Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger (born December 4, 1918 – cryopreserved 23 July, 2011) was the father of cryonics as a result of the publication and widespread distribution of his book, The Prospect of Immortality (Doubleday, 1964) and because of his unceasing, forty-nine year long advocacy of the cryonics idea. He might also justly be called a “father of Transhumanism “on the basis of his 1972 book, Man Into Superman. Ettinger experienced cardiorespiratory arrest at 1600 on 23 July, 2011 at the age of 92.
Robert Ettinger as young boy.
Ettinger served as a second lieutenant infantryman in the United States Army during World War II. Severely wounded in battle in Germany, he received the Purple Heart. He earned two Master’s degrees from Wayne State University (one in physics, one in mathematics) and spent his working career teaching physics and mathematics at both Wayne State University and Highland Park Community College in Michigan. Ettinger and his first wife, Elaine, had two children, a son David in 1951, and a daughter Shelley in 1954. David Ettinger has been active in cryonics since 1968 and currently serves as legal counsel to the Cryonics Institute and the Immortalist Society.
Ettinger recovering from war wounds around the time he conceived of the idea of cryonics.
Ettinger grew up reading Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and assumed that one day – long before he grew old – medicine would have advanced sufficiently to have overcome both disease and aging, resulting in biological immortality. As he grew out of boyhood in the 1930s, he began to realize it might take much longer.
Ettinger read a Neil R. Jones story, “The Jameson Satellite”, which appeared in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories, in which one Prof. Jameson had his corpse sent into earth orbit where (as the author mistakenly thought) it would remain preserved indefinitely at near absolute zero. And so it did, in the story, until millions of years later, when, with humanity extinct, a race of mechanical men with organic brains chanced upon it. They revived and repaired Jameson’s brain, installed it in a mechanical body, and he became one of their company.
It was obvious to Ettinger that the author had missed the main point of his own story. If biological immortality is achievable through the ministrations of technologically advanced aliens repairing a frozen human corpse, then why shouldn’t everyone be cryopreserved to await later rescue by our own medically more sophisticated descendants?
Robert Ettinger in uniform during World war II.
In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories, and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition in the emergency department of a large, industrialized city’s hospital might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.
Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble! [1]
The Prospect of Immortality was published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1964.
In 1962 Ettinger privately published a preliminary version of The Prospect of Immortality; this finally attracted attention of a major publisher, and led to the 1964 Doubleday hardcover and various subsequent editions which launched cryonics. Forty-seven years have elapsed since the commercial publication of The Prospect of Immortality and, without exception, all those active in cryonics today can trace their involvement to the publication of one or both of Ettinger’s books. While Ettinger was the first, most articulate, and most scientifically credible to argue the idea of cryonics, he was not the only one. In 1962, Evan Cooper had independently authored a manuscript entitled Immortality, Scientifically, Physically, Now under the pseudonym N. Durhing. Cooper’s book contained the same argument as did Ettinger’s, but it lacked both scientific and technical rigor and was not of publication quality.
Ettinger became a media celebrity, discussed in the New York Times, Time, Newsweeek, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Christian Century, and dozens of other periodicals. He appeared on television with David Frost, Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, and others. Ettinger also spoke on radio programs coast-to-coast to promote the idea of human cryopreservation.
Ettinger on the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” in 1966.
Following the publication of The Prospect of Immortality and Ettinger’s mass media expositions of the idea, he again waited for prominent scientists, industrialists, or others in authority to see the wisdom of his idea and begin implementing it. By contrast, Cooper was an activist, and must be credited with forming the first cryonics organization (although that name was not to be coined until 1965) the Life Extension Society (LES). LES advocated immediate action to implement cryopreservation and established a nationwide network of chapters and coordinators to develop a grassroots capability for delivering cryopreservation on an emergent basis. Cooper left cryonics activism in 1969, and was lost at sea in 1982, but his work with LES was indispensable in helping to launch the first Cryonics Societies. The first of these was the Cryonics Society of New York, formed in 1965 by writer Saul Kent, attorney Curtis Henderson, and mechanical engineer Karl Werner. It was Werner who coined the term “cryonics.”
At left above, Ettinger with his mother’s cryostat in the mid-1980s and at right, Rhea Chaloff Ettinger, Robert Ettinger’s mother as a young woman.
