Don’t Ask, But Do Tell

By Mike Darwin

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity, and the brute by instinct. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

One of the things I find fascinating about so many people in cryonics is their seeming total inability to ask a direct question – or any question – of the person(s) who can answer it. One of the reasons I dislike the Cold Filter Cryonics Chat forum is the sheer stupidity of it. There are thousands upon thousands of words of more (rather than less) idle speculation about all manner of practical questions about cryonics, and yet, apparently no one ever thinks to simply ask the person or persons who knows, or might know, the answer to the questions that are under discussion.

Some weeks ago, Mathew Sullivan wrote privately to inform me that he wanted me to delete his address from my contacts list, and to never communicate with him again. Certainly, I obliged. So, in his case he has made it pretty clear that he has no interest in any answers to the questions he publicly asks about me, or my intentions (and for the record, he didn’t ask me privately, either): fair enough.

However, that still leaves everyone else who wonders (among other things),” does Mike Darwin want to:

* Turn cryonics into a secret society?

* Turn cryonics into a cult (define cult)?

* Wage war on nation states?

* Abolish capitalism?”

There is now this information-giving instrument called Chronosphere, in fact, you’re reading it. You can ask questions here, and if they are reasonable, they have a high likelihood of being answered.

What’s more, there are, conservatively so I’m told, more than a million words written by me over a period of 36 years (or more) available on the Internet. Much of it is easily and directly retrievable: old Cryonet posts, back issues of Cryonics magazine… And by simply asking, a large cache of other material can be accessed. Long before blogs were invented, a cryonicist named Brian Shock said to me, “I see why you never bothered to keep a journal – you did so in Cryonics magazine and on the Internet.” I’m certain that in all those words there’s a fair number of mistakes, and certainly many things I wish I’d said differently – with more tact and with less aggressiveness. Nevertheless, methinks it is mostly very much on point, and that there is precious little idle or uninformed speculation. But what I personally think isn’t at issue here: those words exist and, for good or ill, they stand as a record of my thoughts, and often my actions, over nearly 40 years of involvement in cryonics.

It’s a very strange situation to find people writing books about me and accusing me of murder, and all manner of foul deeds, when they have never even tried to contact me, and have carefully cherry picked a truly microscopic fraction of my public writing. But that is how it is. In his Notes From The Underground, Dostoevsky wrote: “Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.”

Perhaps my fault has been in being indecent, or being incapable of keeping such thoughts stored away? In either event, what I have written over a lifetime is, I think, by any measure surprisingly candid and unguarded.  While my personal psychobiology is probably the major reason for this candor, another was my experience when I first became involved in cryonics.

I got interested in cryonics when I was 13 years old. By the time I was 14 I had real doubts and concerns about the veracity of what I was being told about various cryonics operations. I heard terrible rumors about the people then in positions of authority in cryonics. My response was to write countless letters asking questions, mow lawns to make money to pay for long distance phone calls, and finally, to GO AND SEE FOR MYSELF. I’ve attached a record of two of those “journeys made in search of the truth” when I was 15-17 years old – posted on Cold Filter, no less (and to no good result, as far as I can tell).

When these things happened I was a child (and if you doubt it, just look at the picture in the press clipping here), and I lived in a time when long distance phone calls were an exotic thing that cost a fortune. Even though I made money to pay my long distance bills, that didn’t stop my father from beating the crap out of me when a $40 bill came in the mail, one winter’s day. He was simply outraged that anyone, let alone his own son, would spend that kind of money (in 1968!) on phone calls. After that, I used the pay phone at Teeter’s drug store on the corner, and fed quarters into it as the calls went along.

We now live in an age of bundled long distance and Skype – I can chat, and see the person I’m chatting with in London, or Moscow, or Jakarta – for nothing more than the cost of the DSL hookup. I can mail people for free – no arduous pecking with one finger at the typewriter, buying the stamp, putting it in the mail… And so can you! Communication has never been easier!

And if you don’t like the answers you get, or more correctly, if you don’t trust them – then it has never been easier to GO AND SEE FOR YOURSELF.

So, I just don’t get it. And I find it impossible to have respect for people who treat cryonics in this way. When I was still a child I already realized that cryonics was important to my survival. In fact, I realized that it was absolutely essential to my survival, and to my temporal well being and happiness. Very soon afterwards, I realized that I loved cryonics – loved it as a parent loves a child, and as a child loves a parent. Cryonics gives hope, sanctuary, and the prospect of an indefinitely long life of inquiry, growth and joy; and it demands in return respect, hard work, and genuine care and concern for its well being and its survival.

So, I’ll be perilously frank, yet again. When I look at the countless bytes and the countless hours (over many years ) of time spent by people on the Internet nattering away about mostly imaginary problems in cryonics (the real ones are much, much worse), I have to work really hard not to feel disgust. Yes, they have the perfect right to spend their time, talents and money in this way (although I am disheartened to see that they are not often held accountable for veracity of their statements, their predictions, or their speculations). But the waste is heartbreaking.

This may seem weirdly tangential, but I strongly suspect that most of the people who engage in this behavior have no savings, and don’t save money. I say this because the expenditure of so many small increments of thought and labor, over such a sustained period of time, is the intellectual and moral equivalent of being a spendthrift. There is, inherent in such behavior, a lack of appreciation for the fantastic (and compounded) value of putting a little effort towards a project, over a long period of time, to a good end. So, I would say to such people (as I have said before, privately), print out your diaries, or gather them into one ‘virtual spot’ and read them. Read everything you have ever written about cryonics, if you can – or at least everything you can retrieve. Diaries are always embarrassing, because they show us how little we really knew about the world we inhabited when we wrote them (and thus imply how little we almost certainly know about the world we inhabit now), and especially because they tell us what truly terrible prophets we are. No elegant words will do here: we suck at predicting our futures, let alone anyone else’s. So please, before you read my life’s diary, take a few hours and read your own. I promise you that the exercise will be well worth your while.

Meanwhile, I am reposting my original missive to Cold Filter, here. The photo links long ago expired, and I have made minor grammar and punctuation corrections, although probably not nearly enough. The URL for the original post is included, in case there are any questions. This is the story of one of my many journeys of discovery in cryonics. If you set foot to path, you can have many of your own – if you have the courage for them.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON BOB NELSON: A Cold Filter Dialogue between Mike Darwin & Ken Bly

Response to Cryoken (corrected)

June 19 2007 at 7:35 AM

Original text is at: http://www.network54.com/Forum/291677/message/1182252950/Response+to+Cryoken+%28corrected%29

KEN WRITES: Mike Darwin has in the past, accused Bob Nelson of undercutting the prices of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY, as wells as bad-mouthing the sister organization, in order to lure away their patients. These accusations have severely damaged Bob Nelson’s reputation, and they are not true.

MD’S RESPONSE: I have stated what I reasonably believed then, and reasonably believe now, to be facts based on personal experience. In many cases these experiences were the same ones other people had at the time, and where I know this to be the case, I will give their names and the approximate dates. A few of these people are still living and compos mente, unfortunately, most are not.

Before I proceed further, it is important that I communicate both a time-line and what will be the first of a great deal of context. First, the time-line: I was born in April of 1955 and am currently 52-years-of-age. This is of significance because it means that on 12 January, 1967 when James H. Bedford was cryopreserved, I was not yet 13-years-old. I became aware of cryonics sometime in January 1968 when I was presenting my Science Fair project entitled, “Suspended Animation in Plants and Animals,” at the Regional Indianapolis, IN Science Fair, held at Butler University Field House. In response to my disbelief that humans were being “frozen for future revival,” I was handed a copy of this article, from either the Indianapolis News or the Indianapolis Star (at that time, and for sometime afterwards, I did not understand the importance of noting the source and date of clippings or articles):

This article provided no viable contact information, and it was not until a few weeks or months later that my father brought me another article on cryonics which had appeared in Men’s True Life magazine. This article mentioned Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation in Phoenix, AZ and its President, E. Francis (Ed) Hope. Using directory assistance, I was able to get the address of Cryo-Care, and I wrote a letter to Mr. Hope asking for information. Mr. Hope wrote me back with the contact information for four cryonics organizations: the Cryonics Society of California (CSC), the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY), the Cryonics Society of Michigan (CSM), and the Life Extension Society (LES). I wrote to all four organizations and received a response from three: CSNY, CSM, and LES. I received a large package of information from CSNY, a tri-fold (single page) brochure from CSM, and a few back-issues of FREEZE-WAIT-REANIMATE, the LES newsletter from LES. In addition to the package of material from CSNY, there was a personal letter from CSNY Secretary Sail Kent. Subsequently, I subscribed to CSNY’s monthly magazine, CRYONICS REPORTS, CSM’s monthly newsletter THE OUTLOOK, and LES’ FREEZE-WAIT-REANIMATE (which shortly thereafter ceased publication).

I rapidly became deeply involved in cryonics, facilitated in no small measure by a personal correspondence between Saul Kent and I. Saul almost immediately put me in touch with a student at Estancia High School in Costa Mesa, CA, Greg Fahy. Greg had founded the Cryonics Youth Association (CYA) and he provided me with back issues of the CYA newsletter, CRYONICS NEWS. Greg and I also began a fairly intense correspondence at this time. From Greg, I obtained information on how to subscribe to CSC’s newsletter, CRYONICS REVIEW. The CSC newsletter could only be had by joining CSC as an associate member, which cost $25/yr, a very large sum in those days. I mowed laws for spending money and it took quite a few lawns to come up with the $25.00 to join CSC. I sent in my money to CSC around the end of July in 1968 and never got a response (or my money back) from CSC. However, Greg Fahy was kind enough to provide me with copies of CRYONICS REVIEW, since he had access to extra copies via his friend Bob Nelson.

During 1969-1970 I began correspondence and phone contact with cryonics activists across the US, and with the Soviet cryobiologist Vladimir Negovski (correspondence only). Long distance phone calls were extremely costly at that time, and perhaps even more to the point, were considered an extravagance reserved for emergencies, or at least substantive business matters. Nevertheless, I soon learned that the only way to get a really broad bandwidth of information was to talk with people on the phone, and as a consequence, I began working at odd jobs and mowing more lawns to get money to pay for long distance phone calls. This was a source of genuine conflict with my parents, who considered such phone calls wasteful and financially irresponsible. So bad was the friction from this that I sometimes had to use payphones, which were even more costly, and required endless amounts of change.

