MP:CH:others who wanted to be frozen, whoput us in the position of do it or not,we became familiar with the real costs.We’d bought a tank from Hope, thenanother tank, which didn’t work verywell. A search for an efficient tankstarted. We more or less were caughtup—we had to go on with it, to turnback was to give up the whole project.Most of what happened after that iscommon knowledge.No doubt many are aware that all thecompanies freezing people in the ‘60sultimately went out of business,including your own, and that nearly allthe patients from those early dayswere lost, for one reason or another.The tragedy was not all in vain,however, because other organizationswere formed who tried to avoid theearlier mistakes and as a result cryonics,while not a large movement, atleast has a devoted circle of followerstoday, and no suspension failure hasoccurred in over five years. But muchhas been written about the ill-fatedefforts of Robert Nelson inChatsworth, California, in which allthe dozen or so people in storagethere were allowed to thaw out anddecompose. Can you comment onthat, in relation to your own efforts?MP:CH:The fight with Nelson started, really,over his intolerance of the existenceof Bay Area Cryonics, in SanFrancisco. Nelson’s later problems,I’m certain, evolved out of the samekind of problems we had. He didn’thandle them nearly as well as we did.The costs of keeping people in liquidnitrogen went way beyond anything heestimated, way beyond anything hewas getting from the people he wasfreezing, and he insisted on undercuttingour prices to get people. And ourprices were way too low. In the meantimehe was carrying on this strugglewith the people who had started BayArea Cryonics, three or four peopleincluding Jerry White and MicheleNavarette. The basic problem wasalways the same—we had way underestimatedthe cost of storage. Towardsthe end there, Mike Darwin got into it.He was interested in perfusion, andhere was a whole area of technologywe had no idea about, and yet it probablywas the most important area. Andof course the costs of doing a goodjob of perfusion, to keep records of itand so on, were astronomical comparedto anything we had estimated. Ihad sort of a nightmare, because ifanybody sued us and took us to courtwe were going to be in the position ofjust taking a body and perfusing it—ifyou want to call it that—at some pointwithin hours or days after death, withan embalming pump which hasabsolutely no way of recording pressuresor pH or anything. You weren’treally doing much more than taking afish and throwing it in a bed of ice,and saying, “well the fish is preserved,it’s frozen.” That’s about the quality ofthe early freezings. The cost of doingit properly with qualified people wassimply out of the question.What finally happened to your organization?Saul went to Florida. Everybody hadto keep earning a living. A fellow inFlorida offered to finance Saul and his<strong>Life</strong> <strong>Extension</strong> Magazine that he wasputting out. I stayed there in NewYork because that’s where I wasworking and where my home was. Itjust sort of faded. We stopped takingon any new people. Still it was costingus four or five hundred dollars amonth, and most of the time thatmoney came out of our pockets. Onerelative, a Mr. Hurst, always paid.Another fellow froze his father, and hewanted to take care of his fatherhimself, which I was only too glad to lethim do. (He eventually let his fathermelt.) We had the people buy their owntanks—we never owned them. I’m gladwe did it that way, because when theystarted saying they were unhappy withthe way things were I could say fine,take the tank.MP:CH:MP:CH:So in the end the relatives all tooktheir people away?Yes. The last one, Hurst, went toNew Zealand, wrote to the city andsaid “I can’t carry it any more, I wantmy father buried,” and we went alongwith his wishes. You see, almost noneof these people had any inkling ofcryonics before they died. It was theirrelatives who wanted to freeze them.We had all-night discussions withMike Darwin when we were goingthrough all these troubles, and we literallyforged the policy that you havenow of not freeing people off thestreet, of freezing only those youknow want to be frozen, who havemade arrangements, and who havesigned papers expressing their desireto be frozen. We had people who hadnever heard of cryonics. Dostal andSteve Mandel were the only exceptions.(Steve’s mother got unhappy,said Nelson was Mr. Cryonics, andthat she wanted to take him there.The tank ended up in Chatsworth.She wasn’t paying us, and I don’tknow how she paid Nelson.)What do you see for the future of cryonics?There has been a lot of discussion anda lot has happened historically asidefrom cryonics. The advent of ourpresent age of “pulling the plug” washardly hinted at back in the ‘60s. I wasvery surprised recently, when I took afriend of mine to the hospital, to learnthat over half the deaths involved thisbusiness of stopping the life-supportsystem, once they’re in the hospital,and that the staff gets permissionfrom the relatives to do that. This isquite a wild thing when you thinkabout it. Now death is a matter of anact, a decision by somebody. But, toget to the point, I think that the healthindustry—as they like to call themselvesnow—is faced with this horrendouscost which is now almost a significantpart of the national budget, ofkeeping these people alive with nohope of recovery. They’re going to be10 Cryonics/Third Quarter 2009 www.alcor.org
forced either to look to alternativeslike cryonics, where instead of pullingthe plug you give them at least a palliative,or just making it official that at acertain point a board or your doctoror somebody will decide that’s itand—that’s it. They do this unofficiallynow, I hear, dose someone upwith morphine and put him on hisway.As cryonics increases its technicalability it increases the promise ofcoming back. As medical scienceincreases its ability to extend life underthe worst of conditions, at some pointI can’t see how they can avoid theobvious: “Are we going to keep thisman on these machines at five or tenthousand dollars a day, eating up ourmoney if he’s indigent, eating up hisfamily’s money if they have any, eatingup his estate’s money if he’s rich, orare we going to take this chance ofcryonics?” I would think that theappeal of cryonics would be hard toresist because to some degree it getseverybody off the hook. It gives anemotional and economic way out forwhat is becoming a major problem.I don’t think suspended animation willever be totally eliminated as a medicalprocedure. Some form of suspendedanimation has been desired for a longtime, and even if you had indefinitelyextended youth some form of suspendedanimation would be verydesirable. So I don’t think any of thistechnology is ever going to be wasted.Right now I think cryonics is going tocome along the way most things do. Ithink it will attract more and moreinterest. The pressures to use it willmount and the desire to use it willmount. The line between life anddeath will get hazier and hazier, andthe legal response to that is going tohave to come. There’ll have to be awhole different approach to when aman is alive and when he is dead.They’re already having problems withthat. It used to be that the heartstopped and that was the end of theMP:ball game, but not anymore. The morecryonics becomes a viable choice, andthe more people accept it as a viablechoice, the more people will do it andthe more support it will get. Andprobably, when it starts to come intofavor and really get support, for mostpeople it won’t be needed anymore—like most things [laughter].Thank you. ■www.alcor.org Cryonics/Third Quarter 200911
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