Jerry Leaf and I used to joke with each other that one of the most compelling reasons we decided to work with each other was that we each had this recurring nightmare where there is a a cryonics emergency. The medical personnel in the emergency department (ED) call the cryonics organization’s answering service, the answering service in turn pages the cryonics technician on-call, and then… the beeper goes off in the ED; and it is on the belt of the “patient” they are calling about, namely, Jerry, or me! Well, as it worked out, that call came in around midnight as I sat in the living room with my feet up on the coffee table watching the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It was Hugh Hixon, not an answering service (in those days Alcor personnel actually answered the phone all the time, every time, 24/7/365) and he informed me that Jerry had just been pronounced at Downey Community Hospital.

Unlucky Jerry, or so it would seem, but who knows, maybe he was the luckier one, after all. Time will tell. So, on practical grounds, there isn’t going to be any one person.

It’s also important to understand that no one man can be “it.” Even groups of men, working g together in professions, or in the sciences, can barely manage, and in professions such as the law and medicine, the results are uneven, at best. Contrast this with, say, aviation or dentistry, where the results are much more consistent and salutary – indeed , in aviation, the results are so uniformly good, it is almost unbelievable!

What may not be as obvious, but what is vastly more important, is that it was never just one man, and it never will be. Hell, I won’t hesitate for a moment in saying that, right now, I’m “Who’s on first.” That’s how the dice rolled, and how a lot of events and decisions, some made thoughtfully, some made for us, and some made stupidly by us (or in this case mostly by me) have turned out to created a situation where there’s now apparently just a lone survivor from that era who has the inclination to change, or to alter the situation that now exists. Sure, there are people like Brian Wowk, who have the breadth of knowledge, skill, and the inherent professionalism to change this situation – but they either cannot, or will not. And, in point of fact, I am currently in exactly the same position. With the exception of a few people in Russia, there isn’t a single person in a position of influence or power in institutional cryonics today, who would make even the slightest effort to empower me to change this situation.

The reasons for this vary, but the result is the same. If you hose away all the bullshit, the core reason for this is that they just don’t see the problem as being that serious or that urgent. Certainly, a fair number of people know that things are really bad, and I predict you will see few, if any specific public disagreements with my analyses here. There are confidential internal documents that would make even some of the thicker rank and file cryonicists’ hair stand on end; if they read them. The Officers and Directors of all the extant US cryonics organizations (and of KrioRus) know what the score is in terms of patient care. And many of them genuinely care. That’s not the issue. [And, BTW, it has taken me a ridiculously long time to understand this.]

No, the problem is far more complex. One one level, it is analogous to what you so frequently see when something goes catastrophically wrong, and everyone inside the extant institutions drop the ball. Consider TEPCO, and the unfolding disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. First there was denial (just as there was at Chernobyl), then there was disbelief (it just can’t be that bad!) and next, there is the mistaken belief that the problem can be dealt with discreetly and, above all internally and with the institution’s existing resource base. After that, things can unfold in a variety of ways.

If there is no feedback that FORCES action (i.e., you go bankrupt, the police incarcerate you…) then, after a period of years, dysfunctional becomes the accepted norm, and what’s more, it becomes the vigorously defended norm. People get angry, really angry, if the situation is criticized, and they will say, with great conviction of belief, “this is the best we can do with what we’ve got, and what you are doing is not constructive, in fact you are attacking cryonics and attacking our cryonics organization(s).

Some organizations may simply say, “Well, it’s sad, but that’s just the way it is. Guys like you and Jerry were an anomaly, and we need to realize that, and adjust our expectations accordingly.” Finally, if the failure mode goes on long enough, say 20 years or so, then you have a truly monstrous problem to deal with, because 20 years is a human generation, and that means that virtually all of the people doing cryonics will have known no other reality than that of what is, in fact, a failure mode.

These people, quite understandably, become enraged if they are told, no matter how delicately, that they don’t know what they are doing and that they have spent a great deal of time and effort (a lifetime, in fact!) learning to do cryonics in anything less than in a very competent fashion. And if they get a whiff of the idea that their practice of cryonics is, in fact, incompetent, or damaging and destructive, well then, you’ve got a group of very certain and very angry people who, at best, want to quietly suffocate you, and at worst, want to beat the crap out of you and then slowly suffocate you. Meanwhile, those who really are in the know, will continue to hold onto to the belief that with more time, more money, or more store-bought “medical expertise,” they will indeed solve the problem.

At ACS, there is more or less quiet acceptance, and this has been the case since around 2001. At CI, there is anger and the certain belief that they are doing the very best that can be done, given their resources, circumstances, and the financial and logistic situations of their patients. In Alcor’s case, the response has been more complex and, unintentionally, pretty horrific. With the exception of Joe Waynick and Tanya Jones, all the people the Alcor Board has brought in to try to “fix the problem” have been basically decent people. Some of them, like Dave Shipman, were very nice people who also brought a lot of business and technical know-how to the table. None of them wanted to hurt Alcor or cryonics, and I believe all of them wanted to “right the ship,” so to speak.

