X-Message-Number: 8147
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 1997 02:09:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: CRYONICS Cryonics Scandal Revisited

Here's something about cryonics (!) to provide a brief
distraction from the primary topic of consciousness/identity.

Almost five years ago I visited Bob Nelson, the one-time 
president of the Cryonics Society of California (CSC), who 
was sued for damages when cryopatients in his care were found 
to be decaying because they had been kept without liquid 
nitrogen. 

I interviewed Nelson for a book that I was writing about 
cryonics. In 1992 I circulated a portion of the book, which
did not include any mention of Nelson. I was saving that for
when I wrote the remainder of the book. But I couldn't find a
publisher, so I never finished the book. In fact, I never
even listened to the tapes of my interview with Nelson, 
mainly because I knew that listening to them would not be a
pleasant experience.

Now that I'm working on a new book, I finally braved the task 
of transcribing the tapes. Here are a few interesting 
excerpts. Since Bob Nelson offered the interview freely and 
signed a general release authorizing me to use his statements 
in any form, I feel it is legitimate to post this online, 
especially since I won't be able to use more than a fraction 
of the text in the book that I'm currently working on (and 
even that fraction may be axed by the publisher). 

For those who are new to cryonics, the incident referred to 
below stands as the one great scandal. In almost twenty years 
since Nelson's acts of omission were discovered, no cryonics 
patients have been lost through malfeasance. The root cause 
of Nelson's disaster was that he accepted many cases who were 
not properly funded, or were completely unfunded, or were 
financed by relatives who subsequently stopped paying. After 
a while, there simply wasn't any money. All cryonics 
organizations today have policies against accepting such 
"charity cases." I think it's useful to remind ourselves, 
periodically, why these policies exist. 

--Charles Platt  

-------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Nelson, speaking June 2nd, 1992, in Norco, California. 


Interviewer: Let's begin with the freezing of James Bedford, 
the world's first cryopatient, in January, 1967.

Nelson: Robert Ettinger called us and said that Dr. James 
Bedford wanted to be frozen and was right here in California. 
That was the last thing I wanted to do, because I knew it 
meant total destruction of all we had put together at that 
time. [Nelson had been trying to assemble a consortium of 
scientists to conduct research, and he feared they would be 
turned off by sensationalistic publicity.] 

Once we did freeze Dr. Bedford, from that point on, a lot of 
crazy things happened. I found myself flying all over the 
country with Ettinger. I was on Donahue ... I was on every 
television show of any importance. It felt good, really good 
to be at the forefront of something that was so incredibly, 
you know, possible. And it happened to me so quickly, within 
a year from the first meeting I attended, to the actual 
freezing of Dr. Bedford. But as I say, my approach had not 
been to just freeze somebody real quick. 

What got us in trouble, the fact that so many people, some of 
whom we knew and others we didn't, but the people coming 
forward wanting to be frozen were people who didn't have 
money. And some of the heartbreaking incidents--the little 
girl, Genevieve de la Poterie, that was the one that finished 
me with cryonics, because we had a capsule failure while I 
was back East. I had done everything I could to safeguard it, 
it was one of these capsules that require you keep a pump on 
it all the time, else the vacuum would lose it and the liquid 
nitrogen would boil away. And, um, that little girl, she came 
and lived here for six months, I adopted her like my own 
child, I loved her, and I watched her slowly get sicker and 
sicker, and she finally passed away at the children's 
hospital. 


Interviewer: I believe ultimately she was found sharing a 
capsule that was originally intended for only one patient. 

Nelson: Yes. Her parents had exhausted their funds from just 
the medical efforts, and, um, she, er, her father appealed to 
us, and ... he was one of the sweetest, kindest people you'll 
ever meet. I could not say no to him. I said I didn't know 
how we'd do it, but we would. So we brought her to Los 
Angeles.  

