X-Message-Number: 17255 Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 03:50:27 -0400 From: <> Subject: Your front page story in the 8/12/2001 Sunday San Francisco Chronicle Hi David, Thanks for writing the article on cryonics which appeared on the front page of the Sunday, August 12 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. Although i think that it may not be so reasonable to gauge the health of the cryonics industry by the number of patients at Trans Time, i understand that naturally you'd like to include some local news in your piece. And by the way, the fact that Trans Time is still solvent and took care of the patients it had says something about the caution that cryonics organizations have shown over the last couple of decades to make sure that funds are available to keep their patients frozen. Did your editor choose the subtitle `Cryonics movement is feeling heat of discord, financial problems and shaky future'? I don't think that your article shows this, and if you provided a graph of the totals (total membership in cryonics organizations, total number of frozen people, total financial assets), i believe the trends would all show positive growth over time. I do think that no matter what editorial pressure you were under, you made an effort to be impartial. Thanks for that. I think your story showed some real integrity in the actors at ACS (Swank, Yount, etc) in the way they stepped up to the plate for pioneer Jerry White. [I also imagine that there's much more to the story than you had room to print.] Did Mike Darwin ask you not to mention him by name (in the spot about the facility being set up by `a former Alcor executive')? Perhaps some time we'll get a chance to hear what the interviewees felt about your piece. I like your paper's policy of putting the reporter's e-mail address (e.g., ) at the end of a story. Thanks again for writing, and i hope you have a chance to do another piece on the movement 5 or 10 years from now. (And i hope everybody will be pleasantly surprised by growth and development in the field.) dan Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17255