that BioTransport was headquartered at Alcor and that two of the four BioTransport directors were Fred and Linda Chamberlain. The Chamberlains founded Alcor in 1972. They were the secretary and president, respectively, of Alcor until 2001.

Kent is listed as one of two shareholders in BioTransport.

The Chamberlains could not be reached. Kent declined to comment.

A November 2001 Alcor newsletter said that the Chamberlains used money from BioTransport to start another company called Cells4Life, which would "offer cold storage for DNA samples with the possibility of future cloning."

Cells4Life

The newsletter also said Cells4Life was intended to generate revenue "that could be diverted, in part, back to Alcor." Cells4Life is now out of business.

Alcor also is listed as the owner of Alcor Biobank and Alcor DNAbank, according to state records. Those "molecular biology related services" businesses were first registered to Alcor in 1997 and renewed in 2002. Lemler said he did not know why Alcor owned those companies.

Police investigation
Los Angeles police are investigating whether an Alcor recovery team euthanized a dying AIDS patient in 1992. The case was opened this summer after Alcor operations chief Larry Johnson, who resigned in August, tape-recorded conversations with other Alcor officials about the incident and turned them over to police.

Detective Brian Carr said he has listened to the tapes, but his work on other cases has kept him from interviewing Alcor officials.

"It's going to be a long process," Carr said, adding that it could take weeks or months to complete the investigation.

On the tapes, a man identified as Hugh Hixon, an Alcor board member and facilities engineer, explains the circumstances of the man's death. Hixon said he watched a former top executive of Alcor administer a dose of a paralytic drug that hastened the death.

Grim allegation

The Republic is not identifying the executive because no charges have been filed.

"(The Alcor executive) gave it to him, and seven or eight minutes later it worked. . . . The guy quit breathing," Hixon said.

Hixon declined to comment on the tapes and referred calls to Alcor's attorney, Ron Carmichael, who did not return calls.

Reach the reporters at craig.harris@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8995 or peter.corbett@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-6862.

[celindra]

"We need some oversight and accountability in order to protect consumers and the integrity of human remains," Bunker said.

I have a feeling this guy has never seen human remains left to their natural course. They don't appear too dignified after a while.

Remember, folks: civilized people freeze their dead for possible revival. It's very simple.

[Bruce Klein]

Some scientists see cryonics' potential
http://www.azcentral...or-science.html

Kerry Fehr-Snyder
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 20, 2003 12:00 AM


Dr. Jerry Lemler is president of the Alcor Life Extension Program.

Most scientists scoff at the idea of freezing the dead and reviving them years after their hearts stop beating. They see it as a sign that some people will grasp at anything that offers the smallest shot at immortality.

But several prominent experts say surviving cryonics is not only possible, it's probable. The debate, they insist, is in the details.

Marvin Minsky, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., has signed up as a future client at Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale because he envisions a day when the contents of the human brain "could be extracted and loaded into some computer system."

Uploading the contents into "any suitable body will do, and the future synthetic ones will probably be more durable and repairable," he added in an interview with The Arizona Republic.

But Alcor executives, scientists and others foresee a different version of the future, where clients will retain their memories and personalities but grow new body parts like some kind of human lizard.

"For people like myself, I want to be uploaded and improved upon with a physical body that's new and improved," said Mathew Sullivan, an Alcor member and the company's director of suspension readiness. "I think we will have options to reinforce our bones with diamond fiber, have artificial blood cells that would hold a lot more oxygen and be implanted with internal networks, like an internal cellphone."

Of course, no one knows for sure because no one can predict the future with certainty.

"Alcorians," as they are called, point to advances in growing and preserving human organs, such as skin on a scaffolding, as evidence that creating futuristic chimeras is not that far away.

Minsky is doubtful, writing that he does not hold much hope for "the present state of 'the science of reanimation' because there is very little research on it today, and the cryonics companies can't afford to do much of it themselves."

Influential book

Minsky wrote the foreword to the oft-cited 1986 book Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler, which details the underpinnings of cryonics. In his book, Drexler notes that the first challenge of "biostasis" is keeping a patient "unchanged for years" after death, then applying future techniques for sophisticated cell repair.

Biologists have been tackling the first question for decades by studying how to preserve the structure of cells during the freezing and unfreezing process of cryonics. Because the human body is largely made up of water, and each cell is primarily a watery bag containing salts, sugars and other small molecules, freezing a deceased body causes cell walls to fracture and spill their contents where they cannot be used.

But biologists are zeroing in on something called vitrification, the process of freezing biological materials to superlow temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (the same temperature as liquid nitrogen) to arrive at a solid. Infused with protective chemicals that reduce the formation of ice crystals, tissue becomes a glasslike solid. The chemicals are packed around the molecules of each cells.

Alcor's Sullivan said the company has been using vitrification since last summer for all its "neuro" clients, whose heads have been severed from their bodies. Vitrified clients represent 14 of its 43 neuro clients and two of its 18 whole-body clients, three of whom also opted for their heads to be decapitated and preserved separately from their bodies. Vitrification is used only for neuro clients, and there is no telling whether clients preserved using older techniques would be viable without first overcoming the extensive cellular damage.

