X-Message-Number: 899 Date: 12 Jun 92 00:08:02 EDT From: STEVE BRIDGE <> Subject: ALCOR INDIANA NEWSLETTER (Part 2 of 2) TWO ANNIVERSARIES, ONE EVENING, ZERO COMPLAINTS April 22, 1992, Alcor held a banquet celebrating both its 20th year of existence and the 25th year of cryonics suspension for James Bedford, "The First Man Frozen." But anniversaries come every year -- what was so special about this one? The entire practice of cryonics is based on WAITING, keeping people frozen until future medical technology can revive them; long-term endurance is Alcor's SINA QUA NON. Twenty years, one fifth of a century, is a vintage sufficient to suggest real endurance. In honor of this milestone, I emptied my savings, put the bite on my friends, tightened my belt, and undertook a pilgrimage to California for that single celebratory night. My train journey was uncomfortable in the extreme. My experiences at journey's end more than compensated. Upon entering the Marriott hotel banquet room in Ontario, California, I was immediately impressed by the company surrounding me. Some of these people I knew better than others, some I liked better than others, but ALL were worthy of my respect. I found myself rubbing shoulders with eminent scientists, self-made millionaires, a popular author, and a host of dedicated, intelligent individuals. Frank Herbert's "fremen" characters in his DUNE novels had a saying about such situations: "Never eat with people you would not care to die with." If we substitute the cryonicist term "deanimate" for "die," my evening fit the adage literally. Even summarizing my conversations during the banquet would cause this article to far exceed its space allotment. To give you some idea, consider that at my table alone were Ralph Merkle (a well-known computer scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center) and Fred Chamberlain (who has worked at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. military's weapons disarmament program, as well as being a founder of Alcor), both inexhaustible raconteurs. The closest I managed to a witticism in this august crowd occurred when our dinner arrived late -- I commented that perhaps we were on the "Roy Walford Diet Plan." (For those without subscriptions to LONGEVITY magazine, Roy Walford is a gerontology researcher who discovered that low-calorie diets extended life span in animals.) After dinner we were treated to nine brief speeches, any of which could have filled an hour with ease. Gregory M. Fahy, Ph.D., cryobiologist, addressed the issue of "whether being in this room tonight is to any purpose" -- in other words, how feasible is cryonics as it's currently practiced? Dr. Fahy confessed that he was comfortable with the notion of cell and tissue repair on a molecular level. His primary worry was that freezing might damage cells and tissues beyond the point where any level of technology could deduce how they might be repaired. He addressed this problem with two sets of experiments. The first involved electron microscope observation of rabbit brain sections frozen under conditions generally approximating cryonic suspension. In this case, freezing resulted in well-defined ice crystals, leaving clean, unfrayed edges in torn areas. Rather than "scrambling," damage appeared to allow reassembly in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle. The second experimental set, completed shortly before the banquet, consisted of testing the memory of nematodes (roundworms) that had been frozen and revived. Under Dr. Fahy's direction, Alcor New York's Gerry Arthus had "trained" specimens of Caenorhabditis elegans, frozen them, and then demonstrated that they still responded to their original training (see the May 1992 issue of Alcor New York's newsletter). While test samples were very small and questions remained as to whether the "memory" examined was equivalent to that of higher organisms, results were clearly NOT negative. (In an ideal world, Dr. Fahy's climactic presentation might've capped off the evening instead of leading it. Of course, no one knew what sort of scientific rabbits he was going to pull out of his hat this time.) Next on the podium was Dr. Ralph Merkle, giving a shortened version of his standard nanotechnology speech. He too brought a pair of interesting novelties: an animated computer-video diagram showing a "bearing cuff" designed at molecular scale, and an amusingly reasonable paradigm for explaining the scientific nature of cryonics. "Cryonics is an EXTREMELY long-term experiment," Merkle announced. Cryonics qualifies as a true experiment because it possesses both a "control group" and an "experimental group." The experimental group contains individuals who are cryonically suspended upon their legal deaths, the control group contains everyone else who dies. So far, there were few results on the experimental group; nothing much had changed with them. "However, we do have some preliminary results on the CONTROL group," Merkle noted. "THEY don't appear to be doing very well." On the less technical side, Max More, philosopher and editor of EXTROPY magazine, dealt with the pitfalls of cryonics' eventual success. If current growth trends continue, within twenty-five years a significant portion of the U.S. population might be signed up for suspension. When cryonics becomes a major force, according to Mr. More, it will find serious opposition, perhaps among religious groups. In order to meet this challenge, he suggested such measures as developing special interest groups in favor of cryonics, lobbying for appropriate legislation, and spreading a "philosophical framework" that supports cryonics. Just before a break, Master of Ceremonies Paul Genteman (Alcor vice president) related an anecdote about Jerry