Thus Spake Curtis Henderson, Part 2

Posted on February 8, 2011 by admin

By Charles Platt and Mike Darwin

Ev Cooper (at left)

“The first meeting of Ev Cooper’s that we went to, he held in Washington, D.C., at a restaurant at eight o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day. And of course, this was my first lesson in fanaticism because Saul Kent, Karl Werner and I showed up at it. Karl was skinny, average height; he was a photographer and a student of industrial engineering at the Pratt Institute who was also very interested in cryonics. Karl began to attend the meetings at the bar.”

“So it came down to this: shall we form our own society? My recollection is that we came to this in Karl Werner’s apartment. His apartment was a large room opposite the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. It had high ceilings, and he’d built himself a loft, he slept up there on a bunch of mattresses. Of course, this was the height of the hippie period; he was always dragging girls up there. He always had half-naked girls hanging around. I guess he was in his early 20s, going to Pratt Institute. I always thought he had the room that Lincoln Rockwell had.” [1]

The Cryonics Society of New York

“Saul was a student at Hunter College, what was he studying, some fool thing.[2] He was going to school because he didn’t want to work, and spending most of his time at the beach.”

“I said I would incorporate a tax-free society because I was a lawyer. And what do we call it? Karl wanted to design the stationery, and Saul wanted to write letters on it, so we had to have a name. Karl said ‘Cryonics Society,’ it just came out. So, I went into the office and scraped together all the papers and went through the process of incorporating, and low and behold, we had the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY). To get tax-free status, we had to elect officers. So I guess there were five of us: me, Karl Werner, Sutton, Saul, and the wrestler, Harold Costello. So we started talking about who should be president and vice-president. Well, Frank, the wrestler said, Jimmy’s going to be president. It never occurred to him that Jimmy wouldn’t be president. Saul and Karl were easily bullied, I could see that. So, we made Jimmy Sutton president. And now we could start typing letters and doing things. Saul wrote endless letters to people.”

“A couple months went by, and Sutton went on a late-night radio show. And the man couldn’t say two coherent words. Forget about it! And then there was the prospect of a TV show. Well, we couldn’t have Sutton doing that. So we had a brilliant idea, to put Ettinger on it. Well, Sutton couldn’t argue against that, so reluctantly—he agreed. We met Ettinger in a restaurant in some big hotel in New York. Sutton made a big stink, but of course we had found out, he was no big business man, he was just a security guard at Macy’s. But he had such pretensions. Complaining about how shabbily we dressed – Sutton had this fancy attaché case and he’d come on like a respectable gentleman. He opened the case one time and out walked a cockroach this big (indicates with his hands it was about a foot long). Clank, clank, clank—I mean you could hear its armor rattling. Nobody said a word.”

Robert Ettinger on the Tonight Show in 1966 (Robert Nelson in background). Photo by NBC TV.

“Ettinger would go on these TV shows where they had people like Zsa Zsa Gabor and Buddy Hackett, and they’d ask him things like, ‘Are you going to be frozen with your clothes on, or your clothes off?’ They were really ridiculous shows, just poking fun at the idea. He’d be appearing with people who wanted to put pants on horses, that kind of thing. And he’d say, ‘well, at least it’s getting the idea thrown out there,’ which was true. And he did get letters. He would pass on names of people who had written to him in the area.”

“TV – everyone remembers their first TV show. It’s a big event. You think, well, now everything’s going to go. But of course it doesn’t go. So there was a lot of excitement.”

“There weren’t organized meetings as such. They were slowly shifting from the bar to Karl Werner’s apartment at 306 Washington Avenue, and we never had more than four or five people. Most of them were behind on their rent. We really had no idea of the form that that this thing should take. Should we charge $5 a month? Should we go for a broad-based approach with lower fees? And Sutton didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t the least bit articulate. He couldn’t write or read, as far as I could tell. He used Saul as his personal secretary. So, he had to go. Saul and I went and changed the address of the society, and told Sutton that that was it, he wasn’t President anymore. There were three of us and two of them, and that was that. Oh, he threatened to sue us, and the fight went on back and forth, and he wrote Ettinger, and Ettinger took his usual noncommittal position. Sutton started crying about all the money he’d invested – I think in the end I gave him $300, or something, just to go away.”

Ed Hope (left in hat) and Ted Kraver (right holding apple) standing next to the Cryo-care Equipment Corporation’s ‘baby blue’ trailer used to move the first Cry-Capsule, model CC-101 to the LES conference in Washington, D.C. in 1966 .Photo by Curtis Henderson.

“Saul provided the sinews of the organization. He wrote all the letters. He did practically all the work and when the newsletter started coming out. He wrote it single-handedly.”

“Then we organized a meeting somewhere in a school; maybe in 1965. We put out fliers, and we got 20 or 30 people. We got Ettinger to come. We paid his way. I was making good money then. We got people vaguely interested. But the hard core was still just me and Saul and Karl, and the whole thing was centered on Karl’s apartment.”

“At this point, I could see we were talking about two different concepts of an organization. Saul and Karl and I wanted an activist organization, really doing something. But most of the people who showed up were concerned with whether you were going to serve tea at the meetings, or whatever. We still had the problem that no one was interested in building the tanks. Union Carbide wanted $250,000 to build a tank – that history is a novel in itself.”

Robert C. W. Ettinger, circa late 1960s.

