X-Message-Number: 3261 Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 04:05:23 From: Subject: CRYONICS /CSNY >From Mike Perry, 13 Oct. 1994 re: Saul Kent/CSNY Recently a number of postings have addressed the issue of what went on in the early days with the Cryonics Society of New York, and in particular whether the principals (Saul Kent and Curtis Henderson) were honorable and ethical in their dealings. Unfortunately these postings have assumed the form of a "flame war"--something that happens all too frequently on the cryonet and which I think most of us want to avoid, so we can use our energies in more productive ways. Some of the assertions this time seemed rather ridiculous--maybe more so than usual in "flaming." I didn't want to have to address these things, and others were doing so meanwhile, so I have remained silent on this up to now. Mike Darwin, in message #3247, is critical of Steve Bridge, myself and "others" for lack of response, on grounds that we are aware of what really went on at CSNY, or sufficiently so, that we ought to at least answer some of the more egregious misstatements in this regard. On the other hand, I have also been under fire, privately, for not addressing some of the other issues that came up. (In fact I think this is the first time I've been under attack by both sides for not joining in!) From this it does not necessarily follow that I *should* join in. But, after thinking it over, I feel that some response is called for, so here it is. 1. In my considered judgment Dave Cosenza (whom I have known well for years) is not a tool or puppet of Carlos Mondragon, but in fact postings under Dave C's name are substantially his own. 2. What about Saul and Curtis? I have always felt that they acted without malicious intent, as well as they could, and even heroically, to make a success of their cryonics venture, which was one of the first operations to freeze people back in the 60s. That they failed in the end seems--to me--to be due to factors beyond their control, that they could not have reasonably anticipated, given the primitive state of things when they started, and many other problems. On the other hand, some I have talked to vehemently assert they *should* have known better, should have realized they were charging too little, should have modified their policies immediately, and *should be blamed* for their ultimate failure. I don't feel "expert" at judging what a person should have known, etc. but can only go by gut feeling, which often amounts to imagining myself in the same situation. Rather than spend a lot of time on this topic, which is a little beyond me, I'll quote from an interview of Saul Kent (by Mike Darwin) that appeared in *Cryonics*, Nov. 1981. (This was after all the CSNY patients had been lost.) Here it is Saul himself who is mainly speaking, and is willing to be self-critical. Perhaps that will provide some additional perspective. MD: Do you feel your efforts with the Cryonics Society of New York and Cryo-Span were productive? SK: I think we succeeded in a couple of ways and failed in some others. We were successful in that we certainly spread the word to a lot of people who had not heard about cryonics beforehand. We encouraged other people to become active, some of whom did. I think we did more than anybody else at that time to spread the word to the general public. I think for example we got mostly good publicity from the freezing of Steven Mandell. That got a few people interested. The mistakes we made? Well, first of all, underestimating the amount of money it would take to freeze someone, and not reacting fast enough once we began to get some experience of what the costs were. In essence, not charging people enough for services. We might also be faulted perhaps for not making a greater effort to do the freezing better. Although we did make efforts in that direction. We tried to get doctors and scientists and we couldn't. We ended up with Fred Horn, a funeral director, because that was the best we could do at that time. Perhaps we could have made greater efforts and found other people who would have done it in a more professional manner. Our problem in one respect was that we hoped that the initial freezings would just be the beginnings of a groundswell of support leading to improvements in every area, including perfusion. Another thing we should not have done was to get the relatives of the patients more deeply involved in matters. The reason we did that was that there were so few people we could count on. We figured, "These are the relatives of the patients, let's see if we can get them involved in more than just being customers." That was a mistake. It might not have been a mistake if the people were different., but it is probably a mistake in general. Of course, we had to go to these people after quoting them a certain price and say, "Well, we've got to charge you more money because this is costing us more than we thought." That inevitably led to them becoming more involved. Of course, if we'd quoted them the right price in the first place most of these people wouldn't have been frozen or would have been frozen with an adequate amount of money. MD: Why weren't you charging enough money? SK: The reason that we didn't was that we were looking, for numerous reasons really, to charge as little as possible. We felt uncomfortable asking for a huge amount of money. We said, "Let's find the cheapest price that we can do it at." I think that's been one of the problems with cryonics all along. You have to ask people for a whole lot of money and people don't like to come up with a whole lot of money. We may have made a mistake in freezing anybody who didn't have insurance. I say that because the great majority of people who have been frozen by relatives have subsequently thawed for one reason or another. There's no doubt that it's far more effective if you've got money that the person left for his freezing. But there are several reasons why we didn't wait for that kind of case. First of all, there were relatively few people signed up and most of them were young and in good health. We were really anxious to freeze somebody and it turned out that all of our opportunities were cases which presented at time of need. If everybody had waited for the other kind, there might not be anybody frozen to this day. Who knows, this might have been good. But I suspect not. At that time interest was high and we had reason to believe that if we started freezing people it would lead to bigger and better things. I really can't fault us for acting as we did on that point. If someone were to have said, "You might have to wait 10 years for a responsible freezing," we would have said, "That's ridiculous!" We couldn't have waited that long. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3261