See also the personal story of Arlene’s cryopreservation: Her Blue Eyes Will Sparkle.

Arlene, 68, began the cryopreservation process after her heart stopped on June 9, 1990, at her home in Sonoma, California, as a result of lung cancer. She was the mother of Linda Chamberlain, one of the founders of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Arlene was born in Chillicothe, Missouri in 1922. She married and had two children. After a divorce, she moved to Los Angeles, California, and worked for 20 years as a secretary for the vice president of a large brokerage house. She was sponsored by her employer to attend brokerage school and became the first woman in California to earn her brokerage certificate, but that same company would not allow her to be a broker because she was a woman. Arlene moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and continued to work for the brokerage company. She realized she was bisexual and became very active in the Gay Rights movement when the AIDS crisis was taking the lives of many of her friends.

When her daughter tried to interest her in cryopreservation, she was not initially interested, and only signed up because her daughter wanted her to do so. However, learning that she had terminal cancer changed that. When the Alcor team began showing up at her house for a standby in order to give her the best possible stabilization prior to cryopreservation and was willing to sleep on her floor, and she could see the dedication of people who had never before met her, she found that her attitude changed to one where she was looking forward to going into the future.

Arlene now awaits the future in a dewar full of liquid nitrogen in the Patient Care Bay at Alcor. She was a strong feminist who always encouraged her children to think for themselves and to always question authority. She had a sense of adventure to the end and always did things “her own way.”