Not to put too fine a point on it, these people might as well have been put in chains in the Tower, and thence led to the chopping block. They never had a chance.

One reason for this, leaving technology out of it, is that there is no moral or ethical code in cryonics – none. There really aren’t even any clearly defined values. Let’s take a very practical example: A patient, or the patients are under attack, and you are the cryonics organization CEO, or Director. What are the limits of your responsibility? If the authorities come to you and say that you will either give over the patient(s), or they’ll strip you of your livelihood (i.e., take your medical or law license away, get your employer to discharge you…) is it permissible for you to hand over the patient(s)? What if they threaten your family, and/or other uninvolved, and completely “innocent” people? Is it OK, then? What if they threaten to imprison you, and even put the death penalty on the table, or they offer to spare some patients (those that may matter most to you, personally) if you just given them the one(s) they want? These are not hypothetical questions – they actually happened to me, and to the other Alcor Directors in the opening months of 1987.

Let me frame the question a bit differently in order to show you just how dangerous having no defined values is. Suppose that the state comes to you and says, “We will shut you down unless you give us control over your patients.” What is the right thing to do? What PRINCIPLES or VALUES will you use to guide you in making such a decision? The answer is NONE. We aren’t even “making it up as we go,” because that would imply that we keep a record our actions, and refer to these decisions as precedents. In fact, we don’t even do this!

And this situation isn’t hypothetical either, because when the Cemetery Board came down on CI, CI, and thus ACS, decided to surrender control of their patients to the state. Now, it is the laws and jurists of the state of Michigan that determine the conditions under which a patient can be removed from a cryostat at CI, and be relocated elsewhere, not the CEO or the Board of either CI, or ACS. If you want to understand the practical implications of this, you can go to http://www.bhsj.org/forms/disinterment%20and%20reinterment.pdf and to http://law.onecle.com/michigan/333-health/mcl-333-2853.html and read what you find there. It isn’t pretty.

A consequence of this is that anyone who steps into a position of leadership in cryonics does so with no rudder to guide them, and no set of standards to which they can be held accountable, or conversely, to which they can turn to defend themselves against unreasonable expectations, or worse, unreasonable charges of misconduct. In particular, the man who steps into the Presidency of Alcor is a man who has entered a country with no laws, but which is nevertheless populated by judges and jurors – each of whom will decide his fate on unknown, unknowable, shifting, and all too often completely arbitrary rules. The Directors, who are for all intents and purposes anonymous, never suffer the consequences of this grotesque situation (unless they err by becoming visible in their personal decision making or are otherwise conspicuous), even as they select victim after victim for the rack and the chopping block.

Beyond this meta-problem, there are the issues of specific technical knowledge, craft, and the culture of professionalism – all of which are either missing, or in serious disarray, when it comes to scientific cryonics (i.e., feedback and research driven cryonics) as opposed to “proceduralistic” or “ritualistic” cryonics, where a rote set of actions is carried out, without any meaningful feedback – rather like a blind baker, who also suffers from anosmia and ageusia, who cooks up pastries and cakes year after year, which are taken away with nary a word about their palatability, or lack thereof, ever returning to his ears. As long as the Boards and Officers of cryonics organizations lack nocioception, this kind of nightmarish landscape will continue to be the one that dominates the cryonics event horizon.

In large measure it’s the purpose of Chronosphere to repair cryonics on these very fundamental levels.

Finally, you ask, “are you willing to teach someone?”

The answer to this is, “No, I am not willing to teach some one, but I am working as hard as I can to establish the framework to instruct and mentor, and be instructed and mentored in return, by a group of like-minded people who share my commitment to cryonics, and my ideal of what it once was, and can be again.” The question now becomes are there the men and resources out there to permit that to happen, and do we (all of us) have enough time to make it happen before cryonics teeters off the precipice and crashes and burns – at least for us, here and now?

If the answer to those questions is “yes,” then an institutional framework must be created to facilitate the regeneration and creation of a cryonics that is informed by the scientific method, as well as a rational and fair morality. — Mike Darwin

How do the people alcor currently use compare to you?

are you willing to teach someone?

This illustrates the pernicious effects of a certain kind of “futurology” on cryonics. Apparently many long-time cryonicists don’t see how much of “the future” has become our recent past. The real 21st Century in many ways doesn’t much resemble the sales job we received about it in the mid to latter 20th Century; yet many cryonicists apparently still live mentally in 1990 or so, and talk about an imminent “nanoassembler breakthrough” and similar fantasies as rationalizations for not improving cryonics in the here-and-now.

I appreciate your efforts to re-inject some reality into the cryonics movement, Mike. The resistance to gathering and studying members’ medical records seems especially odd, considering that some prominent cryonicists advocate the collecting and digitzing of all sorts of trivial information about themselves to create “mind files,” “life blogs” or whatever trendy name they’ve given to this fad these days. The negligence of something as basic as medical records just reinforces the perception of cryonics as an unserious exercise.