“Meanwhile, Ettinger kept appearing on TV shows, and it seemed every couple of months he’d come up with something that was a sure thing. They were going to freeze this person, or that; and it was really going to happen. One of the people he had hoped to freeze was Dandridge M. Cole.  He was research director of General Electric. He was one of the first people to suggest space colonies – the hollowed-out asteroid, that type of thing: a rotating cylinder in space. He was a friend of Ettinger’s, and he said he wanted to be frozen. But he had a heart attack when he was forty-four, and his family went ahead and buried him. They said something about not wanting to disturb the children. So, it slowly came into our consciousness that the world out there didn’t think this was such a great idea at all. In fact, the vast majority of people thought it was a grotesque idea, a ridiculous idea. And certainly when somebody had died, talking about freezing them was like spitting on the flag; even worse than that. So our perceptions started to change. Ettinger went on with his rhetoric about freezing the first man, but –”

The Cryo-Care Model CC-101 Cryo-Capsule at the Life Extension Society (LES) Conference in Washington, D.C. in 1966. Photo by Henry Groskinsky.

“Karl had a movie camera, and he went out and made movies. When LES had its conference in Washington, D. C., there was to be a press conference where Ed Hope would put this dog named ‘Bell,’ that he’d frozen in the Cryo-Care tank. The idea was to create publicity, since no human had yet been frozen; sort of like the Russians did with the dog Laika that they put into orbit. Karl decided to make a movie of Ed Hope putting that frozen dog into the tank.[3] But instead of a bunch of panting reporters, here we were at eight o’clock in the morning, and the police and the SPCA show up! So, Ettinger, I, and some other people went out to face the police. And where was the dog? I guess it was in the tank. Anyway, suddenly Ed Hope gets in his car, and zoom – he’s gone, taking the tank with him. So, nobody ever found the dog. To this day, I’ve never been able to find out what happened to that dog.”

Fraud and Fraudsters

“Ettinger would go on TV, and he’d hold up pictures that people had sent him, and he’d say, ‘these people in Kansas City, Missouri are building a giant facility and will soon be freezing bodies at a cost almost everyone can afford.’ He was such an optimist. The fact was all these people were just looking for money. And there was no money. In our organization, it was basically our mortician Fred Horn’s and my out-of-pocket money, and Saul’s brains. And I was getting into my first divorce. In the meantime, fate intervened. Karl Werner was an amateur photographer, and one night he’s taking pictures of this girl Glenda, whose stark naked, she’s his model. Glenda lived across the street from Karl. He said she climbed in the window naked, and he wasn’t the same after that. He had a blow-up bigger than life size photo of her naked, pasted to his ceiling. There it was, you’d come in, and look up – Well, I knew one of us was done for right there. So, Glenda joined our crew as a secretary, and she had one thing that was absolutely essential. She had a brand-new IBM Selectric typewriter. This was the instrument that was going to put out the first newsletter. “

Henderson’s two son’s by his first wife, Janet; Robert (Robbie) at left and James (Jamie) at right, above, August, 1972. Photo by Mike Darwin.

“Meanwhile, I was getting into the divorce; my wife went away to Florida and took the kids, the usual crap. And I’d just bought that Buick out there.[4] And I was ready to hit the road. In the meantime, in those days for about $12.95 you could get a credit check.[5] I used to do it all the time when I worked for the insurance company. And amazing things came back.”

“There was a guy named Leonard Gold, in Springfield, Ohio. He said things like, ‘in two weeks we’re going to have the first freezing, on color television, and the capsule’s going to be consecrated by the Pope.’ So, the two weeks would come and go, and nothing would happen. Gold had his sidekick, Stanley Milgrim. And they sent out these crude airbrushed drawings of the big facility they were building in Springfield. Saul wanted to get in the car and go to each of these places and check them out. So that’s exactly what we did. We left on our first coast-to-coast trip in October of 1966. Ettinger gave us the names of people all across the country, and one of them was this TV writer, Dick Jones.”[6]

Artie Shaw, was a jazz clarinetist, composer, and bandleader. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest jazz clarinetists of his time.

“Jones was by no means the only celebrity or Hollywood type who was interested in cryonics at that time. Artie Shaw, Steve Allen and Peter Sellers had written to Ettinger, saying they were interested in getting frozen. One of the really interesting things we learned on that trip was why none of those guys ever got involved. We met with this guy named Sam Cavnar. He lived in a swanky apartment on Vine, right near the Capitol records building. Cavnar was a wealthy, influential businessman and Hollywood type who had floated a very successful precious metals consortium, AmeriCoin – gold was still illegal to own in those days because of that communist FDR. Anyway, while Cavnar was not eager to talk, his wife was really pushy and urged him to ‘come clean’ with what he knew. “

“According to Cavnar, Artie Shaw and Steve Allen had been disillusioned about cryonics by Milgrim and Gold – both of whom had been referred to them by Ettinger. Canvnar said that Allen and Shaw had put up substantial sums of money which had disappeared into thin air, along with Milgram and Gold. A guy named Dr. Benjamin Schloss took $5,000 for supposed research in cryonics, from Peter Sellers and Artie Shaw. It was all very sad. I wonder how things might have turned out if those people had been treated with respect.”

“Ettinger had a lot of contacts with wealthy people, but he never had anything to show them. When Alcor came into existence, maybe Ettinger’s friends would have donated some money. But Mike Darwin caused a rift between Alcor and Ettinger. With Ettinger, it was all talk, all blue sky. He didn’t really start his own operation till long after Alcor existed.”

“Ettinger had spoken to the man who was the head of research at Union Carbide. At that time Union Carbide was one of the few places that made cryogenic tanks. I had Union Carbide stock so I went to their stockholders meeting. I asked them if they would make tanks for storing people, and they didn’t answer my question.”

