X-Message-Number: 3228
Date: Sun, 9 Oct 1994 00:01:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: CRYONICS:Financial arrangements for care

David Cosenza writes:
 
> I think negligence is the best face 
> you can hope to put on it. Like CSNY, CSC also collapsed 
> because its patients' "funding arrangements" failed, but what 
> made it worse was that Nelson didn't tell anybody what was 
> going down! Both of these organizations knowingly accepted 
> inadequate funding on the premise that future business would 
> bail them out. If the promises made to the customers had been 
> of profit, AND if they'd been legally alive when the pyramid 
> collapsed, it would have been known as a Ponzi scheme and the 
> perpetrators would have been prosecuted criminally. 
 
You are arguing about a hypothetical consequence to a situation which you
do not know about first-hand. Moreover, using the few facts at your 
disposal, you are deliberately presenting a situation in the worst 
possible light. This, of course, should come as no surprise to those of 
us who have followed your posts in the past.

I have no personal interest in defending Robert Nelson of CSC, but it so
happens I have interviewed him at his home, I have interviewed the
mortician who was his co-defendant, and I have interviewed the attorney
who organized the action for negligence which was brought against them. I
have read the transcript of Nelson's appeal (after he had been found
guilty of negligence), and evidence at his trial clearly showed that all
of the relatives who had agreed to pay Nelson on a monthly basis to
maintain their "loved ones" in cryonic suspension had defaulted on their
obligation. As a result, Nelson had received no maintenance payments for
liquid nitrogen for at least a year prior to the "Chatsworth meltdown" 
which resulted. 
 
Let me now suggest an analogy. If I agree to look after your (living) cat,
and you agree to pay for its food, and you default on your payments, and I
exhaust my own money buying food for the cat, and the cat dies as a
result, obviously you should accept at least some of the blame for the 
death of the cat.
 
Taking this analogy one step further: Suppose I am too proud, or too
embarrassed, to admit that the cat is dead; so I pretend to you that the
cat is doing fine. This is pretty much what Nelson appears to have done,
when his patients were no longer frozen but he didn't admit it. I leave it
to the reader to decide who is most at fault here: the relatives who
defaulted on their contracts, or the man who wouldn't tell the truth and
severely damaged the image of cryonics as a result. (For several years 
after Chatsworth, growth in cryonics was virtually nil.)
 
One could claim, of course, that Nelson should never have accepted
patients who were financed by their relatives. At the time, however,
cryonics organizations were only beginning to discover the astonishing
tendency of relatives to abandon their commitments within a short space of
time. The very same people who promised that they would "do anything" to
preserve a loved one ended up doing nothing, a couple years later, leaving
the organization with unpaid bills and an insoluble dilemma. This, of
course, is why cryonics organizations now insist that the funding should
come from the patient, not from third parties. 

I emphasize again that I am not exonerating Robert Nelson, because I feel
he suffered from delusions of grandeur and acted in an irresponsible
fashion. He did not, however, run a Ponzi scheme. He genuinely believed in
the potential of cryonics, and if you had been in his position, David, I
am not at all convinced that you would have done better than he did.

############################################################
Charles Platt, 1133 Broadway (room 1214), New York, NY 10010
      Voice: 212 929 3983      Fax: 212 929 4467

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