X-Message-Number: 9603
Date: Sat, 2 May 1998 23:07:50 -0400
From: Michael Darwin <>
Subject: Sledge hammers and the Internet

For many years IS/CI and Bob Ettinger have published a newsletter
(initially _The Outlook_, later retitled The Immortalist). One of the
things Bob did (with assistance from his editors--I don't want to deprive
Elaine or Mae of any credit due them) was to "summarize" other people's
(i.e., Bob's opponents in a debate) arguments and then rebut them while
rarely, if ever, allowing the person to respond for his or her self. 
Further, Bob's editing of his critics' writings were often highly selective
and distorted. Quite a number of people have experienced this kind of
"clarification and improvement of their writing" (to quote Mae Ettinger)
from Bob over the years. Many have complained to Mae and Bob Ettinger about
it.  Who knows, some of them may even speak out about it here if they dare.
(See my concluding remarks.) 

This kind of selective control over what people can read who have access 
to information about a subject from only one source is very powerful. And,
de facto, many people still have information about cryonics only from their
cryonics society: most cryonics society members are not on-line.

One of the nice things about the Internet is that it makes this kind of
spin control far more difficult to achieve.  Recently, a piece was posted
here about the purported failure of a company's product which resulted in
the loss of two human cryopatients. This is a nontrivial statement to make.
 I waited some time to see if others who had knowledge of the real
conditions under which that failure ocurred would post.  None did.  Because
of my deep admiration for Bob Schuster (the man who built MVE into the
quality company it became) and his courage in working with Curtis Henderson
to build the first _reliable_ superinsulated cryopatient storage dewars
(including the dewar Ann DeBlasio and the other woman who was lost were
stored in) I felt strongly motivated to correct this situation.

I would also candidly add that I have worked with superinsulated vesssels
for cryopatient storage most of my career in cryonics, and have learned to
respect and admire their strengths (as well as to be mindful of their
weaknesses).  This is another way of acknowledging that I have prejudice in
favor of this kind of equipment and its utility to very small cryonics
operations,  where patients have sometimes had to be moved one step ahead
of people with guns and bad intentions and in other situations for reasons
as impersonal and uncontrollable as the "liability insurance crisis" which
occurrred about 15 years ago and hit California particularly hard.  This
situation of course (at least being small and not owning storage facilities
outright) applied to virtually all of the start-up cryonics organizations
and the courageous lone individual or two who competently cared for a
cryopreserved family member on their own (such as the Bedfords).

I wrote the following as part of my response to John Bull's post about the
DeBlasio dewar failure:

>PG-145s and LS-160's which are used to haul and deliver liquid are abused
>unbelievably by the delivery people and I can speak with confidence that
no
>fiberglass dewar would take that kind of punishment any better.

Bob Ettinger chose to respond to this with the following:

>>Mike also says he thinks the MVE type dewars will take just as rough
handling
>>as the fiberglass. Care to make a little wager, using sledge hammers? 

This is not what I said or even remotely implied.  As far as I know I have
never seen delivery people use sledge hammers on superinsulated LN2
delivery dewars.  I do know that relatively thick necktubes (the usual
failure point in such delivery dewars) were at one time made out of
expoxy-resin fiberglass and that they failed from the same kind of abuses
that cause the welds and neck tubes of stainless steel superinsulated
dewars to fail: i.e., being subjected to multi-g acceleration and
deceleration with hundreds of pounds of liquid inside many times a day,
hundreds of days a year, being dropped, being allowed to bang around
unsecured in the delivery trucks, routinely being  "rolled" to move them
about the dock or shop floor at a 25-30 degree angle while fully loaded,
being beat on with wrenches and lots of other eqally abusive maneuvers. 
The miracle is that they perform as well as they do.

While the abuse described above is bad, it is _not_ a sledge hammer which
is quite a potent and selective delivery of force.  Bob's setting up this
maneuver for a "wager" to prove the superiority of CI's dewars over
superinsulation is a straw man.  I could just as easily have set up a wager
against a CI cryostat involving a propane torch or a simulated
building-burn to point out a weakness in all-fiberglass construction
cryostats; or I could have pointed out that CI patients are stored in a
building that (last I observed) was unsprinklered and with no firewalls
around the patient cryostats.  

However, the intention of my post was not to attack Bob or CI.  In fact, I
think the CI units are very impressive pieces of engineering and that the
learning curve undergone in fabricating them may prove very valuable as CI
customer load increases and surface to volume considerations make low
vacuum-perlite insulation highly cost-effective.

Bob goes on to say:

>> Mike Darwin (#9574) said that CI cryostats have vacuum pumps attached
and
>>require "frequent rehardening." No, not frequent:  the outgassing
diminishes
>>steadily over time, and frequent pumping is needed only initially. In any
>>case, the pumps are cheap and there is never any urgency about pumping. 

This raises a question I've had for a long time and repeatedly asked: how
often does each of the CI cryostats require hardening of the vacuum and how
long are the pump down periods?

Also, last time I checked, the kind of roughing pumps used by CI (which I
observed when I was there) were not cheap, being in the vicinity of $1,500
to $2,000 each. I also noted that each cryostat had a little permanently
built on shelf (as part of the fiberglass resin outershell) to accomodate
the pump.  This doesn't necessarily mean anything terrible about CI's
dewars.  It just means that one kind of inconvenience is being traded off
for another.  I might also add that newer single stage high vacuum pumps
allow you to do the same thing if you want to use superinsulated dewars
without temporarily removing the patients when the getters become saturated
after 10 to 30 years or more and bake-out and re-vac the dewar. Instead, 
you can hook up a pump and re-harden the vacuum every six months or so, or
less often if you want to suffer slightly higher boil off rates.  

I know this is possible because we did it for years with the superinsulated
dewar built by Galiso that James Bedford was welded into until we got tired
of the hassle and the floorspace-eat of his horizontal dewar and moved
Bedford into a Bigfoot dewar.  

The point here is that we are to some extent comparing apples and oranges
and I don't think any reasonable person would have construed my remarks to
be an attack on CI's storage technology.

Finally Bob says:

>Incidentally, many years ago Mike assured the world that fiberglass could
not
>be used for cryostats. He had tried it. As always, we wanted to check it
out
>ourselves, and we found that, while polyester fiberglass would not stand
up to
>liquid nitrogen, the right kind of epoxy fiberglass stands up just fine.

I was wrong about this assertion, and have stated so many times.  But with
Bob, one mea culpa is never enough.

Now, however, I note that Saul Kent, I, and others have been
"excommunicated" from cryonics by Bob and that I am now "merely a
cryobiologist" apparently because I do not share Bob's degree of optimism
about the success of contemporary cryopreservation procedures.  If that
means no more mea culpas for sins long ago atoned for, I'll happily accept
this new status.  In fact, _and this is in all seriousness,_ I would
greatly appreciate a one or two sentence letter stating that "Mike Darwin
is no longer a cryonicist." signed by Bob Ettinger. My reason for this is
that  I would like to join the Society for Cryobiology and can think of no
more definitive proof that I am no longer a cryonicist than a signed
statement from "the universally acknowledged Father of cryonics, Bob
Ettinger."  If Bob will accomodate me on this I'll put a stamped,
self-addressed envelope with a boilerplate statement enclosed in the mail
to Bob immediately.

After 30 years as a cryonicist I think this is an entirely reasonable
request.

And no, this not a joke. 

Mike Darwin

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