Additional important context is that my parents were middle class people, arguably working class people, whose values and financial means were hardly cosmopolitan. My father was an Indianapolis police officer, and my mother supervised data entry (key punch operations) at Dow Chemical-Pittman Moore’s operations in Indianapolis. We lived with my maternal grandfather in his house, and while we were certainly not poor, luxuries consisted mostly of more and better quality of the basics in life. Dining out was rare, and our first television was purchased in the run-up to the Cuban missile crisis in 1961. My parents were (and are) profoundly conservative and deeply religious people whose morality and world-view was shaped by the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. While obviously in many ways very different, I was also at the same time in many ways a product of my home life and upbringing. I was not sophisticated in the ways of the world, and I was not well equipped to separate truth from falsehood in a complex and novel discipline such as cryonics, and neither were my parents.

These phone calls were invaluable because they allowed me to talk at length with Curtis Henderson (President of CSNY and Cryo-Span) and others who had some technical knowledge of cryonics, which was essential, because I had decided to create an emergency response, cryoprotective perfusion, and temporary dry ice storage facility in Indianapolis. I thus had many practical and technical questions which could not be addressed well by mail. During the winter of 1970 I began construction of a dry ice storage box, and began purchasing the equipment, chemicals, and other supplies required to carry out cryoprotective perfusion. By 1970, at the age of 15, I had (although I didn’t know it at the time) the most sophisticated cryonics rescue and perfusion facilities anywhere in the world.

By late 1970 I had acquired enough Ringer’s solution and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) to prepare over 50 liters of cryoprotective perfusate (20% DMSO). The 12 boxes in the top photograph below (with the “Cutter” label on them) each contain 6 liters of lactated Ringer’s solution, and the Fischer Scientific boxes (with “F” on the label) each contained 1.5 liters of DMSO. In 1970, 50 liters of cryoprotective perfusate was considered an extravagant amount. The balance of 22 liters of Ringer’s was to be used for blood washout prior to cryoprotective perfusion. Also visible on the metal cart at the right of the picture is a coil-type stainless steel heat exchanger that I had had custom made by an engineer at Eli Lilly & Company, who also did free-lance work:

By working at the Indianapolis Convention and Exposition Center I had made enough money to purchase the Cryo-Span Amtec model 209 industrial roller pump, and had paid a local glass blower (who also worked for Eli Lilly) to reduplicate the CSNY glass bubble trap and arterial pressure monitor:

The quality of the photos above is very poor; they are Polaroid’s from 1970. The original CSNY bubble trap can be better seen in the image below:

The Cryo-Span Amtec 209 roller pump (for perfusion) is in the foreground of the picture below. It is painted green – the pump head is metallic silver (to the left of the motor & controller assembly):

I had also constructed a dry ice box for freezing and temporary storage of cryopatients by the end of 1970, and I am pictured with this box (in the shed in back of my home in the summer of 1971) shortly after it was stained and the interior foam covered with painted plywood (see below):

Also, sometime in 1971 I had purchased the Cryo-Span Westinghouse Iron Heart (forerunner to the Michigan Instruments Thumper CPR machine) for $400. This photo shows it sitting atop the bureau in my bedroom on Lincoln Street, in Indianapolis:

By 1971 the CYA had renamed itself the Student Cryonics Association (Greg Fahy had gone onto college and felt the word “student” was both more dignified and descriptive). An SCA group had formed in Indianapolis, and in June of 1971 the SCAI newsletter documented the progress made in cryonics readiness in Indianapolis to that time (below).

It was during this time (1969 – 1970) that I began to hear statements attributed to Bob Nelson of CSC that CSNY was not storing its patients properly, that CSNY Officers Saul Kent and Curtis Henderson were over-charging CSNY patients, and that CSC offered superior care at a much lower cost. I initially heard these statements from Lucile Doty, who was then President of the Cryonics Society if Illinois. Soon thereafter, I heard the same statements, again attributed to Bob Nelson, from Loren Fitzgerald in San Diego, CA and Jack Nixon in Akron, OH – both “Cryonics Coordinators” at that time. I became very concerned that maybe I had joined the “wrong” cryonics society, and during a my Freshman (High School) 1970 Christmas break vacation I went with my girlfriend and fellow cryonics activist at the time (Ella Vinci) to visit with Lucille Doty in Chicago, IL. It was while visiting with Lucille that I finally managed to reach Bob Nelson by phone and talk with him personally about these issues. This was not easy to do because Nelson could be reached only via the CSC answering service. He would then (infrequently as I later learned) return the call. In my experience (I sent more than a dozen letters) Nelson never answered written mail. I had tried calling Nelson from my home in Indianapolis and leaving my name and number, but had never gotten a call back. This time, with Lucille Doty making the call, the call was returned the next day.

A photo of me with Lucille Doty in her Chicago apartment in January of 1970:

I asked Nelson about CSNY and he told me (this from notes made at the time) that their (CSNY’s) operation was “very substandard” and that “they are not storing the bodies properly. Henderson charges the family a fortune for liquid nitrogen, but he only keeps the capsules about 1/3rd full. That’s like medical malpractice because any cryobiologist will tell you that you have to keep tissue specimens completely covered in liquid nitrogen. I’ve explained this to Nick DeBlasio, and put him touch with our scientists at CSC, and I think he is going to move his wife (Ann) out of the Cryo-Span facility in the near future…CSNY is operating illegally and they do not have a secure underground facility which is immune to radiation in the event of nuclear attack, such as the Cryonic Interment facility will be here in Southern California…While he is far too much of gentleman to say so, Bob Ettinger’s, actions speak louder than words, and Bob always refers patients for suspension to CSC, not CSNY. I think the fact that the father of the movement refers patients to us should be all you need to know…It is widely known that Curtis Henderson has a serious drinking problem and that may be one reason that the storage at Cryo-Span is not what it should be…We charge less than a quarter of what Cryo-Span and CSNY charge a year for storage. We can do that because we have a lot more patients and because liquid nitrogen is cheaper here in California. In fact, sometimes I get liquid nitrogen for free because we get it by “bulk delivery” in a large tank-truck and I know the driver. If he has have LN2 still in the bulk tank at the end of his delivery route, then he will often just empty out the tank and we don’t have to pay for the extra nitrogen.”

I confronted Curtis Henderson with these charges via telephone, and even though it has been almost 40 years ago, his response is still clear in my mind (sic):

“What do you want me to tell you? I could spend hours arguing against Bob Nelson’s lies, but it wouldn’t do a bit of good. If you really want to know what is going on out here (i.e., CSNY & Cryo-Span) then you need to come out here and see for yourself. And, the same is true for CSC and Cryonic Interment. That’s the only way. You have to go, and you have to see for yourself, and you have to make up your own mind, because otherwise it’s just a bunch of charges and counter charges. Even when you get into a court of law where there are supposedly some standards of evidence, it is very difficult to find the truth unless you have unrestricted access to the facts. Now, you are very fortunate to be asking these questions now because we (CSNY & Cryo-Span) and Nelson (CSC & Cryonics Interment) are right here, and if you really want to know, all you have to do is come and see for yourself. So, that’s all I really have to say; come and see for yourself.”

I wasn’t very happy with this response and decided to call Curtis’ bluff and ask him when I could come, and if I could stay with someone at CSNY. Perhaps because I was only 14-years-old, Curtis Henderson told me I could come anytime I liked, and that I could stay with him and his (second) wife and two kids on Long Island, at his home (which was also where the CSNY office was located). Maybe he thought that it was exceedingly unlikely that a teenage kid would show up on his doorstep? If so, he was mistaken, because a few months later I was at 9 Homes Court on Sayville, Long Island, doing exactly what he said I should: seeing things for myself. This was the first of two summers I would spend at CSNY sleeping on the day bed in the CSNY office with unrestricted access to CSNY and Cryo-Span files and operations. The third summer I spent at CSNY/Cryo-Span was at the Cryo-Span facility on Long Island.

So, I am in a very good position to comment on the statements you make below.

KEN WRITES: “The CSNY was experiencing their own financial woes. They had underestimated the costs associated with maintaining the leaky Cryo-care capsules (sound familiar?), and as a result, the mortuary where Steven Mandel and Ann DeBlasio were stored, had threatened to lock the doors and refuse liquid nitrogen deliveries until either the past due rent was paid, or the patients were significantly decomposed. Pauline Mandel and Nick DeBlasio received letters from the mortuary with this threat (I have the letter to Mandel). Out of desperation, Pauling Mandel contacted Bob Ettinger. Ettinger recommended she go to Bob Nelson.”

MD’S RESPONSE: First of all, the CSNY patients were not initially stored at a mortuary, but rather at Washington Memorial Park Cemetery in Coram, Long Island. The “facility” consisted of a room that could not be locked and which was used by cemetery maintenance personnel (who not infrequently left cigarette butts and empty paper coffee cups on the floor, and around on the dewar platforms). Secondly, there was only one Cryo-Care dewar (Steven Mandel’s) and the vacuum was continuously maintained by a vacuum pump. While it is technically correct to refer to the Cryo-Care (CC) dewars as “leaky” in that they required frequent hardening of the vacuum with a mechanical pump, it is only fair to point out that they were not designed to have a “permanent” vacuum – the header on the patient insertion end of the dewar outer can was sealed (and held in place) with a silicone-greased O-ring. It would be equally fair (or unfair) to describe all of the patient cryostats in use by the Cryonics Institute today as “leaky,” because they too require frequent hardening of the (soft) vacuum that is used (with perlite) to insulate them. Providing a vacuum pump was used to keep the vacuum hard (which it was at CSNY) the Cryo-Care dewars actually performed very well, even by today’s standards, boiling off about 5.5 liters a day, which was what their design specifications called for.

Nevertheless, nobody (and especially not Curtis Henderson) was satisfied with the CC dewars – not primarily because of boil-off, but because of the difficulty attendant to sealing the units in the field (the inner can had to be welded shut under cold conditions), the fact that they were dependent upon electricity because they required an electrically operated vacuum pump, and that they consumed an inordinate amount of floor space. For these reasons, Curtis Henderson, working with Minnesota Valley Engineering (MVE), came up with a “stretched” version of the MVE A-9000 dewar. The A-9000 was a waist high dewar used primarily for storage of cattle semen and tissue culture cells. With the sole exception of Steven Mandell, all the other CSNY patients (Ann DeBlasio, Paul M. Hurst, Sr., and Herman Greenberg) were stored in MVE dewars which were very economical (4.5 to 5.5. liters per day per patient) and incredibly reliable. In fact, the upright MVE dewar in the picture below was later sold Trans Time, Inc., and to the best of my knowledge still has a good vacuum 39-years later. This is a photo taken in 1969 of the Cryo-Span storage facility in Washington Memorial Park. Ann Deblasio’s dewar is the upright MVE unit near the back of the picture. Barely visible on the platform in front of it are family pictures:

Your statement “(CSNY) underestimated the costs associated with maintaining the leaky Cryo-care capsules (sound familiar?)” is incorrect. The estimates for the cost of cryopreservation presented to the public ranged from $8,500 posited by Bob Ettinger in THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY in 1964 to the $10,000 widely quoted by the media as being the cost of indefinite cryopreservation at both CSC and CSNY during the period from1969 to 1972. Of that $10,000 no less than $8,000 was to be invested for long-term care. $8,000.00 in 1969 had about the same buying power as $44,561.80 in 2006, or roughly twice what CI currently budgets for long-term storage for Option One Members (~$23,000 per patient). The problem was that this money was never set aside, and indeed never existed in the first place. What’s more, with the exception of Paul Hurst, Sr. (and later Herman Greenberg), CSNY was not consistently paid, or in the case of Steven Mandell, paid at all. Steven’s life insurance was applied for after he was already (terminally) ill and did not pay out. Pauline Mandell never paid Cryo-Span for the CC dewar, the charges for “encapsulating” Steven, or for liquid nitrogen or facility floor space (rent). The $4,500 for the CC dewar, the ~ $1,100 for the Sergeant-Welch vacuum pumps, and the costs of welding, transportation, and miscellaneous hardware were paid for by Curtis Henderson.