In 1966 the Cryonics Societies of California and Michigan were formed. Ettinger was elected President of the Cryonics Society of Michigan (CSM). In 1976 CSM was transformed, under the direction of Ettinger, into the Cryonics Institute (CI) and the Immortalist Society (IS was originally the Cryonics Association). CI is a nonprofit organization created to provide cryopreservation services to the public. In 1977 Ettinger’s mother, Rhea Chaloff Ettinger, became CI’s first patient. Subsequently, Ettinger’s first wife, Elaine (1987), and his second wife, Mae (Junod) Ettinger (2000) entered cryopreservation at CI. IS is a 501c3 tax exempt organization created to support research and public education into cryonics and related disciplines. Ettinger was President of both CI and IS until 2003.
From the vantage of the opening decade of the 21st century, it is not hard to understand the bewilderment and intense frustration experienced by Ettinger and virtually all other cryonics activists from 1964 through circa 1990. To its adherents, the idea of cryonics seemed at once both obvious and compelling, yet cryonics was not only ignored, it was almost uniformly ridiculed and caricatured in the media. Scientific and medical criticism was vehement, dismissive, and surprisingly superficial. Incorrect statements were made by a wide range of experts, most notably professional cryobiologists, who stated that cryopatients were irreversibly dead, that all such patients’ cells would be ruptured and reduced to debris by ice crystals, that repair of cryoinjury was scientifically impossible, and finally, that the procedure was unethical, immoral, and constituted predation of the bereaved, and others unable to accept the natural order of death and decomposition. [2]
During this period cryonics adherents had no consistent or quality access to professional medical, legal, philosophical, business, or financial expertise. Admission of interest in, or advocacy of cryopreservation evoked displays of revulsion, ridicule, or both. Media and public perception were relentlessly negative. Contrary to public perception at this time, cryonics was (and still is) a largely middle class undertaking, and the resources available were those of mortuary personnel and equipment and the procedures which cryonics adherents were able to construct and devise themselves. [3] An additional concern was the uncertain legal status of cryonics and the ever present possibility of governmental interdiction. [4]
Ettinger has speculated that this state of affairs might be due to the fact that, “I had and have, no credentials worth mentioning being only a teacher of college physics and math. It is precisely this that prevented me, for so long, from doing more: I knew I carried no weight, had no formal qualifications, and was not suited for a leadership role. But as the years passed and no one better came forward, I finally had to write, and later felt I had to form organizations (although others had come into existence). This tragedy, in various manifestations, may persist. Potentially effective leaders may have turned aside because I (and later a few other obscure people) reluctantly preempted leadership. Business people and investors may have hesitated because the small, poorly capitalized organizations already in the field have had such limited (although increasing!) success in attracting participants.” [5]
The passage of over four decades since The Prospect of Immortality was written has demonstrated that the resistance to cryonics was not rooted in any of the deficiencies on which Ettinger speculates above. Rather, the idea was and still is, ironically, far ahead of its time. In 1964 the discovery of DNA was only 11 years old. cloning, genetic engineering, routine organ transplantation (let alone heart and lung transplantation) were years to decades away. Detailed exposition of enabling technology such as molecular level cell and tissue repair were 30 years in the future. Nineteen-sixty-four was a time when vitalistic ideas pervaded both culture and medical science, and death was perceived in binary terms; a patient was either dead or alive, with no middle ground or intermediate states. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had been invented by Peter Safar in 1960, only four years before the publication of The Prospect of Immortality and the first mass citizen training in CPR was still 8 years away: Leonard Cobb held the first citizen CPR training sessions in Seattle, WA in 1972. Passage of the Uniform Determination of Death Act did not occur until 1978, 14 years after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality. Successful cryopreservation of the first human embryo, a bundle of less than 60 undifferentiated cells, did not occur until 1983: 19 years after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality and 23 years after Ettinger first circulated his brief tract summarizing the idea of human cryopreseration as a means of medical time travel. At a time when most of the United States had no emergency medical system (EMS) and ambulances were hearses driven by Funeral Directors, the concept of cryopreservation as a vehicle to rescue by advanced medical technology was understandably incredible.
