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PR push, expansion boosting Alcor's preservation option
Adam Kress
The Business Journal
It's not uncommon for a nonprofit organization to hang photos of some of the people it has helped in the office lobby. What is uncommon is to have those same people dead in the next room.
Check that -- cryogenically preserved -- in the next room.
While the people at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation will admit their clients legally are dead, they also say those clients are far from gone.
"We're not in the business of bringing people back, we're in the business of not letting them die in the first place," says Alcor President and Chief Executive Joseph Waynick. "Death is a gradual decay until it's irreversible. In 100 years, we can thaw these people exactly as they were when their death was pronounced."
You may know Alcor only for its unwanted claim to fame as the resting place of baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams and the battle between his children over his remains. You probably don't know the 501©3 with $2 million in annual revenue is ready to start a $180,000 facility expansion and public relations blitz.
It's all being done in an effort to increase its client base and clear up ugly misconceptions over exactly what the scientific outfit founded in 1972 does. That's a job easier said than done considering most people simply cringe at the description of what Alcor is all about.
The idea of preserving entire bodies -- or just "neuros," which only are from the neck up -- make the hair on the back of many people's necks stand up.
But to those at Alcor, cryonics is an emerging area of science with potentially huge medical benefits that range from organ preservation to bringing the "dead" back to life.
No one knows if preserved people will walk out of Alcor's nondescript North Scottsdale office some day. But if science could clone a sheep in 1997, who knows what it could do in 2107.
Not your average office tour
Tanya Jones fits the part of a scientist perfectly. Sleepy eyes rest behind thin-rimmed glasses. A white lab coat is draped over tiny shoulders on a petite body that hides a not-so-small brain.
Jones is the welcoming and well-spoken chief operating officer of Alcor who started there as a volunteer 15 years ago. She leads free office tours that the nonprofit hosts four times a week for the public. The tours are one way Alcor is trying to battle misconceptions and increase visibility.
She shows off pictures of some of Alcor's clients that are hung in the office waiting area and along a stretch of wall. Jones explains the preservation procedure, which she performs. It consists of draining blood, replacing it with an antifreeze-type liquid and slowly cooling a body over several weeks. That's done to avoid cell crystallization, which ruins cells and makes them impossible to preserve. Finally, patients are placed in tanks of liquid nitrogen.
Jones says Alcor has 65 "patients" and 26 pets -- including a monkey -- cryogenically preserved at the moment. With a fittingly morbid sense of humor, she laments one that got away.
"If I would have known about Alcor earlier, there would be a horse head preserved here also," Jones says. One only can assume it was a pet of hers.
While 65 people isn't an overwhelming number, the "waiting" list is more sizable.
"We have 687 people signed up as members who have completed the paperwork and have the funding in place," Jones says. "They are fully ready to be suspended, and many are young and healthy."
On to the operating room.
The antiseptic smell hits you first -- and hard. Then it's the stark whiteness of the walls and finally the clear box at the end of the room with countless tubes running in and out of it.
"The neuro procedure is better," Jones says. "There's always more damage to the whole body."
At this point, it's impossible not to picture a patient from the neck up in this two-and-a-half-foot, clear square box.
"We're working on a bay for the full body," Jones says. "It could give us the potential to preserve organs for the rest of the world.
"A lot of times, donated organs go to waste because of time or because they are not a match," she says. "We hope to some day store organs almost indefinitely."
Last stop, storage.
A group of tall metal tanks line the two side walls of the chilly Alcor storage room. There are eight tanks in use right now with two more being built. Each "Dewar" can hold four bodies and five "neuros."
"They're just like a very large thermos," CEO Waynick says. "We have people here 24 hours a day to monitor them, and we add more liquid nitrogen as needed."
Alcor has experienced 8 percent to 10 percent growth in membership per year without any marketing, Waynick says. In the past year, Alcor has preserved six people, and Waynick says that number is expected to consistently rise.
Clearing the air
Cheryl Walsh heads up local strategic marketing firm WalshComm and recently was hired by Alcor to help the organization clarify its image and gain more exposure. She says it took her some time to get comfortable with what Alcor does, but understanding was the key.
"This is much less science fiction to me than to most," she says. "Most people don't like things because they don't understand them, and Alcor has just been misunderstood. This is a scientific organization performing a long-term experiment, and every member knows there is no guarantee."
While Walsh works to position Alcor, Waynick is concentrated on expanding it. With almost 700 members laying in wait, it's only a matter of time before they call Alcor home.
Waynick says Alcor is about to build a 2,000-square-foot bay that will be able to hold up to 900 patients. The current bay is only 600 square feet.
"We're also building a new operating room, because now we can only have one procedure at a time," he says. "We've had some close calls before with multiple patients."
Waynick also is doing a number of things to bring more attention to Alcor, including promoting the tours.
"We've registered with some of the local chambers of commerce as a tourist attraction," he says. "And we invited the whole state Legislature to come visit, and many of them have."
Waynick added that an event on cryonics early in 2005 at the Arizona Science Center also is in the works.
The marketing push seems to be garnering some early attention. The History Channel program "Tactical to Practical" recently filmed at Alcor and plans to run a segment on the group Nov. 22. Walsh says she has fielded requests for information from media outlets from The Netherlands to Japan who want to do a piece on Alcor. She also says The Wall Street Journal has contacted her, as well as a U.S. network newsmagazine show.
All of them want footage of an operation, Walsh says, so Alcor will film in high definition the next procedure it performs. While on the surface it may seem a grisly thing to watch, Walsh believes there is interest.
"I think there's a huge move toward acceptability of this," she says.
In fact, Walsh has become so enamored with Alcor that she may soon be their newest client.
"I will do this definitely," she says. "I understand the science of it."
Being preserved is not inexpensive, but Waynick says 95 percent of Alcor members pay for preservation through life-insurance policies, and the cost could be less than $100 a month. A neuro preservation costs $50,000 and a whole body is $120,000.
"To me, that's a bargain when you think that there could be a revival," Waynick says.
Revival or not, and with the negative attention of the Ted Williams ordeal settled, Alcor is alive and kicking.
That makes one.
Get connected
Alcor Life Extension Foundation: www.alcor.org