I’ve no doubt you have a letter from Washington Memorial Park threatening eviction. I only knew him by his last name, Campbell, but by 1970 Washington Memorial Park’s manager wanted Cryo-Span out of there – and it had nothing to do with nonpayment of rent. Rather, the cemetery had come to realize that cryonics was not going to be a viable business venue for them, and worse still, they were under intense pressure from their colleagues and the cemetery board to dissociate them from cryonics. Making matters worse still was the fact that the Suffolk County Health Department refused to issue burial (disposition) permits for the patients stored in the Coram facility. Cryo-Span was asked to leave. What you have also not said here is that because of the objections of Nick DeBlasio and Pauline Mandell (the two were romantically involved at the time) Cryo-Span could not get their permission to move Steven and Ann to a leased facility in a nearby industrial park. DeBlasio and Mandell insisted that the only legal venue for storage of cryopatients was a cemetery. Unfortunately (or rather very fortunately, as things turned out) Curtis Henderson had decided that he was through dealing with cemeteries, and that cemeteries were not a workable place to store cryopatients. So, the impasse continued, and Mr. Campbell grew both angry and desperate. On the occasions when I saw Campbell and Henderson interact it was not over unpaid rent, but rather because the patients were not being moved, and that the cemetery was “washing its hands of frozen bodies.”

KEN WRITES: Bob Nelson went to New York and was able to get the mortuary more to give the NYCS and Mandel and DeBlasio to come up with the money. Mandel set up a meeting with Bob to arrange a meeting with her, DeBlasio, and Bob. They both desperately wanted out of the NYCS. Mandel arranged to have Steven Mandel shipped to the CSC, ad ultimately to the vault in Chattsworth. She agreed to make monthly payments for storage and maintenance (which she defaulted on, by the way). DeBlasio, on the other hand, demanded to have full control over his wife’s suspension. Bob suggested DeBlasio build himself a vault similar to what Bob had built in Chatsworth. Bob suggested that Mandel and DeBlasio share the vault, but neither wanted anything to do with that. Bob, funded and arranged the building of the vault. DeBlasio eventually paid Bob back. Bob never had control over the day-to-day operation of DeBlasio’s vault. DeBlasio wanted out of the NYCS and wanted full control over Ann’s suspension.

MD’s RESPONSE: From first-hand observation I can tell you that the decision to move out of Washington Memorial Park by Cryo-Span was only delayed by Mandel and DeBlasio. Cryo-Span rented an industrial bay in Farmingdale, L.I., NY and sublet half of it until they could occupy it. The delay was due to Nelson’s (repeated) missed dates for removing Steven Mandell to Chatsworth, and later Ann Deblasio to Mt. Holiness Cemetery. Ann was the last to be moved, and that took place on 17 September, 1971. Shortly thereafter, Paul Hurst, Sr., the only other CSNY patient, was moved to the Cryo-Span facility in Farmingdale.

I spent a good part of the summer of 1971 at CSNY/Cryo-Span and below are pictures of the Farmingdale facility. This is a photo of the exterior of the Cryo-Span facility in Farmingdale. The small green car is Curtis Henderson’s. Barely visible in the window (above the blue van) is the Cryo-Span logo designed by Vaugh Bode, which was adjacent to the company name:

Photos of me at the Cryo-Span facility during dewar filling in August of 1971:

The Cryo-Span facility was small and unpretentious; however the patients were well cared for. Context is critically important because, you see, with the exception of Nelson telling me that Curtis Henderson and Saul Kent were dishonest and price gouging, just about everything else he told me about Cryo-Span was “true.” Patient dewars were kept between ½ and 1/3rd full of LN2 because the relatives refused to pay more, and because a different set of cryobiologists had advised them, correctly as it turns out, that most biological specimens are stored in LN2 vapor, not submerged in LN2. As it turns out (aswe have learned over 30 years later), the real issue is not so much the temperature out of the LN2 in the dewar (which Greg Fahy and I measured at ~ -150 degrees C at the patient’s head in a dewar 1/3rd full of LN2), but rather thermal cycling between -196 degrees C and -150 degrees C, which causes much additional fracturing. Once the patient is completely solidified below the glass transition point (Tg) of the tissue and cryoprotective(s), chemical change is halted, regardless of what is predicted on the basis of the Ahrrenius equation. Ironically, the Cryo-care dewars with their horizontal configuration (and the patient being stored in the upper half of the cylinder) had to be allowed to boil off sufficient nitrogen to expose the patient to vapor in order to allow room for refilling with two 160 liter (LS-160) fill dewars. This is photo of a Cryo-Care dewar with the stretcher (and thus the patient) occupying the upper half the LN2 reservoir in the inner can:

If bulk delivery was used to refill a CC dewar on a monthly basis then the dewar had to be allowed to run down to 1/3rd to 1/4th of LN2 capacity; meaning that the patient spent at least half of the time at ~ -150 degrees C and the other half at -196 degrees C, with the transition between LN2 and vapor temperature being achieved by quench cooling in LN2! The important point here is that Curtis never lied, and he never told anyone he was offering immersion storage in LN2. In fact, that service was not offered by any cryonics service provider until Trans Time started offering storage in 1973. Even then, it was almost impossible to fill the dewars often enough to avoid exposure of at least the sleeping bags the patient’s were wrapped in, since the distance between the patient and the bottom of the dewar necktube, was typically less than 10 inches. The photo below is of the inside of a patient dewar at Trans Time in 1981, and shows the close proximity of the patient’s feet to the necktube of the dewar (the bottom of which is the highest level to which LN2 can be added):

The solution to the problem was to do what Curtis Henderson had wanted to do from the start, namely to put the patient’s into the vertical MVE dewars head down with their feet closest to the neck-tube. Ironically, it was the families of the CSNY patients, in particular Nick DeBlasio, who refused to allow this, and who considered it, “disrespectful and cheap to stand patients on their heads.”

It was also true that Curtis was an alcoholic. However, what was not said was that despite his drinking problem, he worked 12 to 14 hours a day, 6 and often 7-days-a-week, on the swing and night shifts at Sonic Records, on Long Island. He did this because he had to be free during the business day to go and pick up LN₂: welding supply firms are only open from 9 to 5 for LN₂ pickup, and not at all on weekends. He also had to pay the lion’s share of the bills to be keep patients cryopreserved. Sonic was something out of Dante’s inferno, a terrible place to work which was hot, dangerous, and noisy. Safety and worker protection were non-existent, and the acrid stench of molten vinyl chloride, coming from open vats well over 12 feet high (with unprotected catwalks), was dizzying. I vividly remember Curtis coming home with a broken arm in an air-splint, picking me up to help him, going for LN₂, filling the dewars, and only then going to the emergency department to have his arm X-rayed, properly set, and casted. The absolutely critical (but missing) context was that Curtis Henderson (and CSNY and Cryo-Span) were honest, and despite terrible personal hardship and inconvenience, they did keep their patients cryopreserved, and they did not lie about what they could offer, nor did they denigrate CSC and Cryonic Interment.

I look back on Nelson’s remarks to me in 1970 (and later) with bitter contempt. Protection against radioactive fallout? Immersion storage of patients at a 1/3rd the cost of Cryo-Span? He lied to a 15-year-old kid who was just trying to find his way in cryonics. He lied, and he lied in a way that was malicious and damaging to others, and that caused me to question the integrity of a man who had told me only the truth, however unpleasant and inconvenient that was for both him and me.

KEN WRITES: Mike accuses Bob of luring the NYCS’s away. Nonsense. DeBlasio and Mandel had good reason to seek out Bob. Their loved ones were about to have their suspensions by the mortuary where they were stored.

MD’S RESPONSE: While I believe that Bob’s claims of better service at a lower cost were certainly material in the decision Pauline Mandell and Nick DeBlasio made in pursuing service with CSC and Cryonic Interment, I have never said that this was the main reason they moved Steven and Ann, or that they were “lured away.” Nick DeBlasio and Pauline Mandell were both angry and frustrated about cryonics in general, and CSNY and Cryo-Span in particular, long before Nelson slithered into the picture. Both wanted cryonics to be something it would not become for at least another 20 years: clean, clinical, professional in appearance, and above all affordable. In Pauline’s case affordable meant “free,” and in Nick’s case, it meant whatever he thought it should cost based on standards he set and changed arbitrarily. Nick complained bitterly about the cigarette butts on the floor at Washington Memorial Park (BTW, neither Curtis nor Saul smoked, or ever has), about Curtis’ “lack of professionalism” and about Ann not being kept covered with LN2. So, as you point out, he moved Ann to the Cryonic Interment East Coast Facility (see below) and began caring for her himself and eventually another CSC patient from the West Coast, as well. What were his standards? How did he do? Well, on 27 July of 1980 I got see just what Nick DeBlasio AND Bob Nelson did with Ann DeBlasio and the other CSC patient stored with her.

I found Ann’s dewar sitting a black hole in the ground with no electric power having ever been run to the vault (and thus no lighting or alarms) sitting in ~6 inches of foul water. The wood-paneled walls of the “facility:” were almost completely covered with white mold or mildew. The once pristine white dewar looked like this as it was hoisted out of the facility:

The lid of the dewar which covered the neck-tube had been retrofitted with bulk delivery pipes. The lid was denuded of paint from the repeated overflow of LN2 and was dented and distorted from being struck with objects to free it of ice which accumulated on it due to the heat leak from the bulk fill pipes (which were un-insulated) and the high humidity from the half a foot or more of standing water on the floor:

Incredibly, the photo below shows the base of the dewar – the support bottom header and the legs upon which it rested are covered in rust. This incredible because the entire dewar was made of 312 stainless steel!