Cryonics depends upon a number of paradigm changing observations: Death is a gradual process rooted in progressive loss of biological structure (information) and is not a binary condition in most cases. Life does not depend upon continuous function or metabolism; widespread cryopreservation of human embryos was required to bring this idea into the public consciousness. Cryopreservation is possible for a wide range of cells and tissues, and even when uncontrolled freezing occurs, vast amounts of cell and tissue structure remain either intact or inferable (i.e., theoretically possible to reconstruct and restore to health and life from their damaged state). Advances in biology and medicine offer the prospect of growing new organs and regenerating or replacing damaged tissues; this is no longer considered wild speculation, but rather, is today progress expected by the public as a result of the logical progression of biomedicine. Finally, the ideas of nanoscale engineering and computation and their implications for cell and tissue repair (nanomedicine) are still not fully appreciated by the public, although understanding and acceptance of these ideas is growing. [6]
Robert Ettinger at the Cryonics Institute (CI) in 2009, with photos of some of some of the patients in CI’s care visible in the background. Photo by Chris Asadian
Without these paradigm shifts, cryonics appears irrational, or even bizarre, or macabre. In 1987 Ettinger, at first surprised that his idea was not rapidly accepted by society, reflected philosophically on the state of affairs 23 years after The Prospect of Immortality introduced the world to the idea of cryonics:
“Tragedy is in the eye of the beholder. As Sid Caesar (or maybe Mel Brooks – one of those really heavy thinkers) said: “The difference between comedy and tragedy? When the saber tooth tiger eats Moe, that’s comedy. When I get a hangnail, that’s tragedy.” And if the Tiger of Death eats you, that is the ultimate tragedy; that is when the world ends, when the cosmos disappears, when Everything becomes Nothing.
The “tragedy” of the slow growth of immortalism pertains mostly to them, and perhaps to you — not so much to me or to us, the committed immortalists. We already have made our arrangements for cryostasis after clinical death — signed our contracts with existing organizations and allocated the money. We will have our chance, and with a little bit of luck will “taste the wine of centuries unborn.”
– Mike Darwin, 24 July, 2011
Figure 1: The Alcor facility in Riverside, California at night in June of 1987.
Figure 2: Two views of the building once occupied by Alcor as it appeared in April of 2010 just before sunset. Two large motor homes, apparently undergoing renovation, sit in the parking lot obscuring much of the front of the building. Photos by Stanislaw Lipin.
Figure 3: Mike Darwin, shovel in hand, standing next to the Alcor Time Capsule which was buried in the footing of the Doherty Street building in September of 1986.
Figure 4: Front exterior of the Alcor facility in Riverside, CA on 12May, 1987 shortly after Alcor moved into the building. The vehicle bay which housed the Alcor ambulance is on the left and the patient care bay which house Alcor’s patients is on the right of the photo above.
Figure 5: The reception area of the Alcor facility.
Figure 6: The reception area looking in towards the interior of the building. That there were three Alcor patients at this time is easy to infer from the three photos of patients above the commissary cart.
Figure 9: The central work area where solutions were mixed, equipment checked and assembled, and where Cryonics magazine was pasted-up each month prior to being taken to the printer. The Alcor administrative files were in the black filing cabinets visible at the right of the photo.
Figure 10: The central work area extended in front the patient care bay and opened into it.
Figure 11: The stairway in Figure 1o led to a loft that was used for the storage of equipment and supplies, as a conference area and for additional office space. 
Figure 12: Conference/eating area, Mike Darwin’s office and some of the Alcor library in the loft. The small window at the left my desk opened into the patient care bay.
Figure 13: The “art office” where custom illustrations for Cryonics magazine were prepared using an Apple Macintosh computer and dot-matrix printer.
Figure 14: The loft space over the operating room was ultimately use to store infrequently used hardware and building supplies. In May of 1987 the most prominent fixture was a metal casket lined with foam and containing a metal air shipping box which served as the cooling bath for chilling whole body patients to dry ice temperature. 
Figure 15: The bulk of the loft space was used to store biomedical equipment and supplies to support the operating room.
Fire 16: Two views of the operating room: note the 15,000 BTU air conditioner in the upper left of the photo, which opened exhausted its heat into the central work area.
Figure 17: Acute post-operative care and ICU room.
Figure 18: The crew room where personnel could sleep during lengthily experiments. This room ultimately became the permanent residence of Hugh Hixon and Mike Perry.
Figure 19: The laundry and utility room of the facility; it also housed a second toilet.
Figure 20: The patient care bay with one neuro-vault, one upright MVE dual patient dewar (not in service) and the horizontal dewar containing James Bedford (barely visible at the lower right of the photo).
Figure 21: Vehicle bay and shop also served as the chemicals storage area.
Figure 22: The shop.