We kept her in dry ice for about a year. I lived in Woodland 
Hills about that time, and I had a little Porsche, and I used 
to have to drive 300 pounds of ice, once a week, to Buena 
Park, which was a total of about 125 miles. At the end of 
about a year you couldn't believe what my car looked like 
from the dry ice seeping into the seats. But in any case--we 
didn't have a capsule for her, but what happened, a year 
after that [in 1973, on the East Coast] Pauline Mandell's 
son, Steven, was in a capsule, and she didn't have any money 
or any place to keep it, and I said, if you sign it over to 
us, I will do my very best. She had pleaded with us to take 
over, because she was at the throats of the Cryonics Society 
of New York, and I said fine. What I had in mind--and I 
didn't tell her--is that this capsule can hold 3 or 4 people. 

[In fact, this would leave little room for any liquid 
nitrogen.] 

I didn't, you know--perhaps I misled her. But on the other 
hand, perhaps I didn't, you know? I told her I would do my 
very best to keep that capsule, erumm, in operation, as long 
as I possibly could. What more could I promise her than that? 
And that was fine with her, because it was over with her in 
New York. And so we flew the capsule out here, put it down in 
the vault, opened the capsule up, put Genevieve in the 
capsule, sealed it back up, and after just two or three 
months, she [Pauline Mandell] changed her address and 
vanished. No more payments. So we went for several years 
after that, and then that capsule developed a leak.... 


Interviewer: I'm surprised no one noticed, because when you 
have a tank full of liquid nitrogen, and it vaporizes--as I 
understand it, it creates a loud hissing noise, and billowing 
clouds of white vapor--
 
Nelson: Er--not, no, it, it, it, if you've got a container of 
liquid nitrogen, and you're losing your vacuum, it'll just 
boil away a little faster, a little faster, and it's almost, 
you know, if you were putting it in a container at room 
temperature, yes, but remember, it's at 300 degrees and it's 
slowly going down [the level of the liquid]. So it could 
happen without anyone noticing, especially this particular 
capsule.... 

Fred [Chamberlain, then affiliated with CSC but now President 
of Alcor] would constantly ask to examine the facility, but 
he was the last guy I would want to examine the facility, 
because I had people doubled and tripled in capsules. I 
didn't want him to know about that. If he didn't know about 
it, he wasn't involved in it. Not that there was anything 
wrong with it. 


Interviewer: Would Fred have objected? 

Nelson: He probably--I don't think he--he may--he--I don't 
know. Had he objected, what could have happened? He would 
have made it common knowledge. Had it been common knowledge, 
Mrs. Mandell may have gotten real pissed at me, and started 
trouble. I was just trying to bridge a period of time to get 
from here to here. My idea was when I got _this_ thing into 
operation [he points to pictures of very large cryogenic 
dewars potentially able to store multiple patients] we'd put 
'em all in there and I was out of that situation where nobody 
knew there were three people in one capsule. I don't think 
that was such a terrible crime. If it is, then I'm guilty of 
it.... 

The most difficult of all, was actually telling people that 
the capsules themselves were just beyond being maintained, 
and unless someone else came along and took over, I couldn't 
go any further. So I wrote a letter, I think Mike Perry has a 
copy, to Mr. de la Portiere, he then came to California, and 
I was virtually, er, I don't know, I guess close to a nervous 
breakdown over the whole thing. And I was asked by the little 
girl's father to assist him in going down and opening up the 
capsule and removing the little girl. I said, I can't do that 
personally, but I will take the responsibility to pay for the 
expense, find people who can do it, open up the capsule, take 
them out, you know. So we did all that. At some point after 
that was over, the news media somehow, not surprisingly, got 
wind of it [in 1978], and went right to the facility, broke 
the lock, and the cemetery people called the police. But they 
had cameras there, you know. It was clean down there, wasn't 
anything--what would happen, periodically, water would seep 
into the vault, we could never figure out how and why. We had 
a pump and would pump it out, and that would be it. But they 
had opened up the vault and they had cameras and would zero 
in, maybe, on a fly on top of the vault, and say, "Oh, the 
stench!" But there was no stench whatsoever. 

[In fact, several witnesses stated that the stench of 
decomposition was overpowering. A judgment for damages was 
eventually brought against Bob Nelson on June 5th, 1981. He 
no longer has any involvement with cryonics.] 

------------------------------------------------------------

End of excerpts from Nelson interview. 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8147