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Date: Tue, 5 Apr 1994 10:32:47 -0700
Subject: CRYONICS Trans Time Newsletter
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THE TRANS TIMES
Life Extension through Cryonic Suspension
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Volume 3 Number 2 April 1994
Copyright 1994 by TRANS TIME, INC., 10208 Pearmain Street, Oakland,
CA 94603. Phone 510-639-1955. All rights reserved.
New Suspension Forms Available
TRANS TIME placed its first patient in suspension in 1974. In
1975 we completed the first set of legal documents for use in our
pare-need suspension program. At that time, we offered the
program in conjunction with the American Cryonics Society.
There have been important changes that have occurred over the
intervening 19 years:
1. We have thoroughly overhauled the legal forms that we use. We
have discovered needed improvements through years of experience,
and through several legal reviews of our documents.
2. TRANS TIME has established a program whereby clients can
contract directly with us for services. This reduces the complexity
of the program considerably, in that for the most part you only
have to deal with one organization.
At the same time, we no longer have a contract with the American
Cryonics Society to service their members. We do have such a
contract with the International Cryonics Foundation (ICF), but it
is not necessary for you to join ICF now to obtain our services.
The new package includes the following documents:
How to Arrange for your Cryonic Suspension
Required Documents
Application for the TRANS TIME, INC. Suspension Program
Will and Charitable Trust
Will and Charitable Trust (filled-in sample)
Consent for Cryonic Suspension
Anatomical Gift by a Living Donor
Optional Documents
Certificate of Religious Belief
Instructions for Completing Declaration by Next of Kin
Declaration by Next of Kin
Declaration by Next of Kin (filled-in sample)
Life Line Application
Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care Decisions
Revocable Living Trust
We supply this forms package to all subscribers to our Emergency
Responsibility Service. When the subscriber has completed the
funding arrangements and the required forms, we accept
responsibility for getting the subscriber into suspension upon
deanimation.
Call us or write us for an Emergency Responsibility Application.
TRANS TIME Investments
by Art Quaife, Ph.D.
TRANS TIME was formed 22 years ago as a for-profit cryonics
corporation. The actual business of placing patients in
suspension has been quite sparse since then; we are now
maintaining 10 patients in suspension. Viewed solely as a
business, cryonics has been terrible. So how have we survived?
1. For many years, we had Directors who were willing to work for
free or cheap, because they were working to save their own lives.
2. More recently, we have made a number of very successful
investments. The following is a complete list of all stock market
investments we have made and sold:
Investment Cost Sales Price % return
compounded yearly
Cryomedical Sciences $83,225 $480,000 89.48%
Berkshire Hathaway $25,967 $ 28,500 8.18%
Berkshire Hathaway $86,311 $ 93,250 5.86%
Berkshire Hathaway $78,675 $118,196 76.18%
Vanguard Index-500 $45,623 $ 45,908 3.21%
In addition, we currently hold the following portfolio:
Investment Cost 2/28/94 % return
Price compounded yearly
BioTime $32,175 $174,040 106.65%
Berkshire Hathaway $59,823 $ 92,700 24.22%
Apollo Genetics $ 4,000 $ 40,000 221.18%
Vanguard Index-500 $ 4,377 $ 4,452 3.80%
Vanguard Index-Europ. $25,000 $ 26,836 16.74%
Vanguard Index-Pacific $35,000 $ 36,309 8.35%
The Apollo Genetics shares are not publicly traded. The valuation
shown is that of the last private placement.
How should we put together the above figures to determine an
overall rate-of-return on our investments? It is incorrect to
simply average the returns in the right column. Clearly the larger
the original investment, and the longer we maintained the
investment, the more it should influence the overall return.
The proper way to combine these returns is to treat this as an
investment project with compounded cash flows. Cash is moving in
and out of our total investment portfolio. Let C[i] be the amount
invested or withdrawn from the portfolio at time t[i] (measured in
years). C[i] is positive for a purchase, and negative for a sale.
Let our portfolio be worth I(t) at today s date t. Then our overall
rate-of-return on investment, compounded yearly, is the value of R
that satisfies the equation:
I(t) = SUM C[i] * (1 + R) ** (t - t[i])
i
I solve this equation for R on the computer using Newton s method.
There are even hand calculators (such as the Texas Instruments BAII
Plus) that will solve the equation automatically for you.
Using our results as reported above, we find that
R = 80.20%, compounded yearly.
