X-Message-Number: 20979 Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 20:11:19 -0800 (PST) From: Russell Jefferson <> Subject: article: Ted Williams, cryonics history, life extension, etc From the Providdence Journal, requires detailed registration (but no email verification), long and detailed... Selected excerpts below, and here is the url: http://www.projo.com/health/content/projo_20030126_ted26.41688.html .............. Iced: For $12,000, you can be with Ted Williams -- forever 01/26/2003 BY G. WAYNE MILLER Journal Staff Writer Ted Williams was feeling ill, and his difficult breathing concerned his caregivers. The 83-year-old baseball great had a history of heart disease, and out of an abundance of caution, an ambulance was called to his home in Hernando, Fla. It was Friday morning, July 5. The ambulance took Williams to Citrus Memorial Hospital, some five miles away. Williams was barely inside the door when his heart sputtered and stopped. The doctors could not get it beating again -- and at 8:49 a.m., the legendary Boston Red Sox star was pronounced legally dead. Time was of the essence now. .... "I sometimes use the analogy that if you took a cow and ground it up into hamburger that science someday will learn to turn the hamburger back into a cow," said Peter Mazur, a pioneering cryobiologist for many years at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a professor now at the University of Tennessee. "I think cryonics's credibility is about zero." Cryonicists do not dispute that they face uncertain odds, and Lemler and his company do not promise success. Indeed, Lemler says that the best possibility is to live until preservation techniques are perfected -- or, better yet, until medicine finds the Fountain of Youth and natural aging can be stopped or reversed. Cryonics then would be obsolete. "The objective is to stay vertical as long as you can -- stay alive as long as you can," Lemler said that day at Alcor. Nevertheless, Lemler imagines salvation for people already or soon to be frozen. With knowledge in the Internet Age increasing exponentially, Lemler maintains, why should it be impossible to think that scientists might even be able to revive, cure, and rejuvenate someone frozen under inferior circumstances like Ted Williams? ... "Each one of us carries within us a complex universe of knowledge, life experience, and human relationships," Freitas said. "Each individual is gifted with unique insights possessed by no one else. Almost all of this rich treasury of information is forever lost to mankind when we die." A research fellow at California's Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and a consultant to Zyvex, a Texas nanotechnology startup company, Freitas specializes in the emerging field of nanomedicine: the engineering of molecule-size machines to cure disease. While mainstream researchers investigate the more immediate potential of stem cells and gene therapy, Freitas envisions a day when tiny nanorobots will function as vigorous new blood cells or even repair DNA damaged in the normal course of aging, a process he has dubbed chromosome-replacement therapy. Such technology would constitute the Fountain of Youth. While nanomedicine is in its infancy, Freitas believes its wonders may be within reach of aging baby boomers. And so, his first advice is to stay healthy. "Try to do whatever you can that will stretch out your years," he said, "because you never know. If you can buy an extra year or two -- that extra year or two might be the year or two when the breakthroughs are made." Like Lemler, Freitas views cryonics not as the ideal approach, but rather a measure of last resort. "You kind of use cryonics as an insurance policy," he said. "If for some reason you don't make it -- you know, you just miss [the breakthroughs] by that much, just a few years -- it's good to have that in there. I would recommend signing up for Alcor as kind of a backup." The bill is $120,000 Mankind's yearning for immortality is ancient, and it is reflected in the core beliefs of many modern religions, including Christianity and Islam. But cold wasn't seriously contemplated as a bridge to a distant tomorrow until the 18th century. That's when the great English surgeon-scientist John Hunter froze animals and tried to revive them. His resurrection experiments all failed. "'Till this time, I had imagined that it might be possible to prolong life to any period by freezing a person in the frigid zone," Hunter wrote. "I thought that if a man would give up the last ten years of his life to this kind of alternate oblivion and action, it might be prolonged to a thousand years; and by getting himself thawed every hundred years, he might learn what had happened during his frozen condition. Like other schemers, I thought I should make my fortune by it; but this experiment undeceived me." Scientists after Hunter experimented with using cold to preserve life, but the movement now called cryonics was not born until 1964, when Robert C.W. Ettinger, a junior-college physics teacher and science-fiction writer from Michigan, published a book called The Prospect of Immortality. Cryonics clubs soon opened around the country, and a college professor named James Bedford became the first person to be frozen, after he died of cancer in January 1967, one month after Walt Disney passed away. The coincidence may explain the persistent myth that Disney is on ice (in fact, he lies in a cemetery in Glendale, Calif.). This was the era of the TV show Star Trek, and