X-Message-Number: 27000
From: "Jordan Sparks" <>
Subject: RE: final disposition
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 07:33:00 -0700

But I think it is final disposition of a dead body, at least until
someone can reverse it.  And don't give me any crap about us being able
to reverse it anytime soon.  We're many many decades or centuries away
from reversing the process.  If we never develop the technology to
revive them, then they remain dead.  While we believe the technology
will be developed, we cannot have a law based upon such speculation.
I'm totally fine classifying the patient as dead.  I still refer to them
as a patient so that everyone understands that I am hopeful that we will
be able to revive them.  If organ preservation and banking is perfected,
then I might support different semantics.

The battle I'm fighting is a much more ordinary type of battle than the
one you suggested.  Oregon law states: "Final disposition" means the
burial, interment, cremation, removal from the state or other authorized
disposition of a dead body.  I just need to convince the board that
storage in LN2 classifies as interment, or else should be an "other
authorized disposition".  The mortuary board is simply interested in
protecting the public health and respecting the dead.  The whole reason
they even exist in Oregon is because some funeral director a few decades
ago ran a very sloppy business.  By the time they caught him, there were
hundreds of bodies that were not buried appropriately.  Bodies were
placed in the wrong plots or they were unmarked.  They never were able
to sort out the mess.  As you can imagine, many relatives were very
upset.  Looking at all the rules of the mortuary board, they are
essentially designed to prevent that sort of neglect.  We just need to
prove that we are protecting the public health and respecting the dead.
We need to be well organized.  If we do need to revise our statutes
(although I don't think we do), then we need to do it with the full
support of the mortuary board.  The legislature will depend heavily on
the opinion of the mortuary board.

Oh, and I'm no lawyer either.  So I may be way off base.

Jordan Sparks
 

-----Original Message-----
These divergent perspectives show up in the term
"final disposition".  This terminology is to be
expected of a Mortuary Board individual. As the
cryonics guy, Jordan, you need to confront this
erroneous point of view and promote (insist on,
actually) the more correct model: simply, that cryonic suspension is a
medical response to an otherwise lethal inevitability.  Cryonic
suspension is "storage" not "final disposition".

I'm no lawyer.  Nevertheless, my approach to the legal challenges would
follow two lines of reasoning:  ....

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