Leaf (a cryonics pioneer now in suspension). In the "old days," Genteman had acted as a surgical assistant at a suspension training session. Once when Genteman's mind wandered, Jerry turned to him and said, "Pay attention, Paul. Someday you'll have to do this on ME." Saul Kent, President of the Life Extension Foundation, followed with an account of his experiences in the cryonics movement's earliest years. As secretary of the Cryonics Society of New York in the 1960's, he was part of an effort to move away from "blue-skying" toward something practical. To this end, he and CSNY president Curtis Henderson set out in October of 1966 on a cross-country tour. They were determined to get people involved in cryonics, investigate reports of activity, and make connections between individuals interested in the subject. Although their investigations uncovered numerous cases of exaggeration or fraud, they also found solid interest. They spoke with a group at the home of Robert Ettinger (author of THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY, the seminal work on cryonics) and convinced them to form the Cryonics Society of Michigan (now the Immortalist Society and Cryonics Institute). In Arizona they met with a businessman who was manufacturing cryogenic capsules, one of which the New Yorkers purchased. Finally, they talked to a group that soon became the Cryonics Society of California, which froze the first man a few months later. Fred Chamberlain, one of Alcor's founders, talked about the early days of the organization. Twenty years ago Alcor was a "five-week-old infant" composed of Fred Chamberlain, Linda Chamberlain, and Fred's seriously ill father. Alcor was formed as an emergency response system for Fred's father, because the other Southern California cryonics group at the time, Cryonics Society of California, had virtually no provisions for emergency suspensions. The Chamberlains soon acquired basic perfusion equipment, wrote a 100-page manual of suspension procedures, and put together some loose contracts to use funeral parlors as cryonics facilities. Alcor grew slowly, adding a few members, leasing industrial warehouse space, and purchasing a van (known as "Big Al") and an ambulance ("Little Al"). Still, during the years between 1972 and 1976, Alcor remained almost dormant. Linda Chamberlain took up the organization's history from there, describing what she called the "Dark Ages of Cryonics." Under the auspices of their for-profit venture, "Manrise Corporation," she and Fred developed an early perfusion pump that they hoped would be the basis of an entire line of such machines. Money and space for cryonics work was at a premium; initially they used a workshop crammed into their bedroom. Later they considered setting up shop in an unused missile silo in Northern California, but abandoned this idea from lack of money. Although they did eventually rent an industrial bay, most of their funds went into outfitting "Big Al" (the van) as a suspension lab. Finally, in July of 1976, Fred's father deanimated and was suspended as both Alcor's first patient and the first neurosuspension patient by any cryonics organization. Alcor's current president Carlos Mondragon spoke briefly of his initial involvement with the group. He came on the scene in 1982, when Alcor was still quite small. At that time the organization was housed in the same cramped industrial space as Cryovita Laboratories (Jerry Leaf's corporation) in Fullerton, California. The facility was so tight that getting from one side of a room to the other actually required turning sideways, not the most ideal arrangement for the medical operating-room functions of a suspension. Of course, Mondragon didn't see an Alcor suspension until 1985. Next up was Dr. Gregory Benford, physicist and well-known science fiction author. Benford admitted to knowing of Alcor's existence for only the last four years, ever since Robert Ettinger wrote him a letter in protest to some of his apparently anti-immortalist short stories. It was not long before Benford was convinced of the seriousness of cryonics and cryonicists. In particular he mentioned concern over certain "irrational elements" of society's reaction to death. Frequently outsiders to cryonics assume that cryonicists have an extraordinary fear of death, when in fact the cryonics approach is more one of HATRED toward death. Benford also spoke of his interest in a project to preserve vanishing segments of the environment by freezing different species' cell samples. He expressed frustration over choosing among all the species now being lost: "We're like an illiterate who wandered into the library of Alexandria and noticed it was on fire. How can we know the most important items to save?" Mike Darwin rounded out the night with a moving speech about James Bedford, the first man frozen (January 27, 1967). While he admitted never having met Bedford, Darwin was able to infer much about the man's adventurous and humane spirit. "We all live by myths," Darwin said. "In the case of Dr. Bedford, the myth may eventually reconstitute the man." As the clock neared midnight, the audience had an opportunity to question a panel of the evening's speakers. They discussed the fate of early Alcor members that had fallen by the wayside, the implications of Dr. Fahy's research, and the financial and social future of Alcor. (My notes on the session are as extensive as they are cryptic. Unfortunately, my two days of train travel were catching up to me at this point, and fatigue was clouding my thoughts. Attempting to extract further detail from the situation would be dangerous.) All in all, I was encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive attitudes of that night. Individuals from vastly different backgrounds came together for a few hours and celebrated their love of life with a rare openness. