Max More

Introducing the Reintegration Working Group

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Alcor will not be able to revive any patients for many decades to come. Although that time is a long way off, we should be thinking about it and planning for it now. For one thing, that’s part of Alcor’s mission: “Future restoration of good health and reintegration into society for all patients.”

Cryonics will be less scary to some if we have a clearer picture of the challenges revived patients will face and the ways we can prepare for them. The Reintegration Working Group (RWG) aims to develop ideas and plans relating to:

  • Asset trusts and future-income trusts
  • “Memory books” and ways to fill in any missing memories
  • Legal structures to allow patients to claim their identities and their status as persons
  • An organizational culture that fosters interest in and desire to help those who return from biostasis.
  • Supporting and protecting newly revived patients as they gradually reintegrate into the new world
  • Facilitating contact with other revived cryonauts, if this is desired.

Are you interested in this work? If so, what can you contribute? If you want to inquire about participating, email me.

–Max More

 

Max More

What questions would you ask during a tour of Alcor?

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During the coronavirus pandemic, Alcor has had to curtail in-person tours. We are currently arranging to offer virtual tours. When you book a tour, you will receive a link to view a video of a tour conducted by Dr. Max More, Alcor’s Ambassador & President Emeritus. During this video tour, many of your questions will be answered. However, you will have an opportunity to ask additional questions during or following the virtual tour.

We will likely revise the virtual tour, including creating a more technical version for those with more scientific and technically oriented questions. To help us provide you and other future virtual visitors with a maximally informative and useful tour, please send us your questions. Some of the questions that will be answered include:

Introduction:

  • What kind of organization is Alcor?
  • How long has it been in operation and what are the highlights of Alcor’s history?
  • How many members and patients does Alcor have?
  • Is cryonics unique or does it have anything in common with low-temperature surgery or freezing sperm or eggs?
  • When was the first person frozen?

Standby, Stabilization, and Transport section:

  • How does Alcor know when a member needs to be cryopreserved and how quickly can that happen?
  • What procedures do you use to keep human tissues viable until you can cryogenically preserve them? Is it anything like CPR? Or like transporting organs for transplant?
  • How soon must Alcor’s team get to the member after legal death? Is there a limit?
  • Can you start the procedure before legal death?

Operating Room/Perfusion section:

  • Doesn’t ice badly damage human cells? Or do you have a way of preventing that?
  • Why do you have a CT scanner in the operating room?
  • How does a brain-only or “neuro” case differ from a whole-body cryopreservation?
  • Why do many members choose the neuro option?

Patient Care section:

  • Are cryonics patients alive? Dead? Something else?
  • How long can patients stay cryopreserved?
  • Is it true that baseball great, Ted Williams, is one of your patients? Who else do you have who is famous? (Or why can’t you tell me?)
  • Would you revive anyone before a solution to the problem of aging has been found?

Post-tour section:

  • How much does all this cost, and can I pay for it with life insurance?
  • Who will take care of me if I am revived?
  • Will I have any money or be able to make an income? Is there any way to take my money with me and my loved ones?
  • Can I ask to be revived only if my spouse/siblings/offspring/parents can be revived?
  • What will the world be like if I am revived?
  • When do you think people will be revived? What technologies will make that possible?
  • Won’t there be too many people in the future already?
  • What if I want to do this but my spouse/family/friends are against it?
  • Why have so few people signed up to be cryopreserved?
  • Why would I want to be cryopreserved rather than eaten by worms and bacteria or incinerated in a large oven?
  • Is there any tension between cryonics and religions?

Technical questions, probably for a separate, optional section:

  • You say you don’t really, literally freeze people, but instead “vitrify” them. What does that mean?
  • Is it true that the brain dies after three minutes without oxygen?
  • Why is it that we can cryopreserve skin, corneas, eggs, sperm, and heart valves and rewarm and implant them but we cannot yet revive whole humans or human brains?

Book a tour.

Send your questions to: info@alcor.org

Max More

De-identification in Case Summaries

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Alcor is pushing to provide a higher level of confidentiality and anonymity of members and patients who wish it. As a result:

  • Case summaries no longer identify the location of a patient more precisely than the level of country and (within the USA) state.
  • The date of a cryopreservation will no longer be given except for the month and year. Timelines will begin at <month> at T+0 days. Subsequent days will be presented as “T+x days”. Case summaries will also no longer report confidentiality status.
  • Even if a patient is non-confidential, no name will be given in case summaries. This is to make it more difficult to connect a name in the List of Patients to that Case Summary and A-number, especially if they were the only non-confidential patient that same month.

For links to full case reports, see Complete List of Alcor Cryopreservations, and Complete List of Non-Confidential Cryopreserved Alcor Patients.

Many case reports are currently in the pipeline and will be published soon. Publication was delayed while Alcor decided on the most effective and practicable way of protecting confidentiality for those who request it.

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Does cryonics mean I have to change the way I live?