In 1969-70 Nick DeBlasio and Pauline Mandel were given free space by CSNY to run this ad in CRYONICS REPORTS:

This is Ann DeBlasio, the ad proclaimed, and indeed, this was DeBlasio when CSNY was caring for her, and it is Ann DeBlasio as I first saw her, and as I like to try and remember her:

It was my unhappy task, (and that of fellow cryonicist Joe Allen) to remove Ann DeBlasio, or more properly what was left of her, from that dewar, as well the badly decomposed remains of another woman, the CSC patient whom Nelson and DeBlasio had placed in the dewar with Ann. You are fortunate that I cannot convey the horrible odor which accompanied the image shown below:

IMAGE REDACTED

It took us nearly a day of uninterrupted work to free those two women from that dewar. A major reason for subjecting myself and Joe to that horror was to protect cryonics from what could have been, and in my opinion would have been, another scandal of Chatsworth proportions – coming right on heels of Chatsworth itself. The stench from the decomposing bodies was wafting over to the nearby homes (one of which you can see in the background) and the cemetery management was nearly hysterical and on the verge of calling the health department. Another reason was to give some closure to the son of the other woman in the dewar. He was decent, sincere, and wealthy professional who had considered CSNY, but had gone with Nelson instead because, as he told me at the time, of Bob’s claims of superior service, underground storage, and more competitive price. This patient died not on the East Coast or in the Midwest, but rather in Beverly Hills, CA on 13 November 1972 and was sent cross-country by Nelson to be stored in Cryonic Interment’s East Coast facility! Here was a man who truly was “lured away” from CSNY. And he was not the only one who was affected by Nelson’s lies. In December of 1972 CSNY cryopreserved another patient. This woman was the first patient I cryopreserved, and her wellbeing and continued survival were incredibly important to me. The photo below was taken of me with this patient about 2 days after the start of her cryopreservation (I was 17-years-old at the time):

Solely on the basis of Nelson’s assertion that he could store this patient for less money, and more securely underground in a “permanent” facility, her family decided to have her transferred to Nelson’s East Coast Facility in Butler, New Jersey. The MVE dewar which had been on order for her was, upon completion, shipped to Mt. Holiness in Butler, where it sat, still crated at the side of the road, near the Cryonic Interment East Coast Facility for many months. The patient’s relatives (truthfully, I believe) testified that Nelson took their money (around $2,000, if I recall correctly) and never showed up to “encapsulate” their mother. This family then made the decision to bury their mother, something they had wanted to do from the start, but which Nelson gave them an excellent excuse to follow through on. Sadly, this patient had provided ~$30,000 for her long term care, but to no avail.

A year later, when Cryo-Span had closed it doors after Gillian Cumming’s death, another patient I cryopreserved avoided ending up at Mt. Holiness only because I repeatedly and emphatically warned the next-of-kin (the patient’s wife and son, respectively) against Nelson, CSC and Cryonic Interment. It took considerable effort on my part to persuade this family to send the patient to Trans Time which, at that time, was operating out of Art Quaife’s home and did not have a single patient, let alone a storage facility. It took even more effort to persuade a very burned-out Curtis Henderson to fly to the Bay Area and assist Trans Time in setting up storage operations. The patient’s relatives had to spend many thousands of dollars for capital equipment, leasing a building, and paying storage fees many times more than that for which Bob Nelson told them he could do the job, and do it better. The dewar this patient went into was the one that had been sitting at Mt. Holiness for the better part of year: the relatives sold it in a cash transaction* in the cemetery in the dead of winter* (half of the proceeds were collected by Curtis Henderson on the spot to pay the unpaid dry ice storage bills owed to him and which had paid for out of his own pocket). A few years later this patient’s wife joined him in cryopreservation (she was Jerry Leaf’s second patient and Trans Time’s third). Today, both of those patients are still cryopreserved and in fact, the husband is the second longest surviving patient in storage. The only other patient to survive prior to 1973 is James Beford, whose son had the good sense to remove him from Nelson’s care almost immediately after he was frozen in 1967.

I could be so emphatic About Nelson and CSC because in the early summer of 1971 I had gone with Greg Fahy on the Super Chief (transcontinental train) to Los Angeles and tried to visit CSC, see the Cryonic Interment facility, and meet with Nelson. I was not allowed to see the CSC facility, but I did get to meet with Nelson who told us that Joe Klockegether had all the CSC perfusion supplies and equipment at his mortuary in Buena Park, CA. Greg and I then went to the Klockgether-Renaker Mortuary, and all Joe Klockgether was able to show us was an embalming room with embalming equipment. I photographed that visit and here are the (representative) results:

The outside of the Klockgerther-Renaker mortuary:

Mike Darwin (left), Greg Fahy and Joe Knlockegether.

This it, this is all the “highly specialized equipment” assembled by CSC’s scientists to do human cryonic suspensions:

Joe, clearly embarrassed, wandered around the funeral home looking for, “a bottle of DMSO which I think we have somewhere here.” He gave up when it wasn’t in the closet where the chicken soup powder was kept for the hot soup machine. Here I was, 16-years-old, and I had vastly better equipment and chemicals (including mortuary tools and cannula) in my bedroom, and in the shed behind my house! There was nothing there in the way of cryonics equipment or chemicals at the Renaker-Klockgether mortuary, not even a dry ice box! Nelson had sat in the coffee shop where he met us and lied to us, lied to us in the expectation that a couple of “kids” were not going to exercise due diligence and check out every claim he made. And, why should he have done otherwise? Every adult, every journalist, every concerned relative, and every CSC member (with the exception of Fred and Linda Chamberlain) believed every lie he told them, and they never bothered to go and see for themselves what the truth was.

And, while I did not get to see the CSC facility, I did track down the welder (then working for American Cryogenics) who claimed he had welded shut one of the CSC dewars with three patients stuffed into it. He was hardly able to talk about it, and he described it as, “one of the worst experiences of my life.” He said he could smell the hair and flesh burning as he welded the inner can shut. I also called every cryogenic fluid distributor listed in the Yellow Pages in the greater Los Angeles area at that time. Everywhere, the story was the same “Do you know where Bob Nelson is? Can you tell us how to get in touch with him?” As Virginia Gregory, President of Gilmore Liquid said, “It’s not just the money he owes us for liquid nitrogen and demurrage; he also has a couple of our LS-160 LN2 delivery dewars!”

KEN WRITES: When you were making your accusations, Mike, why was none of this mentioned? The CUNY’s financial difficulties are well known. They suffered much of the same difficulties that plagued the CSC, patients’ families that weren’t paying, and leaky Cryo-Care capsules. You wrote half truths and flat out lies. I have documentation illustrating the REAL reason Mandel and DeBlasio left the NTCS.

MD’S RESPONSE: I left nothing out. CSNY and Cryo-Span paid their bills, took care of their patients well, and went out of business honorably and without litigation. Every patient was disposed of per the instructions from the next of kin, and was cremated or interred legally, and with dignity. No one was lied to or left to rot in their dewars. This was Steven Mandell as he once was:

This is what was left of Steve Mandell’s CC dewar after it was pulled out of Chatsworth. The top of the dewar has been removed with a cutting torch so the three decomposed bodies inside could be removed and interred. The forensic pathologist who was hired to help identify the remains said it took nearly a week to sort out the bones of the three people inside and free them from the “black goo” which had formerly been their soft tissues:

KEN WRITES: You laid the blame for the failure of DeBlasio failure to maintain his wife’s suspension of his wife. Bob was never involved with maintaining that vault. He had his own vault to tend to in Chatsworth. DeBlasio wanted out of the CSNY, and he didn’t want her shipped to another cryonics organization, so Bob did the logical thing and helped to build him his own vault where DeBlasio would have complete control. Bob went there at the request of two of the CUNY’s patients. His help in getting the mortuary to open up for the liquid nitrogen venders, and extending the time they allowed the CSNY to come up with the money owed was not the act of someone that was out to take those patients away.

I have the documents to prove that you were embellishing what happened with DeBlasio to discredit Bob Nelson and portray the NYCS as innocent victims. You sir, should acknowledge it and apologize for it.

MD’S RESPONSE: Throughout this response I’ve referred to the facility in Mt. Holiness Cemetery in Butler, New Jersey as the “Cryonic Interment East Coast Facility.” You claim that Bob Nelson had nothing to with that facility, and the loss of Ann Deblasio and the CSC patient from Beverly Hills was all Nick DeBlasio’s doing. You say that the facility in Butler, NJ was not a CSC or Cryonic Interment operation, and that Nelson was in no way involved beyond being what can best be described, per your account, as a good hearted, selfless soul, who just tried to help Nick Deblasio out of a bad spot due to CSNY’s insolvency. Well, neither you nor Bob Nelson can have it both ways. The fact is that I, and everyone else, took Bob Nelson at his word when he and CSC stated the following in the September 1971 issue of CRYONICS REVIEW, the official publication of CSC: “A second long-term cryonic storage facility is now operational in Butler, New Jersey. The facility was opened on September 17 by Cryonic Interment, Inc…The new facility, designed to accommodate 24 persons at liquid nitrogen temperature, compliments (spelling error theirs) the first long-term multiple-storage facility in operation in Chatsworth, California.” Here are scans of the original issue of CRYONICS REVIEW:

Here is a copy of the article from that issue of CRYONICS REVIEW

So was Nelson lying then, or is he (or you for him) lying now? What are we to believe? Perhaps we can best ascertain the truth by Nelson’s actions in sending a CSC patient from Southern California to be stored in the Mt. Holiness facility in December of 1972; and of his attempts to attract two other patients to CSC’s and Cryonic Interment’s care in 1972 and 1973? Maybe we might best be instructed as to Nerlson’s character and integrity (or lack of same) by the canceled CSC checks written to Frank Bucelli by Robert Nelson and to Elaine Bucelli by Robert Nelson? Who would have guessed in 1967 and 1968 that Robert Bucelli was in fact Robert Nelson, or that Elaine Bucelli was, in fact, Robert Nelson’s wife at the time? The papers I have, virtually the entire financial record of CSC from 1966 until its demise, show a picture of routine overdrafts, expenditures for dry cleaning, car towing, and utility bills (when CSC had no car, no facility and no uniforms). Below is but a small sample of what are hundreds of scans (and pages) of financial records that show the same dismal pattern of bounced checks and threats from creditors:

KEN WRITES: I anxiously await your response.

