X-Message-Number: 1438
Date: 12 Dec 92 00:18:32 EST
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CRYONICS:splitting Alcor

TO SPLIT UP ALCOR: CONSTITUTIONS AND TRUST

Recently several Alcor members have argued that storage services
should be separated from suspension services, and that Alcor should
not deal with storage of patients any more.  I recently received a set
of arguments for this idea from Saul Kent.  There may be other
arguments than those he gives; however in several essential ways, I
found his arguments lacking.

To summarize, Saul believes that separating storage from other
cryonics activities will increase its safety for the patients.  The
first reason he says this is true is that Alcor, which does the actual
suspensions, will be much more the object of legal attack than an
organization which does nothing but store patients.  This attack may
come from government or even independent groups who feel that cryonic
suspension is somehow evil.  It can also come from disgruntled
relatives of the patient, who feel that Alcor has not done its best or
perhaps has defrauded the patient.

An organization involved purely in storage would (he suggests) keep
its assets out of the United States, managed by agencies in a country
which does not recognize the Rule against Perpetuities.  Actual
storage may even happen outside the US.

My major difficulty with these arguments happens because they read the
entire history of cryonics, so far as I know it, QUITE BACKWARD.  The
major purpose of a suspension organization IS the long term storage of
patients.  As patients accumulate, the suspension funds paying for
this long term storage become by far the largest assets.  In fact, up
to now the only lawsuits from INDIVIDUALS cryonics societies have
faced (and Alcor potentially faces) are those from disgruntled
relatives who want the suspension funds BACK.  If different
organizations had dealt with storage and suspension, BOTH would have
been attacked; and if these relatives act solely for the money
involved, they would first go after the storage organization, where
most of the money lies.  The funds devoted to the suspension
operation, unless augmented by punitive damages, would barely pay the
cost of recovering them.

Furthermore, separation of storage and suspension would not have
helped the kind of problems Alcor faced with Dora Kent.  At first
Alcor's officers, following procedures they had followed repeatedly in
the past, believed that everything was in good order.  Dora would soon
be encapsulated in a permanent location.  And in fact, the initial
contacts between Alcor and the Riverside Coroner were, if anything,
actually friendly.  If we had had two organizations rather than one,
the Coroner would have tried to attack the STORAGE organization and
threatened, as he did, to impound all patients, not just Dora Kent.
Not even the case with Sacramento would have improved: the bureaucrats
in Sacramento believed that cryonic suspension must be illegal because
it is not listed on a California Death Certificate.  A loss of this
case would have meant that any STORAGE organization in California
would then have to give up its patients to burial or cremation.

Yes, I am aware that one advantage of separate organizations is that
the storage organization need not be located at the same place, or
even in the same country, as the suspension organization.  But that
doesn't really solve the problem, it merely places it somewhere else.
Individuals have sued and been sued across state boundaries.  As for
governmental attack, just what makes anyone believe that a facility in
country Y is less likely to incur attack than one in country X?  This
issue deserves more discussion than in this paragraph, and I shall
return to it later.

A second kind of danger suspension patients face is that their
caretakers, themselves, decide to raid their suspension fund.  Such
raids may come both from very high motives or from low ones; once
carried out for any reason, less money remains to support suspension.
Currently the caretakers consist of the Board of Alcor, and some
members claim that money from the Suspension Fund has been wrongly
spent.

Regardless of any mistakes or malfeance by members of the present
Alcor Board, wrong uses for the Suspension Fund remain a problem.  If
anything, the best solution would be to somehow give longterm members
some voice on the Board, including an ultimate ability to remove an
entire Board and force election of another.  Such power, of course,
also requires that members received accurate reports about the
activities of the Board, as soon as possible.  The constitutional
question of how exactly to make these arrangements will take much
thought and discussion; I will not discuss it further not because it
does not deserve more, but because it is basically irrelevant to the
issue of splitting Alcor into two organizations.

However, one essential confusion needs addressing.  When I provide
Alcor money for my suspension, I give them carte blanche to use it in
any way they see fit to arrange my indefinite suspension.  They may
choose to buy their own LN2 machine, or move me to Antarctica.  The
rightness or wrongness of their decisions will depend, of course, on
the circumstances they face when they make them.  But a suspension
fund should NOT be thought of purely as a sum of money to be put out
in some secure investment whose returns provide other money for my
support.  The problem with that approach is that, especially now, it's
quite easy to imagine circumstances in which a refusal to spend some
part of the principal would be the height of folly.  What if Alcor
people learned of an imminent raid by government agents to sequester
all the patients?  If extra money must be spent to turn all patients
into neuropreservation patients and move them elsewhere at short
notice, it would be well spent.

This issue, in fact, gets into the real problems we face in REALLY
long term storage.  I say REAL long term storage because, as much as
many of us may HOPE that storage may only be 100 years, it would be
wise of us to plan for storage times of several centuries.  And that
puts our problem directly into history.

At one time Switzerland was famous not for its finances but for its
mercenaries.  At another, not really so long ago, Luxemburg had been
conquered by Napoleon.  History is full of flux and change.  If we
rely on one country or one law, in the long term THAT RELIANCE WILL
PROVE WRONG.  That is why the continued existence of an organization
devoted to storage of suspension patients becomes so important.  No
one can forsee what financial and political decisions these caretakers
must take 200 years into the future.  To attempt to do that now in
1992, laying down inflexible conditions for our storage and the
treatment of our money, will result one way or another in our
destruction and the destruction of our money.  This problem, more than
any other, is the real reason why we have banded together into
cryonics societies.

Certainly Saul or others can go to Luxemburg and set up trusts which
(so the paper on which they write them says) will "never" terminate.
They might even give these trusts the entire control over not only
their money but their body too.

But think a moment what they have gotten with all that effort: they
have gotten some paper with writing on it and a gold seal.  In the end
no amount of paper can really protect them, no matter how
grandiloquently the writing on that paper has been worded, no matter
how fervently the people signing on the other line promise to hold to
it.  The state and laws that support that paper will change with time,
and those who signed it will disappear.  What will protect them then?
The best protection consists of the members of the cryonics society
itself, who will want to see your suspension through to a successful
revival because they too believe that someday they will be suspended
and face the same problem.

Here we come back again to the issue of trust.  Saul feels that the
Board of Alcor may not be trustworthy, and somehow that (for some
unknown reasons) the Board of a storage society WILL be trustworthy.
Perhaps it will be, for few short years, until its members TOO go into
cryonic suspension.  But that just isn't good enough.

The only way Alcor, or any storage organization, can keep its Board
trustworthy is to throw out anyone who looks as if they are not.  That
has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with splitting Alcor into different
organizations and everything to do with the CONSTITUTION of Alcor.

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