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I must confess feeling as though I were part of a dynamic, caring family. That April evening left me pleased and proud to be an Alcor member. * * * SCIENCE MATTERS; Achieving Scientific Literacy. By Robert M. Hazen and James Trefil. Doubleday, 1990. Review by Steve Bridge Let's face it -- few of us know enough science. Most of us took a few required classes in high school two decades or more ago. You probably had a class or two in college. Maybe you sneaked by with a semester of botany and a semester of psychology to fulfill your science requirement. So you don't know much science, yet you're being required to make decisions about the world based on what little you DO know. Global warming, artificial intelligence, genetic technology, space stations -- we are being asked to support various governmental policies which deal with these concepts. You may well work in a business directly affected by the consequences of these decisions. And we members of Alcor are asking you to consider cryonic suspension, based on projections of the next century's technology. But if you don't know RNA from JFK or quarks from kumquats, you are lost in the woods of the future, my friend. Americans today are some of the most scientifically illiterate people in the industrial world. 15% of us believe deeply enough in astrology to base some of our decisions on it; 40% think that evolution is just some atheist plot; more than half cannot explain what a molecule is or what DNA is for. Our schools and our media are short on science teachers and science knowledge; most children today don't even get as much knowledge as Don Herbert ("Mr. Wizard") gave me 30 years ago. But even the scientists are illiterate outside their own specialities. The authors of SCIENCE MATTERS are a geologist and a physicist, respectively; so they asked "a group of twenty-four physicists and geologists to explain to us the difference between DNA and RNA -- a basic piece of information in the life sciences. We found only three who could do so, and all three of those did research in areas where this knowledge was useful . . . . The fact of the matter is that the education of professional scientists is just as narrowly focused as the education of any other group of professionals, and scientists are just as likely to be ignorant of scientific matters as anyone else. You should keep this in mind the next time a Nobel laureate speaks EX CATHEDRA on issues outside his or her own field of specialization." (p. xiii) OK, so we are all shamefully ignorant of much that is going on around us. But we don't have time to head back to school for science classes. A simple, yet highly pleasurable solution is to read SCIENCE MATTERS. Hazen and Trefil have done a wonderful job summarizing today's basic scientific knowledge and putting it into a form any reasonably intelligent person can understand. They do so by proceeding in a logical fashion from a discussion of what science is (attempting to "uncover the basic, simple laws that produce . . . the regularities of the universe.") through basic physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, to ecology. Perhaps the most impressive element of the book is the way they tie all of this knowledge together to show how the seemingly disparate fields are nonetheless bound together by basic principles. For example, nuclear and particle physics help to explain both the workings of chemistry and astronomy. Astronomy and chemistry help to explain geology. Geology and chemistry are necessary for an understanding of evolution, biology, and ecology. The primary pattern the authors have used is to select an area of basic science, list one or two elementary tenets, and summarize science's understanding of the area. For instance, Chapter 3, "Electricity and Magnetism" begins with "Electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the same force." From there the discussion proceeds to Maxwell's laws, how an electromagnet works, and a description of the electromagnetic spectrum. Even this makes the book sound much more difficult than it really is. The writing is clear, the print is large, the examples are practical. And the book is only 294 pages long. As cryonicists, as parents, as citizens of the world, we need to understand how nature functions. We are a part of it, for better or for worse, and if we wish to go beyond the paltry limits nature has currently placed on us, we must understand what we are dealing with. If we wish for this human race even to survive another century, we must understand what we are doing to or for the world that gives us life. An intelligent and readable book like SCIENCE MATTERS is as good a start as I have ever found. * * * AMIX: "A-MIX"ED REVIEW by Richard Shock A few months ago, nearly anyone who'd ever contacted Eric Drexler's FORESIGHT INSTITUTE received an advertisement informing him or her that the American Information Exchange (AMIX) computer system had adopted a nanotechnology section. While not quite the Hypertext arrangement everyone might wish, AMIX did allow for a serious exchange of ideas. ["Hypertext" is a way of arranging information such that each major point of a document has a potential "footnote." These footnotes in turn might have footnotes for their major points, and so on. For example, if I were reading an article on Nanotechnology and wondered what the term "Assembler" meant, a hypothetical hypertext system could pop up an explanation on my command. If this explanation happened to contain the phrase "flagellar motor," again I might be able to request a definition.] Aside from momentary annoyance at