MD’S RESPONSE: You have it. Bob Nelson damaged the lives of many, if not most of the people he dealt with in cryonics. He arguably destroyed the lives of every patient he came into contact with, with the possible exception of James Bedford. I say “possible” because Nelson’s utterly unprepared and incompetent care of Bedford caused terrible injury which was shockingly visible when Bedford was examined during his transfer from the Galiso dewar to the Alcor Bigfoot dewar in May of 1991. His bloody face is a damning indictment of Bob Nelson – an indictment which remains unchanged (and unchanging) from that fateful day in January of 1967 when Nelson first betrayed the trust put in him by a patient and that patient’s family, and then took 135 pages to lie about it in WE FROZE THE FIRST MAN.

And yes, I have the photographs to prove it.

Mike Darwin

This message has been edited by Jonathan_Hinek on Jun 19, 2007 4:21 PM

From Jonathan Hinek:

Had to reconsider my decision           June 19 2007, 4:32 PM

After receiving a request from several parties and hearing a particularly sound argument about the current state of the ‘net, I’ve decided that the only responsible action to take is to remove the more graphic of the three images. I don’t think the gore is necessary, and such an image can only do damage if widely disseminated without proper explication. As always, I’m open to further input from Mike or anyone else who feels strongly about this.

From Mike Darwin:

No Problem     June 19 2007, 9:29 PM

Jonathan,

I understand and have no problem with your redacting the image.

–

The Cold Filter

A forum dedicated to reporting on and discussing cryonics and cryo related topics.

From Long Life Lurker:

Paging Mr. Cryoken! Mr. Cryoken?!?…         June 20 2007, 1:20 PM

It turns out I was not alone with my concern about the photography in question. I certainly agree about transparency and disclosure as long as the process is considerate and careful. Should I presume these photos or others like them were presented when all this was the matter in court? A court of law is the venue I am most comfortable with when they are necessary to establish the facts. A current example of careful process is the People vs. Spector trial now being covered on CourtTV when they discretely avoid showing the explicit and graphic photos taken at the crime scene.As for the here and now, I am hoping for Mr. Cryoken’s prompt response to MD’s expansive Chatsworth review where the lessons are glaringly self evident. -LLL

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From Shipdit:

History and decisions June 20 2007, 5:01 PM

I feel that the original post in its entirety represents something extremely valuable.

History, edited by a perceived need for protecting others from unpleasantness becomes something different than history.

SD

From Finance Director:

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Anyone wanting a copy of this picture, can email me.           June 20 2007, 11:53 PM

Some of us captured the original post before it was edited. I’d be glad to email the deleted picture, by file attachment, to anyone who did not get here in time and wants to see it. Use an email address capable of receiving a file attachment slightly under 600KB. Your email address, and that you emailed me, will not be divulged to anyone or retained by me.

This is not intended to mean that I disagree with Jonathan’s decision to remove it from the forum – he had to do what he felt is best and I support that.

Anyone can email me at: Redacted

This message has been edited by Finance_Department on Jun 20, 2007 11:57 PM

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This isn’t about protecting others from unpleasantness          June 21 2007, 9:54 AM

Although it may be a component. If my friend or family member was murdered, I probably wouldn’t want pictures of their bloody remains all over the internet. Even if those images did serve as some sort of reminder. However, that’s not the main reason I redacted the photo in question. Like Mike, I believe that his pictures can do some good, in the right place, and in proper context.

But what happens when such images are taken out of context? Once they’re digitally available, they will spread virally. People who are dedicated to discrediting cryonics will use them out-of-context to inflame others. Yes, I realize that this will, in all likelihood, happen regardless of what I do. The photo is undoubtedly being disseminated through e-mail as I write this. That doesn’t mean I want to be associated with it.

From Ken Bly:

My late late response  September 2 2008, 2:49 AM

I have ha neither the time nor the energy to respond to this lengthy post. However, in answer to FD’s persistent challenges, I decided to make the time tonight. It’s not as lengthy as I had anticipated originally. You don’t need to be particularly prolific to make a good argument.

“I asked Nelson about CSNY and he told me (this from notes made at the time) that their (CSNY’s) operation was “very substandard” and that “they are not storing the bodies properly. Henderson charges the family a fortune for liquid nitrogen, but he only keeps the capsules about 1/3rd full. That’s like medical malpractice because any cryobiologist will tell you that you have to keep tissue specimens completely covered in liquid nitrogen. I’ve explained this to Nick DeBlasio, and put him touch with our scientists at CSC, and I think he is going to move his wife (Ann) out of the Cryo-Span facility in the near future…CSNY is operating illegally and they do not have a secure underground facility which is immune to radiation in the event of nuclear attack, such as the Cryonic Interment facility will be here in Southern California…While he is far too much of gentleman to say so, Bob Ettinger’s, actions speak louder than words, and Bob always refers patients for suspension to CSC, not CSNY. I think the fact that the father of the movement refers patients to us should be all you need to know…It is widely known that Curtis Henderson has a serious drinking problem and that may be one reason that the storage at Cryo-Span is not what it should be…We charge less than a quarter of what Cryo-Span and CSNY charge a year for storage. We can do that because we have a lot more patients and because liquid nitrogen is cheaper here in California. In fact, sometimes I get liquid nitrogen for free because we get it by “bulk delivery” in a large tank-truck and I know the driver. If he has have LN2 still in the bulk tank at the end of his delivery route, then he will often just empty out the tank and we don’t have to pay for the extra nitrogen.”

Bob denies making these statements. In fact, he had a good relationship with Curtis fom the beginning. He gives Curtis and Saul a lot of credit for helping the CSC get started. They came to California at the beginning and gave some very helpful advise. Also, in a recent visit between Curtis and Bob, Curtis reminded Bob that the CSC sent the CSNY $1,000 of the money Bob got from selling We Froze the First Man. While there may have been light competition between the two societies, Bob did not trash mouth Curtis.

I will retract any past comments I’ve made regarding CSNY’s operation simply because I do not have adequate documentation other than a couple of letters from Mandell and one from Washington Memorial Park threatening to cut off LN2 supplies. Mike is obviously much more qualified to comment on CSNY operations than neither Bob nor myself.

“It took us nearly a day of uninterrupted work to free those two women from that dewar. A major reason for subjecting myself and Joe to that horror was to protect cryonics from what could have been, and in my opinion would have been, another scandal of Chatsworth proportions – coming right on heels of Chatsworth itself. The stench from the decomposing bodies was wafting over to the nearby homes (one of which you can see in the background) and the cemetery management was nearly hysterical and on the verge of calling the health department. Another reason was to give some closure to the son of the other woman in the dewar. He was decent, sincere, and wealthy professional who had considered CSNY, but had gone with Nelson instead because, as he told me at the time, of Bob’s claims of superior service, underground storage, and more competitive price. This patient died not on the East Coast or in the Midwest, but rather in Beverly Hills, CA on 13 November 1972 and was sent cross-country by Nelson to be stored in Cryonic Interment’s East Coast facility! Here was a man who truly was “lured away” from CSNY. And he was not the only one who was affected by Nelson’s lies.”

Bob did not have any control over the vault in Butler and he certainly never made a dime from it. He simply helped DeBlasio get the thing built. He also used the name “East Coast Facility” to bolster the image of the CSC for marketing reasons, but only on a couple of occasions. He was legally able to do that until DeBlaso finished paying Bob back for the vault )Bob fronted the money for the vault to DeBlasio). Questionable marketing tactic, sure, but Bob had no motivation to undersell one of your clients since he would have gained nothing from it. Bob recalls having the patient shipped to NYbut doesn’t remember for sure why. He believes it was because DeBlasio needed the funds to help out. DeBlasio would never have shared that capsule just to profit the CSC, Hell, He wouldn’t share it with Mandell, and he was banging her.

“In December of 1972 CSNY cryopreserved another patient. This woman was the first patient I cryopreserved, and her wellbeing and continued survival were incredibly important to me. Solely on the basis of Nelson’s assertion that he could store this patient for less money, and more securely underground in a “permanent” facility, her family decided to have her transferred to Nelson’s East Coast Facility in Butler, New Jersey. The MVE dewar which had been on order for her was, upon completion, shipped to Mt. Holiness in Butler, where it sat, still crated at the side of the road, near the Cryonic Interment East Coast Facility for many months. The patient’s relatives (truthfully, I believe) testified that Nelson took their money (around $2,000, if I recall correctly) and never showed up to “encapsulate” their mother. This family then made the decision to bury their mother, something they had wanted to do from the start, but which Nelson gave them an excellent excuse to follow through on. Sadly, this patient had provided ~$30,000 for her long term care, but to no avail.”

BS. According to Curtis Henderson’s own deposition, the patient’s daughter and son were nut cases and a pain in the ass. She wanted Curtis to spread the payments for the capsule and services out over time. Curtis refused. Instead, HE sent her to Bob, telling her that he would likely be willing to do it. Curtis wanted to get rid of them! I don’t have the testimony in my possession right wow, but I’d be happy to get it. Mike Perry and Bob both have copies. Also, Bob agreed to go to NY and make arrangements to check out the condition of the patient and possibly have her shipped to California. He was paid up front for his travel expenses. When he got to NY he called the son. The son told him that he wanted nothing to do with cryonics and that they were all “fucking crazy”., which is consistent with the son’s testimony. Bob could have still checked to see what kind of shape the patient was in, but what would be the point? The lawsuit was started by the daughter because Bob didn’t have the money to pay the full $2,000 back to her. He offered to do it in payments, but she refused to accept. Again, Curtis wanted to get rid of the daughter and son. This is his own testimony under oath.

“Maybe we might best be instructed as to Nerlson’s character and integrity (or lack of same) by the canceled CSC checks written to Frank Bucelli by Robert Nelson and to Elaine Bucelli by Robert Nelson? Who would have guessed in 1967 and 1968 that Robert Bucelli was in fact Robert Nelson, or that Elaine Bucelli was, in fact, Robert Nelson’s wife at the time? The papers I have, virtually the entire financial record of CSC from 1966 until its demise, show a picture of routine overdrafts, expenditures for dry cleaning, car towing, and utility bills (when CSC had no car, no facility and no uniforms). Below is but a small sample of what are hundreds of scans (and pages) of financial records that show the same dismal pattern of bounced checks and threats from creditors:”

This means nothing. Have you never bounced a check? I worked with Bob for years and managed his TV shop. He operated it, as he did his cryonics operation, as a sole proprietorship. He often paid for materials, services and even payroll out of his own pocket. He would sometimes repay himself from the business by writing himself a check. There were times when funds were low and he didn’t have the money in his personal account to cover, so small checks sometimes bounced. It wasn’t something that happened every day, but it happened. Again, have you never bounced a check? This doesn’t say anything about his character. Running a micro business can be difficult, but he managed to do so for many years, and did OK.

