X-Message-Number: 15474
From: "Jeff Grimes" <>
Subject: Reply to David Pascal (long)
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 02:08:52 +0000


I'm afraid this is a long post because David Pascal wrote two REALLY long posts.
I have tried to restrict myself to points that seem important.


First David is annoyed that I quoted, here, some email that he had sent to me. 
But, I did ask him if anything he was telling me was private or secret. He said 
NO. Also, since he and I had never written to each other before, it wasn't a 
personal exchange. So why not quote his actual words (rather than try to 
summarize them myself, perhaps inaccurately)? David, I'm sorry you didn't like 
it, but I cannot understand why it has pissed you off so much. 


DP wrote: "Is it not *obvious* that, unless you re living outside Alcor HQ in 
Scottsdale, a funeral director a few blocks away can get to you more quickly 
than someone cross-state cross-country, if you happen to live outside the US?"


My reply: Yes, I think this is a good point, and I have not disputed it. All I 
did was ask for information. Since you know how many hours Alcor's last four 
patients took, from time of death to time of arrival at Alcor, I asked how long 
your last four patients took. Apparently this question seems unreasonable to 
you. I cannot understand why. You waste 1000 words ranting about it, but you 
still don't answer it. Why not tell me the answer?


I thank you for telling me how many people are in your team (two, one of them a 
funeral director).

DP wrote: "Again, this is not to bash Alcor."


My reply: Then what other purpose do you have, listing every possible Alcor 
shortcoming and complaining that no one has answered your questions about Alcor?
Incidentally, have you actually addressed those questions to Alcor? There's no 
point in complaining that you can't get answers, if you have not tried to do so.


DP Wrote: "Generally, though, funeral directors do not do full perfusions. CI in
Michigan is centrally located and many patients can be brought there by plane 
or even car in a matter of hours. If a patient can be brought to CI quickly, CI 
may have the patient receive an anticoagulant on the spot and be brought to CI 
for full perfusion. If not, the funeral director may do the washout and 
perfusion at the funeral home, or a travelling team may be sent, if requested."


My reply: Thank you for this clarification. I don't know why you had to precede 
it with a long sneering rant, because my question seemed reasonable. As I 
understand it from other people I have been writing to, it is unusual to do a 
PERFUSION in the field. That is why I asked if you really meant that your 
funeral directors may perfuse a person with glycerol. Do other organizations use
the glycerol before the person is moved to the cryo lab, or is this a feature 
which is unique to CI?


DP Wrote: "The stuff they they use when they fly hearts or kidneys ? I don't 
travel around with hearts or kidneys myself (apart from my own) but -- unlike 
people -- severed individual organs don't have full cardiovascular systems 
filled with blood. Didn't your EMT training cover tiny points like this? Heparin
is an anticoagulant and, since dead people have a heck of a lot more blood 
coagulating than one severed organ has, CI (like Alcor) favors heparin as 
opposed to 'stuff'."


My reply: The idea of a blood washout is to wash out the blood, right? After you
wash out the blood, it would be easy enough to use a standard organ 
cryopreservation solution, which I have been able to find out, by making one 
phone call, is Viaspan. That's the "stuff" I was talking about. Why make fun of 
me for referring to it that way, when you seem to have no idea what it is 
yourself? And, now we have got that out of the way: Why don't you use Viaspan, 
since it seems to be a standard item in organ transplant work?


DP Wrote: I find myself suspecting that Mr. Grimes, for all his questions, 
really does not want to know. This makes dialogue kind of superfluous.


My Reply: I explained right at the start that I am interested in CI because they
offer services in England. But even so I am still condemned by DP because I 
have not asked an equal number of questions about Alcor! Yes I am curious as to 
why Alcor did not bother to reply to some of the allegations against it. But I 
certainly don't have the time or the interest to follow that up, especially if 
you remember that I expected SHORT SIMPLE ANSWERS TO SHORT SIMPLE QUESTIONS, not
a huge lengthy diatribe! The answers to my questions should be routine, as in, 
"We have x funeral directors in our database, we contact them at least x times 
per year to make sure they are still in business and have not moved, x percent 
of them have taken out training course, x are on retainer, and they are in x of 
the 50 United States." You see? What is so hard about writing this kind of 
response? Why must it be preceded with some truly offensive stuff? I have 
acknowledged that CI's funeral director system se!
ems to have some advantages. What more does David Pascal want? 


DP Wrote: "CI s latest round of tests show that stepped ramping is (*very* 
slightly) superior to one-pass. Therefore stepped is in and one-pass is out."


