X-Message-Number: 1426 Date: 12 Dec 92 00:18:32 EST From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CRYONICS:splitting Alcor TO SPLIT UP ALCOR: CONSTITUTIONS AND TRUSTRecently several Alcor members have argued that storage services should be separated from suspension services, and that Alcor should not deal with storage of patients any more. I recently received a set of arguments for this idea from Saul Kent. There may be ther arguments than those he gives; however in several essential ways, I found his arguments lacking.To summarize, Saul believes that separating storage from other cryonics activities will increase its safety for the patients. The first reason he says this is true is that Alcor, which does the actual suspensions, will be much more the object of legal attack than an organization which does nothing but store patients. This attack may come from government or even independent groups who feel that cryonic suspension is somehow evil. It can also come from disgruntled relatives of the patient, who feel that Alcor has not done its best or perhaps has defrauded the patient. An organization involved purely in storage would (he suggests) keep its assets out of the United States, managed by agencies in a country which does not recognize the Rule against Perpetuities. Actual storage may even happen outside the US.My major difficulty with these arguments happens because they read the entire history of cryonics, so far as I know it, QUITE BACKWARD. The major purpose of a suspension organization IS the long term storage of patients. As patients accumulate, the suspension funds paying for this long term storage become by far the largest assets. In fact, up to now the only lawsuits from INDIVIDUALS cryonics societies have faced (and Alcor potentially faces) are those from disgruntled relatives who want the suspension funds BACK. If different organizations had dealt with storage and suspension, BOTH would have been attacked; and if these relatives act solely for the money involved, they would first go after the storage organization, where most of the money lies. The funds devoted to the suspension operation, unless augmented by punitive damages, would barely pay the cost of recovering them.Furthermore, separation of storage and suspension would not have helped the kind of problems Alcor faced with Dora Kent. At first Alcor's officers, following procedures they had followed repeatedly in the past, believed that everything was in good order. Dora would soon be encapsulated in a permanent location. And in fact, the initial contacts between Alcor and the Riverside Coroner were, if anything, actually friendly. If we had had two organizations rather than one, the Coroner would have tried to attack the STORAGE organization and threatened, as he did, to impound all patients, not just Dora Kent. Not even the case with Sacramento would have improved: the bureaucrats in Sacramento believed that cryonic suspension must be illegal because it is not listed on a California Death Certificate. A loss of this case would have meant that any STORAGE organization in California would then have to give up its patients to burial or cremation.Yes, I am aware that one advantage of separate organizations is that the storage organization need not be located at the same place, or even in the same country, as the suspension organization. But that doesn't really solve the problem, it merely places it somewhere else. Individuals have sued and been sued across state boundaries. As for governmental attack, just what makes anyone believe that a facility in country Y is less likely to incur attack than one in country X? This issue deserves more discussion than in this paragraph, and I shall return to it later.A second kind of danger suspension patients face is that their caretakers, themselves, decide to raid their suspension fund. Such raids may come both from very high motives or from low ones; once carried out for any reason, less money remains to support suspension. Currently the caretakers consist of the Board of Alcor, and some members claim that money from the Suspension Fund has been wrongly spent.Regardless of any mistakes or malfeance by members of the present Alcor Board, wrong uses for the Suspension Fund remain a problem. If anything, the best solution would be to somehow give longterm members some voice on the Board, including an ultimate ability to remove an entire Board and force election of another. Such power, of course, also requires that members received accurate reports about the activities of the Board, as soon as possible. The constitutional question of how exactly to make these arrangements will take much thought and discussion; I will not discuss it further not because it does not deserve more, but because it is basically irrelevant to the issue of splitting Alcor into two organizations.However, one essential confusion needs addressing. When I provide Alcor money for my suspension, I give them carte blanche to use it in any way they see fit to arrange my indefinite suspension. They may choose to buy their own LN2 machine, or move me to Antarctica. The rightness or wrongness of their decisions will depend, of course, on the circumstances they face when they make them. But a suspension fund should NOT be thought of purely as a sum of money to be put out in some secure investment whose returns provide other money for my support. The problem with that approach is that, especially now, it's quite easy to imagine circumstances in which a refusal to spend some part of the principal would be the height of folly. What if Alcor people learned of an imminent raid by government agents to sequester all the patients? If extra money must be spent to turn all patients into neuropreservation patients and move them elsewhere at short notice, it would be well spent.This issue, in fact, gets into the real problems we face in REALLY long term storage. I say REAL long term storage because, as much as many of us may HOPE that storage may only be 100 years, it would be wise of us to plan for storage times of several centuries. And that puts our problem directly into history.At one time Switzerland was famous not for its finances but for its mercenaries. At another, not really so long ago, Luxemburg had been conquered by Napoleon. History is full of flux and change. If we rely on one country or one law, in the long term THAT RELIANCE WILL PROVE WRONG. That is why the continued existence of an organization devoted to storage of suspension patients becomes so important. No one can forsee what financial and political decisions these caretakers must take 200 years into the future. To attempt to do that now in 1992, laying down inflexible conditions for our storage and the treatment of our money, will result one way or another in our destruction and the destruction of our money. This problem, more than any other, is the real reason why we have banded together into cryonics societies. Certainly Saul or others can go to Luxemburg and set up trusts which (so the paper on which they write them says) will "never" terminate. They might even give these trusts the entire control over not only their money but their body too. But think a moment what they have gotten with all that effort: they have gotten some paper with writing on it and a gold seal. In the end no amount of paper can really protect them, no matter how grandiloquently the writing on that paper has been worded, no matter how fervently the people signing on the other line promise to hold to it. The state and laws that support that paper will change with time, and those who signed it will disappear. What will protect them then? The best protection consists of the members of the cryonics society itself, who will want to see your suspension through to a successful revival because they too believe that someday they will be suspended and face the same problem. Here we come back again to the issue of trust. Saul feels that the Board of Alcor may not be trustworthy, and somehow that (for some unknown reasons) the Board of a storage society WILL be trustworthy. Perhaps it will be, for few short years, until its members TOO go into cryonic suspension. But that just isn't good enough. The only way Alcor, or any storage organization, can keep its Board trustworthy is to throw out anyone who looks as if they are not. That has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with splitting Alcor into different organizations and everything to do with Distribution: >INTERNET: Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1426