another commercial (this one impinging on my valuable Compuserve time), I paid the announcement little attention. However, Alcor Indiana member Bob Schwarz got the same ad (via US Mail, costing HIM nothing) and was thoroughly intrigued. Since Bob's computer wasn't up to the task of handling AMIX, I agreed to investigate for him, under his financing. [This should give you an idea of the trust between Alcor Indiana members -- in effect, Bob was handing me a blank check!] AMIX is one of those systems that requires its own software on your machine, not unlike PRODIGY. Whereas any local Bulletin Board will give you access through communications programs such as Telix or Procomm, AMIX insists upon seizing total control of your computer for its own cryptic purposes. Perhaps this approach is the way of the future. I hope not. I've always been uncomfortable at the possibility of someone three thousand miles away invading my files or reformatting my hard drive. Granted, AMIX AND PRODIGY WILL NOT DO THIS. But less ethical organizations could. AMIX was a simple branching system of topics and subtopics. At the end of each branch was a specific document section such as "Nanotechnology." Users could purchase a document to read (typically for only $1.00), then leave comments about it. Authors' resumes were available online at no extra charge. (I ignored other functions such as consulting services and mail.) PROS -- A "Taxi Meter" in the lower right-hand corner of the screen kept constant score on what you spent on AMIX time and documents. I appreciated this, since losing track of expenses on commercial computer systems has always been a danger for my bank account. (Of course, the Taxi Meter does NOT say anything about long-distance charges.) -- AMIX's Nanotechnology section is full of familiar names. It's managed by Chris Peterson (Co-author of UNBOUNDING THE FUTURE and Eric Drexler's wife), and includes documents by Drexler, Ralph Merkle (Alcor member and computer scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center), and Marc Stiegler (author of the science fiction novella THE GENTLE SEDUCTION). CONS -- I felt AMIX was SLOW. (Techies will note that I tested AMIX on a 386-based machine with a 2400 baud modem.) Each time I selected an option, the software seemed to take forever to accomplish it. Presumably data was being downloaded; all I know is that the word "WORKING" flashed lethargically in the screen's upper right-hand corner. -- The Nanotechnology section was sparse. When I connected on May 5, it contained only 16 documents. Of the six introductions I browsed, three were from an issue of FORESIGHT UPDATE that I'd already seen. With luck, this will change. CONCLUSION AMIX is still early in its development. While I personally dislike its software, I also realize this arrangement may someday support the rapid hypertext-style data exchange that could send nanotechnology into high gear. Although the term "nanotechnology" may eventually be stretched into oblivion by the broadness of what it entails, its basic concepts will certainly contribute to eliminating disease, increasing life span, and resuscitating cryonics patients. The faster this technological explosion occurs, the better chance each of us has of seeing the future. Skeptic that I am, I'll still be checking into AMIX at least once a month. * * * A TERMINAL DIGRESSION Earlier in this issue, very brief mention was made of Roy Walford's calorie-reduction/life-extension research. Before going overboard about Dr. Walford's results, however, one might consider the wisdom of the Sufi "Father of All Humor," Mulla Nasrudin: Nasrudin had a donkey with a voracious appetite. The Mulla wondered whether by gradually decreasing his animal's food every day, it would not be possible to condition the beast to more reasonable eating habits. This experiment was continued for several weeks, but then, suddenly, the donkey toppled over and died. "What a pity," muttered Nasrudin. "He had just gotten accustomed to eating nothing at all." -- Paraphrased from JOEY ADAMS' ROUND-THE-WORLD JOKEBOOK" [This story SHOULD sound familiar -- it was old seven hundred years ago. The Sufi dervish "Mulla Nasrudin" ("Nazardin" in Afghanistan, "Nasir-Ud-Din" in Iran, "Nasreddin Hoca" in Turkey, "Goho" in Egypt, and "Abu Nawwas" in Syria) was reputedly the perpetrator or butt of almost every joke in Western and Middle-eastern culture. One who intends to live long could do worse than look to immortal humor.] * * * WHAT THE HECK IS "ALCOR INDIANA"? ALCOR INDIANA is an unincorporated group of ALCOR suspension members who have banded together to help ensure each other's eventual cryonic suspension. Informal monthly meetings are held the second Sunday of each month at 2:00 PM, and are open to anyone who calls ahead of time. Subscriptions to the semi-monthly ALCOR INDIANA NEWSLETTER are at present free of charge. Contributions are more than welcome. For information on ALCOR INDIANA meetings, newsletter subscriptions, ALCOR LIFE EXTENSION FOUNDATION, or cryonics in general, call Richard Shock (days: (317) 872-3070; evenings: (317) 769-4252) or Stephen W. Bridge ((317) 359-7260). ALCOR INDIANA COMMUNICATIONS BOARD, a local electronic bulletin board, can be accessed between the night hours of 7:00 PM through 9:00 AM, at (317) 870-5780. Mail to Richard Shock, including Newsletter submissions and comments, may be sent to 670 S. St. Rd. 421 N., Zionsville IN 46077. Mail to Steve Bridge may be sent to 1208 Charleston E. Dr., Indianapolis IN 46219 or e- mail to "". E-mail for Mr. Shock may be sent to Mr. Bridge, who will forward it. * * * SPECIAL THANKS TO: B&C WHOLESALE CRAFT SUPPLIES 5723 W. 85th St. Indianapolis, IN 46278 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=899