“Ettinger, sitting on these ridiculous TV shows with his celluloid collar, trying to look respectable. We also learned, and were later able to verify, that the Juno tank was in fact made by an Ohio cryogenics and engineering firm, Cryo-Vac Company, in Columbus.  Gold had also been in touch with the management of Ryan Industries, a large aeronautical engineering firm that had just merged with the even bigger Cosmodyne. He had persuaded them to do some research and was trying to get them involved in making tanks. Since he lied outrageously and apparently and misappropriated money, all these business people and celebrities were completely soured on the idea of cryonics.”

Saul Kent standing in front of the Patton Machine Works building used by Leonard Gold and Stanley Milgram to house Juno, Inc. of Springfield, Ohio.; the source of the “Springfield Incident.” Photo by Curtis Henderson.

“Ettinger was completely uncritical in referring these con men and Mr. Wonderfuls, even to highly influential, wealthy and important people. He had no sense of responsibility whatsoever.  Jack the Ripper could show up, and if he had a good line, fancy letterhead and drawings of non-existent facilities, he was immediately put in touch with the highest quality and most important and influential prospects. It was a disaster. People with that kind of wealth and public influence talk to each other, and it didn’t take any time at all before the whole lot of ‘em had the clear impression that cryonics was fraud and bunkum; just a bunch of con men endorsed by the guy who was the public father and the public face of the of the whole movement.”

End view of the first dewar made for the cryogenic storage of humans. Photo by Curtis Henderson.

“Ettinger didn’t approve of us (Saul and I). For one thing, we thought nothing of tapping phones, breaking into places, doing whatever was necessary to find out the truth. Ettinger was the opposite; he never budged from his place in Michigan to find out anything. Even now, he’s never seen Alcor. We had to more or less kidnap him to see the place we built on Long Island. Anyway, he was super-respectable; he took a dim view of us. Cryonics was to suffer for that later on.”

Side view of the Juno, Inc., dewar in Springfield, Ohio. Curtis Henderson.

“We went to Springfield, Ohio and sure enough, they were making some sort of tanks. I put on my old clothes and we broke into the building at night; there was a tank there, but there was no evidence of any bodies. We were wandering around Springfield; this guy comes up in a car. We had gone to this address that Gold had given us, Patton Machine Works, and it was a shoe machine factory that had gone into bankruptcy. And through the credit check, we began to get the picture. Gold made a habit of buying up companies and putting them through bankruptcy. He sold all the assets. And this was his business.”

Interior of Patton Machine Works factory building in Springfield, Ohio. Photo by Curtis Henderson.

“Gold was quite a con man. He’d convinced a local journalist that he would get the Pulitzer Prize for writing this story. So he got all this publicity, with pictures of tanks—but this thing never would have worked. Anyway, we broke into the factory at night; we even have some Polaroid pictures. And there was an old tank in there covered with dust. No facility at all. So, we went on with our travels, to Kansas City, Missouri, where there was a funeral parlor, a beautiful chapel on a hill: The Christian Memorial Chapel. There was only one guy there in this whole huge place and he tells us that ‘only Mr. Alden’ can answer our questions and ‘he isn’t there and doesn’t like to talk on the phone.’ For not wanting to talk, he had a lot to say. He told us they had ‘time elector units’ that would take the body down to 0oC in a flash, and that they were underway with construction of a cryogenic mausoleum that would hold 40,000 bodies; that they were in touch with cryobiologists and cryonics scientists all over the world, some of whom would be coming to work for them. It was bullshit, bullshit. We never met Mr. Alden and that was the last we ever heard of ‘Cryo-Life of Kansas City.’

Footnotes

[1] George Lincoln Rockwell (March 9, 1918– August 25, 1967) was a Navy Reserve Commander and founder of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was a major figure in the Neo-Nazi movement in the post-war United States, and his beliefs and writings have continued to be influential among white nationalists and neo-Nazis.  After WWII ended, Rockwell became a commercial artist. He applied to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and was accepted for the following year. Rockwell and his wife moved to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and in spring 1946, he built a photography studio and found work painting commercial signs. Later that year, they moved to New York City, where Rockwell started his studies at Pratt. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lincoln_Rockwell. MD

[2] Saul Kent was a physical education major and received his B.A. in PhysEd from Hunter College. MD

[3] This was the Life Extension Society (LES) Conference in Washington, DC in 1966. This is a Bettman Archive photo of the dewar (the very first dewar) at that Conference. Karl Werner did not rent a trailer and transport the dewar; it was brought out in the “baby blue” Cryo-Care trailer expressly for display at the conference. The dog was named “Bell” and to this day nobody will talk about her (not even Ted Kraver). MD

[4] The Buick features prominently in a blackly ironic article on Henderson and cryonics that appeared in the ‘Ladies Home Journal’ in 1968; unarguably the best media article ever written about Henderson, and one that completely captures his demeanor and personality. It was entitled “No, Thank You, I’d Rather Not Live Twice” and authored by Lois R. Chevalier (Ladies Home Journal, Volume 86, March 1969;  Page 68-69.).  MD

[5] The company was the Patton Machine Works. More importantly by far, this was no credit check he was having run. He was using the resources of his employer to commission a full scale Pinkerton (private) investigation of Milgram & Gold. This report survives and is now in the Digital Cryonics Archives. MD

[6] Richard (Dick) Clair Jones was actually an actor/writer at this time. MD

Posted in Cryonics History | 2 Comments

Cryonics and Technological Inevitability

Posted on February 7, 2011 by admin

By Mike Darwin

A Flash of Insight

One of the most fundamental insights I’ve ever had came when I was in Rome, and also reading a very good biography of Leonardo da Vinci,1 in preparation for a visit to Florence. Da Vinci spent most of his career designing war machines, and trying to reroute the Arno River for military advantage. As I looked at the remains of the awesome Ancient Roman engineering around me, and thought of da Vinci, it occurred to me that one of the most powerful and off putting military advantages that could have been deployed, in either Ancient, or Renaissance times, would have been hot air balloons.