This is a world-class return on investment: George Soros, eat your
heart out! However we must note that our three most spectacular
returns have resulted from being in on the ground floor of newly
formed companies. This was possible for us because of our close
relationship with the principals of these companies. But it is
doubtful that we can continue generating these great startup
returns in the future.
Real Estate
It is easiest to judge one's investment wisdom with the benefit of
20/20 hindsight. Just as our stock market investments look
spectacularly inspired, our one real estate investment now looks
spectacularly stupid. This investment is the purchase of a 37,000
square foot building that was to be the new home for Northern
California cryonics. Our $245,000 share of the down payment bought
us 48% interest in the building. Five cryonicists are now on the
title for the remaining interest.
What went wrong? First of all, we paid about 25% more than the
building was worth. We listened to building evaluations by people
who claimed to understand real estate, but who instead were driven
by fantasies. Secondly, we got into a business arrangement that
just won't work. The limited partnership that was to share the
purchase with us fell apart shortly after closing. This left a co-
tenancy of 6 parties, who are at odds with each other. The only co-
tenants that are paying their bills are TRANS TIME and Carmen
Brewer.
It is difficult to determine the current value of our investment;
my best estimate is about $100,000. It is entirely possible that
the extortion attempts of one of the co-tenants will block all
attempts to sell the building. In that case a total investment of
more than $500,000 by Northern California cryonicists has become
worthless.
Other TRANS TIME Directors disagree with my assessment and believe
that somehow we may still be able to sell the building at
reasonable profit. May they prove me wrong!
Even if my pessimistic evaluation proves correct, lumping together
the real estate purchase with our stock market investments produces
a total investment return of 36%. This is still an exceptional
return on investment.
BioTime Completes Second Public Offering
BioTime, Inc. recently completed a public offering of 900,000
shares at $5 1/8 through Thomas James Associates, Inc. brokerage
house. BioTime shares are now trading on the Boston Stock
Exchange (trading symbol BTM) in addition to NASDAQ.
BioTime now has more than $6,000,000 of cash available to finance
its product development and testing programs and to seek FDA
approval of one or more versions of its blood substitute and
organ preservation solutions.
"I expect the remainder of 1994 to be an exciting time for
BioTime," said company President, Dr. Paul Segall. "With our
financial position fortified by new capital, and the results of our
research program continuing to meet our expectations, we hope to
make significant progress in advancing our lead products into
clinical testing and regulatory review."
BioTime, headquartered in Berkeley, California, is engaged in the
research and development of blood substitute solutions and
technology for use in emergency trauma treatment, surgery, the
preservation of organs awaiting transplant, and other biomedical
applications.
BioTime is the second company to spin off from TRANS TIME and raise
millions of dollars on Wall Street. (The first was Cryomedical
Sciences.) TRANS TIME benefits directly from BioTime's ongoing
research, since we have the right to use all of their products for
cryonic suspension purposes, royalty-free. Their Z+ ice-cold blood
substitute has been successfully tested in dogs and baboons. Their
Z2 cryoprotective solution is showing great effectiveness--see the
following article. TRANS TIME is the only cryonics organization
using these solutions.
Improved Cryoprotective Solution
by Hal Sternberg, Ph.D.
Recent BioTime studies support previous observations that a newly
developed cryoprotective solution ("Z2") is advantageous over
other formulations that we have studied. We reported one year ago
that earlier formulations maintained contractile activity of
heart muscle cells after liquid nitrogen storage. The Z2 solution
yields even better contractile activity of the stored muscle
cells. Also brains of hamsters, reperfused after liquid nitrogen
storage, are not edematous nor appreciably dehydrated, while
capillaries become reperfused with blood or stain.
We perfused whole rats and hamsters with a similar solution,
removed full thickness skin samples, and froze the samples in
liquid nitrogen. After thawing and transplanting the skin to
other animals, we found that the skin regains function!
Previously we had not been able to recover EKG signals from
hamsters perfused with cryoprotective solutions and frozen at
near sub-zero temperatures for more than 24 hours. Recently the
Z2 solution has allowed repeatable recovery of EKG signals after
storage at as low as -4.0 degrees C for more than 60 hours. Also,
the
same solution permits revival of animals after perfusion with 2
blood volumes and circulatory arrest for 45 minutes.
We continue to test the Z2 solution. To date the results have
exceeded what we could accomplish with earlier formulations. We
have some evidence that frozen cryoprotected tissues undergo
damage to the extracellular matrix and capillary bed. As we
better understand the nature of freezing damage suffered by
organs and tissues, we may be in a better position to reduce such
damage.