“Bob Nelson damaged the lives of many, if not most of the people he dealt with in cryonics. He arguably destroyed the lives of every patient he came into contact with, with the possible exception of James Bedford. I say “possible” because Nelson’s utterly unprepared and incompetent care of Bedford caused terrible injury which was shockingly visible when Bedford was examined during his transfer from the Galiso dewar to the Alcor Bigfoot dewar in May of 1991. His bloody face is a damning indictment of Bob Nelson – an indictment which remains unchanged (and unchanging) from that fateful day in January of 1967 when Nelson first betrayed the trust put in him by a patient and that patient’s family, and then took 135 pages to lie about it in WE FROZE THE FIRST MAN.”

Bob did not do the perfusion of James Bedford himself. Dante Brunol and Robert Prehoda did the perfusion and Bob assisted. Did they betray the patient and his family? If Bob lied about it in We Froze the First Man, where is the outrage from the people he wrote about in the book? i would think that everyone from Robert Ettinger to Robert Prehoda would have been pretty pissed off, and we would have heard from them a long time ago.

A small handful of people; The Chamberlains, Mike Darwin, and Charles Platt, are bent on discrediting everything Bob Nelson and the CSC did, even to the point of discrediting themselves. If Bob Nelson’s operations were completely negative, if everything he ever did was criminal, neglectful, deceitful and disgraceful, why did the Chamberlains and others stay with him so long? Why don’t people like Robert Ettinger, Marshall Neal, Joe Klockgether, and many others loser to his operations condemn him? Why just these few? The trial hurt cryonics. Bob Nelson got in over his head and did some questionable things trying to do the honorable thing and keep his patients in suspension. These people want desperately to distance themselves from the trial and bob Nelson by discrediting everything he did. That is cheap and blatantly unfair. Unfortunately the Chamberlains, Platt have a great deal of influence among the cryonics community, and what they say carries a lot of weight.

I’m nobody in the cryonics community, but I’m here to set the record straight the best I can for those who are willing to listen. I set out to help Bob write a book about what happened and I was appalled by some of the things I read on the internet. My goal is and has always been to find out what happened and why, weather my enquiries are good for bob’s reputation or not. Obviously not everything he did was positive. Conversely, not everything he did was bad. Those who try to discredit all that he did without acknowledging at lease SOME positive harm their own credibility, much more than I am harming mine by defending what Bob did right.

From Mike Darwin:

Re: Do nothing good; say nothing bad! (Final)

