X-Message-Number: 21913 Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2003 01:18:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: Promises, promises In his recent notification re the two new CI cases, Robert Ettinger follows his time-honored practice of stating: "Further information may be published at a later time." Really? So far as I can recall, CI has never provided a full and informative report on any case that it has managed, with the exception of the one which Ben Best described a few months ago. It is indeed ironic (and really a bit tiresome) that the man who complains perpetually that he lacks sufficient information about vitrification solutions is congenitally averse to revealing even the most basic facts about procedures which are applied to CI patients. In his announcement he can't even bring himself to name the U.S. state in which one of the patients was pronounced legally dead. What possible interest does this secrecy serve? For centuries, medicine has advanced by sharing case histories while withholding names and other identifying details when necessary to satisfy the need for confidentiality. Recently we saw extremely swift exchange of information about SARS cases, and huge benefits that accrued from the shared-data policy. (One establishment publication, The Lancet, even made its initial papers freely available online, to promote understanding of SARS as rapidly as possible.) One nation, China, chose not to participate initially in this exchange of information. China of course was the nation that suffered most. The tragedy in cryonics is that we won't know which patients are suffering the most damage until many decades in the future. This doesn't mean the topic is irrelevant; it means we need to gather AND SHARE as much information as possible to compensate for our lack of knowledge about outcome. At the "cryosummit" last year, CI and Alcor agreed to the idea of exchanging observers at their cryonics cases. Alcor was contacted by Tim Freeman, and we invited him to observe either of the two cases that were pending at that time. He was unable to do so, because we couldn't predict the time of death, and he didn't have sufficient time to wait for days or weeks. Still, the invitation was freely offered. Alcor has never received any such invitation or notification of an impending case from CI, leading me to wonder if CI was ever really serious about its "exchange of observers" pledge. Alcor has been remiss in not publishing detailed accounts of its own most recent half-dozen cases, but at least the organization provides the basic information very promptly (dates, times, temperatures, problems that were encountered, and mistakes that are made--see the most recent issue of Alcor News at www.alcornews.org). I've never seen any attempt to do this at CI, with the exception of the Ben Best report mentioned above. CI remains almost as opaque as the old Soviet Union, and thus CI's procedures remain immune from feedback that might conceivably improve them. This is not a healthy policy, for cryonics or for the patients. --Charles Platt Speaking for myself, not necessary Alcor. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21913