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Q: I enjoy activities that are fun but may be dangerous sometimes, like mountain climbing, scuba diving, and wilderness exploration. I understand that these activities could cause me to die in a place where I may not be retrieved in time for a good cryopreservation, or at all. Would signing up for cryonics mean that I must change the way I live?

A: Having cryo arrangements actually does NOT require you to avoid risks. You can live exactly as you did before. You may decide to change some aspects of how you live. You may instead decide to live the same way but with a backup plan in place (cryopreservation should all else fail).

If you are thinking of physically risky activities (riskier than driving a car), it’s true that a fatal accident could damage you in a way that could never be fully repaired in the future. If you fall from a motorcycle or a mountain, you may suffer loss of brain structure (not simply loss of function). If you have a fatal accident (or heart attack or stroke) while hiking in remote wilderness beyond anyone’s easy reach, it may not be possible to cryopreserve you well or at all. But does it make sense to pass on cryonics because you want to take some risks? You don’t say you won’t wear a seat belt because you sometimes go mountain climbing, right?

Even for the less adventurous, this kind of disastrous outcome is always possible in today’s circumstances. There are car crashes, suicides, homicides, airplane crashes (occasionally), and falls from roofs. But put the risk in perspective. The fact is that you’re more likely to die of a disease. Cryonics is far more likely to provide a promising path forward in those cases.

You might decide to take fewer physical risks over time because you are not as physically resilient or because you now think you have more to lose. It’s possible that the act of making cryopreservation arrangements encourages you to think about your life in more long-term ways. That may or may not lead you to pull back on stimulating but risky activities. Any change will be a choice you will make based on what you understand at the time.

So, we can’t know whether or not you decide to do fewer things that you find fun now. But we can say that signing up for cryonics won’t stop you from enjoying the wilder parts of your life. For you, those activities may be a large part of why you want to live longer.

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A-3360 becomes Alcor’s 178th Patient in June 2020

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Alcor member A-3360 is an 87-year old male with whole body cryopreservation arrangements. He was pronounced legally deceased in June 2020 in California.

This was a third-party sign-up case with cryopreservation arrangements made at the last moment by his family who contacted Alcor shortly after legal death. Alcor’s Deployment Committee dispatched one of its strategic partners, International Cryomedicine Experts (ICE) to send one of their paramedics. Once the legal paperwork had been signed early the next morning, the ICE operative was able to retrieve the patient and manage initial cooldown and transport to Alcor on dry ice. Cryogenic cooldown was completed, and the patient was transferred to long-term storage. A debriefing was held less than two weeks later.

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Member A-1404 became Alcor’s 179th Patient in June 2020

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Member A-1404, a 59-year old female Alcor member with neuro cryopreservation arrangements was pronounced legally deceased in Texas in June 2020.

Alcor contacted Suspended Animation (SA) to deploy for standby. SA was on the plane with equipment loaded in less than five hours but faced unavoidable layovers and mechanical issues with the planes. In case the delays were too much, Alcor’s Readiness Coordinator promptly got on a flight with a full Field Neuro Cryoprotection Kit, carried all of it into the hospital and got set up. Fortunately, SA arrived within four hours before care was withdrawn from the patient.

SA performed a stabilization and field blood substitution. The patient was flown on ice to Alcor where a neuro separation and neuro cryoprotective procedure was performed. Alcor’s gravity-driven Field Neuro Cryoprotection system was used in place of the standard pump and mixing reservoirs to minimize the generation of aerosols at a time when COVID-19 was spreading. A debriefing was held less than two weeks later.

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A-1468 became Alcor’s 177th Patient in May 2020

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A-1468, a confidential, 56-year old male Alcor member with neuro cryopreservation arrangements was discovered legally deceased in his residence in May 2020. Cryogenic cooldown was initiated two days later.

A-1468 had been an Alcor member for many years. The circumstances were extremely unfortunate. This patient experienced an unattended death in his home in California, making him a Coroner’s case. Alcor received notification the morning after the member was discovered by authorities performing a wellness check at the request of family. Despite Alcor rapidly providing paperwork documenting wishes to avoid autopsy, an autopsy was performed. The patient was released to Alcor the following day.

Once Alcor received notification about the circumstances, Alcor immediately called upon International Cryomedicine Experts (ICE) to respond to the location to assist with coordination and logistics. ICE recovered the patient’s brain, which had been sectioned during autopsy, and placed the tissue on dry ice just after noon. The patient was then transported on dry ice by ICE via airline to Alcor and cryogenic cooldown was initiated at 19:52 hrs. that same day. An uneventful cooldown was terminated at 11:35 hrs two days later, and the patient was moved to long-term maintenance at liquid nitrogen temperature.

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Alcor Members Speaking at the Humanity+ July 7-8 Online Summit

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POST-PANDEMIC: A World Free from Disease and Destruction. That’s the title of a summit organized by Humanity Plus to be held online via the Zoom platform. Alcor members are likely to find plenty of interest here. In fact, a good portion of the speakers are Alcor members! There are three key topics or themes:

    Beyond Mortality: Preventing Negative Conditions Impacting Life
    Beyond Scarcity: Economy of Abundance
    Beyond Cruelty: Stop Discrimination, Create Compassion

Most obviously, Alcor members will immediately find relevant the first of these topics. Longer lives do not occur in a vacuum. The other topics consider some of the context we might hope for as we live longer lives. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have provided the original impetus for this event. As the summit page says:

There is an undeniable need for new technology, science, and social efficacy to empower human dignity and to minimize the destruction of life.

