X-Message-Number: 2047
From: "Mark B. Kaminsky" <fasfax!mbk>
Subject: CRYONICS Boston Globe article
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 93 15:06:45 EST
Here is the whole article from the March 28, 1993 edition of The
Boston Sunday Globe. Note again that this is Boston's leading
newspaper with a Sunday circulation of 812,021 and that the
article was on page 1 (one) with a color photo. Given that multiple
family members share the same Sunday paper it is clear that over
a million people at least saw the article even if they didn't
read it.
The front page color photo is of Derek Ryan taken from above in
front of 3 '"patient care bay" cylinders' with the ALCOR name
and logo on two of them. The photo caption is "Derek Ryan, an Alcor
Life Extension Foundation staffer, displays "patient care bay"
cylinders, each with room for four bodies". The story continues on
page 18 (using a full half of that page) and has a black and white
photo of Tony Reno. In this photo Tony is standing in front of what
appears to be the back of a building restoration truck. But only the
word "RESTORATION" in big black letters is visible above Tony as are
some smaller words behind him: "waterproofing, spray... , sandblasting,
chemical cleanin... y repairs", Boston area code "617" and a NH
license plate. Cute. The caption is "TONY RENO...I want to see how
it all ends up".
Mark B. Kaminsky, mbk%
Fasfax Corporation, Nashua, New Hampshire, USA
Headline (page 1): "Cryonics draws a frozen few in New England"
Continuation Headline (on page 18): "Through cryonics, a frozen few
seeking to outwait death"
Tony Reno, a software engineer from Pepperell, is only 33 but he's
taking no chances.
"I love life" he says, "I love the way technology is going, and I
want to see how it all ends up."
So, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Reno has
signed up to be frozen upon his death for as long as it takes scientists
to figure out how to thaw people and bring them back to the future.
David Greenstein, a 55-year-old Framingham optometrist, has also
signed up with Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a California cryonics
company, because he has "always felt that aging and death were something
we could maybe do something about." Just signing up, he says, "has
given me some hope rather than despair about getting older."
To many people, the mere idea of freezing dead people in hopes
of bringing them back decades or centuries later is morally repugnant -
the ultimate expression of an age-phobic, death-denying, selfish
culture.
But a small - and growing - minority of technofreaks clearly
feels otherwise, though even the most ardent admit that successful
cryonics is a long leap from today's science.
Many mainstream scientists, in particular cryobiolo-
(continued page 18)
gists, who study ways to freeze human cells and tissues for
possible transplantation, go out of their way to distance themselves
from the cryonics movement, which began almost 30 years ago.
So far, not so much as a single dog has been deep-frozen, thawed
and returned to life, much less a person, advocates acknowledge. In
fact, scientists say it has not yet been possible to thaw and revive
to a functioning state any organ, except, some content, the small
intestine in dogs.
The biggest human tissues that can be frozen and returned to
viability are single cells, very early multi-celled embryos, and a
few selected thin tissues such as bone, corneas, cartilage and heart
valves.
But the cryonics movement, however far out it seems, does raise
intriguing questions piquing a growing interest.
About 650 people, many of them college educated and some of them
in their early 30s and 40s, have already signed up with Alcor in
Riverside, Calif., the American Cryonics Society in Sunnyvale, Calif.,
or Michigan's Cryonics Institute.
Frozen heads
Another 35 people or so are already in the deep freeze, and 15 Alcor
members have just their heads frozen in the belief that science will
be able to regenerate their bodies if it has developed the technology
to thaw their heads.
Participants have little in common aside from their belief in
cryonics. Spread across the country, they come from all walks of
life. Alcor reports a handful of clients in Massachusetts and about
50 from New England.
Those who sign up with Alcor or American Cryonics pay about $300
a year in dues and name the companies as beneficiaries of life insurance
policies worth roughly $100,000 to $150,000. That pays for freezing
and upkeep in the hereafter, when the cryonically suspended are put into
human-sized thermos bottles and cooled by liquid nitrogen to minus 320
degrees Fahrenheit.
The Cryonics Institute has a one-time membership fee - $1250 - but
cryonic suspension is cheaper, about $28,000.
The process of cryonic preservation begins immediately after death
is pronounced. At the mortician's, blood is drained and an organ-
preservation fluid is put in. The body then packed in ice and flown
to the cryonic preservation site, where it is pumped full of glycerol,
which acts like anti-freeze. The body is then deep-frozen.
