X-Message-Number: 7463
Date: 09 Jan 97 01:15:25 EST
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS: Cryopatients autopsied and cryopreserved

Steve Bridge writes that he knows of only one Alcor patient not frozen who had
cryopreservation arrangements in place at the time of death.  This statement is
misleading at best, and to be more frank, is simply not the case. I give the
breakdown as follows (these are the ones I can recall during my tenure at
Alcor):

Jeannie Curran was an elderly Florida woman and long-time cryonicist who was

fully signed up and funded.  Due to clear and unequivocal organic brain syndrome
she became UNARGUABLY demented (I saw her first hand!) and a court in Florida
was persuaded to overturn her cryonics arrangements.  Alcor actually went to
court to fight this and lost. This was a lady who who was telling me she had

mannequins coming in through her windows and that Jesus was telling her that the
cryonics people were trying to kill her.  Momney was not the sole issue here;
she would have been funded by charitable giving even though her trust was
overturned by the court.  However, the court ruled that her cryopreservation
arrangements per se were invalid because she was "still competent to make major
life decisions."

Rob Michaels died and decomposed and was not cryopreserved per his instructions
(which were to proceed regardless of how badly he had decomposed).

A young male Alcor member (fully signed up and funded)  comitted suicide with a
shotgun circa 1989 and was not cryopreserved.

Althea Flynt (Larry Flynt's wife) had core paperwork (i.e., enough to get her
frozen) completed and money was CERTAINLY not a problem.  She did not have her
CSA done, but did have her AGA and Relative's Affadavit from Larry. She was not
cryopreserrved because she was autopsied with subsequent refusal of the ME to
release her brain. PERIOD.

PS: changed his mind after one standby.  

There was also a young man with osteosarcoma who was fully signed up, but whose
family overrode his decision in the last days of his illness. I do not recall
his name. His paperwork is probably still in the Alcor files.   Interestingly,
this young man had requested information from Alcor 3 years before his death,

and he finished sign-up about 6 months before he died (when he still believed he
had a reasonable chance of beating the illness).  He died in an experimental
treatment program in Tuscon, AZ using calcium channel blockers to inhibit the
pump-out of chemotherapeutic agents by resistant cancer cells.  (Guess what; it
inhibits pump-out in healthy marrow cells too, and even better than in cancer
cells; he died during treatment and was autopsied.)

Include Tim Leary if you like, or not, as a CC failure case ( I do).  But
clearly his decision to not be cryopreserved was materially influenced by those
around him and his own deteriorating health.  In a society where
cryopreservation is recognized as being a reasonable medical option this would
almost certainly (in my opinion, anyway) not have happened.

Steve Bridge's statement is thus not accurate.

I recently contacted Jim Yount of ACS and got numbers from him on ACS cases
where there has been an autopsy or long post mortem delay due to being an ME's
case.  There are 18 patients who are now or have been in ACS's care.  Of these
patients the brakdown is as follows:

Luna Wilson homicide, (nonmember) autopsied, brain not sectioned, long delay.
LW: iatrogenic death, (nonmember) autopsied, brain not sectioned, long delay.
JM: accident; possible negligent homicide (nonmember) brain sectioned,
autopsied, long delay.
NT: iatrogenic death, (nonmember) autopsied, brain not sectioned, long delay.

The above patient's represent ACS's willingness to take unfavorable post mortem
cases, not any deficit on ACS's part regarding handling of members.

Of ACS members who were fully signed up the following were ME's cases:

JF: young woman who experienced sudden death following a seizure, prior history

of cancer and poor health.  ME's case with prompt release (delay of only an hour
or two).
CC: sudden death from undiagnosed CNS problem, no autopsy but delay of over 6
hours till released.

MB: suicide: limited autopsy (brain not removed) with long delay (greater than 6
hours).
SW: medical autopsy, short delay, brain not sectioned.
Jerry White was technically an ME's case, and we had to wait for a couple of
hours with him on bypass in his home before we could leave for Southern
California.  This was because the local ME requires _all_ AIDS deaths to have
release numbers before being removed from the county.  It took them a couple of

hours to get a release #.  In this case the delay was probably not very material
because the patient was at 2 degrees C on bypass.

Jim pointed out during our call that ACS patient Violet Jones was also an ME's

case and that it was a "close call" that she was not autopsied.  Due to an error
on the part of the ME's office she was released to ACS from the hospital and
cryopreserved.  When the error was subsequently discovered an attempt was made
to take custody of her and perform a post mortem examination.  This was
unsuccessful.

I would also note that Alcor's Jerry Leaf came perilously close to being
autopsied as well.

One ACS patient (as is the case with one Alcor patient) was later removed from
cryopreservation (Sam Berkowitz) due to funding/legal problems.

CryoCare also has one nonmember (post mortem) patient who was autopsied (brain
not sectioned) and experienced a long delay.

I think what is relevant here is a concept used in medicine during clinical
trials which is called "intent to treat."  What this means is if you start
treatment or enroll a patient in a clinical trial that patient COUNTS in your
statistics even if:

1) They take one dose of the medicine and say "God, this is terrible stuff, I'm
out of here!"
2) They die before they get their first treatment.
3) They become disqualified from the trial due to complications such as mental
incompetence.


The "intent to treat criterion" makes good sense because no clinician just wants
to know how many people a drug cured or helped who took the treatment.  If you
give 1000 people a drug and 500 of them have hideous side-effects that cause
them to stop after the first dose, this is critically important to know!

In cryonics you can define intent to treat as any situation wherein someone who
has legal and financial arrangements sufficiently in-place that they could
reasonably be expected to be cryopreserved.  Some cases like Althea Flynt's are

a bit gray, but there was clearly a maximum effort made to get her free from the
ME.  Alan Isaacman (Larry's attorney) and I were up all night, and in fact at
one point I was in Larry and Althea's home and the ME's people were about to
release Althea to us (she was still on the bathroom floor at that point and I
was allowed to look at her) but chaged their mind at the last minute on
instructions from higher up.

Jeannie Curran definitely counts in my mind, as does Mr. Michaels and the young
man who comitted suicide.

The take home message in all of this is that you run a significant risk of
autopsy, delay, and/or not getting cryopreserved.  In fact, your risk is
somewhere between 10 and 30% depending upon how you wish to define intent to
treat criteria.

Unlike Steve Bridge, I don't think the 1990's are going to be any kinder than
the 1980's or 1970's were.

So, (meaning no offense)  when are people like Thomas Donaldson, Steve Bridge
and others in the cryonics community going to come out from under the ether and
see what is really going on?

Mike Darwin


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