X-Message-Number: 22402 From: Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 01:41:21 EDT Subject: Re: CryoNet #22389 - #22395 I also want to express my appreciation for the background and clarifications provided by Bridge, Pizer, and especially Platt regarding the Larry Johnson saga. I had first gone to Rick Potvin's web site to review a dialog involving Platt, Johnson, and others that took place a month or two prior to LJ's resignation. That discussion involved the issue of professionalization which remains very germaine. I think it is a great and continuing worry that we depend so much on the energies and perseverence of committed individuals who yet have other lives they want to live prior to their moment of extreme need. From the accounts provided, it seems that everything about Larry was a dream come true until, suddenly it was a nightmare. Nevertheless, if the lesson we draw is to forget about professionalism, then I think we draw the wrong lesson. Our survival as cryonics organizations depends upon growth, growth in memberships, growth in facilities, growth in the strength of our endowments, growth in our capacities across the board. This won't happen just through the enthusiasm of a bunch of amateurs and part timers. I think we need to look beyond our anger and shock at the apostasism and perversity of Larry to consider in more detail what was wrong with the set-up that motivated him to leave. My first thought was that he had deliberately deceived us in a carefully planned plot to seize photos and other artifacts on TW to make a windfall profit through sale to SI or more plausibly the National Inquirer or some such. Clearly that is the path he is on now, but, from Platt's description, it is just as clear to me that my original conspiracy theory doesn't hold water. This guy came in with the more or less sincere intention of making a nice career for himself in Cryonics. However, the career he had in mind apparently was a financially rewarding career having nothing much to do with believing in our cause. He did give lip service to the cause as he realized was required of his new role but he didn't come to ALCOR on that basis nor should we expect other cooperating professionals we bring on board in the future to have such beliefs. What he did come with was the expectation that there was a financial and career opportunity here, a reasonable expectation given the enormous publicity which resulted from the TW affair. There is always that prospect lurking in the wings. We all think that some day some how this thing is going to take off. Note that all the cryonics organizations that have any service capacity at all are in the United States. I think that this is partly to do with the fact that the US is such a beehive of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship involves creativity, initiative, and innovativeness, but it is also and perhaps most importantly about aquisitiveness, i.e. raw greed, the dazzling promise of windfall profits. Somewhere in the future there are going to be windfall profits in Cryonics, but not tomorrow or the next day. Forty years of struggle on a very bumpy growth curve has taught us that. My guess is that in going around and familiarizing himself with our little cryonics world, it gradually dawned on our professional pal Larry that this wasn't going to happen today, tomorrow or the next day. I speculate that he might have asked for a big raise under the circumstances and got turned down or maybe he just decided to make his exit without prompting, having brainstormed another money making venture. (I agree that a credit check might be in order.) In closing, I urge my colleagues on and off the cryonet to continue discussing the two issues which emerge for me from this messy affair. Number one: professionalization and number two, commercialization. Sooner or later we are going to have to come up with more satisfactory answers on both these counts, and this applies to ALCOR, CI, ACS, SAI and anybody else involved in our little world. Ron Havelock, CI member Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22402