By June the number of people putting their futures on ice is expected
to grow considerably, thanks to an essay contest sponsored by Omni
magazine and Alcor. So far 450 people have submitted 250-word essays
on why they would like to be frozen. The lucky winner, with the best
essay, says Alcor spokesman and science fiction writer Charles Platt,
will be frozen free of charge.
In Massachusetts, Reno and others are spreading the word through
open houses about once a month for potential clients.
"Screwy science"
To many people, like Art Caplan, director of the University of
Minnesota Center for Biomedical Ethics, the whole idea of cryonics is
"goofy beyond amusement. It's a movement that combines... screwy science
and a secular lust for reincarnation with large-scale refrigeration
technology."
Others, though still skeptical, take a somewhat softer view. Cryonics
is "not wacko in the same way as astrology or witchcraft is wacko, but
wacko or questionable in the sense of being an extreme extrapolation of
what's known," says cryobiologist Gregory Fahy at the Jerome Holland
Laboratory of the American Red Cross in Rockville, Md.
Fahy is working on ways to "cryopreserve" rabbit kidneys and rat
livers for transplantation. There's almost no hope, he says, that
literally freezing such organs will work because freezing "means turning
the water in something into ice." Ice crystals that damage the delicate
structures linking cells together are formed during both freezing and
thawing, he says.
Instead, Fahy is experimenting with replacing the water in animal
organs with a glycerol-like "antifreeze," then cooling organs to a solid
or "vitrified" state. So far, Fahy's team has only cryopreserved two
organs, and "we haven't transplanted them yet."
Asked whether freezing and reviving whole human beings is a total
pipe dream, James Southard, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin
School of Medicine and president of the Society for Cryobiology, says
"Everything's possible, but do I think it will be done? No. ... The
problems are humongous."
Strides in reviving tissue
Still, cryonicists point with hope to the strides scientists have
made in freezing and reviving simpler tissues.
Human sperm, which are single cells, can be frozen, as can
individual blood cells, pancreatic islet cells, which make insulin, and
liver cells. And human embryos are frozen by the thousands - 30,000
worldwide at last count, notes Caplan.
For the last nine years, companies like Cryolife in Marietta, Ga.,
have been freezing other bits of human tissue.
Robert McNally, a biomedical engineer and Cryolife senior vice
president, says his firm freezes human heart valves, leg veins, the
meniscus or cartilage in the knee, and the anterior cruciate ligament,
also used for knee repair. Others have successfully frozen bone tissue.
But this is a long way from freezing and reviving people, says McNally,
adding, "We try to divorce ourselves from cryonics, which is absolute
nonsense."
None of which deters the true believers who seem in sympathy with
Woody Allen's words: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my
work, I want to achieve it through not dying."
Jim Yount of the American Cryonics Society pooh-poohs current
resistance to cryonics, noting that 100 years ago people also gave
cremation the cold shoulder.
Robert Ettinger, 74, head of the Cryonics Institute, insists the
pessimistic view of ice crystal damage is "mostly baloney."
"I know I'll be frozen," he adds. "Whether I'll come back remains
to be seen, but whatever it'll be like, it'll be more interesting than
being dead."
Unlike Alcor, which will freeze heads alone for $41,000, Ettinger
does not advocate freezing human heads without the rest of the body.
"We don't have any quarrel with the rationale," he says but it's "a
public relations negative."
Charles Platt, the Alcor spokesman, disagrees.
"If we are ever going to resuscitate a frozen patient, it will
take very advanced technology," he says. And if that technology
exists, it's almost certain we can clone a new body for a person who
has only the head frozen."
"My personal feeling," says optometrist Greenstein, "is I'll go
for the whole body. I don't like the idea of just freezing your head.
It's gruesome."
2 centuries hence
And if that's gruesome, what about waking up 200 or 300 years hence
in a world populated by one's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
great-great-grandchildren's generation? Will they even remember to thaw
you out?
Greenstein says he is "not under the illusion" there are any
guarantees he will wake up whole, healthy and ready for a world that may
have changed considerably.
"But 50 years ago, when people stopped breathing they were thought
dead. Then, it was thought that if the heart stopped, you were dead,
and that is not true. We want to fight death."
People who resist the idea of cryonics, he adds, are not very
rational "because rationally, you have nothing to lose because you're
dead, right?" To embrace cryonics, he adds, "you have to have the
conviction that it is technically possible and you have to be more
afraid of death then the average person."
Reno, the software engineer, adds that "cryonics is the best hope
with current science." Being frozen for decades or centuries is "the
second worst thing that could happen to you. The worst is not to be
frozen," Reno says.
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