September 3 2008, 10:53 AM

Ken writes: *”I asked Nelson about CSNY and he told me (this from notes made at the time) that their (CSNY’s) operation was “very substandard” and that “they are not storing the bodies properly. Henderson charges the family a fortune for liquid nitrogen, but he only keeps the capsules about 1/3rd full. That’s like medical malpractice because any cryobiologist will tell you that you have to keep tissue specimens completely covered in liquid nitrogen. I’ve explained this to Nick DeBlasio, and put him touch with our scientists at CSC, and I think he is going to move his wife (Ann) out of the Cryo-Span facility in the near future…CSNY is operating illegally and they do not have a secure underground facility which is immune to radiation in the event of nuclear attack, such as the Cryonic Interment facility will be here in Southern California…While he is far too much of gentleman to say so, Bob Ettinger’s, actions speak louder than words, and Bob always refers patients for suspension to CSC, not CSNY. I think the fact that the father of the movement refers patients to us should be all you need to know…It is widelyknown that Curtis Henderson has a serious drinking problem and that may be one reason that the storage at Cryo-Span is not what it should be…We charge less than a quarter of what Cryo-Span and CSNY charge a year for storage. We can do that because we have a lot more patients and because liquid nitrogen is cheaper here in California. In fact, sometimes I get liquid nitrogen for free because we get it by “bulk delivery” in a large tank-truck and I know the driver. If he has have LN2 still in the bulk tank at the end of his delivery route, then he will often just empty out the tank and we don’t have to pay for the extra nitrogen.” Bob denies making these statements. In fact, he had a good relationship with Curtis fom the beginning. He gives Curtis and Saul a lot of credit for helping the CSC get started. They came to California at the beginning and gave some very helpful advise. Also, in a recent visit between Curtis and Bob, Curtis reminded Bob that the CSC sent the CSNY $1,000 of the money Bob got from selling We Froze the First Man. While there may have been light competition between the two societies, Bob did not trash mouth Curtis.* This simply isn’t true, any of it. Curtis Henderson is still very much alive and he does NOT agree with these remarks. Nor does he consider Bob Nelson a “friend” or anything other than, and I quote, “a liar and a fraud.” It is not necessary to take my word on this matter. If Ken Bly and Johnathan Hinek, or some other reasonable and dispassionate 3rd party is willing, I will arrange for you to speak with Curtis by telephone and you can ask him these questions yourself. I request only that the conversation be recorded (with all parties’ consent) and made available to the principals as part of the historical record. If Curtis wishes a wider distribution, that is up to him. I need not be present on the call but would like a copy of the recorded call. It is very easy for someone to say, as Bob and Ken have (sic), “Why, I think Curtis Henderson is my friend and that he and I have the utmost respect for each other.” That would be the equivalent of someone saying of me, “Mike Darwin and Bob Nelson are great friends, they’ve never exchanged a harsh word and Bob has always been forthcoming when he has spoken to Mike by phone. He seems very committed to cryonics today, is signed up, and Mike thinks the past is the past and let’s all just try to get along.” It is true that Bob and I have never exchanged harsh words, that he has been forthcoming on the few phone calls we’ve had, and that he is apparently signed up with CI. It is not the case I consider him a friend or feel the past is the past and should be forgiven absent genuine remorse, acceptance of personal responsibility, and a full and honest accounting of the misdeeds. I believe in forgiveness, but not in whitewashing and certainly not in establishing as the moral standard in cryonics that you can do anything terrible, immoral, destructive, deceitful or dishonest with no adverse consequences from the cryonics community as long as you don’t *say& anything unpleasant, uncomfortable, upsetting, un-aesthetic, or otherwise politically incorrect or as being perceived to “hurt” the image of cryonics or (fill in the blank) the image of the ______________. cryonics organization. There are two people and just about only two people (other than I) who were principals to the events re Nelson and CSNY from 1968 to 1975 who have not spoken out in print. Other than asking them to speak for the record, and facilitating that to the extent possible, I do not know what more I can do. I can be reached at: m2darwin@googlemail.com. *I will retract any past comments I’ve made regarding CSNY’s operation simply because I do not have adequate documentation other than a couple of letters from Mandell and one from Washington Memorial Park threatening to cut off LN2 supplies. Mike is obviously much more qualified to comment on CSNY operations than neither Bob nor myself.* Fair enough, and my sincere thanks. *”It took us nearly a day of uninterrupted work to free those two women from that dewar. A major reason for subjecting myself and Joe to that horror was to protect cryonics from what could have been, and in my opinion would have been, another scandal of Chatsworth proportions – coming right on heels of Chatsworth itself. The stench from the decomposing bodies was wafting over to the nearby homes (one of which you can see in the background) and the cemetery management was nearly hysterical and on the verge of calling the health department. Another reason was to give some closure to the son of the other woman in the dewar. He was decent, sincere, and wealthy professional who had considered CSNY, but had gone with Nelson instead because, as he told me at the time, of Bob’s claims of superior service, underground storage, and more competitive price. This patient died not on the East Coast or in the Midwest, but rather in Beverly Hills, CA on 13 November 1972 and was sent cross-country by Nelson to be stored in Cryonic Interment’s East Coast facility! Here was a man who truly was “lured away” from CSNY. And he was not the only one who was affected by Nelson’s lies.” Bob did not have any control over the vault in Butler and he certainly never made a dime from it. He simply helped DeBlasio get the thing built. He also used the name “East Coast Facility” to bolster the image of the CSC for marketing reasons, but only on a couple of occasions. He was legally able to do that until DeBlaso finished paying Bob back for the vault )Bob fronted the money for the vault to DeBlasio). Questionable marketing tactic, sure, but Bob had no motivation to undersell one of your clients since he would have gained nothing from it. Bob recalls having the patient shipped to NYbut doesn’t remember for sure why. He believes it was because DeBlasio needed the funds to help out. DeBlasio would never have shared that capsule just to profit the CSC, Hell, He wouldn’t share it with Mandell, and he was banging her.* Ken, READ what you have written above, really read it. You say: a) *“He also used the name “East Coast Facility” to bolster the image of the CSC for marketing reasons, but only on a couple of occasions.”* This would be comical if the subject and its consequences weren’t so tragic. So, if I understand your position correctly: it is OK to lie perniciously “once or twice” but not two or three times? It is OK to leave everyone in the cryonics community AND the world at large believing a seriously misleading statement from September 1971 until now, or whenever it was (some months ago) when Nelson finally informed the world that the Cryonics Society of California’s East Coast Facility was not really that at all, and was, in fact, ooops, just a “questionable marketing tactic.” Let’s see, 2008 minus 1971 = 36 years. That’s as good as, “I am not a crook,” “I did not have sex with that woman,” and “that depends upon what the definition of is is.” Morally in my book it is *much worse.* What does someone have to do to provoke even the slightest moral outrage or concern from the cryonics community? And why does it matter? Well, it matters because Nelson was the opening act of “clinical cryonics” and his deceit and misdeeds were not only tolerated, they were praised and rewarded. This is symptomatic of a deep psychopathology in cryonics that continues to this day. As my understanding of this phenomenon has become more sophisticated, I’ve come to realize that there are two main types of (in my opinion) sociopathic personalities that currently infest the clinical aspect of cryonics. I call them “pod people” because they can (as in the case of Nelson) look and act like real cryonicists, and Nelson’s type even has the remarkable ability to be liked and admired, this despite truly terrible behaviour. In fact, this species of pod person is often well spoken of by the same people they have hurt repeatedly, and without remorse. The second type of pod person is the “hired hand;” individuals who enter cryonics as paid “professionals” to provide clinical services. This type has been around almost from the beginning as well, but in recent years it has started to become more common. Not all non-cryonicists who have worked as professionals in cryonics are pod people, or do harm. Far from it; many have been extraordinary caregivers showing high competence, a willingness to take personal and professional risks, and who deliver technically rigorous care. Most people who see ads for jobs in cryonics either are not interested, check it out and decide it is not for them, actually try out the job and decide it is not for them, or take the job and find it rewarding intellectually and emotionally, if not financially. With the advent of high paying jobs in cryonics, yet another type of job seeker has been attracted; the person who could care less about cryonics or cryonics patients, but who nevertheless takes the job and fights tenaciously to hold on to it. The reasons for wanting the job, and liking it, are that there is no feedback, virtually no caseload, and in short, high pay for doing little or nothing. Psychologically healthy people invariably leave such situations, especially when they involve highly emotional, as well as medically and psychologically controversial and stressful experiences, such as is the case with cryonics. The situation of dying people who are hoping and counting on a technology which you, as an employee and provider, do not believe in, or worse still, hold in contempt, would be intolerable for almost anyone. Almost – and there’s the rub. Because the kind of person who will take such a job and “fake” concern while providing dismal care is neither commonplace nor psychologically healthy. They are, at a minimum, low-grade sociopaths, and when they luck into the tiny world of cryonics where they are well paid, have little work, and enjoy the need, and often the admiration and gratitude of their victims, it is the functional equivalent of turning a pack of wolves loose on the Galapagos Islands. Cryonicists are completely defenceless because they desperately need the services these people claim to competently provide; which in turn makes them less critical and more willing to suspend normal levels of scrutiny. Additionally, the average cryonicist is not medically sophisticated, and has little ability to judge what constitutes good care. *In fact, the problem goes deeper still because there is no consensus nor standards for good care, let alone any criteria for what constitutes an error, bad judgement, negligence or even pathological wrong doing.* Finally, the patients who are hurt can not only not complain they can’t even demonstrate any signs or symptoms of the abuse they’ve suffered. It must be a dream come true for this kind of psychopath; the psychosocial equivalent of being able to beat your wife or abuse a child endlessly and with absolutely no detectable sequelae – and thus no possible adverse consequences. I believe that the failure to act when Nelson behaved as he did, starting with Bedford’s cryopreservation, was a crucial and damaging mistake that has dogged cryonics to this day. I’ve begun to organize these ideas into a long article and a slide presentation. The latter is designed to try and show, by analogy, and in a blackly humorous way, that these pod people exist, and that they are much like the pod people in the SF classic _Invasion of the Body Snatchers._ Their characteristics and a shortlist of the damage they have done to cryopatients is summarised in the following images: b) *“Bob recalls having the patient shipped to NY but doesn’t remember for sure why.”* He doesn’t recall why????? Nelson did not exactly have a huge practice; he was not a physician or surgeon with hundreds or thousands of patients. Nor was he was a businessman with thousands of customers or clients. Excluding Dr. Bedford and Clara Dostal, he had 11 patients in his sorry career in cryonics. The one in question was the mother of a successful and well respected Los Angeles attorney who I had substantial dealings with regarding disposition of his mother’s remains. If Nelson does not recall why he sent this woman to New Jersey, he must be either forgetful beyond comprehension, negligent, uncaring, or lying. I can’t imagine any reasonable person believing such incredible nonsense. This was a human being, or at very least human remains which had to be transported on dry ice; and that required complex paperwork and coordination. She was not a pair of trousers dropped off at the drycleaners! What kind of psychopath would claim he has no idea why he shipped a cryonics patient, for whom he had accepted responsibility and been paid for, to a facility he now claims he had no control over her care or wellbeing and who he now states he put into the hands of a man who had no experience or expertise in the field, and who was (unarguably) proved to be incompetent to provide safe cryogenic care? Give us all a break! c) You write: *“DeBlasio would never have shared that capsule just to profit the CSC, Hell, He wouldn’t share it with Mandell, and he was banging her.”* How do you know “he was banging her?” All I know is that Nick told me he and Pauline Mandel had been dating, and briefly considered marriage. I have no idea if they engaged in intercourse, and unless you have evidence to support this contention, I think you should consider retracting this statement. *”In December of 1972 CSNY cryopreserved another patient. This woman was the first patient I cryopreserved, and her wellbeing and continued survival were incredibly important to me. Solely on the basis of Nelson’s assertion that he could store this patient for less money, and more securely underground in a “permanent” facility, her family decided to have her transferred to Nelson’s East Coast Facility in Butler, New Jersey. The MVE dewar which had been on order for her was, upon completion, shipped to Mt. Holiness in Butler, where it sat, still crated at the side of the road, near the Cryonic Interment East Coast Facility for many months. The patient’s relatives (truthfully, I believe) testified that Nelson took their money (around $2,000, if I recall correctly) and never showed up to “encapsulate” their mother. This family then made the decision to bury their mother, something they had wanted to do from the start, but which Nelson gave them an excellent excuse to follow through on. Sadly, this patient had provided ~$30,000 for her long term care, but to no avail.” BS. According to Curtis Henderson’s own deposition, the patient’s daughter and son were nut cases and a pain in the ass. She wanted Curtis to spread the payments for the capsule and services out over time. Curtis refused. Instead, HE sent her to Bob, telling her that he would likely be willing to do it. Curtis wanted to get rid of them! I don’t have the testimony in my possession right wow, but I’d be happy to get it. Mike Perry and Bob both have copies. Also, Bob agreed to go to NY and make arrangements to check out the condition of the patient and possibly have her shipped to California. He was paid up front for his travel expenses. When he got to NY he called the son. The son told him that he wanted nothing to do with cryonics and that they were all “fucking crazy”., which is consistent with the son’s testimony. Bob could have still checked to see what kind of shape the patient was in, but what would be the point? The lawsuit was started by the daughter because Bob didn’t have the money to pay the full $2,000 back to her. He offered to do it in payments, but she refused to accept. Again, Curtis wanted to get rid of the daughter and son. This is his own testimony under oath.* I have no doubt that your account of Curtis’ attitude in this matter is more or less correct. I’d be fascinated to see the copies of the lawsuits and court actions. I never met Richard Dostal, but I did meet his sister Claire Halpert who was, in my opinion, a most unpleasant woman. Considering the circumstances, I’m not sure I can blame her (she must have felt like she just stepped into a Twilight Zone episode), but I’m not inclined to think warm thoughts about her, either. BUT, SO WHAT????? Curtis Henderson had to deal with these same “nut cases” and, to the best of my knowledge, he did not receive a penny from them until the MVE dewar was sold to Ray Mills, Jr. at Mt. Holiness Cemetery. Now, consider that while Curtis was not paid for perfusing, cooling and storing Clara Dostal on dry ice for many months, he did not abandon her or let her thaw out and decompose. Everything else is completely irrelevant. Rational and responsible alternatives would have been for Nelson to call the Medical Examiner or the Health Department, both of whom deal with abandoned human remains all the time. New York and New Jersey have a well developed system in place (as do most metropolitan areas in the US) for disposing of bodies abandoned by relatives, or in cases where no family can be found. In New York, it is City Cemetery, which is more commonly called “Potter’s Field,” and it is located on Hart Island in the Bronx; out on Long Island Sound. Burials are done with inmate labor under supervision of the New York State Department of Corrections. This is not a recent development, and since the Hart Island facility first opened in 1869, ~750,000 burials have taken place there. My knowledge of Hart Island is due to the fact that another cryonics patient who was being stored by family who could no longer support his care, and where there were no funds for burial or cremation, was interred in Potter’s Field on Hart Island *still ensconced in his (then ~$8,000) MVE dewar!