Figure 23: The Alcor ambulance with the Mobile Advanced Life Support System (MALSS) cart just visible in the open rear doors.
Figure 24: Former pilot Curtis Henderson prepares for a flight on an ultra-light aircraft as Mike Darwin looks on; his first time aboard a plane of any kind in many years.
Figure 25: Some of the attendees of the Grand Opening at a local Riverside eatery.
Figure 26: From left to right with faces to the camera: Thomas Donaldson, Fred Chamberlain, Linda Chamberlain and Billy Seidel (in profile).
Figure 27: Parking jam in back of Saul Kent’s Riverside home in Woodcrest.
Figure 28: Left to right: Arel Lucas, Steve Harris, Virginia Gregory, Hugh Hixon, Keith Henson and David London.
Figure 1: Enkidu, Alcor/Cryovita canine total body washout (TBW) # 2. At top, Enkidu lies chilled to ~5○C, his blood replaced with a specially designed preservative solution (perfusate), near the end of his 4-hours of cold, bloodless perfusion. The perfusate used was hyperosmolar and this resulted in dehydration of the aqueous and vitreous humors of the eyes resulting in ocular dehydration given the globes of the eyes of a flaccid and sunken appearance. Below, Enkidu 24 hours after reperfusion with blood and rewarming to normothermia. 
Figure 2: The first human cryonics case done at Cryovita Laboratories on 14 July, 1978 prompted a visit from the Fullerton police and the Orange County Coroner. Only photos were taken and footprints left behind. No harm was done to cryonics or to its patients in the process…
Figure 4: Spreadsheet of some of Alcor’s financial parameters from fiscal year ending 1984 through the end of fiscal year 2007. The total revenues column in highlighted in purple and the expenditures for research column is highlighted in red. Expemditures for research as a fraction of total revenues declined dramatically after the Dora Kent crisis in 1988. In the ensuing 19 year expenditure for research remained a tiny fraction of Alcor’s total revenues, and with the exception of three years, failed to even approach in absolute dollar amounts the yearly disbursements for research in the years prior to 1988. 
Figure 5: Alcor’s all-volunteer research team provided an otherwise unaffordable asset in the form of thousands of hours of contributed labor in support of Alcor’s various research undertakings. 
Beginning in 1982, Alcor continued the research to establish the degree to which ultrastructure was being preserved using existing human cryopreservation techniques begun by IABS in the late 1970s. The work at IABS employed rabbits, however it was decided to use cats as the experimental animals in the Alcor work because of the previous work done on brain cryopreservation by Isamu Suda and because it was anticipated that this work would progress to the evaluation of brain viability using electrophysiology – a model that was, at that time, largely confined to the cat. This research disclosed a number of previously unknown and unexpected findings, including the presence of macroscopic fractures in the animals as a result of cooling to below the glass transition point (Tg) of the water-cryoprotectant solution present in the tissues, as well as much more serious ultrastructural disruption due to freezing damage, than was previously expected. This work constituted the first comprehensive evaluation of human cryopreservation techniques and was also the first to examine the effects of ischemia on cryopreservation injury.
By carrying out autopsies and conducting histological and ultrastructural studies on the bodies of human patients converted from whole body cryopreservation to neurocryopreservation, Alcor was the first to discover that the macroscopic fracturing of organs and tissues that were occurring in experimental animals were also occurring in human patients. This work demonstrated that existing perfusion techniques were not delivering an adequate amount of cryoprotectant to the tissues. It was also the first demonstration that at the histological level, 3M glycerol was effective in preserving tissue architecture in a state indistinguishable from that of seen in unfrozen humans.
Alcor research demonstrated that hollow fiber dialyzers could be effectively used as oxygenators for extracorporeal support of animals, including adult ~25 kg dogs. This work was conducted 4 years before the first hollow fiber blood oxygenators entered clinical trials and five years before they entered routine clinical use.[21, 22]
Alcor also pioneered pharmacotherapy to mitigate the ischemia-reperfusion injury cryonics patients necessarily suffer as a result of having to wait for the pronouncement of medico-legal death prior to the start of the procedure.
Alcor applied research led to the development of a field-able platform for rapid post-cardiac arrest extracorporeal support of cryonics patients.
Alcor pioneered high efficiency storage for cryonics patients with the use of the MVE A-2542 cryogenic dewar for storing neuropatients and the subsequent development of the “bigfoot” dewar which can store four whole body patients and 4 neuropatients. Alcor was the first cryonics organization to offer seismic, ballistic and blast protection to its patients with the development of the “neurovault” in 1984.
