X-Message-Number: 1366
Date: 27 Nov 92 17:31:35 EST
From: Steve Harris <>
Subject: The Patient Care "Trust"* Fund
To: Cryonet Readers
*Your milage may vary.
Some of you may remember my piece about Lovecraft in a recent
issue of CRYONICS magazine. In Lovecraft's early 1928 "cryonics"
story, a scientist seeking to preserve his clinically dead body
in the cold is ultimately thwarted by equipment failure and lack
of social support; when he warms up, he decays. I suggest in
that article that the next cryonics story which appears in
fiction, the famous "Jameson Satellite" story by Jones (1931) has
enough Lovecraftian plot elements that its author may well have
read Lovecraft's 1928 story. In the Jameson satellite, the
cryonicist is preserved in Earth orbit naturally, effortlessly,
and non-mechanically (presumably by the "cold" of space) and thus
explicitly does not suffer the failure mode of Lovecraft's
cryonaut. Clearly, Jameson is the first person to see that what
we call "Patient Care" should be as automatic as possible.
Now, of course in the real world of 1992 we do not have access
to (sunlight deflected) space storage for cryonics. That's too
bad, because ever since reading Rand Simberg's article on this,
that's the storage mode I would like for myself, if I could have
my first wish <grin>. Failing space storage, I'd at least like
some sealed underground vault somewhere, where capsules are
tended and maintained by self-repairing automatic machinery.
<double grin>. Alas, of course this sort of thing is even more
technically difficult than space storage. Cryonics, for the
foreseeable future, is going to consist of dewars tended by live
humans. Too bad.
All right, then. So, if we cannot have this kind of nifty
automatic technical stuff in cryonics, what CAN we have? Well,
it seems to me that what we CAN have, is some nifty automatic
*financial* and fiduciary stuff. Or, at least, we can have
something much more automatic than is in place now.
What I'm talking about, of course, is a REAL trust fund (as
defined in the narrow legal sense, which is the only definition
that matters)-- in fact, what I'd like to see for patient care is
that special subspecies of trust fund which is irrevocable (non-
invadable). By anyone. Including the Alcor Board of Directors.
I'd like the principal of this fund to be as untouchable as if
the checks or account code numbers were on Mars, and the divi-
dends were being mailed straight from God.
Side-stepping for the moment the question of the rule against
perpetuities, such a thing would operate in the way that per-
petual care trusts operate for cemeteries, and would create a
sort of "guaranteed income," or "lifetime (downtime?) pension"
for each suspendee. Or a sort of cryonics dowry. Or, if you
will, (and this is my favorite analogy) a sort of "cryonics
voucher." As in the case of vouchers for education, if such a
fund is large enough, we can look to the _free market_ (in which
I happen to have more faith than any religion) to act as a "last
ditch" backup to dedicated living cryonicists, in the care of
suspended patients. If such a fund is large enough, in other
words, suspendees forsaken by their brother cryonicists will get
well-taken care of in much the same impersonal but adequate way
that the cats of a rich and reclusive person get well taken care
of when left some millions of dollars in trust in a will. For
cats, this happens even if the decedent was unable to identify in
life any friends or companions who are rabid and dedicated cat-
lovers. For cryonauts, I see no reason why the same principals
need not apply. To use a less appealing but still apt analogy,
paid foster parents are not as good as fully involved real
parents, but as a back-up, foster parents sure as heck beat no
care at all.
Now I've heard or inferred a number of arguments against such
a scheme, and there are four that come to mind immediately for
me:
First, it has been argued that the full patient care funds
must be available in case of a large cash-eating emergency which
threatens the patients. This is indeed a problem, but I would
prefer that it be dealt with by having another buffer fund (or
perhaps by putting only a fraction of monies in the irrevocable
fund-- any suggestions as to the fraction?). If we permit
borrowing against the guaranteed income from a trust in emer-
gencies, the purpose of setting up the trust in the first place
will be thwarted. All in all, I think the benefits of safety
and surety outweigh the drawbacks of loss of liquidity. We can,
after all, *insure* against most foreseeable big emergency ex-
penses, including acts of God. Those premiums can be paid out of
the trust return.