Artificial Intelligence
-----------------------
The N Queens Problem:
Triumph and Challenge
by Art Quaife, Ph.D.
The N queens problem is a time-honored challenge in artificial
intelligence research. The problem is to place N queens on an
N N chessboard in such a way that no two queens attack each
other. (An ordinary chessboard has N = 8.) Two queens attack each
other if they are on the same row, same column, or same diagonal.
The problem can be solved for all N > 3, and the number of
solutions goes up rapidly with N. You can easily experiment with
the problem, starting with N = 4, by drawing a grid on scratch
paper and trying to place non-attacking pennies on the grid.
There are some (N2)! / (N! (N2 - N)!) ways of placing the N
queens on the chessboard. For N = 20 this is 2.8 1033 placements,
so generating and testing all possibilities is quite out of the
question for even moderate N. Finding solutions to the problem
requires efficient techniques for searching and pruning a large
state space.
One can write an elegant Prolog program to find all solutions,
using only about 30 lines of code [1]. But in my testing using
Arity Prolog 6.1, this program did not produce a solution for N =
30 in 11 hours of computer time.
Whiz-bang solution
I recently wrote a C++ program that finds all solutions, for all N
up to 20,000! When N = 20,000, the computer has 400,000,000
chessboard squares to consider in placing the queens. Using Borland
C++ running on a 486 DX2-66 machine, the following table shows the
number of seconds my program took to find solutions:
N 1 solution 1000 solutions
----------------------------------
10 .00 .28
100 .22 2.15
1000 18.02 36.25
10000 1954.90 2165.70
20000 13734.89 14279.39
World record?
I am ready to claim the world record for achieving solutions for N
= 20,000, at least for solutions found on a personal computer. I
can squeeze solutions for even higher N out of my program, but the
runs are now taking long enough to make that unappealing.
And so, to all my fellow AI researchers, techno-nerds, and
codeheads, here is the CHALLENGE: Can you write a computer program
that will find all solutions, and for N larger than 20,000 will
actually determine some of them within (say) one day (86,400
seconds) of computer time? You will need some good heuristics to
prune the huge search space. You will also need to write efficient
code. If you succeed, you may get your name in the Guinness Book of
World Records before I do.
Reference
[1] Bratko, Ivan. Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence,
Second Edition, Addison-Wesley (1990).
The Brighter Side of Death
--------------------------
Etiquette: At the Funeral
by Mark Twain
[from Letters from the Earth, Bernard DeVoto editor, New York:
Harper & Row, 1962.]
Do not criticize the person in whose honor the entertainment is
given.
Make no remarks about his equipment. If the handles are plated,
it is best to seem to not observe it.
If the odor of the flowers is too oppressive for your comfort,
remember that they were not brought there for you, and that the
person for whom they were brought suffers no inconvenience from
their presence.
Listen, with as intense an expression of attention as you can
command, to the official statement of the character and history of
the person in whose honor the entertainment is given; and if these
statistics should seem to fail to tally with the facts, in places,
do not nudge your neighbor, or press your foot upon his toes, or
manifest, by any other sign, your awareness that taffy is being
distributed.
If the official hopes expressed concerning the person in whose
honor the entertainment is given are known by you to be oversized,
let it pass--do not interrupt.
At the moving passages, be moved--but only according to the degree
of your intimacy with the parties giving the entertainment, or with
the party in whose honor the entertainment is given. Where a blood
relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant
acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble
sympathetically with his handkerchief. Where the occasion is
military, the emotions should be graded according to military rank,
the highest officer present taking precedence in emotional
violence, and the rest modifying their feelings according to their
position in the service.
Do not bring your dog.
Have Something to Say?
We invite our readers to submit cryonics-related articles for
possible publication in this newsletter. The best way to submit
is to send us the article in a WordPerfect file, on an MS-DOS
diskette. Call us about other electronic formats you may use. We
will also consider typed or handwritten submissions.
For Sale
TRANS TIME has two used cryogenic storage containers for sale,
which we have used for long-term storage of human patients. One
of them is a two-patient unit, for which we want $8,000. The
second is a one-patient unit, for which we want $5,000. If you
are interested, contact us for further details.
Upcoming Meeting
TRANS TIME holds bimonthly business meetings at which visitors
are welcome. The next meeting will be the Annual Meeting of
Shareholders. This will be held Sunday, April 17, 1:00 p.m. at:
The TRANS TIME Facility
10208 Pearmain St.
Oakland, CA 94603
(510) 639-1955
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