Hot Air Balloons in Ancient Rome?

Lighter than air craft are very easy to build, and both the Ancient Romans and the Renaissance Italians had the materials, the wealth, and the technology. The Colosseum was covered with canvas awnings, the Velarium,2 that were operated by a complex series of ropes and pulleys, and the Roman’s were superb canvas makers and produced the material in copious amounts to use for ships’ sails. Why didn’t they develop lighter than air flight – and why didn’t Leonardo? The Montgolfier brothers came up with the idea while lying beside a fire and watching hot ash and embers float upwards – and they thought about this in a military context – namely how to take Gibraltar from the British.

Selection Bias and the Arc of Technology

That got me thinking about all sorts of technologies, and why they were not developed far earlier, given that the minds, the tools, and the ancillary technologies were often all clearly in place. It was then that I realized that to a great extent we are, all of us humans, optimists and technological prophets of the most lunatic sort; in no small measure because all we know, by experience, is that we have survived, and that we have triumphed (so far). Similarly, most people in the West (and especially cryonicists) see human history as relentlessly and inevitably progressing, in large measure because we ourselves are the product of a civilization that has survived and progressed – and that has done so to an astonishing degree – in an equally astonishingly short period of time.

The Antikythera Mechanism (above).

Unfortunately, there is nothing in our current understanding of human history, let alone physical law, which mandates technological advance, let alone specific kinds of technological advance, as inevitable. To understand this, it is only necessary to look to the past, to the long history of scientific and technological advance that was, and wasn’t to be. To do that is to understand that there is a fundamental difference between technological possibility, and practical inevitability. By looking at the past, and applying the expectations we have of the present, it is possible to perceive a more sobering and cautionary reality.

In 1901, in the remains of a sunken ship just off the coast of Antikythera, an island between Crete and the Greek mainland, divers harvesting sponges recovered the remains of what had once been a wooden box, containing what appeared to be a complex clock-work mechanism.3 The shipwreck has been unequivocally dated to ~80 BCE. For nearly 60 years the artifact was largely unappreciated; it was encrusted in a hard calcareous mass, and what little remained of the metal parts of which it was once comprised, had been converted into what might reasonably be described as metal-doped casts, or ‘fossils’ of the original mechanism. Thus, it was not until the advent of sophisticated examination techniques, such gamma ray imaging in the 1970s, and more recently, gamma ray tomography, that the structure of the original mechanism could be determined.

As it turns out, the artifact recovered from that ship just over a century ago, and now called the Antikythera Mechanism, was about as incredible as if a 16th century pocket watch were to be found today in a sealed Pharaonic tomb from Ancient Egypt. The Antikythera Mechanism has forced a complete re-evaluation of the technology of the ancient world. The device contained 32 gears, assembled into a mechanism that accurately reproduced the motion of the sun and the moon against the background of fixed stars, with a differential drive giving their relative position, and thus the phases of the moon.4 More recently, it has been discovered that device also integrates eclipse prediction with cycles of human institutions, most notably the Olympics!5

The technology used to produce the Antikythera Mechanism rivals that used in the best 16th century clocks, and the understanding of planetary motions embodied in the workings of the device suggest that some form of the calculus may have been in use by its makers. It is also clear from the complexity and precision of the device that it was not a prototype, but rather represents a well developed, and arguably a mature technology, which must have had other applications. In short, its elegant mechanism whispers across the millennia about what could have been and what, from our perspective and experience, seemingly should have been the follow-on to such scientific insights and technological capabilities. Why didn’t the Ancient Greeks invent timekeeping devices – why did the mechanical clock take centuries more to be born?

Hero of Alexandria and his inventions; (clockwise) the wind-wheel, the aeolipile, and complex automata used in temples and as public monuments. Images courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons

That the technological revolution, ‘our’ technological revolution, did not proceed from the Antikythera Mechanism might seem more reasonable if there were no other similarly remarkable developments occurring at the same time. However, Hero of Alexandria (10–70 CE) was well known for constructing complex automata, had powered a pipe organ using his wind-wheel (windmill) and developed a variety of steam driven devices using his aeolipile; a primitive turbine type steam engine with surprising motive capacity.6 From our vantage, it would seem not only reasonable, but prudent, to speculate with confidence about the technological capabilities that would (seemingly inevitably) flow out of these insights, coupled with the robust base of engineering skill that made them possible in the first place. And yet, the industrial and the technological revolutions did not proceed from these insights, and while many reasons have been put forth, the truth is that all technological advances are dependent upon a complex mix of social, political and environmental factors which we still do not understand, and thus cannot predict.

The ‘mundane’ observation that caused Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740 –1810 CE) to invent the hot air balloon7 was just as accessible to the Romans of ~400 BCE, as were the materials and technologies required to construct human carrying hot air balloons. Certainly, the same motivations were present in both cultures at both times: Joseph Montgolfier was contemplating how to successfully assault the British fortress of Gibraltar, which had proved impregnable to the French by both sea and land, when he noticed how floating embers from a fire he was laying next  to were carried aloft and over great distances; giving him the idea of lighter than air flight.8 The Romans, a military people with similar problems, as well as a love of spectacle and a penchant for technological innovation in war, could just as easily have developed lighter than air manned flight – and yet they did not. There are no Roman frescoes of hot air balloons, whether for war or celebration, drifting over the Empire’s capital.