Alcor engaged in considerable charity work during the 1980s taking over the care of three unfunded patients and assisting two other patients with inadequate funding into cryopreservation. This record of charitable cryogenic care of patients in need is unique to Alcor through to the present.
Wowk, BW, The death of death in cryonics. Cryonics. 9(6);30-71:988: 
Darwin, MG. Transport Protocol for Cryonic suspension of Humans. Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Fullerton, CA, 1986. 
This period was also one of great growth in the technology for providing in-field support of patients experiencing cardiac arrest remote from Alcor’s facilities. Alcor conceived of an implemented the idea of remote standby and was the first cryonics organization to offer extended extracorporeal support during ultraprofound hypothermic transport of patients.
On 21 March, 1978 the Cryonics Institute (CI) acquired their first facility, a storefront building in the Detroit Metro area. The CI building was the first wholly owned (cash purchase) patient storage facility in the history of cryonics, and remains one of only two in the world today. The May, 1978 issue of the Immortalist Society newsletter, The Immortalist, described the facility thusly:
Above: The CI facility as seen from the street corner a block away in Detroit Michigan.
Above: The first CI facility was quite small and was tucked in between other businesses in a residential area of Detroit. 
Above: The entrance to the CI facility in 1978.
Above: The rear of the CI facility in 1978.
Above: CI’s first cryostat. This cryostat was fabricated in CI’s first facility by Andy Zawacki and Robert Ettinger, and was later transported to their second, much larger facility in Clinton Township (see below). Photo by Taryn Simon, 2008.
Above and below: American Cryonics Society (ACS) patient being readied for cool-down to liquid nitrogen temperature. Control of temperature descent was by slowly lowering the patient towards a pool of liquid nitrogen in the bottom of rectangular, vacuum insulated fiberglass and epoxy resin cryostat. Above, Robert Ettinger (left) and Andy Zawacki (right) and below. Robert Ettinger (far right) and Andy Zawacki (right). Photos by Jim Yount.
Figure 1: Fred and Linda Chamberlain with an early prototype perfusion machine.
Figure 2: Fred and Linda Chamberlain with Fred’s father, Frederick Rockwell Chamberlain, Jr., in December of 1974.
Figure 3: Operating room of Soma, Inc., and the Institute for Advanced Biological Studies (IABS) in Indianapolis, IN in 1979.
Figure 4: The entrance to Cryovita Laboratories located at 4030 N. Palm, Unit 304 in Fullerton, CA circa 1979.
Figure 5: Cryovita occupied a small, impossibly cramped industrial bay in Fullerton, California. Animal research and human cryonics cases were carried out using the same facilities. At left, above, Jerry Leaf stands next to Alcor’s first dual patient cryogenic dewar, proudly sporting the MVE logo.
Figure 6: With the exception of the operating room and the office/reception area, the bay was neither subdivided not heated or cooled. It was often miserably cold in the winter (~ 15○C) and brutally hot in the summer. Dust, which poured in from over and around the roll-up door at the back of the bay and through the skylight, was a constant problem.Above is the Alcor office at appeared in 1983.
Figure 7: Before the operating room was constructed, patient cryopreservations and research work were conducted in the undivided industrial bay. Wiring was makeshift, comfort was non-existent, and the whole operation functioned on a shoestring. Above, a canine total body washout conducted at Cryovita in 1978 or 1979.
Figure 8: The all-volunteer research staff at Cryovita during a canine TBW after the (unsuccessful) experiment circa 1978-79. Left to right: Jerry Leaf (hands), Betty Leaf, Reg Thatcher, Greg Fahy, Tom the Perfusionist, Cath Woof and (barely in frame) Thomas Donaldson.
Figure 9: A Clay Adams Becton-Dickinson 0151 Analytical Centrifuge of the kind commonly discarded after home-dialysis patients died or returned to –in-center hemodialysis. These units retailed for ~$500 in 1982.
Figure 10: Cryovita was located in an industrial park a few hundred yards from a major Southern California drug wholesale warehouse. Experimental dogs were walked along the concrete wash (photo at lower right) or in the field on the other side of the wash. A red X marks the location of the PRN dumpster where we used to recover discarded medical products. The image is from Google Earth and the building which currently occupies the lot labeled “Dog Exercise Field” has been removed using Photoshop.
