Robert Ettinger - Alcor Life Extension Foundation

Bob Ettinger and the
Cryobiologists
By Charles Platt
__________________
His contributions are
obvious: His seminal book
energized activists from
Curtis Henderson to
Bob Nelson, and
precipitated the first
cryonics cases.
Without him, would
cryonics even exist?
__________________
I
have often wondered how cryonics
would have developed if Bob Ettinger
had not been around to champion the
cause. His contributions are obvious: His
seminal book energized activists from Curtis
Henderson to Bob Nelson, and precipitated
the first cryonics cases. Without him,
would cryonics even exist?
We should remember that Ev Cooper
(writing as “N. Duhring”) came up with the
idea separately and circulated his manuscript
Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now
two years before Doubleday published its
edition of Bob’s book in 1964. Cooper’s
Life Extension Society could legitimately
claim to be the first cryonics organization,
although of course it was only a discussion
group. Karl Werner had not yet come up
with the word “cryonics.”
Looking back farther, British scientists
Alan Parkes, Christopher Polge, and Audrey
Smith evidently considered the possibility
of human cryopreservation in the 1950s.
Their success in cryopreserving red blood
cells and bull semen led Parkes to remark,
in an article in Scientific American: “Inevitably,
we were drawn to a still more fascinating
question: Could a whole animal survive
freezing?” Smith subsequently pursued the
reversible cryopreservation of hamsters,
and Greg Fahy once showed me a paper
coauthored by her that discussed the challenge
of rewarming larger mammals. I don’t
think it was coincidental that an illustration
suggested something big enough for a human
being.
Going back farther, the implications of
stopping and restarting life processes were
explored in Luyet’s book “Life and Death at
Low Temperatures,” based on his pioneering
work in the 1930s and 1940s. And still
farther back, in 1862, a novel titled “The
Man with the Broken Ear” by French author
Edmond About described a person
being revived after being preserved by desiccation.
Bob Ettinger once told me that he
was aware of this novel.
Clearly, cryonics was a concept that was
ready to happen. Bob’s singular achievement
was that he used the media to popularize it,
encouraged its first application to human
beings, and led an organization that pursued
it with truly remarkable persistence.
I once asked him if he felt that media
coverage for cryonics in the 1960s had
scared cryobiologists away from their prior
work on organ cryopreservation. He readily
agreed that the early cryonics cases unnerved
the scientific community, but of
course he tended to blame them for their
lack of courage and vision.
I had significant differences with Bob,
most notably in the mid-1990s when the
protocol at CI appeared to violate basic
cryobiological principles for minimizing
ice formation during initial cooling. (CI has
subsequently made great efforts to use rapid
cooling, as opposed to the slow process
that was applied previously.) Bob scoffed at
me for paying attention to anything a cryobiologist
would say, but I think mostly he
felt that their concerns were irrelevant. He
seemed to believe that future science would
be able to fix pretty much anything. When
he moved to Phoenix for a while, I was
told by someone at Alcor that he politely
declined their offer of local standby help in
the event that he might need it. As always,
he placed his trust in a local mortician, a
shot of heparin, some chest compressions,
and a few bags of ice.
This optimism inevitably put him at
odds with the scientific community. We can
only wait to find out whether he or they will
have the last laugh.
For myself, I hope that his optimism
was not misplaced. �
www.alcor.org Cryonics/Fourth Quarter 2011 19