How would the technological arc of the ancient world have been changed if Archimedes, and not Edison, had invented the phonograph? Image adapted by the author from Sir Alma Tadema’s ‘A Reading from Homer,’ courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.

For that matter, either Hero, or Archimedes of Syracuse (287- 212 BCE)9 before him, could quite conceivably have invented the phonograph. It is a simple analog mechanical device which requires the same kinds of recording media; wax or metal foil wrapped cylinders or plates (wax tablets were then in universal use by the Greeks as reusable writing slates, and gold foil was commonplace, if expensive). To complete it, all that was needed were a needle stylus, a deformable diaphragm of thin metal, or tanned hide, a sound concentrating horn, and the almost ridiculously simple cranking mechanism used by Edison for his prototype model. Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1878, and all the subtle and yet profound social and technological effects that emanated from that discovery, could have come at almost any time in human history, from ~400 BCE on. It is not difficult to envision Archimedes, the inventor of the water pump that bears his name (the Archimedes screw), the designer of the mammoth ship the Syracusia, and the discoverer of hydrostatics, sitting amongst a group of lazy ‘Greeks’ on Syracuse, while declaiming the wonders of his latest invention, the phonograph.

Debased Social Choices as an Obstacle to Adoption of a Transformative Technologies

The past century, so recently closed, is rich with examples, both poignant and tragic, of technological possibilities not realized. On 1 September 1939, a decision was (in effect) taken by our species to spend five trillion dollars[1] and expend ~72 million human lives. This decision was followed in 1947, and repeated at intervals until 1991, to expend an additional ~12 trillion dollars, and perhaps another 1-2 million human lives. These ventures are known today as World War II, and the Cold War[2], respectively. In the midst of the first of these costly escapades, on 15 March, 1944, the architect of the German V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun, was arrested by the Gestapo on charges of high treason for having privately expressed regret, after dinner at a colleague’s home one evening the previous October, that he and his team were not working on a spaceship, and that von Braun felt the war was not going well.10

Artist’s Chesley Bonestell’s vision of von Braun’s plan to reach and colonize Mars, from Collier’s magazine, 1952.

In fact, von Braun was engaged in designing and building the V-2, and much more sophisticated rockets, solely because he wanted to achieve the exploration of space; both personally and for the human species.11 Throughout the war he had spent what little free time he had laying out the technological basis for a systematic program to reach and colonize the moon and Mars. In 1948, von Braun laid out these detailed specifications and they were subsequently published in his book Das Mars Projekt (The Mars Project),12 in 1952-3. Forty-two million Americans saw beautifully illustrated and highly detailed explanations of this plan on television on the Walt Disney Show, and many millions more saw the same plans in print in Collier’s magazine, beginning in February 1952 and continuing through March of 1954.13

The cover of Collier’s magazine 30 April, 1954 which contained the articles ‘Can We Get to Mars?’ and ‘Is There Life on Mars.’

Von Braun’s proposals also received wide circulation outside the US in a broad range of Western media, and notably, there were no serious scientific or engineering criticisms of the proposals. In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of expending ~$17 trillion and ~74 million human lives on war and destruction, we would have reached the moon in a robust and durable way by no later than the mid-1950s, and would now have well established, and very likely self-sustaining outposts on the moon and Mars. We would thus now be in the position of having substantial insurance against both technological collapse and the possible extinction of civilization (if not the species itself).

The technology required to credibly begin this effort existed in 1939, and the cost in dollars (and certainly in human lives) for its realization would have been vastly lower than those that were suffered prosecuting WWII and the Cold War.

And yet, none of these things happened. It is, of course, possible to speculate endlessly in this manner, asking, “what if,” in countless situations where a technology was developed and not exploited, or was not developed when it easily could have been. It has been argued that our position in the opening decade of the 21st Century is unique: that having let the technological genie out of the lamp by discovering the scientific method and developing the printing press and mass production, we are now assured of relentless progress towards human suspended animation, practical biological immortality, and a mature and highly capable nanotechnology.

Perhaps this is the case. However, the examples of our past, particularly of our recent past – of chance and choice frustrating our expectations of technological advance – should instruct us that inevitable does necessarily mean immediate or even foreseeable, advance. Fifty-seven years later, we are still waiting for our tickets to the moon and Mars.

The Future That Wasn’t: Failure to Perceive Hidden Costs and Risks

Two other entangled obstacles to technological inevitability must also be considered: unappreciated psychosocial reservations and genuine, but unappreciated hazards that either slow, or virtually inhibit the adoption of what would otherwise be hugely transforming technological advances.

