X-Message-Number: 20942
From: "aschwin de wolf" <>
Subject: Comeback would top them all
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 12:29:16 -0500

http://www.sunspot.net/news/sns-othernews-williams-lat,0,2003125.story?coll=
bal-features-specials
From the Los Angeles Times

Comeback would top them all
By J.R. Moehringer
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 22, 2003

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- It stands 10 feet tall and gives off a loud, gasping
hiss from its nozzles and gauges. It looks like a giant thermos, but sounds
like a cappuccino maker.

And it's now the resting place of perhaps the most talented hitter in
baseball history.

But not the final resting place, not according to officials at Alcor Life
Extension Foundation. If their predictions about cloning and cryonics prove
true, Ted Williams, who retired from baseball nearly 43 summers ago, will
one day make a jaw-dropping comeback.

Just before he died last July, the 84-year-old Hall of Famer apparently
signed a piece of paper authorizing Alcor to ship his corpse here to be
frozen - or cryonically "suspended" - then stored upside down in this
stainless-steel tank full of liquid nitrogen until cures are found for the
heart and brain ailments that ended his life.

Williams signed the paper privately, in the presence of his grown son and a
daughter. But a daughter from a previous marriage made the paper public,
insisting that her father's real wish was to be cremated and sprinkled off
the Florida Keys.

A nasty fight ensued. Hard words were exchanged, strange accusations aired -
including one of DNA-harvesting for future profits. The eldest daughter even
filed suit in Citrus County, Fla., trying to retrieve her father and
transfer him from ice to fire.

Finally, last month, the sad custody battle ended. The siblings announced a
few days before Christmas that they had reached a deal. The eldest daughter
would let her father stay at Alcor in exchange for a sum of money and a
batch of autographed bats.

None of the siblings or their lawyers will comment publicly on the deal. But
son John Henry Williams insists that his father's final wishes have been
honored.

"Anyone who really knew my father, or who was really close to my father,
knew that he made his own decisions his entire life," John Henry says. "He
was very stubborn, always had his own opinion, and no one could make him do
anything he didn't want to do - for instance, like wearing a tie."

John Henry said his father put great faith in the future.

"He was very into science and believed in new technology and human
advancement and was a pioneer. Even though things seemed impossible at
times, he always knew there was always a chance to catch a fish - only if
you had your fly in the water."

Asked if he believes his father is coming back, the son heaves a sigh.

"I believe," he says. "I believe. I believe that one day my dad will be
back."

Days after the deal was struck among the Williams children, there was no
sign of anything different here at Alcor. Like every other day at the
foundation - a palm-festooned warehouse behind Scottsdale Airport - a
feeling of ongoing suspense, of perpetual stasis, hung in the air.

Williams - who hit .406 in 1941, a feat still ranked among the greatest in
sports - is one of 55 people to have chosen the frozen limbo of Alcor over
the cold finality of the grave, says Dr. Jerry Lemler, president and CEO of
Alcor. Nearly 100 people worldwide are said to have been frozen by a handful
of organizations, Lemler says, and another 1,000 are pending.

But Alcor is the leader, the center and the Cooperstown of the burgeoning
cryonics movement.

Founded in 1972, Alcor claims more members than any other cryonics
organization and counts among them James Bedford, said to be the first man
ever frozen back in 1967.

Williams' stainless-steel tank, or Dewar, stands alongside Bedford's and the
rest - opaque, vacuum-sealed, undistinguished. Lemler says he can't point
out exactly which Dewar holds Williams because confidentiality agreements
prevent him from even confirming that Williams is on-site.

When pressed, however, Lemler fixes his gaze on one tank and raises his
eyebrows.

"You should be able to figure it out," he says.

Many people view death as something to be avoided. Alcor members take that
instinctive aversion a step further. To cheat death, they seal it up,
flash-freeze it, forestall its attendant decay. Without decay, they believe,
human bodies may someday be like well-preserved engines, capable of taking a
jump-start from some unforeseen spark.

Many of Alcor's members - whom the foundation terms "patients" after they
die - are less private than Williams. They let themselves be photographed
and give permission for their pictures to be displayed in the lobby after
their deaths.

Beneath each picture, a gold plate bears the patient's name and the dates of
his or her "first life cycle." Each patient's face, meanwhile, bears a look
of anticipatory triumph. Behind the shy smile, a single thought seems to
lurk:

I'll be back.

Some pay as much as $120,000 to join Alcor, which is a nonprofit and
tax-exempt foundation, and the money is seen as more than just down payment
on resurrection. It's an investment in a deeply held belief, gaining
considerable momentum these days, that humanity will inevitably vanquish its
archfoe, the aging process.

"I truly believe," Lemler says, "that the first generation of people whose
only certainty in life will be taxes, who will not have to face death, at
least not by disease or old age, are crawling, if not walking, the planet."

He stops.

"I just don't think I will live long enough to see that day."

So the 53-year-old Lemler expects to endure the discomfort of death, the
inconvenience of it all, and enter Alcor's "patient bay." He makes a point
each day, therefore, to walk down the hall from his office and visit the
room in which he'll spend that lonely interlude between lives.