Although scientists have shown success with vitrified mouse embryos that have grown into healthy mice, no one has been able to accomplish the task by first chopping off the embryos' heads. Scientists who have frozen whole adult mammals also have been unable to revive them, mainly because there has been nothing to repair cellular damage.

Tiny machines

Enter the brave new world of nanotechnology, tiny molecular machines that would repair cellular damage in the teeniest of tiny places.

Drexler described the nanomachines 17 years ago as surgical devices that would remove "solid plugs of tissue to open access to major arteries and veins." They would then begin repairing cells. Today, nanotechnology is alive and well but envisioned for less grandiose pursuits than bringing someone back to life.

But Mark O. Martin, a geneticist at Occidental College in Los Angeles, is skeptical to say the least.

"Couldn't nanotechnology bring back mummies then?" he asked.

Most scientists would agree the answer is no, even though Egyptian mummification is one of the oldest quests for immortality.

"In the land of nanobots and milk and honey, it may very, very well possible," Martin said. "But who knows?"

Martin, who is a science-fiction fan and better grounded in cryonics than most, believes what's missing is experimental success in preserving a complicated mammal and bringing it back to life.

"If they could do cold storage of a dog for even a month . . . I'd be signed up," he said.

What is memory?

The problem of cellular damage through cryonic preservation poses another major stumbling block for cryonicists, but by no means the only one. Take the human brain, for instance.

How memory and personality are hard-wired in the human brain are illusive questions for even the most scholarly biologists, geneticists, neurologists and others who have studied cognition.

"Is memory RAM or ROM?" Martin asked.

Applied to the human brain, memory can be short-term (more RAM-like) or long-term (more like ROM). But scientists don't know for sure, and even cryonicists admit it's the biggest bugaboo in their field.

"Even with vitrification, we don't know if we're preserving memory," Alcor's Sullivan said. "We're preserving the structure for memory."

Some scientists theorize that short-term memory is electro-chemical, while long-term memory is structural. And "if long-term memory is all electro-chemical, we're in trouble," Sullivan added.

In either case, no one knows for sure even as scientists are trying to study memory in lower species.

Scientists have shown that memory can be preserved in primitive worms known as nematodes brought to subfreezing temperatures and then revived. But again, they haven't chopped off the worms' heads first.

Similar work is going on with frogs, according to Gregory Benford, a physicist at the University of California-Irvine and a cryonics member. He would not disclose where the work is being done except to say it is at a "reputable institution."

The experiments involve training a frog to run a maze, chilling them to subzero temperatures and reviving them to see if they remembered the maze, Benford said. They did.

But even Benford admits that frogs are much simpler than humans, so applying the results to higher-order mammals is dicey.

Benford, who wrote the science-fiction novel Chiller under a pseudonym about 10 years ago, also believes that current cryonics techniques might be preserving bodies at temperatures that are too cold and cause irreparable cell damage. He thinks minus 140 degrees Fahrenheit might prove to be a more suitable storage temperature.

The higher temperature would preclude the use of liquid nitrogen, a cheap substance, although running electric controls to warm storage containers through thermal diffusion is proving viable.

Despite the hurdles cryonics must clear, Benford said he is encouraged by the long-term prospects.

"However infinitely small the odds are of surviving the process, they're infinitely larger than if you don't," he said.

A belief in progress

Benford also said that cryonics garners much of its support from sheer argument that in the future, many things are possible that cannot be envisioned today.

He recalled an old joke that goes something like this:

Q: How many cryonicists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: None. They just sit in the dark and wait for technology to screw it in.

"It's a rational gamble," he said of cryonics. "But it does cost you money."

Only game in town

And as Benford once put it to MIT's Minsky, cryonics is the only game in town in civilization's never-ending stabs at immortality. Those shots have included the ancient Babylonian poem of Gilgamesh, Egyptian Pharaohs, Chinese elixirs, Ponce de Leon's quest for the fountain of youth, Alexis Carrel's chicken heart cells experiment for which he won the Nobel Prize, Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein.

And in that vain, Dr. Robert Butler, president and chief executive officer of the International Longevity Center in New York City, is not surprised by the undying interest in cryonics.

"This is powerful stuff that reflects the fears of the unknown, of dying," he said.

He said too little is known about the freezing and thawing process and the brain itself to consider cryonics credible.

"There's also population dynamics to consider," he said, noting dwindling natural resources to support swelling human populations amid growing life expectancy.

In addition, cryonics, if ever feasible, would be available only to the rich at a time when "we already see in the United States a growing economic disparity for health care and in the world, a growing inequality of life expectancy."

The life expectancy in Sierra Leon, for example, is less than 40 years.

"So we'd have another kind of gated community, so to speak," Butler said of immortality for the rich.

"And that's the final point: Making money out of this."

Reach the reporter at kerry.fehr-snyder@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8975.