As a child, I was told about what my future would be like and how much better it would be in almost every way, technologically, from the world I then inhabited. I was, literally, a child of the atomic age, and the molecules in the DNA of my brain still bear the 14Carbon isotope signature of the open-air nuclear testing era, just as surely as my bones, made radioactive in my infancy and childhood by the Strontium 90 (90Sr) in the milk I drank are still, ever so slightly, more radioactive today, than are those of people born before, or after, the era of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.14,15

But beyond these physical stigmata of the atomic age, my mind bears the stigmata of a world promised, but never delivered. Scientists and laymen alike were quick to understand the truly staggering potential benefits of what we now call nuclear power. Countless pronouncements were made that the arrival of an era of cheap, clean, safe, and virtually unlimited electric power was at hand. Electricity generated by ‘atomic power’ and nuclear fusion, we were told, would be so inexpensive to produce that it would not even be worth the expense of metering its use to bill the customer for. People would simply play a flat rate for the service, as is the case for long distance or computer telephony today. In a speech given by Lewis L. Strauss (1896-1974), Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to the National Association of Science Writers, in New York City on September 16th, 1954, Strauss commented on how scientific research then underway would transform life for the next generation of Americans, the generation that would be born in then and in the coming decade, my generation:

“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter…will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”16

At about the same time as Strauss made this pronouncement, the Ford Motor Company developed a concept car called the Ford Nucleon. The Nucleon was to use an ‘atomic power capsule,’ in effect an atomic battery, located in the rear of the car which charging stations would switch out for a fresh one every ~ 5,000 miles of driving time.17

The Santa Fe Railroad, then as commercially important and as technologically credible as Apple or Microsoft are today, anticipated fission reactor powered trains within 20 years, and ran ads in national magazines featuring a youngster only a few years older than me, asking to buy a ticket on an atomic powered version of the Super Chief which was then the preeminent way to travel across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles, in both speed and comfort.

So what went wrong? Were these predictions based on erroneous assumptions about was both possible and economical? The answer to that question depends a great deal upon what kinds of risks and responsibilities you are willing to accept as a society. In 1974, Medtronic, the world’s leading manufacturer of cardiac pacemakers, then and now, released the Laurens-Alcatel Model 9000 pacemaker.18 It was a nuclear powered device that used a tiny thermopile powered by 2 to 4 curies of plutonium-238 (with an 88 year half-life).  As the term “thermopile” implies, heat from the decaying plutonium was used to generate the electricity that powered the device. There are an estimated 40-50 people in the US still alive with an implanted Laurens pacemaker. Thirty years later, these devices continue to operate flawlessly in those patients who remain alive with them. No doubt, those few of the devices that have escaped destruction will outlast their owners by many decades, if not a century or more.[3] A prototype power supply for a total artificial heart, containing 50 grams of plutonium, was also demonstrated at around this time.20

Soviet-era RTGs that have been vandalized by thieves looking for valuable, non-ferrous metals resulting in the release of radioactive 90Sr into the environment.

In the former Soviet Union, compact nuclear ‘batteries,’ Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs), typically powered by 90Sr, were in moderately wide use to provide electric power and heat for a wide range of applications – including serving as the electricity source for remote lighthouses in the arctic.20 Well over a thousand of these devices were deployed. So, there can be no doubt that this technology was not only feasible – it was a demonstrated reality. Had it been pursued as aggressively as the development of say, the transistor or the lithium battery, it would be omnipresent in our daily lives. Laptops, flashlights, and other portable electronic devices would effectively never run out of power, with their lead and titanium encased ‘nuclear batteries’ being handed from one generation to the next.  Arguably, most electronic devices would now have self-contained RTGs, freeing us of the frustrating nuisance of cords, cables and the infuriating lack of a power point where and when we need one. And of course, former Vice President Cheney would not now be tethered to the cumbersome and short-lived battery pack (~5 hours) to power his left ventricular assist device (LVAD)21 – nor would he face the near certain (and likely eventually fatal) risk of infection from the power cable that connects the vest-worn external batteries to the centrifugal pump implanted in his chest.

What a wonderful world it would be – except for one small problem: the fundamental inability of most humans to handle such technology responsibly. There can be no doubt that had these nuclear technologies been so universally applied, we would currently be awash in uncontained and highly lethal radioactive material. Humans are simply not diligent enough, smart enough, and above all long lived enough, to be trusted with such dangerous materials, even though the benefits are both enormous, and abundantly clear. Even in the case of large, well designed nuclear power generating facilities, a major (and all too legitimate concern) is the deliberate compromise of the reactor containment structure to facilitate the release of radioactive materials for purposes of war or terror. Or what is worse, the diversion or deliberate use of the reactor fuel, or byproducts, to produce nuclear weapons. Crazy and irresponsible civilizations have no business using such technologies, and that is the primary reason why their use has been restricted, or prohibited altogether, in ours.

Where their use it is deemed worth the risk, or there is no alternative, the precautions required to make such use tolerable have proved staggeringly expensive. Atomic trains, planes and automobiles, as well as plutonium powered artificial hearts, and low cost and highly reliable electricity generated from nuclear fission, are all eminently doable – and would be highly cost effective if people handled these technologies with the high degree of responsibility they demand. If only we could change our natures such that our most powerful insights could not be deliberately perverted to do harm and wage war. Alas, that is clearly not in the cards any time soon.

But the pace of technological advance has not been slowed solely as a result of the actual (but unforeseen) risks inherent in novel technologies such as nuclear energy. Indeed, in the case of fission reactor generated electricity a significant cause of delay, or even abandonment of the technology, has been psychosocial.  France has long been known for its aggressive nuclear power program and they have derived upwards of 75% of their utility

C. Walton Lillehei and his beer tubing and industrial finger pump heart-lung machine.

Nowhere have psychosocial factors been more of a problem in slowing technological progress than has been the case in the life sciences. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a few daring surgeons in the US made the decision to develop cardiac surgery. A necessary element of such an undertaking was the development of the heart-lung machine to pinch hit for the patient’s heart and lungs during while the heart was being operated upon. The first such heart-lung machines were fabricated from industrial items, such as finger pumps and plastic PVC tubing used in the beer making industry.23 The DeWall-Lillehei oxygenator was just such a device – it was tested in dogs and then more or less immediately applied to humans. Twenty years earlier Willem Kolff had done exactly the same sort of thing with the artificial kidney machine – using an automotive fuel pump and sausage casing tubing to cleanse the blood of patients with acute kidney failure.24 Such rapid and direct application of biomedical advances to humans is now inconceivable, not only in the US, but virtually anywhere in the world.25,26

