X-Message-Number: 6825
Date: 31 Aug 96 03:16:27 EDT
From: Carlos Mondragon <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS  re harris

I was very sorry that Dave Cosenza mentioned the case of the Florida
man who had been signed up with Alcor and is now consigned to oblivion.
Somehow, I'd managed not to think about him for some time. (For those
who don't know, I was Alcor's CEO at the time, I had never "lost"
anybody until then, and this episode was quite painfull). Knowing that
four years can make holes in one's memory, I asked others for their
recollections and checked my correspondence with Steve Harris.  I wish
Harris had taken the time to do the same.  In his reply to Dave, Harris 
makes an utterly useless ad hominem attact peppered with cute insults,
then follows with a non-denial denial of the story Dave told, and he  
obfuscates it in an avalanch of mostly irrelevant verbiage.

[a little of the garbage deleted]

>   Be that as it may, those non-space cadets who share planet
>Earth with Yours Truly may be interested in the facts of what
>happened in the incident referred to above, since it does bring
>up what has potential to be a very difficult situation in
>cryonics. To wit: what if one does have to choose between paying
>for a suspension *now* (yours), VERSUS using the same money to
>escape an acutely deadly medical situation, perhaps betting on
>being able to recoup finances later if you survive?  And always
>remembering that a later suspension, other things being equal,
>will be a better suspension, as technology improves?

Better suspension technology is only a vaguely realistic possibility
if the potential added lifespan can be measured in years.  A few  
months aren't going to make any difference (unless perhaps Harris
thinks that the NIH has been secretly working on suspended animation
and that they may release their findings at any time). 

>   Of course there is no single right answer in such situations,
>for the decision matrix depends on the odds of all kinds of
>events, plus all kinds of personal value judgments about the
>desirability of such events.  It's even more difficult in the
>case of what you do if you are acutely ill and can't think
>straight, or are comatose.  In this case you might want to take
>legal steps to leave the decision in the hands of someone you
>trust.  In that case, your *decision,* according to your VALUES,
>would be to leave the *deciding* to someone else you have chosen
>in advance.

All this just to state the obvious & to reiterate what Dave had said
about this being a question of values.

>   Which is what the man with AIDS in Florida had done, as it
>turns out, having taken the trust fund that was supposed to be
>left to Alcor for his freezing, and signed it over (in relative
>secrecy) instead to his mother.  All this in strict violation of
>his agreement with Alcor, and with Alcor policy.
>
>   Thus it was that when it came to the point that this man was
>dying in the hospital of a quite treatable (but untreated)
>bacterial infection, Alcor did not know that it would not likely
>be paid if he died and they froze him, and so they sent a
>cryonics team across the country to stand by.  Since the patient
>was incoherent, a representative of Alcor asked me, as a then-
>member of Alcor, to talk (long distance) to the man's doctors and
>then to his mother.  

NO, this didn't happen. It was Saul Kent that asked Harris to get
involved. Kent was NOT a "representative of Alcor" and at the time
everyone knew that.

>I did this. After which I told the mother
>the truth, which was that the Florida doctors (no connection to
>Alcor) were doing nothing for her son, and that if she wanted her
>son to leave the hospital alive she would have to make changes in
>his care.  Which she then did, allowing him to survive the
>episode.  

NO, the patient was recovering *before* Harris managed to piss off
the doctor and re-alienate the mother.

>It is not my fault that when the Alcor representatives
>arrived at the hospital after a cross-country flight, the mother
>concluded that they were vultures in cahoots with the do-nothing
>doctors.  I, as an Alcor member at the time, didn't say or imply
>this.  

A reaction of this kind is common at standby situations. We have
encountered it many times and we have learned to deal with it with
sensitivity.  Alcor's Tanya Jones had managed to soften the mother's
attitude considerably-- until the lady got that call from Harris.

>Had the mother years ago had any way to read Cosenza's
>1996 post about me being "at the time in disagreement with Alcor
>people over the value of getting this man frozen versus getting
>him medical care," she would perhaps have been more justified as
>to what she did.  In reality, nothing close to such disagreement
>came until later, and that in hindsight.  At the time, Alcor was
>merely embarrassed at being thrown out of the hospital room (and
>vaguely angry at me about it), and still later even more embarra-
>ssed that they had almost frozen a man with no funding (something
>they've done by mistake several times).  

Alcor made that mistake exactly *once*. Disagreement in "hindsight" 
means the morning after. We were not "merely embarrased", we were 
outraged by Harris' intervention and much more than "vaguely angry" 
at him.

>If the truth were told,
>at the time the AIDS patient under discussion was in the hospit-
>al, Alcor did not know enough to push for better medical care of
>this man, or worse.  They were simply out of the loop.

The truth is that at the time, I would have had no reason to trust
Harris' judgment on an AIDS patient's treatment more than the
specialists that had been treating him, since Harris' experience
mainly consisted of feeding lab rats and, when he could work up the 
ambition, part-time jobs at "doc-in-the-box" establishments.

[deleted]

>   Certain parties at Alcor, just as Cosenza does, blamed *me*
>for the fact that the AIDS man had dropped his Alcor membership
>(nevermind the fact that there is no good evidence he ever had
>any reasonable chance to be, and stay, frozen).  And they blamed
>me the more later when he didn't get frozen.  Deja vu-- it's the
>Leary case all over again.  The problem is that as a physician--
>cryonics physician or not--  it's my ethical job to give people
>choices, and Alcor sometimes has not liked the choices these
>people have made.  That kind of thing more than three years ago
>was part of what ultimately let me know that I, and those who ran
>Alcor, had come to a philosophical parting of the ways.  

[deleted]

The deja vu is real.  Silly us, we seem to think that its possible
to do cryonics without necessily being assholes to everyone we
encounter. As for the duty of physicians, no argument there, it
seems that Dave said exactly what Harris says on this and even gave
Harris credit for being a "competent" doctor. I could blow more of
my three day weekend waxing poetic about the philosophical diference
that Dave & Harris allude to, but I'd rather summarize: Some of us
take cryonics, but not ourselves, seriously. The others do the
opposite.

Carlos Mondragon


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