Figure 11: Above left, dozens of doses of Unipen (nafcillin) parenteral antibiotic recovered from the dumpster of PRN. At right, boxes of perfusion supplies, dialyzers and ethylene oxide sterilization wrap all obtained for free, or at pennies on the dollar. Photo 28 May, 1995.
By Mike Darwin
Figure 1: Sir Astley Cooper (1768 –1841).
Figure 2: Today we have antisepsis, anesthesia, and injectable pain killers. Medical and dying have been made seemingly more palatable. But are they, really?
Figure 3: Then and now: At left above, a tuberculosis (TB) ward in the late 19th or early 20th century was a place fear, loneliness and often little or no hope. A contemporary nursing home (above, right) is little different, except that the people dying there are, on average 30 or 40 years older and they, unlike the TB patients of the previous centuries, know with certainty that for them there will be no escape.
Figure 4: Death is death; the end result is the same; non-existence and oblivion. It is also an illusion that the horror and suffering are really less today than they were yesterday, or will be tomorrow. If anything, extension of the mean lifespan in the absence of regenerative and rejuvenating medicine extends the period of suffering and increases the terror. The average lifespan of a patient with Alzheimer’s disease is 8 years from diagnosis to death. More people are interned in extended care facilities today than were ever imprisoned at Auschwitz, Dachau, or all the Nazi concentration camps combined. And unlike many patients dying from infectious disease in the previous centuries, patients in nursing homes and care facilities (if they are not demented) know that for them there is no hope of escape. That is a condition that even the Nazis never managed to uniformly impose on their victims.
I don’t believe in any magical technological Singularity where we will all wake up someday soon; both immortal and in utopia.
Figure 7: No marker or monument endures and no man’s life, let alone his personal identity, can be written down on paper in words.
Question: How did God create heaven and earth?
The resolution of the images, both real and computer generated (CGI), is superb and unassailable. The credibility of CGI has surpassed that of what is possible when merely capturing reality on film, and by this I mean that the unreal trumps the real and the unbelievable is more credible than the believable. Sitting there dazzled by the sheer beauty of the film’s imagery, it occurred to me why god(s), if there are any, made the universe – because they could realize a place vastly more beautiful and wonderful, and vastly more terrible and dark than the world which they themselves are confined to.
By “nicer” I do not necessarily mean more “pleasant.” There are physical limits imposed by our universe on how much pain, how much suffering, how much physical distortion, disruption and rending of the flesh are possible, before life ceases. It is the sorrow of every sadist and every masochist that the flesh of the body can only be tortured in so few, and so finite ways. What are the implications of that? Perhaps it would be wise for us to reflect on the quote from Milton’s 
The story line of the film captures with perfection the essential values of this culture. The “final” battle between good and evil is played out; Lord Voldemort, whom the author of the Harry Potter books has 
The closing sequence of the film is of Harry Potter and his cohorts as mature men and women living in the everyday world we all inhabit. He has a child now, and it is time to send him off to Hogwarts boarding school to learn the craft of Wizardry. Age has begun to mark Harry Potter, and these scenes are meant to show us that by his deeds, he has ensured and acceded to the triumph of generational mortality. Harry Potter will grow old and die, as will his children, and his children’s children. Immortality is not for men, nor is super-knowledge beyond that already granted to Wizards, which is, of course, vastly greater than that granted to the mere “muggles” whose world they cohabit.