My reply: It took you hundreds of words before you provided that single piece of
information, and again you made it sound as if I had asked a dumb question, 
when really the question was quite reasonable.


DP wrote: "Mr. Grimes asks how much CPA does CI use and how fast do they put it 
in. The *rough* answer is, we need enough to replace all the patient s blood 
possible, and we try to do it as quickly as we can, and *generally* doing so in 
an actual perfusion of a patient takes perhaps an hour and a half."


My reply: Thanks for the info. I am puzzled though because I thought you did 
blood washout before you do perfusion, so your cryoprotectant is not actually 
replacing blood, is it? No doubt this doesn't make any difference to the time 
the procedure takes.


DP wrote: "The really solid source for that statement is available through the 
CI link to the INC web site, where one of the scientists developing 
vitrification has a full article posted which states that in earlier results 
(not the current ones), quote, vitrification was only possible by combining the 
cryoprotectant with 1,000 atmospheres (atm) of hydrostatic pressure."


My reply: I have followed up this, and the paper was very old, and the procedure
was used more than ten years ago, with a totally different kind of protectant. 
You should really stop using this example in an attempt to discredit research 
which is being done today. This is quite wrong.


DP wrote (regarding Alcor vitrification procedures): "How does Mr. Ettinger know
they are so bad? He doesn t. Maybe they re not so bad."


My reply: I'm glad we can agree on this. Evidently Mr. Ettinger didn't actually 
have the information to support his claim (on your web site and in CryoNet) that
Alcor's vitrification procedures are more destructive than the procedures used 
at CI. Therefore I hope this claim will be removed from your web site.


Dp wrote: "Do Alcor or INC or 21CM or Mr. Grimes believe that no damage 
whatsoever occurs to vitrified patients, and that reversible suspension is here 
now?"


My reply: Since you include me in your question, I will answer: I doubt that any
medical procedure which involves totally altering the chemistry of cells will 
cause NO damage. The question is whether the damage is small enough and 
reversible, to allow recovery afterward. I do not know the answer to this 
question. I doubt that anyone knows.


DP wrote: "I should add that I don t believe that Alcor has been licensed to use
the vitrification system."


This sounds as if you are speculating. Perhaps you should ask? Neither you nor 
Robert Ettinger seems willing ever to call Alcor to check your facts. Why not? I
suppose I could telephone Alcor myself, but the phone call is not cheap from 
here.


DP wrote: "I should note in passing that the only reason we found out about 
these different versions of viability is precisely because Mr. Ettinger alone 
raised the issue and so finally got someone to come out and clarify it."


My reply: No, this is misleading. Mr. Ettinger made an error, because apparently
he didn't bother to check before making a categorical statement. As a result of
his error, someone corrected him. This is not the same as "raising the issue." 
It is more like attacking someone on grounds that are false, and then having to 
admit that you're wrong. Incidentally, as any politician knows, these two 
actions do not cancel each other out. Once someone has made a derogatory 
statement, the bad flavor of it lingers on, regardless of the denial.


DP wrote: "Mr. Grimes reads this, cuts it out, pastes it into his post, and says
in the very same paragraph carrying the quote, you don't say anything about the
volume of the solution which is passed through the person, or the temperature 
Well yes, he does! It s 45 deg F . It's right there! How can someone *read* the 
temperature, and cut it and paste it and quote it, and then ask what the 
temperature is?"


My reply: I apologize for not being clear. My general point is that the info I 
was given is nothing like the kind of info you would get from scientists doing 
an experiment. While the temperature of the ingoing liquid was mentioned, there 
was nothing about the temperature of the patient. I assume this is a system in 
which variables change all the time. The kind of info I had expected was 
something like, "Ideally the patient is about x degrees at the start of the 
procedure, and during the procedure we try to maintain this value between plus 
or minus x degrees." This is the kind of thing one would normally find in a 
summary of a medical procedure.


I will not bother to deal with DP's suggestion that I was impolite, and my 
motives are suspect. DP's own text to me has been far worse than impolite, but, 
maybe this is just his normal writing style. I don't care, anyway. All I have 
wanted, from the start, was to get some information. After an incredible amount 
of complaining, digressions about Alcor, evasiveness, and ridiculing my 
questions, I was finally given some of the information I wanted. Thanks for 
this!

My TWO remaining questions are very short and simple:


I still look forward to finding out how long it took CI to get its last four 
patients from deathbed to laboratory, and I would like to know how Robert 
Ettinger got his "26% concentration" figure, bearing in mind he has also told us
that the concentration of the glycerol is not the same throughout the person 
who has been perfused, because the glycerol is not able to penetrate fast 
enough.

Jeff Grimes.

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