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By Mike Darwin CPB at BPI When I left Alcor and started BioPreservation, Inc., (BPI) in 1992, the same high standard of care was continued. Where there was adequate notice, cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) was initiated in the home using mechanical … Continue reading →

From the time Jerry and I took charge of patient care at Alcor, both standard and cutting edge extracorporeal medical technology was applied to cryonics patients with both a high degree of competence and success.[1] That does not mean that we had the latest equipment, or the most elegant surroundings, because we usually did not. Nor do perfusionists or intensivists in New Zealand, or in the UK today, and yet despite (or perhaps because of) a relative paucity of the very latest devices in their ICUs and ORs, their patient outcomes, in terms of both morbidity and mortality, are better, on average, than those in the US – and these outcomes are achieved at markedly lower costs. Continue reading →

When I returned to Indianapolis, Indiana from working with the Chamberlains in 1975, a high priority for me was to acquire the equipment and expertise required to integrate extracorporeal medicine into cryonics. This proved much more difficult than I had hoped. To a man, all of the emerging professional perfusionists I contacted were uninterested in cryonics, or were actively hostile to it. Nevertheless, I managed to acquire training and employment as an acute care (ICU) hemodialysis technician, and this provided entre’ to both experimental perfusion (the hospital where I worked at the time was gearing up to begin a heart transplant program) and, just as importantly, several sources of used medical equipment. Continue reading →

Cryonics was not initially conceived of as a medical undertaking, per se. While there was discussion of the use of the facilities of hospitals and of heart-lung machines, extracorporeal medicine was just beginning in 1964, and the general approach outlined in Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality was one that might fairly be described as straddling cryobiology and mortuary practice.1 The idea was itself radically new, and little attention was given to business planning, or other minutiae of day-to-day operations. A likely reason for this was that many, if not most of those who first espoused or took up the idea, expected that cryonics would become the province of large corporations and establishment medicine, as soon as it ‘caught on.’ Continue reading →