Figure 1: Soluble urokinase plasma receptor (suPAR). Panel A – Schematic representation of the amino acid sequence of human uPAR showing its three homologous LU domains. Consensus disulfide bonds defining the LU domains are coloured black. The position of the C-terminal glycolipid anchor (GPI) is shown (modified from Ploug and Ellis, 1994, with permission). Insert: The archetypical three-finger fold is illustrated by a ribbon diagram for a single secreted LU-domain protein (snake venom toxin-a) using the PDB coordinates 1NEA and PyMOLTM (DeLano Scientific). Panel B – LU domain signatures in the primary sequence of human uPAR. The three LU domains (DI, DII and DIII) of uPAR are aligned with the consensus structures being highlighted (disulfide bonds in yellow and the invariant asparagines in red). The number of residues between the individual cysteines is represented by dots or numbers in brackets (modified from Kjaergaard et al., 2008). Panel C – The crystal structure solved for uPAR in complex with a peptide antagonist is shown as a ribbon diagram (Llinas et al., 2005). The individual LU domains are colour-coded (DI in yellow, DII in blue and DIII in red), and N-linked carbohydrates are shown as white sticks. The attachment to the cell surface by a glycolipid anchor is modelled in this cartoon. The insert shows uPAR in a surface representation, with the hydrophobic ligand-binding cavity marked with hatched lines; carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms are coloured white, blue and red, respectively. These structures are visualized by PyMOLTM (DeLano Scientific), using the PDB coordinates 1YWH (reproduced from Kjaergaard et al., 2008).[1]
Figure 2: Schematic representation of urokinase receptor The GPI-anchor links uPAR to the cell membrane making it available for uPA to bind to the receptor. When the receptor is cleaved between the GPI-anchor and D3, it becomes soluble (suPAR). suPAR is a stable protein that can be measured in various body fluids. uPA: urokinase-type plasminogen activator, uPAR: uPA receptor, suPAR: soluble uPAR, 1: Domain 1, D2: Domain 2, D3: Domain 3.
Figure 3: uPAR ligands. Schematic representation of the functions of uPAR via its interaction with uPA, integrins, and vitronectin (modified from Kjaergaard et al., 2008)[1].
Figure 4: The optimum level of circulating suPAR appears to be below 2.0 ng/mL in men and 2.5 ng/mL or lower in women. In the healthy population, risk of disease or death rises sharply as the suPAR level increases. The circulating suPAR level increases sensitively with lifestyle choices know to be associated with increased risk of illness and death, such as tobacco abuse, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle – but not to the same degree in all individuals. In fact, suPARnostic® testing may allow clinicians (and theoretically tobacco companies and smokers) to determine those patients for whom smoking, obesity or other “harmful” lifestyle choices pose much less risk.
Figure 5: Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve comparing composite marker’s ability to predict mortality. ROC curves comparing suPAR measured with suPARnostic® (V-suPAR) combined with age (AUC=0.92), soluble triggering receptor expressed on myoloid cells-1 (sTREM-1) combined with age, V-suPAR, sTREM-1 and macrophage migration inhibitory factor ROC curves combined as the 3-marker, and the 3-marker combined with age. Prediction of 30-day mortality (a) and 180-day mortality (b) prospectively collected cohort of patients with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) that were admitted to an emergency department and a department of infectious diseases at a university hospital.[12]
Figure 6: Monitoring of suPAR levels over time is likely to produce data such as is hypothesized above. Adverse and persistent poor lifestyle choices lead to a gradual elevation of suPAR until a lethal event occurs; in this case metastatic colon cancer. suPAR monitoring may allow for early detection of “acute” morbid processes such as cancer.
CASE 2: Healthy male, age 25 years, experienced a continuing “feeling sick” and symptoms like being pale, being tired. Repeated doctors visits resulted in no diagnosis, all blood values were normal, no further tests were authorized. 
CASE 3: Healthy male, age 45, experienced the same symptoms as Case 2 above, including loss of some weight. Blood values were normal and the person’s suPAR level was slightly elevated, but was not rising into the critical area
Figure 3: The author standing next to the “John Snow Pump” on Broadwick Street, Soho, London in May of 2011. Snow is justly considered the father of epidemilogy for his work in pinpointingthe source of cholera outbreak in London in 1849 as the public water pump on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street). The municipal authorities removed the handle from the pump to prevent the local residents from usingthe water. The handle remains off of the pump except for one day of the year, John Snow Day, when it is cerimoniously put back in place.
Figure 5: Trajectories of projectiles launched at different elevation angles but the same speed of 10 m/s in a vacuum and uniform downward gravity field of 10 m/s2. Points are at 0.05 s intervals and length of their tails is linearly proportional to their speed. t = time from launch, T = time of flight, R = range and H = highest point of trajectory (indicated with arrows). Corporations have similar arcs from launch to crash back to earth.
Figure 6: Arie De Geus
Figure 7: The arc of the corporate life span as proposed by by Arie De Geus. Note that the terminal phase is bureaucracy where in the corporation becomes unresponsive to its environment and becomes increasingly insulated from both new opportunities and from its customers by bureaucratic mechanisms.
Figure 8: Offering someone a costly ticket on a plane that has a negligible probability of making the journey without falling out of sky is not much of an alternative to staying put, even in the face of certain death. At least you have the opportunity to enjoy the money you would have spent on a ticket to nowhere.