"To energize the juices," he explains. "I'm going to be one of those
pictures you saw when you came in here. I'm going to be one of those people
in the tanks, in the Dewars, and I'll want someone out here speaking for me
when I can't speak for myself."

A board-certified psychiatrist with a thick beard and thick glasses, Lemler
says he's opted to preserve only his head. Most Alcor members choose this
mode of suspension, he says, which takes less room and costs less money -
$50,000, compared with the $120,000 for full-body suspension.

The hope, Lemler says, is that once-dead heads - or, more precisely,
brains -can be retrofitted onto new healthy bodies, possibly clones of the
originals.

Alcor's newest arrival was a head-only suspension. In fact, Lemler says,
gesturing toward a steel tank smaller than the one containing Williams, the
man arrived only days ago.

Lemler steps over to the tank and lifts the lid. A foamy cascade of fog
curls over the side, like steam from a pot of soup. As the fog dissipates, a
red wrinkled head becomes hazily visible.

The man, who lived in Beverly Hills, fell and broke his hip not long ago,
Lemler says. He healed, briefly, then died in a convalescent home. Hours
later Alcor's team of paramedics were at his bedside, chemically preparing
him for embalmed hibernation.

Cryonic suspension begins with the infusion of 14 chemicals designed to slow
death's metabolic processes. Paramedics pump the heart to circulate the
blood and distribute the chemicals, a procedure that looks like CPR, though
all precautions are taken to make sure the patient isn't resuscitated.

"That would be horrific," Lemler says.

Speed is key in cryonics, Lemler says, which is why Alcor recently signed a
contract with a network of paramedics nationwide. (The foundation already
employs a staff of seven surgeons throughout the U.S. who are on call 24
hours a day.) The faster a person is pumped with chemicals and packed in
ice, the better off he'll be when defrosted.

"But we can't do anything to hasten a person's death," Lemler says. "No
matter how much we want to."

Deep-freezing people in the middle of the desert, Lemler concedes, makes for
some unintended irony. But, he adds, freezing is a slight misnomer. Although
Alcor uses liquid nitrogen to keep patients at 320 degrees below zero,
bodies aren't so much frozen as turned to glass.

"We don't give hydrogen and oxygen molecules time to combine," he says. "If
they can't combine, you can't make water, and without water, you can't make
ice."

Ice, he says, would destroy cells and tear internal organs.

Alcor stores patients upside down in case of leaks in the liquid nitrogen.
The feet or neck would thaw first, the brain last. The brain must be
preserved at all costs, Lemler says, because the brain is the seat of the
self.

"While a strand of hair certainly contains DNA, and a copy of that person
could be made, it still would not be that same person," he says. "Our
contention is that the essence of the self is contained within the thoughts,
feelings, hopes, wishes, fantasies and so forth, contained within the human
brain."

Critics of Alcor say the foundation takes solid scientific principles and
spins them into false hope.

"It's highly unlikely anybody's ever coming back," says Lee M. Silver, a
professor at Princeton University's department of molecular biology and the
author of "Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform
the American Family."

Yes, Silver acknowledges, scientists have been successfully freezing and
thawing human embryos for 11 years. But the process took decades to discover
and refine, and all embryos frozen before that discovery and refinement are
worthless.

"They weren't frozen right," he says. "Maybe there is going to be some way
in the future to preserve the brain. Unfortunately, [Alcor technicians]
aren't going to have done it right."

Lemler prepares potential members for the possibility that cryonics won't
work, along with other uncertainties. He tells them they may come back
different. Perhaps as a dimwitted clone. Perhaps as a pale specter, with no
memory of a past life. He describes the worst-case scenarios, and the best -
that they will return as the person who now greets them in the mirror each
morning.

"The most logical conclusion," he says, "is probably going to be somewhere
between those two extremes."

Besides the large payment upon death, Alcor charges $400 in annual dues.
Members can change their minds and back out any time before they die, and
only forfeit the $25 handling fee.

Every new member is given a box to fill with photos or videos, diaries or
letters, anything to jog the memory "on the other end." The boxes are stored
a mile below ground in a Kansas salt mine. Some members ask for extra boxes
and stuff them with belongings, as if packing for a prolonged move.

Richard Clair, for instance, former writer for "The Carol Burnett Show,"
crammed 19 boxes with memorabilia, including tapes of shows he wrote. He
also left his Emmy with Alcor. It sits in the lobby, waiting for him to walk
up and reaccept it.

News of Williams' arrival set off a surge of interest, to which Alcor is
still adjusting. Last year the foundation got 5,000 hits a day on its Web
site; this year the number reached 600,000.

Membership has jumped too. It stands at 611, a 10% increase from January
last year.

To prepare for the eventual onslaught of new arrivals, Lemler says, Alcor's
board of directors recently approved plans to expand the patient bay.

Loved ones may occasionally visit the patient bay for a few private moments.
Some leave cards and flowers.

Fans, however, are not allowed. Those who want to see Williams must wait for
the comeback. They might take heart in the knowledge that coming back was a
specialty of "The Kid."

"He was always coming back," John Updike wrote in a famous 1965 tribute.

"Back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a
bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly
a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back,
and always looked like himself."
Copyright   2003, The Los Angeles Times

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