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Date: Fri, 20 Jan 89 09:27 EST
From: "(Roy R. Beatty) Keane, Inc. [BEATTYR] 302-774-0335 B-10217"
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Subject: CRYONICS - NYT Article
To: ho4cad!kqb%
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Status: R
The New York Times of Friday, January 20, 1989 (that's today) has an
article on page A8 on cryonics:
[picture]
Caption: Willie Brown, Speaker of the California Assembly, cutting a
birthday cake at the 20th anniversary celebration of the
American Cryonics Society last week in San Francisco. Looking
on were H. Jackson Zinn, president of the society, and Avi
Ben-Abraham, chairman.
San Francisco Journal
Chilling Answer to Life After Death
By KATHERINE BISHOP
Special to the New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 19 -- Everyone knows that you can't take it with you.
But if members of the American Cryonics Society Inc. have their way, they
are going to come back and get it.
Last week the organization, which is dedicated to the proposition that
death is an imposition on life and ought to be eliminated, celebrated its
20th anniversary here with a $100-a-plate dinner attended by 65 people.
The Speaker of the State Assembly, Willie Brown, showed up at the Fairmont
Hotel to cut the cake, and Angela Alioto, a newly elected member of the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors, made an appearance, testifying to the
fact that no group is too eccentric to be ignored here.
* * *
Since the term was coined in 1965, cryonics has taken some small steps
from the realm of science fiction and has even come up with its own inde-
pendent religion known as Venturism. Cryonics (derived from the Greek
word for cold) refers to the practice of freezing the body of a person
after death to preserve it for possible revival in some distant future
after a cure has been found for whatever killed the poor soul. Adherents
make arrangements to have their bodies placed at extremely low temperatures
using liquid nitrogen in stainless steel capsules.
As it turns out, members are planning to come back to a body vastly
better than the one they left in. "Usually the body is shot and they
don't want to come back in that kind of shape," said H. Jackson Zinn, a
San Francisco lawyer who is the organization's president.
Many members believe science will be able to restore their body and
build a better better one as long as the basic "information" of the
person remains properly stored. Thus one popular choice is the "neuro
only" option, in which only the head is preserved.
* * *
Such practices are not without problems. Last year, six people from
Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Riverside, a nonprofit cryonics storage
center independent of the Cryonics Society [sic], were handcuffed and
taken away for questioning on suspicion of homicide after they removed
and froze the head of one client after her heart stopped beating but
without having a doctor present at Alcor to pronounce her legally dead.
While criminal charges have not been filed, a grand jury investigation
is continuing and Alcor has sued the State Department of Health Services,
which believes that cryonics does not qualify as a "scientific" use of
human remains and refuses to issue required forms. The lawsuit's outcome
will affect the work of all existing storage centers, said Alcor's
Manager, Michael Federowicz, who goes by the name Mike Darwin.
Should cryonics prove to work, it might lead to a host of social issues,
including what is to be done about overpopulation if people continue to be
born while others refuse to stay dead. The organization believes that
space will be colonized, opening up vast new adventures in living for
millions of humans, new or reconstituted.
"To think that we must be confined to this planet is, come on, too
parochial," said Jerry White, a computer programmer who is a founder of
the Cryonics Society.
Another problem is where to store all the stainless steel capsules
holding the "suspension members," as the frozen bodies are called. Thus
far, there are fewer than a half dozen storage centers in the country,
with two of them in this state.
Mr. White suggested that there are a number of existing structures that
could be adapted for such use, including an abandoned Titan missile site
the group has toured in Northern California.
"I was envisioning these big silos just full of liquid niotrogen, the
liquid nitrogen generator busy 24 hours a day just spewing stuff in there,"
he said. "and you could see thousands of patients in there, see them
bobbing around."
* * *
Cryonics also involves a host of moral and philosophical problems that
have not been addressed by society. The most immediate one that might be
faced by the survivors of the suspended, who might not agree with their
loved ones' choice of body preservation and might bring legal challenges
to them.
"If I'm frozen, will my wife say, 'Gee, I should have gotten that
insurance money,'" mused Irving Rand, a New York City insurance salesman.
Mr. Rand is president of Cryonics Coordinators of America, which helps
people obtain insurance to cover the cost of freezing and storage.
A more weighty issue to ponder grows out of the fact that if future
technology makes it possible to duplicate a person from those parts that
have been frozen, it follows that a frozen person could not only be
restored, but could also have complete copies of himself as sort of a
human floppy disk.
As Mr. Darwin states the issue, "If you duplicate and store yourself
as a backup copy, is that copy you?"
And there is also the question of what the state of the world will
have become over time. As Mr. Rand said, "Who knows what the world is
going to be like 100 years from now; if it's even worth coming back."
But Mr. Zinn is more upbeat about the prospects. "One hundred years
from now, anything that's fun, I don't want to miss it."
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