X-Message-Number: 9373
From: Ralph Merkle <>
Subject: Re: Growth in Cryonics
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 10:36:12 PST

Charles Platt pointed out in a recent post that:

>Standby/transport teams burn out. It's an emotionally gruelling, time
>consuming job, and no one receives proper payment. In the past, Alcor has
>lost team members. At BioPreservation, it's no secret that team members
>would rather do research than cryonics at this time. 

This is, of course, a serious problem.  Charles draws the conclusion that
the fundamental cause of this problem is that cryonics is grossly underpriced.

I think a more significant factor is very low volume.  Alcor is
doing on the order of 2 suspensions per year (I don't have more
accurate data offhand) which clearly means a suspension team will only
spend a fraction of its time actually doing suspensions.  This creates
a number of problems, including a requirement that members of the
suspension team have a "day job," inefficient use of equipment that is
essential but which is used only once or twice a year, and others.  A
ten or twenty fold increase in suspensions would imply 20 to 40 suspensions
a year, which would keep a suspension team fully occupied, permit hiring of
full time personnel, allow much more efficient usage of equipment, eliminate
the need for personnel to cope with pressures from their day jobs (which,
in the case of medical personnel, might include pressure from their day
job to reduce involvement with cryonics) and others.

Charles pointed out other factors which would not be directly improved
by increasing volume.  Standby is expensive (in more ways than just
financial) and this expense has, to a significant degree, been born
by cryonics organizations without full compensation.  Shifting a greater
percentage of this burden to the patient seems reasonable as one relatively
near term approach for dealing with this issue.  Longer term, we can
reasonably hope for improvements in the social and legal infrastructure.
The Oregon Death with Dignity act indicates a greater willingness to
leave "end of life" decisions to the patient.  Actually establishing
case law or changing existing law in ways beneficial to cryonics will
require legal and financial resources -- and growth would provide us
with greater strength in both areas.

I think most other issues follow a similar pattern: the more people involved,
the greater the resources that can be applied to any particular problem.
Consider that a 30% annual growth rate sustained over 20 years implies
total growth by a factor of 190 (over one hundred times as large).  A
10% growth rate would give us total growth over a twenty year period
of 6 or 7.  Moving from a 10% annual growth (a rather optimistic assessment
given the present data, but certainly modest in comparison with prior
experience) back to something approximating our 30% annual growth would
have a *major* impact on the total resources available to cryonics.

Cheers!
  Ralph

PS:  The "Birthday Paradox" implies that the probability that two or more
people in a group of 23 share the same birthday is approximately 50%.
See http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/newfaq/q95.html
With 20 to 40 suspensions each year, simultaneous suspensions (occuring on
the same day) would be happening every year or two.  While this would be
a problem, it's the kind of problem I'd like to be dealing with.

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