Dealing with the pandemic is front page news. Yet, another never-ceasing crisis goes under the radar—all people are aging from failing systems, people are suffering from scarcity, and people are affected by the cruelty of others.

SARS-CoV-2 is a war on human biology and a wake-up call for every person on the planet. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, or socioeconomic status. It can affect everybody, but it kills first the oldest, the weakest, and the poorest.

This world-wide killer infection has expanded the bandwidth of news feed and online events as people are trying to understand and strategize a solution. There is no question that human civilization is now alert to its own vulnerability. Rather than continuing with such vulnerability, we need to act at the biological core. The human genome must be strengthened and protected.

Expanding on the three themes:

1. Beyond Mortality: The disease of aging leaves people helpless, locked in a system of sickness and death rather than a system of healthcare and life. We need new technology, science and social structures that promote positive conditions rather than negative conditions.
2. Beyond Scarcity: We must improve global quality of life. An economy of abundance is not about how much; it is about how good—a quality of life that provides basic human needs, freedom, and well-being, and that advances opportunity and potential.
3. Beyond Cruelty: Discrimination of people because of sex, age, race, gender, appearance, religion, beliefs, and political and social status are global, verifiable, and prevalent. What would society need to overcome misperception and cognitive bias? With an abundance of compassion, discrimination has no place or purpose.

The speakers currently confirmed are: Ben Goertzel, Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Nell Watson, Jose Cordeiro, Anders Sandberg, David Brin, Betelhem Dessie, Alishba Imran, Michael Masucci, Kat Cotter, Zoltan Istvan, Maria Entraigues-Abramson, Ryan O’Shea, David Ernst, David Wood, David Kelley, and Didier Coeurnelle.

More Information.

Register.

–Max More
Ambassador and President Emeritus, Alcor Foundation

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Technical Update: Body Bag Modification

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After much discussion between the medical and scientific staff, directors, and others, Alcor recently adopted new guidelines: “Pandemic restrictions on Alcor cryonics procedures”. Two components of those procedures for all cryonics procedures in the operating room (OR) are: 1. Either use a body bag or the Alcor whole body table for OR procedures. 2. Drain into a sealed bladder or bucket pre-loaded with the appropriate quantity of disinfectant. Steve and Jacob Graber figured out how to put this procedure into operation.

In Steve’s view, the best approach is to perform the Field Cryoprotection Procedure (FCP) directly in the body bag with a gravity drain into a sealed bladder pre-metered with the appropriate disinfectant. This enables good control over the drain protocol. It also prevents additional moving of the patient from the gurney onto and off of the WB table – a point of physical exertion and a potential source for contaminated fluid leakage.

Steve and Jacob “came up with a modification to the body bag that provides for a controllable drain system into a waste reservoir during FCP. See the image. The acrylic strengthening rings are welded to the body bag. The barbed drain-nipple is captured on the inside by a threaded nut. It is very strong and completely waterproof.”

Previously, to drain the body bag from the corner into a bucket meant cutting the body bag with scissors. This could expose the operator to the flow of fluid and risks spillage if the bag was moved. Steve writes: “The gurney must be tilted such that the drain is lower and a hydraulic assist at the head-end of the gurney does this, as well as offering the surgeon some height adjustment of the surgical field. We will use a hydraulic jack under that set of wheels and the rear wheels must be locked and/or blocked to prevent movement of the gurney.”

Having a controllable drain for ice bath water and for FCP effluent is a desirable feature. Steve and Jacob will be modifying all body bags with this drain system, including those that are sent into the field.

–Max More
Ambassador and President Emeritus, Alcor Foundation

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A Bad Coronavirus Week for Arizona

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In my last post a week ago, I noted the shortening of doubling times for confirmed cases of COVID-19, starting May 25. In that week, total confirmed cases have risen from 29,852 to 40,924. The daily percentage increase has varied between a low of 2.84% and a high of 6.52%. Another measure of growth in cases that smooths out daily bumps is the 7-day moving average. This is how it has looked over the last month:

05/27: 338
06/03: 710
06/10: 1,090
06/17: 1,581

Today, June 17, Arizona ranks #18 in total cases; #4 in new cases; #20 in cases/capita. #19 in total deaths; and #23 in deaths/capita. Rising numbers of confirmed cases can sometimes be attributed in part to increased testing. That has not been a factor over the last couple of weeks. A disturbing sign is the growing percentage of positive tests:

Covid Act Now’s chart provides several indicators:

In future posts, I’ll be looking at other states in which Alcor has many members and in which the disease is growing.

–Max More
Ambassador and President Emeritus, Alcor Foundation