Second: it has been argued that patient care funds must be
available for re-animation, and thus they shouldn't be all
"frozen up" (forgive me) in a way that they are never available
en bloc. My answer to this is that should it ever become
possible to re-animate suspendees by spending all of their share
of the trust principal at once, then it may well (given an ap-
propriate amount of time and improvement in technology) even-
tually become possible to do the same, on just the return or
dividends. In fact, it would be bizarre to cross one threshold
and never the other, would it not? So with an irrevocable trust
we might have to wait a while longer; I think it's worth it.
In discussing the need for funds to reanimate patients we need
to remember that we're necessarily discussing a world of nano-
technology-created wealth where even ordinary people control vast
riches by today's standards. No, I'm not quite falling for what
Donaldson calls the "nanotech as God" routine, but at the same
time I do not find it inconceivable that reanimation may yet
become an academic hobby in the future. You don't think so?
Suppose I had suggested in 1970 that genetic engineering would be
done, within one generation, for high-school science fair
projects? What kind of response would I have gotten? Or suppose
I had suggested, way back in 1892, that building and operating
one's own flying machine would be a popular hobby for Americans
in a century's time? Resurrection is psychologically powerful
stuff, and I think that once it becomes technically possible, it
will become a major focus of interest for people, and not all of
that interest will be mercenary. Recently, I have been heartened
by a PBS series on dinosaurs, in which I watched goodly numbers
of volunteers (just plain folks) help professors and grad
students to find fossils in the desert. It was hot and horrible
work, but it was being done by a coalition of private and
academic people for not much more than the simple pleasure of re-
creating, in a really inadequate way, some big dead lizards [!].
Looking at this spectacular evidence of human "collecting and
restoring" instinct in action, I could not help but re-think my
old assumptions that cryonauts who make it to the future without
re-animation funds or organizations, will be doomed. On the
contrary, I think it more likely that GETTING to the far future
will prove to be FAR more of a problem than getting out of the
can once we make it. Best to spend our attention, then, on
making the *ride* more foolproof, even if the end of the journey
is therefore left a bit more up to the kindness of strangers. My
point is that the world where we're going can afford a lot more
kindness than the world we'll be traversing to get there.
Which leads us to the third argument, which is that it's silly
to even think about saving patients in the face of the collapse
of a cryonics organization, so there's no point in bothering
about mechanisms to do this. In one form, such an argument is
really a syllogistic one, with the conclusion hidden in the
premise: i.e., the assumption is made that no cryonics organiza-
tion will go bankrupt while it still has patient care funds to
burn, and thus destruction of organizations will equal destruc-
tion of patients, QED. However, as I have argued above, the
initial premise here does not have to be granted. It is NOT
completely unrealistic to imagine suspendees surviving the total
collapse of their cryonics organization, if a steady flux of
"outside" funds for patient maintenance is available from a non-
pervertable source. We have already seen a closely related
example of this kind of survival in the case of our frozen friend
James H. Bedford, who made it to here from 1967 only by means of
"outside the cryonics community" support for a long period
between cryonics organizations. If he did it, perhaps WE can do
it.
Fourthly, it has been argued in a very similar vein that it is
unrealistic to imagine that at some time in the future there will
be no group of dedicated cryonicists to take care of patients, so
why shouldn't we have trust in our fellow members? However, it
is not the possibility of dedication dying out exactly that
worries me. I think there will always be dedicated cryonicists:
what I have doubts about is whether there will always be dedi-
cated cryonicists willing to shoulder the responsibility and
expense of the very "non-sexy" task of taking care of a parti-
cular load of frozen people whose suspension funds have been
spent down --in other words the ashes and the clinkers of badly
run previous cryonics organizations. On the contrary, I think it
more likely that fractures may occur in organizations faced with
such a task, with _neither_ resultant splinter group wanting to
take responsibility for prior liabilities that it will accuse the
other of creating.
