X-Message-Number: 31587
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Alcor in Phoenix Magazine
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 08:29:30 -0700

http://www.phoenixmag.com/lifestyle/valley-news/200904/obama-futurama/

Obama Futurama
Author: - Jimmy Magahern

Issue: April, 2009, Page 68


Could the nation's new 'hope' mantra help the business of preserving bodies? One
Scottsdale-based cryonics organization is banking on it.


"Hope” - that single word emblazoned on all those iconic stenciled posters of 
Barack Obama in 2008 - has become the ad world's favorite buzzword in 2009.
 

Iconic brands such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Ikea have gotten in on the game with 
some variation of the "Hope” slogan in ad campaigns.
 

Perhaps soon we'll see red, white and blue "Hope For Change” logos wrapped 
around the giant insulated containers that Scottsdale-based cryonics 
organization Alcor uses to store its cryopreserved human bodies.


Certainly the message fits the elusive commodity that the organization has been 
banking on since its formation in 1972. After all, nobody has embraced hope for 
the future more literally than the 84 patients and 872 living members who have 
elected to spend $150,000 to have their bodies scientifically preserved at the 
company's Scottsdale Airpark facility. Not only are cryonicists betting on a 
brighter society that will someday be able to restore their bodies to full 
health, they're also counting on a future simply worth coming back to.


"We've always been into hope,” says Regina Pancake, the company's readiness 
coordinator, a position that entails transferring patients into precious cargo 
containers within minutes of their being declared legally dead, thus avoiding 
cell damage should they eventually be revived.


"To be a cryonicist, you have to be an optimist,” she explains. "You have to 
really think that we're going to pull it together and make it as a society and 
become a technologically advanced one at that. You have to be able to embrace 
the future rather than running from it.”


Pancake, 47, a wry redhead with a sharp sense of humor that would be right at 
home on The Daily Show, came to Alcor from a Hollywood job as a props specialist
in science fiction movies. Her 14 years in that field attuned her to the ways 
in which society's vision of the future is largely shaped by popular sci-fi.


"The future, in movies, has always been very dystopian,” she says, rattling off 
a list of films - from Woody Allen's Sleeper to Aliens to even Planet of the 
Apes - in which cryonics, typically misrepresented as "freezing” a body (they're
actually preserved today in non-freezing liquid nitrogen), fast-forwards its 
heroes into a dismal future.


"Offhand, I can't think of any movie or TV show where cryonics delivers the 
characters to a better place and time,” she says. "Well, maybe Futurama,” she 
adds with a chuckle, referring to the Simpsons-like TV show.


But now, our collective vision of the future may be brightening in favor of 
cryogenics, says Richard Leis, an operations specialist for University of 
Arizona's HiRISE Mars Orbiter imaging center. He signed up for cryonic 
suspension at Alcor a little more than a year ago.
 

"That line in Obama's inaugural speech, about 'restor(ing) science to its 
rightful place and wield(ing) technology's wonders to raise healthcare's 
quality,' was emailed all through the cryonics community,” he says. "But people 
are already coming around on their own. When you're seeing the world transformed
by emerging technologies, I think people naturally become more optimistic about
those technologies actually working to eliminate diseases, and maybe providing 
a way to slow aging and even death.”


Leis funds his cryopreservation fee with a 20-year term life insurance policy 
that the 35-year-old says costs him less than $25 per month - a popular route 
for younger sign-ups. To preserve itself in the long run, Alcor set up the 
interest-earning Alcor Patient Care Trust in 1997 to supplement the revenue 
derived from membership fees and donations. The trust puts roughly $65,000 from 
each registration into the shared fund, which now holds assets of more than $3.5
million.


"It's all a gamble,” Pancake admits. "Who knows? A giant comet could wipe out 
the Earth, and then it's 'game over' for everybody.”


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