X-Message-Number: 33114
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:22:27 -0700
Subject: Leary video
From: Charles in Arizona <>

I had heard of the Leary video but had never seen it before.

Leary told me, about a month before he died, that he had no further
interest in cryonics. I questioned this, but he was quite adamant
about it. John Perry Barlow (lyricist for The Grateful Dead) later
stated in an email to me that he had played a part in persuading Leary
to die "naturally." Barlow wrote:

"I will take some responsibility for Tim's decision to drop being
preserved. I told him that one of the greatest things he could do with
his life would be to die publicly, joyfully, and naturally. . . .  His
original decision to be frozen had been one of his many iron whims,
solidified by repeated statements of intent. Confronted with the
impending reality of the preservation process, I think he found the
Cryocare culture a little more sober than suited him. I also think
that in the end, he began to accept the idea of there being a soul,
independent of the body. . . ."

I believe that Barlow was there when Leary died. Barlow also wrote:

"He didn't, as threatened, commit suicide on the Net. Or have his head
cut off and frozen. Or engage in any of the other spectacles of
departure I had dreaded. In the end, he surrounded himself with the
angelic band of twenty-somethings who have been uploading him into the
Web these last few months, and he drifted peacefully out of here."

Years later, I ran into Mr. Barlow at an event in New York and had an
interesting chat with him, in which I suggested that depriving someone
of cryopreservation might be regarded, in the future if not now, as
being similar to killing them. Barlow seemed surprised that I would
think in those terms.

Mr. Barlow refers to the "angelic" people surrounding Leary during his
last weeks, but I regarded most of them as being opportunistic and
parasitical. His slow decline was being chronicled on a web site, and
I felt fairly sure that one person in particular wanted to make a
movie of his death. Whether the link that David has provided is that
movie, I don't know. But I believe it is a fake. I think I can state
categorically that Leary is not cryopreserved anywhere.

Additional details on this topic can be found by searching the Cryonet
archives. There was some acrimonious debate, at the time, as to
whether a different team from a different organization could have
intervened to save him. Since we had people such as Arel Lucas
intervening on our behalf (she was an old friend of Leary's, who I
think was trusted by him) I find this doubtful.

Charles Platt

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