Yes, I know, the mind reels from the very idea of fiscal
mismanagement or civil war in cryonics, given the general
pleasantness and peacefulness here at Alcor. In our present
organization our skeleton crew of employees labor in the vine-
yards of cryonics from sun-up to long after sun-down with nary a
wasted motion, but still it seems possible to me that some
nameless cryonics organization in the future may become bloated
and lazy, with salaries and poor management gradually siphoning
off capital, until patients threaten to become liabilities.
Really. Similarly, although in our own organization people treat
each other with unfailing courtesy and respect, it seems possible
that one day a cryonics organization will suffer very nasty
schisms and vicious infighting <gasp> and that this will happen
even among people who are totally dedicated to the idea of
cryonics itself and should therefore have more than enough common
ground to get along. Yes, I can actually imagine it. It's only
slightly more difficult than nanotechnology....
Such a thing happened to Nelson's cryonics organization, of
course. And such things have happened in the care of cemeteries
for years, and that is why the law, in the wisdom gained from
long experience with human frailties and such matters, has
created the legal necessity for non-invadable care trust funds
for cemeteries. Cryonics would do well to learn here. It may be
possible to get around the perpetuities rule if a patient care
trust is set up as those for cemeteries, or it may be possible to
set up such a fund in a foreign country where there are no such
laws, or it may be that the index "lives in being" for such a
trust can be named to be some suitable group of children (say,
the children and grandchildren of all Alcor members as of 1992),
which should give us well over a century to work with--- and this
may be quite enough time. In any case, something of this sort
seems worth doing.
There are still a few questions: if our present 1.2 million
were in a trust-fund, would the real return on conservative
investments of such a trust be enough to maintain patient care,
even if Alcor were to go bankrupt? I don't know; much depends,
of course, on what kind of a physical structure you were to try
it in, who your personnel were, etc. I can only guess, however,
that the patients would have a much better shot at this than they
would if not financially protected in this way. I'd personally
rather take a larger chance that "PCTF-less Alcor" would have to
declare bankruptcy (if I knew the patients would be safe no
matter what) than take a lesser chance of a combined-asset Alcor
going under (knowing that it would necessarily in that case take
the patients with it). We can resurrect Alcor easier than lost
patients, if necessary, after all. Again, note that the idea of
a separate and inviolate trust income paying for patient care, is
the most basic nub of the "unbundling" idea that we've talked
about on the net, but in this case the unbundling is a legal more
than a physical one, a thing very useful at present since it
would still permit economies on overhead resulting from two
organizations sharing the same quarters.
Actually, a separate and inviolate patient care trust fund is
what I *thought* I was getting when I became a suspension member
in 1987; only gradually have I since learned (and gotten used to)
the fact that it's not that way at all. Perhaps, in retrospect,
I shouldn't have been so complacent.
And yes, finally (while we're on the subject of complacency)
let Alcor without delay pay an appropriate attorney for an
authoritative answer vis a vis the issue of how vulnerable
Alcor's assets (including the patient care funds) are to a legal
suit, and (more importantly) to what probabilistic degree they
could be protected under various Honest-to-God trust plans. It's
utter nonsense to suggest that the burden of legal proof is with
Courtney or any other member with concerns about this question,
since Alcor's vulnerability here is not some off-the-wall idea,
but is instead immediately apparent to most who consider it. You
don't need to be a weatherman to tell when it's raining, and you
sure don't need to be a lawyer to tell that you probably have a
big liability problem when you've messing about with people's
lives and deaths in a way that is very threatening and foreign to
their families and their society, and you have, at the same time,
a giant hunk of cash in the bank. Duh. As far as I'm concerned,
there might as well be a target painted on that $1.2 million of
liquid assets, with a neon blinking arrow sign: "Free Money HERE!
Ghoulish hucksters with Deep Pockets Invite You to Find a Sym-
pathetic Jury and Sue Right HERE! Contingency Suits Welcome! Give
it a Spin; What's to Lose? SUE HERE! SUE HERE!"
It is indeed a very obvious problem that should be addressed
immediately. It boggles my mind that we're even arguing about
it.
Steve
P.S. Speaking of obvious problems, by the way, are we ever going
to see anything in CRYONICS magazine about the investment
advisory group resigning? I hope that CRYONICS is not going to
be like Pravda, with Cryonet in the role of Radio Free Europe....
Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1366