X-Message-Number: 13781 Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 06:31:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: Cryo Future All right, a few serious thoughts in response to Dave Pizer's rather gloomy prognosis--which I feel may not have been quite gloomy enough. Pessimism: Some of us may feel less confident of cryonics today because we have learned from some fairly sobering experiences. We know more about damage, and we have lived through more cases where errors were made, help arrived probably too late, people made foolish or self-destructive decisions, or other factors diminished the patient's future chances. Note that some of the people who feel less confident today helped to sustain cryonics actively in the past. This is not a trivial matter. We have also seen how organizations can be seriously affected if just one or two key volunteers get tired of providing free labor. I am not just referring to CryoCare. All cryonics organizations depend on volunteers, and the average age of these volunteers is still rising, as naturally tends to happen in a field which has only existed for about 30 years and attracted young people initially. Price: I find it hard to believe that this is a major factor compared with all the others, since almost everyone pays via life insurance, and the premium for a $50,000 policy is not THAT different from the premium for a $150,000 policy. Also, the cost of whole-body preservation at CI is not that different from the cost of neuropreservation elsewhere; and many people do opt for neuro. I believe the success of CI in recruiting new members is largely based on the gung-ho optimism at that organization. Whether the optimism is realistic remains controversial. Generally speaking, the history of cryonics (if we care to read it) teaches that excessive optimism can create short-term growth, but in the long term is no more desirable than it would be, say, in an insurance company. Unfortunately, there is no way to define "excessive" except in retrospect. The positivism of CI's web page may turn out to be entirely justified; we have no way of knowing. Leadership: This is a very personal issue, and I find Dave's comments a bit unfair. Dave seems to forget the intransigence of past leadership at Alcor. The self-electing board of nine directors, none of whom showed much interest in very persistent complaints from activists who had been members for many years, was a major cause of the decision to split and start another organization (the last thing that any of us wanted to do). A secondary cause was concern over possible misuse, or ability to misuse, long-term patient funding. By comparison, I believe the situation is greatly improved today. Alcor has dealt with the funding issue, and personally I found the various fulltime personnel of Alcor very easy to get along with during the past five years or so, even though I was active in a competing organization during that time. If current leadership seems worried about factors which were ignored or trivialized in the past, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If current policies have resulted in some members quitting, or being disqualified on the basis of inadequate or unverifiable funding, this is not necessarily a bad thing either, despite its negative impact on growth. My major concern about the future of cryonics is that it won't be there for me when I am statistically most likely to need it. Twenty years from now, the death rate among cryonics organization memberships will be rising at the same time as volunteers themselves are aging to the point where they may not want to deal with a dozen cases (or more) per year. I described this future problem in some detail, with statistical modeling, in an article in Alcor's CRYONICS magazine. It is a potentially fatal problem for any "full service" organization. It may not affect an organization such as CI, because CI doesn't attempt remote standby, and uses rudimentary (i.e. cheap and relatively non-labor-intensive) perfusion and cooldown techniques. Personally I feel I have a choice between treatment that is worthless, and better treatment that is less likely to be available as I grow older. Just my personal opinion, of course. The easy answer, as I see it, is an influx of highly motivated, medically qualified idealists who will respond eagerly to the challenge of implementing new technology, in the lab and in the field. Unfortunately, even if such people do magically appear, experience suggests that they may tend to be unbalanced. (See Dr. Steve Harris's post on narcissistic personality disorder, which I think appeared on CryoNet a few years ago.) Why else would they sacrifice a potentially rewarding career in medicine, and work for virtually no pay in cryonics, where they will be stigmatized professionally for the rest of their lives? I conclude that the only rational plan is to develop better proven techniques of cryopreservation, which will enable animal studies, which will ultimately remove the stigma from cryonics and make the field commercially viable. Unfortunately this process is proving to be far slower than I had hoped. I doubt I will benefit from it personally. I believe the "golden era" of cryonics ended about the same time I arrived, about ten years ago. This was well before the split in Alcor that Dave feels was crucial. In fact the key turning point, as I read cryonics history, occurred with the death of Jerry Leaf. At that time, Mike Darwin wrote that the news of Leaf's death was like waking up and discovering that the law of gravity had been abolished. In retrospect, this was a fairly accurate analysis. In such a small field, the abrupt disappearance of one powerful individual can have destabilizing repercussions for years afterward; and I think that is exactly what happened. --CP PS. Regarding the number of cryonicists: Any commodity tends to be more highly valued if it is scarce, and resources obviously are more plentiful if they are not widely distributed. Suppose ONLY ONE person from the 20th century were to remain in cryopreservation when techniques are developed for resuscitation. The interest level, and implementation of care, would be maximized. Of course, nanotechnologists believe it will be so cheap to revive people, numbers won't be an issue. I find this hard to believe. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=13781