X-Message-Number: 18289
From: 
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 10:19:01 EST
Subject: Swayze, Freeman, Christensen

>Message #18288
>From: "Toby Christensen" 

>Hello everyone. It is my belief that cryonics presents an opportunity for 
disabled >people like myself to be helped via future medical technologies and 
that this is an >area that needs more focus.

Indeed--but it's a difficult practical and psychological problem. 

From my point of view, we are all almost equally deprived, relative to what 
we can become and experience. But still many will feel a greater boon for 
those obviously deprived relative to "normal" life.

We do probably have "handicapped" people represented somewhat more than 
proportionately in cryonics, and would have still more if they could afford 
it. (We're working on that.) I  know of at least two blind men, both Ph.D.s, 
with cryonics arrangements. Then there's James Swayze, whom most of you know 
through these pages.

At this point let me thank Dr. Tim Freeman for his recent and very generous 
donation to CI's James Swayze Fund. It is still well short of the goal, so I 
hope some of you will consider adding to it, and soon--I don't want to be 
alarmist, but James' health is even more precarious than previously. You can 
use a credit card via www.paypal.com, using our email address 

There are lots of special groups we would like to reach, but don't know how 
to do it effectively. Cancer patients, stroke victims, dying infants, hospice 
patients, blind and otherwise handicapped, several others. But we can't look 
like ambulance chasers, and I don't know of any practical approach to focus 
on any of these. Perhaps the best we can do is hope for trickle-down as the 
general awareness improves.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
www.cryonics.org

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