Research into stem cell therapies, cloning, and gene therapy technology have also been greatly slowed by psychosocial concerns. Clinical progress in these areas is a mere shadow of what it could have been, and arguably should have been, absent the widespread resistance on the part of a broad cross section of the public on moral and ethical grounds – grounds which have no basis in any rational framework of risks versus benefits evaluations.  One can only wonder what the rate of progress in the life sciences would have been like had there been no Asilomar Conference and the creative energies of the brightest young minds in the West had been applied to engineering biology with even a fraction of the focus and vigor that engineering in computing and microelectronics have been pursued.

The enabling technologies that will be required for vast life span extension, recovery of cryopreserved patients, space colonization, and personal biophysical redesign and transformation are unarguably many times more mischievous and dangerous than was (or is) nuclear energy. Mature genetic engineering, nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, to name but a few, each hold many times the potential for systemic harm to, or destruction of our civilization; and they do so absent the inherent check on their proliferation that was present in the case of nuclear energy, by virtue of the extreme scarcity of the necessary isotopes, and the even rarer and more exotic expertise and massively expensive hardware required to transform them into weapons grade materials. A likely consequence of this will be that the cost of these technologies will be much higher than anticipated and their development will also likely be slowed, as well as being rendered unpredictable and erratic.

Apocalypse Soon?

We must also confront the possibility that the civilization we are embedded in will, just as have all those that have come before it, fail and fail catastrophically. The very technology cryonicists venerate offers not only the prospect of immortality, but also of oblivion. History has been defined in many ways, but perhaps one of the best and most applicable here is that, “history is that period of time which has passed out of living memory.” To achieve practical biological immortality is, then, by that definition, to put an end to history. If we want to end history, then we must come to understand that where our personal survival is concerned, historical trends, and even historical certainties, will have no relevance if they do not occur in time to save our lives.

Finally, any study of history from a cryonics perspective leads to the inevitable conclusion that civilizations rise and fall based upon their core values, their commitment to the long-term versus the short-term, and of course, upon factors beyond their control, such as climate change, epidemic disease and military conquest.14 Cryonicists and Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization.  To fail to do so at this juncture in time is to accede to the end of our history – not by the practical abolition of death, but rather by its universal application to humankind, and perhaps to all life on earth.

References

1)    Nicholl, C. Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind. Viking Penguin, (2004). ISBN 0670033456.

2)    Leacroft, R. The Buildings of Ancient Rome, Brockhampton Press, (1969). ASIN: B000Z4DOUO.

3)    de Solla Price, D. An Ancient Greek Computer, Scientific American. June 1959 pp. 60-67.

4)    de Solla, D. Price, D. Gears from the Greeks – The Antikythera Mechanism, A Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C., Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. 64, part 7 1974.

5)    Freeth,T, Jones, A, Steele, JM, Bitsakis Y. Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism. Nature. 2008;(454):614-617.

6)    Gillispie, C. The Montgolfier brothers and the invention of aviation 1783-1784. Princeton University Press, (1983).

7)    Gillispie, C. The Montgolfier brothers and the invention of aviation 1783-1784. Princeton University Press, (1983).

8)    Boas, M. Hero’s pneumatica: a study of its transmission and influence,” Isis. 40(1);1949: p. 38 and supra

9)    Archimedes Homepage: http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/contents.html.

10)  Neufeld, MJ. The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. Harvard University Press, (1996). ISBN-10: 067477650X. Jaroff, Leon (2002-03-26). ‘The Rocket Man’s Dark Side.’ Time. onhttp://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,220201,00.html Retrieved: 05-23-2009.

11)  Das Marsprojekt; Werner von Braun, Studie einer interplanetrischen Expedition. Sonderheft der ZeitschriftWeltraumfahrt. Frankfurt: Umschau Verlag 1952; English language edition: Werner vonBraun with Henry J. White, translator The Mars Project, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, (1953).

12)  von Braun, W. The Collier’s Space Flight Series:

March 22, 1952: Man Will Conquer Space Soon, a collection of eight articles .

October 18, 1952: Man on the Moon, The Journey, and Inside the Moon Ship

October 25, 1952: Man on the Moon, Inside the Lunar Base

February 28, 1953: World’s First Space Suit

March 7, 1953: Testing the Men in Space

March 14, 1953: How Man Will Meet Emergency in Space

June 27, 1953: Baby Space Station

April 30, 1954: Can We Get to Mars? and Is There Life on Mars

13)  Bhardwaj, RA, Curtis ,MA, Spalding , KA, et al. Neocortical neurogenesis in humans is restricted to development. PNAS. 2006;103(33):12564-12568: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/33/12564.full.

14)  Mangano, JJ, Sherman, JD. Elevated In Vivo Strontium-90 From Nuclear Weapons Test Fallout Among Cancer Decedents: A Case-control Study Of Deciduous Teeth. International Journal of Health Science. 2011;41(1):137-158.

15)  Too cheap to meter: the great nuclear quote debate: http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2009/09/too-cheap-to-meter-nuclear-quote-debate.html.

16)  “Ford’s mid-century concept cars forecast future vehicles”. Ford Media. http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3359. Retrieved 8 Jan 2011.

