X-Message-Number: 7724
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 20:02:41 -0700
From: David Brandt-Erichsen <>
Subject: Wall Street Journal cryonics article from Jan. 31

RAT STUDY REVIVES HOPES FOR CRYONICS; THEN INTEREST COOLS
97-01-31 16:41:13 EST VIA AP

 By MICHAEL MOSS
 
 The Wall Street Journal
 
 As the millennium approaches, the "life-extension" industry is getting
plenty of attention. But this turns out to be cold comfort for entrepreneurs
like Paul Wakfer.
 
 Mr. Wakfer is president of CryoSpan Inc., a Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.,
concern that practices cryonics. This means people pay him to keep their
bodies frozen after they die, in the hopes that medical science will find a
way to bring them back to life someday, memories and capabilities intact.
 
 Cryonics has been a subject of fascination for more than three decades,
ever since former community-college teacher Robert Ettinger introduced the
concept in his 1964 book "The Prospect of Immortality." During the past five
years, interest has intensified, with more than 100 articles and television
reports each year on the topic. Despite all this, it turns out that very few
people are willing to put their own bodies on the line.
 
 World-wide, the iced-body count stands at a scant 70 -- not including Walt
Disney, long rumored, falsely, to be among them. (In fact, a Disney
spokesman says, he was cremated, and his ashes are preserved at a cemetery
in Southern California.)
 
 For Mr. Wakfer, who charges $1,500 a year to maintain a whole body, $250
just for a head and $200 for a brain, business is distinctly disappointing.
"My current year's income -- I just totaled the invoices -- is $8,200," Mr.
Wakfer says. "That's $8,200 gross."
 
 Others in the field -- even the premium-priced Alcor Life Extension
Foundation Inc., a not-for-profit that charges $120,000 for perpetual cold
storage -- also are discouraged. Among potential clients, religious
objections abound. There are also some pretty daunting scientific obstacles.
Most basically, no one knows if it will ever be scientifically possible to
revive a frozen corpse. Cloning a new body from a frozen head or brain may be
even more farfetched.
 
 "Every few months, someone comes along with a plan to make this popular,"
says Brian Shock, membership administrator for Alcor, in Scottsdale, Ariz.
But, he laments, "It never works."
 
 Which may be why the cryonics community got so very excited recently about
the exploits of a group of South African rats.
 
 Late in 1995, researchers at the University of Pretoria in South Africa
submitted a scientific paper for publication in the British journal
Cryobiology. The journal focuses on the cooling of human tissue for
scientific and medical purposes, including surgery and organ transplants.
The researchers said they had extracted rats' hearts, injected them with a
secret protective solution, cooled them to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit for
as long as 45 minutes and then slowly thawed them out. The result: The
hearts started
beating again.
 
 While a far cry from reviving a dead human, not to mention making
productive use of a frozen head, the rat experiment had an energizing effect
on cryonics advocates. Though the article was unpublished, word of it spread
quickly. Last September, Alcor brought one of the researchers, Olga Visser,
to Scottsdale for a demonstration.
 
 People who were there say that she succeeded in reviving a rat's heart that
had been frozen for 90 seconds. Among some dozen cryonics die-hards, the
demonstration produced gasps and even tears, Alcor's Mr. Shock says.
"Feelings were running pretty high," he recalls.
 
 Alcor quickly reported the development on its web page under the headline,
"Press Release: Breakthrough!" It termed the experiment a "running start"
toward proof that cryonics could work. And it noted that Ms. Visser's
research paper was under consideration by Cryobiology.
 
 Since then, however, doubts have surfaced. It turns out that Cryobiology
had rejected the manuscript months before Ms. Visser's visit to Arizona,
says the journal's editor, David Pegg. He adds that the research wasn't
backed by sufficient data and didn't advance knowledge in the field.
 
 Alcor, which keeps 33 human bodies and heads in perpetual storage, tried
but failed to replicate the experiment with rats of its own. And the South
African government recently halted unrelated AIDS research in which Ms.
Visser and colleagues were involved, pending an investigation of what other
scientists have claimed are unorthodox research methods.
 
 Calls to Ms. Visser were referred to Larry Heidebrecht, a spokesman for a
private concern that Ms. Visser and her partners have created to market
their research. He said Ms. Visser stands by all her work and still hopes to
get the rat study published.
 
 In fact, she is scheduled to try her demonstration again at a conference,
dubbed the "Advancing Cryonics Technology Festival," sponsored by Alcor in
Scottsdale this weekend.
 
 "It's either a curiosity or it might turn out to be a learning path,"
Alcor's outgoing president, Stephen Bridge, now says of the rat work. "I've
been in cryonics 20 years. While there have been improvements, a lot of
things you think are going to take off, don't."
 
 Meanwhile, interest is shifting to research at fast-growing biotech concern
BioTime Inc., in Berkeley, Calif. In the course of working on a blood
substitute for organ transplants and cold-temperature surgery, the company
has been plunging golden hamsters into a freezing bath, then turning up the
heat. "We can get a decent percentage of these guys back," says Paul Segall,
the company president. "You warm them up and, lo and behold, they breathe

again. You can squeeze their paw and they'll respond. They'll even walk around."
 
 Even so, Mr. Wakfer isn't expecting any significant spike in business.
Instead, he is building his clientele a little bit at a time. Last month, he
accepted a client who apparently had disappeared mysteriously. "There's good
reason to believe he's dead," Mr. Wakfer says. "There were hairs and skin
flakes on the bed sheets, so we just rolled up the sheets and froze those."
 
 Mr. Wakfer is charging a flat fee of $1,000 to keep them on ice. A friend
of the client wanted to do this, Mr. Wakfer explains, "to have at least a
clone of that person around again."


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