of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece. In real life, astronauts were headed to the moon and computers were reaching the masses. Who knew what further marvels the future held? Who did not want to be around to see them? What a bummer to be foiled by mortality! But the early days of cryonics were less than marvelous. Bedford's luck held and he remained frozen (he was eventually transferred to Alcor) -- but many of the early cryonauts, as they were called, fell victim to incompetence, legal challenge, and bankruptcy. Refrigeration failed, tanks leaked, and an untold number of cryonauts ended up as lukewarm ooze. Not even a visionary believed that ooze could be reassembled into a person. Fred and Linda Chamberlain, a married couple who were prominent in the California cryonics movement, founded Alcor in 1972, naming the new company after a star near the Big Dipper -- a star that approached an acronym for what they referred to as Allopathic Cryogenic Rescue. Alcor launched its first cryonaut, Fred's father, in 1976. Alcor's second client was frozen in 1981 and its third in 1985, when the organization claimed 50 living members. Alcor credits its founders' belief in sound fiscal management with succeeding in a business that proved treacherous for most competitors. In the United States today, only the Cryonics Institute of Clinton Township, Mich., still offers preservation services and long-term freezing. In all, about 100 people nationwide are preserved -- all but five or so in Scottsdale and Clinton Township. ... Although he is sometimes mere inches away, the younger Hixon does not visit Dad per se. "It's not that sort of thing," he said. "He's in a 'hospital' being taken care of and at this point there's not much point in putting an emotional investment into it. I've done what I can." Hixon himself hopes that scientific advances will spare him from the very technology he has helped advance. "It's a desperate thing to do," he said, "because we're not at all sure it's going to work." Still, if science does not afford him longevity in this, his first cycle, Hixon will be frozen. Either way, he hopes to bring his father back. In what form is quite another matter. Even assuming that nanotechnology or some other wonder could undo the damage of Hixon Sr.'s crude preservation -- could somehow recover the contents of his brain before his heart stopped beating in 1981 -- could any of his personality possibly have survived a 1972 heart attack that damaged his brain? Hixon is mildly optimistic. "The question is: was the memory gone, or was there an access problem?" he said. "There may be something there." If there is, he could see Dad as he remembers him again. And if not, Hixon Sr. would emerge from "Bigfoot 5" as nothing but a blank brain -- but from its cells, a new being might be cloned. This is where things could get really weird. ..... An amnesia clone of yourself Lemler has always conducted his life from a different score. He dropped out of high school in New Rochelle, N.Y., to sing in nightclubs as one-half of a Simon and Garfunkel-like duo. He eventually earned his high school diploma, then graduated from college and medical school, after which he was a private psychiatrist for almost 20 years in Alabama. Moving to Tennessee, he continued practicing psychiatry and was chief of staff at a mental hospital. Along the way, he said, he earned his pilot's license, assisted at an exorcism, and cowrote Journey to Noah's Ark, based on one of his many trips abroad. The book reports on finding traces of an ancient boat, perhaps the biblical character's, on a mountaintop in Turkey. Lemler knew little about cryonics until one day in February 2000, when he visited a bookstore in Knoxville and happened on a copy of K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, a seminal work on nanotechnology. In it, Drexler, who holds a doctoral degree from MIT, recommends cryonics as the bridge to the future for older people who would die before aging is conquered. This belief is held by respectable others: as the human genome yields its secrets and stem-cell, nanotechnological, and related treatments are developed, growing numbers of scientists predict a redefinition of what it means to be old. Lemler, 53, found Drexler's vision an epiphany. "I have always been an adventurer," Lemler said, "and to me this is the grandest adventure of all." Lemler and his wife joined Alcor in June 2000, and early the next year, he became Alcor's medical director. In September 2001, the medical director was elected president and CEO. .... Along with traveling to other galaxies, Lemler desires simple pleasures in his second life cycle. "Gosh I'd love to see my great-great-grandchildren!" he said. "It's a peculiarity with me, but tennis was my father's sport, it was my sport, and it became my son's sport. I would just love to go out and hit backhands with my great-great-grandson." The case of Ted Williams, meanwhile, was resolved just before Christmas, when daughter Bobby-Jo Ferrell accepted a $215,000 cash settlement to drop her legal action. For the indefinite future, baseball's last .400 hitter will remain upside-down in a "Bigfoot" Dewar. Whether he will ever step to the plate at Fenway Park again is the sort of question a cryonicist likes to ponder. Find Web resources on cryonics and its proponents, as well as previous installments in The Fountain of Youth series at: http://projo.com/extra/2003/medical_pioneers/ __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. 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