* When you write: *“Bob could have still checked to see what kind of shape the patient was in, but what would be the point?”* Do you think we are all idiots? Why don’t you answer that question yourself? In the meantime, here are a few of my own answers, and I suspect they reflect those of most of the people reading this: 1) Commonsense; what kind of sociopathic personality is required to just leave a woman’s body lying around because the family was unhappy or even “nuts”? That is precisely why morticians and cemeterians are licensed and go to jail if they do something like that! The answer is, this kind of sociopath (in fact, this fellow went to jail): http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E0DD113FF934A25751C0A9649C8B63 *“Every funeral director for 100 miles did business with the Tri-State Crematory on the assumption that the owners were doing their job of transforming dead bodies into ashes. But today, horrified authorities discovered decomposing evidence that the furnace at the crematory had not worked for years. After a dog walker stumbled over a skull on Friday, law enforcement officers discovered at least 120 rotting corpses in sheds and on the ground near the crematory, and state officials said that that figure could double by the time the area is fully excavated. Some of the bodies had been there for years and were nearly skeletal, while others, fresh from the funeral home, still bore toe tags. Human bones, weathered white, were scattered through the woods like leaves, skulls mixed with leg bones in a ghoulish jumble that one state trooper compared to a scene from a Stephen King novel. An infant’s body was found in a box in the back of a rusting hearse. Some bodies had become mummified and may have been at the site more than 20 years, said Dr. Kris Sperry, Georgia’s chief medical examiner. Nearly two dozen coffins that had once been buried were also found on the ground, Dr. Sperry said, and in some cases their embalmed contents had been dragged out and left exposed to the elements for years. It was unclear why those bodies were at the site. Officials said there was no foul play involved. But even hardened law enforcement officers were left shaken and nauseated by the sight that greeted them in the sheds. ”There were bodies stacked like cordwood, just discarded and thrown in a pile,” said Vernon Keenan, assistant director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. ”After 30 years in law enforcement, you think you’ve seen everything. And then you see something you can’t even imagine.” Dr. Sperry, who deals with corpses every day, said nothing in his experience prepared him for what he saw today. ”I have to say, the utter lack of respect in which they were piled on top of one another was very disturbing,” he said.”* This was a scandal that disturbed the entire nation. It really makes no moral difference whether it was 1 body one 1,000 bodies handled in this disrespectful manner; and it is the same kind of action you dismiss as casually as you might excuse someone from dropping an empty soda can or food wrapper on the street! 2) He could have contacted the Medical Examiner or the Public Health Department both of whom have routine experience dealing with and disposing of bodies where there is no known next of kin or the family is indigent and cannot afford to pay for disposal of the body. New York and (sometimes) New Jersey use the City Cemetery, commonly called Potter’s Field, on Hart Island in the Bronx onLong Island Sound. Since it began operations in 1869, more than 750,000 burials (estimate) have been made on Hart Island. My familiarity with Hart Island came about as a result of a cryonics case where the family was indigent and the patient was interred on Hart Island still in situ in a ~$8,000 MVE dewar (in 1974 dollars!). 3) He could have contacted the family and followed up to be sure that the remains were disposed of legally and with dignity. Again, anyone with a lick of sense and a picogram of concern about the damage that might result to cryonics from such a callous and negligent act would have taken steps to ensure that the body was properly disposed of. He would certainly not just “walk away and forget about it!” *”Maybe we might best be instructed as to Nelson’s character and integrity (or lack of same) by the canceled CSC checks written to Frank Bucelli by Robert Nelson and to Elaine Bucelli by Robert Nelson? Who would have guessed in 1967 and 1968 that Robert Bucelli was in fact Robert Nelson, or that Elaine Bucelli was, in fact, Robert Nelson’s wife at the time? The papers I have, virtually the entire financial record of CSC from 1966 until its demise, show a picture of routine overdrafts, expenditures for dry cleaning, car towing, and utility bills (when CSC had no car, no facility and no uniforms). Below is but a small sample of what are hundreds of scans (and pages) of financial records that show the same dismal pattern of bounced checks and threats from creditors:” This means nothing. Have you never bounced a check? I worked with Bob for years and managed his TV shop. He operated it, as he did his cryonics operation, as a sole proprietorship. He often paid for materials, services and even payroll out of his own pocket. He would sometimes repay himself from the business by writing himself a check. There were times when funds were low and he didn’t have the money in his personal account to cover, so small checks sometimes bounced. It wasn’t something that happened every day, but it happened. Again, have you never bounced a check? This doesn’t say anything about his character. Running a micro business can be difficult, but he managed to do so for many years, and did OK.* I’m not talking about an occasional bounced check; I’m talking about a routine practice that went on for years. Here are but a few examples: I am not where I can access the CSC records, but I can provide you with many more pages of what you see exemplified above. *”Bob Nelson damaged the lives of many, if not most of the people he dealt with in cryonics. He arguably destroyed the lives of every patient he came into contact with, with the possible exception of James Bedford. I say “possible” because Nelson’s utterly unprepared and incompetent care of Bedford caused terrible injury which was shockingly visible when Bedford was examined during his transfer from the Galiso dewar to the Alcor Bigfoot dewar in May of 1991. His bloody face is a damning indictment of Bob Nelson – an indictment which remains unchanged (and unchanging) from that fateful day in January of 1967 when Nelson first betrayed the trust put in him by a patient and that patient’s family, and then took 135 pages to lie about it in WE FROZE THE FIRST MAN.” Bob did not do the perfusion of James Bedford himself. Dante Brunol and Robert Prehoda did the perfusion and Bob assisted. Did they betray the patient and his family? If Bob lied about it in We Froze the First Man, where is the outrage from the people he wrote about in the book? i would think that everyone from Robert Ettinger to Robert Prehoda would have been pretty pissed off, and we would have heard from them a long time ago.* -Great point!- To my knowledge Dante Brunol did at least one more case under illegal and dismal circumstances. What happened to him after that, I have no idea. Curtis Henderson has repeatedly told me that Bob Ettinger knew there had been no perfusion, and that he and Ettinger had looked at Bedford’s face when Bedford was still on dry ice (Henderson and Ettinger had flown out to LA for the press conference announcing Bedford’s cryopreservation). Why didn’t any of these people say anything? I don’t know the answer to that question with the exception of two cases; Curtis Henderson and Robert Prehoda. Curtis has said that to his considerable regret he said nothing because the first freezing had finally happened and the consensus (unspoken) was to just smooth it over and do better next time. Do I think this was a mistake? Absolutely. Do I think it was immoral? Absolutely. While it may not have been possible to publicly disclose what had happened for many reasons (patient/family privacy, litigation, etc.) that would not have, and should not have, stopped the matter from being dealt with privately, honestly and aggressively inside the cryonics community – there and then. Certainly, you don’t pat the doctor on back who has just botched his first surgery due to a near total lack of preparation and competence, and then refer 11 more patients to him! As to Prehoda, to his credit he did speak out, but only years later. It was too little too late, but I give him enormous credit for his honesty and for his obviously genuine concern about Bedford when he stood in front of his dewar in Fullerton, and with more sincerity that I have heard from most involved in the sorry affair of Bedford’s care in 1967, or lack thereof, said (sic), “I really hope he makes it.” That Nelson lied in We Froze the First Man is without question. That he lied at the press conference is also without question: “A small handful of people; The Chamberlains, Mike Darwin, and Charles Platt, are bent on discrediting everything Bob Nelson and the CSC did, even to the point of discrediting themselves. If Bob Nelson’s operations were completely negative, if everything he ever did was criminal, neglectful, deceitful and disgraceful, why did the Chamberlains and others stay with him so long? Why don’t people like Robert Ettinger, Marshall Neal, Joe Klockgether, and many others loser to his operations condemn him? Why just these few? The trial hurt cryonics. Bob Nelson got in over his head and did some questionable things trying to do the honorable thing and keep his patients in suspension. These people want desperately to distance themselves from the trial and bob Nelson by discrediting everything he did. That is cheap and blatantly unfair. Unfortunately the Chamberlains, Platt have a great deal of influence among the cryonics community, and what they say carries a lot of weight. I’m nobody in the cryonics community, but I’m here to set the record straight the best I can for those who are willing to listen. I set out to help Bob write a book about what happened and I was appalled by some of the things I read on the internet. My goal is and has always been to find out what happened and why, weather my enquiries are good for bob’s reputation or not. Obviously not everything he did was positive. Conversely, not everything he did was bad. Those who try to discredit all that he did without acknowledging at lease SOME positive harm their own credibility, much more than I am harming mine by defending what Bob did right.* Again this nonsense: First, Marshall is dead; he died from motor neuron disease some years ago. Marce Johnson is ill with Alzheimer’s. I can tell you that when I spoke with Paul Porcasi (a CSC Director and long-time associate of Bob’s in cryonics) at the last Alcor Conference some months ago in Phoenix, he had absolutely nothing positive to say about Nelson and when I asked him how Nelson managed to pull off his deceit for so long, he simply shook his head and said (and I quote), “You just had to be there. It was incredible.” At the time Nelson was operating there were, generously, maybe 50 people seriously active in cryonics. In fact, it was not until after 1983 that Alcor had more than 50 signed up members! Most of the activists who had dealings with Nelson are either dead, incapacitated, or simply refuse to discuss what was an unpleasant and in some cases financially costly experience in their lives. Even given the heavy mortality in this cohort, I know of at least six people alive and well today who were activists at that time and who share my opinion of Nelson. If you want names, ask me by email. Considering only ½ or less of the activists at that time had dealings with Nelson, and considering the high morbidity and mortality in this cohort as a whole, 6 people is a very large number indeed. As to Bob Ettinger, he is still around and I guess the answer is to ask him. Marce did ask me to speak for her, and she gave me the CSC records and personally handed me the letter reproduced below. What she said was (quote), “This letter speaks for itself. Bob was a trusted friend and someone that I believed in. How could anyone with any humanity write a letter like this to me when I was very concerned about what had happened to the patients, and what could happen to me and my family in terms of personal responsibility, because I had taken over the Presidency of CSC at Bob’s request? Please see to it that this letter becomes public when the time is right.” The time is right. When the letter below was written, all but two of the patients at Chatsworth had long been thawed out and were rotting away. According to Nelson’s sworn testimony (Los Angeles Superior Court case C-161229; Supplemental answers to interrogatories …, 14 (July 22, 1980) the “capsules had failed” sometime around mid-1974 (http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/suspensionfailures.html) . Only a person’s worst enemy or a monster (or both) would write the letter below from Nelson to Marce Johnson dated 15 April, 1977. This letter was sent to a woman who Nelson to this day states did him no harm, helped him and CSC faithfully, and whom he considered a “dear friend.” That this letter is a holographic document I am very, very thankful for. It is as if Nelson were speaking these words on tape, because they are in his own hand (I have provided a typed transcription following the letter.) I have also included scans of the document whereby Marce took over the Presidency of CSC on 11 October, 1974; the same year Nelson has testified that the majority of the CSC patients had thawed out, including former friends and associates of Marce’s such as Russ Stanley and Helen Kline. TYPESCRIPT OF LETTER FROM ROBERT F. NELSON TO MARCELON JOHNSON: 17 April, 1977 Dear Marce, I just received your letter and felt I must respond immediately. It upset me to learn that you feel I am or should be in hiding. My guess is that (sic) your still feeling the pressures of that lying ghastly written (sic) suppena (subpoena) . But I thought we discussed and dismissed that matter for what it was, a totally untrue document. The only reason I avoided it all was at Mrs. G.* (sic) advise because that would give them the opportunity to search in other areas in their lying money grabbing search. I feel no need or desire to hide from anyone. I am still renting the apartment with Holly* as when I last saw you and can be reached at this number I gave you at the time (399-2664) Since we last talked my time has been consumed with my mom having cancer and her losing her 52 year old husband to heart attack 2 weeks after her breast removal. I’ve been going through an intensive electronics retraining. The years with cryonics left me with a large gap in my knowledge and ability to earn a living thru electronics repair. In addition I am maintaining the facility – have installed a new alarm system and ordered an additional capsule. My interest and commitment to cryonics is still very great. However I am unwilling to spend or waste time trying to interest the masses in the subject. As Ettinger so correctly phrased it, “Before you can interest people in cryonics you must interest them in life” and that is not a crusade I am qualified or care to take on. I know you know all of this, but I just feel like repeating it so at least there is no confusion in your mind as to where I stand, or what I am doing at the present time. So to summarize. I am maintaining the facility I am interested in and working in the storage end of cryonics. I am and have been here (at Hollys**) since my return from Hawaii and would like to talk to you at any time. You are one of my dearest friends and prime movers in this effort to extend our precious life. I look forward to hearing from you as soon as you and I can arrange a time and place. Endless Best Wishes, Believe me, (Signature) Bob Nelson P.S. I will write Mr. Fallon** regarding the capsule inquiry immediately. Thanks. ————————————————————————————————————————- * “Mrs. G refers to Stella Gramer who was the legal counsel for CSC Mrs Gramer was influential in CSC on almost every level, and we understand that it was due largely to her financial support that Cryonic Interment (CSC’s sister for-profit company) was able to construct its underground facility at Chatsworth. Mrs. Gramer was very active in CSC in the early days of cryonics and she can be regarded as a pioneer cryonicist. Mrs. Gramer was brutally murdered on February 7th; an unemployed scriptwriter named Thomas DeSoto is being held in connection with her death. Apparently DeSoto and his mother, June Nelson, had been living with Mrs. Gramer for the past five years. Mrs. Gramer had practiced law in California for 61 years and was still actively practicing law at the time of her death at 84 years of age. Mrs. Gramer was described by friends and associates as being “spry and energetic, very much involved with her law practice.” She was reported to be the oldest practicing female member of the California Bar. (see: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8304.txt) Presumably referring to Holly Douglas Martin, daughter of Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. The e founder of Douglas Aircraft Company (Douglas Aircraft became McDonnel-Douglas in 1967) . Ms. Douglas married the insurance salesman Fred K. Martin in a well publicised “first” cryonics wedding where the “till death do us part” portion of the vows was omitted from the ceremony. *** Refers to a letter from Bill Falloon of the Cryonics Society of South Florida enquiring about manufacturers of patient storage as well as pricing and availability. DOCUMENT TRANSFERRING THE PRESIDENCY OF CSC FROM ROBERT NELSON TO MARCELON JOHNSON: Mike Darwin