Once you have the checklist you are ready for Step 2, which is to start your evaluation by web, email and phone. Get as much information as you can by these means, but trust none of it. And I do mean trust none of it.

That done, you are now ready for Step 3, which is to GO THERE and see for yourself. You will need to allow for at least 3 days days to examine the organization, because you are going to both not trust and to verify. This means that if you are told that the organization has, say, $50,000 in trust, or in the bank, or in gold, or in heads of cattle for each patient in cryopreservation, you are going to go and see the banker, go and see the gold, and in short, go and do whatever it takes to be as sure as humanly possible that not only are those cattle there, but that they are fat, happy, and know their owners by name.

You are going to look over their facilities, see if their toilets are clean, see if the facility cat or dog (if they have one) is well tended, see if the lawn is well manicured… You are going to talk to their neighbors, the Better Business Bureau, the local newspaper and TV station and, if you can find her, the town busy-body. You will definitely talk not only to their current liquid nitrogen supplier, but every liquid nitrogen supplier in the province…to their landlord…to their IT guy…

You are going to expect and accept invitations to the homes of their principals, or at very least, to be entertained by them, or for them to accept your offers of entertainment for at least one evening during your stay. You are going to insist upon spending TWO long evenings meeting MANY other members of the organization in an informal, social setting at a place with private spaces, where you can easily be “pulled aside” for a quick, whispered invitation to another private meeting. And if you get such an invitation, you WILL cancel your costly plans for the Bolshoi or Dearborne Village, or Pinnacle Peak and you will make that meeting(s).

You will insist on looking inside patient dewars, getting copies of LN2 fill logs, and having an opportunity to question the staff that care for patients during every phase of the procedure. You’ll look at equipment. If you know about motor vehicles, you’ll carefully scrutinize any of those that they own. If you are a finance guy, you’ll look at their fiduciary operations with similar scrutiny, if you a medical guy… Get the picture?

What I am trying to tell you is that, because cryonics is not a mature, developed product, my opinion, while not worthless, ultimately comes down to this:

* They are all grossly deficient (they all stink)
* Failure of existing organizations is highly probable
* Cryonics is an activist, work in progress endeavor; NOT a consumer good
* Altering the probability of failure is a function of what happens now and in the future
* Success or failure depends not just on them, but upon them, you and other like you, as well.

Current cryonics organizations are heavily focused on growth. They believe that getting bigger – in other words becoming MORE of what they already ARE is the solution to their problems. This focus on growth by dysfunctional cryonics has been the norm for 50 years. Interestingly, the only time a cryonics organization grew at a high rate (~ 30% a year) was when there was virtually no focused interest by that organization in membership growth at at all). I would also note that all the extant cryonics organizations seem to acknowledge that cryonics does have serious problems. IMO, these two things. taken together are akin to a precancerous cell struggling to escape the control of the apoptosis machinery trying to shut it down. — Mike Darwin

Apologies if I’ve overlooked something elsewhere in your site.