X-Message-Number: 13781
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 06:31:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Cryo Future

All right, a few serious thoughts in response to Dave Pizer's rather
gloomy prognosis--which I feel may not have been quite gloomy enough.

Pessimism: Some of us may feel less confident of cryonics today because we
have learned from some fairly sobering experiences. We know more about
damage, and we have lived through more cases where errors were made, help
arrived probably too late, people made foolish or self-destructive
decisions, or other factors diminished the patient's future chances. Note
that some of the people who feel less confident today helped to sustain
cryonics actively in the past. This is not a trivial matter. We have also
seen how organizations can be seriously affected if just one or two key
volunteers get tired of providing free labor. I am not just referring to
CryoCare. All cryonics organizations depend on volunteers, and the average
age of these volunteers is still rising, as naturally tends to happen in a
field which has only existed for about 30 years and attracted young people
initially.

Price: I find it hard to believe that this is a major factor compared with
all the others, since almost everyone pays via life insurance, and the
premium for a $50,000 policy is not THAT different from the premium for a
$150,000 policy. Also, the cost of whole-body preservation at CI is not
that different from the cost of neuropreservation elsewhere; and many
people do opt for neuro.

I believe the success of CI in recruiting new members is largely based on
the gung-ho optimism at that organization. Whether the optimism is
realistic remains controversial. Generally speaking, the history of
cryonics (if we care to read it) teaches that excessive optimism can
create short-term growth, but in the long term is no more desirable than
it would be, say, in an insurance company. Unfortunately, there is no way
to define "excessive" except in retrospect. The positivism of CI's web
page may turn out to be entirely justified; we have no way of knowing.

Leadership: This is a very personal issue, and I find Dave's comments a
bit unfair. Dave seems to forget the intransigence of past leadership at
Alcor. The self-electing board of nine directors, none of whom showed much
interest in very persistent complaints from activists who had been members
for many years, was a major cause of the decision to split and start
another organization (the last thing that any of us wanted to do). A
secondary cause was concern over possible misuse, or ability to misuse,
long-term patient funding. By comparison, I believe the situation is
greatly improved today. Alcor has dealt with the funding issue, and
personally I found the various fulltime personnel of Alcor very easy to
get along with during the past five years or so, even though I was active
in a competing organization during that time. If current leadership seems
worried about factors which were ignored or trivialized in the past, this
is not necessarily a bad thing. If current policies have resulted in some
members quitting, or being disqualified on the basis of inadequate or
unverifiable funding, this is not necessarily a bad thing either, despite
its negative impact on growth.

My major concern about the future of cryonics is that it won't be there
for me when I am statistically most likely to need it. Twenty years from
now, the death rate among cryonics organization memberships will be rising
at the same time as volunteers themselves are aging to the point where
they may not want to deal with a dozen cases (or more) per year. I
described this future problem in some detail, with statistical modeling,
in an article in Alcor's CRYONICS magazine. It is a potentially fatal
problem for any "full service" organization. It may not affect an
organization such as CI, because CI doesn't attempt remote standby, and
uses rudimentary (i.e. cheap and relatively non-labor-intensive) perfusion
and cooldown techniques.

Personally I feel I have a choice between treatment that is worthless, and
better treatment that is less likely to be available as I grow older. Just
my personal opinion, of course.

The easy answer, as I see it, is an influx of highly motivated, medically
qualified idealists who will respond eagerly to the challenge of
implementing new technology, in the lab and in the field. Unfortunately,
even if such people do magically appear, experience suggests that they may
tend to be unbalanced. (See Dr. Steve Harris's post on narcissistic
personality disorder, which I think appeared on CryoNet a few years ago.)
Why else would they sacrifice a potentially rewarding career in medicine,
and work for virtually no pay in cryonics, where they will be stigmatized
professionally for the rest of their lives?

I conclude that the only rational plan is to develop better proven
techniques of cryopreservation, which will enable animal studies, which
will ultimately remove the stigma from cryonics and make the field
commercially viable. Unfortunately this process is proving to be far
slower than I had hoped. I doubt I will benefit from it personally.

I believe the "golden era" of cryonics ended about the same time I
arrived, about ten years ago. This was well before the split in Alcor that
Dave feels was crucial. In fact the key turning point, as I read cryonics
history, occurred with the death of Jerry Leaf. At that time, Mike Darwin
wrote that the news of Leaf's death was like waking up and discovering
that the law of gravity had been abolished. In retrospect, this was a
fairly accurate analysis. In such a small field, the abrupt disappearance
of one powerful individual can have destabilizing repercussions for years
afterward; and I think that is exactly what happened.

--CP

PS. Regarding the number of cryonicists: Any commodity tends to be more
highly valued if it is scarce, and resources obviously are more plentiful
if they are not widely distributed. Suppose ONLY ONE person from the 20th
century were to remain in cryopreservation when techniques are developed
for resuscitation. The interest level, and implementation of care, would
be maximized. Of course, nanotechnologists believe it will be so cheap to
revive people, numbers won't be an issue. I find this hard to believe.

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