17)  Smyth NP, Millette ML. The isotopic cardiac pacer: a ten-year experience. Pacing Clin Electrophysiol. 1984;7(1):82-9.

18)  Kallfelz FA, Comar CL, Casarett AP, and Craig PH. Radiobiological Effects of Simulated Nuclear Power Sources for Artificial Hearts: A Preliminary Report

Transactions of the American Nuclear Society 1970;13 (2):499.

19)  Alimov,  R. Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, Bellonas Working Paper, 01/04-2005: http://www.bellona.no/bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/navy/northern_fleet/incidents/37598.

20)  http://newsblog.barnesjewish.org/2010/07/14/dick-cheney-story-brings-attention-to-left-ventricular-assist-devices/.

21) EdF, Nov 1996, Review of the French Nuclear Power Programme, EdF: http://france.edf.com/-45634.html and http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html.

22)  Miller, W. King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery. Three Rivers Press; 2nd edition (2000). ISBN-10: 0609807242.

23)  Cameron, JS. A History of Dialysis. Oxford University Press, (2002). ISBN: 0198515472.

24)  Higgs, R. Wrecking ball: FDA regulation of medical devices. Cato Policy Analysis #235.  August 7, 1995. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-235.html. Retrieved 2011-01-30.

25)  DiMasi, JA, et al. The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development costs. Journal of Health Economics. 2003;(22):151–185. http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/CostOfNewDrugDevelop2003.pdf.  Retrieved 2011-01-30.

26)  Diamond J. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking Adult, (2004). ISBN 1-586-63863-7.

Notes

It would be difficult to find a better example than Wernher von Braun of the impact of a civilization’s choices on the moral behavior of an individual. Von Braun repeatedly visited the Dora-Mittelwerk facility in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen, where concentration camp laborers were forced to assemble V-2s under deplorable conditions that resulted in staggering mortality.(1)  It has been estimated that ~20,000 workers died in V-2 production, as contrasted with the comparatively miniscule 2,541 (documented) people who died from the use of the V-2 as a weapon during the war.(2) Von Braun acknowledged, in writing, that he personally selected workers for Mittelwerk from camp inmates at Buchenwald, who he described as in ‘pitiful shape,’ and he acknowledged that by 1944 he was aware that many of the slave laborers at Mittelwerk had been executed, that many others had succumbed to malnourishment and dysentery, and that the environment at Mittelwerk was “repulsive.”(3) Under the strict definition of the term, von Braun was not a war criminal, per se, (4) but it is hard to argue that he was not a party to ‘crimes against humanity’ as defined today by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum. (5)

After immigrating to the US under the auspices of Operation Paperclip, von Braun became a US citizen and led a life that might best be described as mirroring the morality of his new masters. Aside from modest amounts of work on the exploitation of space as a (thermonuclear) weapons delivery platform, the vast body of his career was focused on efforts to colonize space. (6)  Arguably, not unlike most men (consider the Milgram Experiment) von Braun was a moral chameleon who behaved as was needed to advance his own interests and survival; in his case the conquest of space. While there is evidence that he was not indifferent to the human suffering and murderous exploitation he observed at Mittelwerk (7), there is even more evidence that he was unwilling to take any action, direct or indirect, to change the status quo, or even to withdraw from participation in the Nazi rocket development program (incapacitating illness is always a viable excuse).

Throughout his long career his only recorded incidents of insubordination or disobedience to orders are those that occurred when the interests of his prime directive, the exploration of space, conflicted with those of his masters. Notable examples are his disobedience of direct orders to destroy remaining V-2s as well as all drawings and documentation pertaining to the German rocketry program in the closing days of WWII, his forging of (contrary) orders to move him and his team into Allied hands (8), and his collaboration with Army General John Medaris who headed the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, AL (again in direct violation of orders) to assemble and secrete a Redstone launch vehicle and its satellite payload (the Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone intercontinental ballistic missile that launched America’s first satellite, the Explorer probe) in anticipation of the failure of the US Vanguard effort to orbit an ‘artificial moon.’(9)  In short, he appears to have been committed to the realization of space flight at any cost. This may rightly be considered as unforgiveable, but it should be remembered that countless others in human history have participated in such atrocities with nothing more grandiose at stake than the prospect of a better job, a little more money, higher standing in the community, or simply because they enjoyed the power and authority that accompanied their execrably inhumane jobs. Had humanity chosen to pursue space flight, instead of war and genocide, von Braun would almost certainly have been the man for the job; and a model citizen and untarnished hero in the bargain.

References for Notes

1) Jaroff, Leon (2002-03-26). ‘The Rocket Man’s Dark Side.’ Time. onhttp://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,220201,00.html Retrieved: 05-23-2009.

2) Neufeld, MJ. The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, The Free Press, (1995). ISBN-10: 067477650X

3) “Excerpts from “Power to Explore“”. MSFC History Office. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/excerpts.html. Retrieved: 05-23-2009.

4) Fourth Geneva Convention “relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” (first adopted in 1949, based on parts of the 1907 Hague Convention IV)

5) Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, opened for signature 17 July 1998, [2002] ATS 15 (entered into force 1 July 2002), UN Doc A/CONF 183/9: <http://www.un.org/law/icc/statute/romefra.htm>

6) Neufeld, MJ.  Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Alfred A. Knopf, (2007). ISBN 978-0-307-26292-9

7) ‘Biography of Wernher Von Braun.’ MSFC History Office. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/bio.html. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Giants/vonBraun/. Retrieved: 05-23-2009.

8) Cadbury, Deborah (2005). “Space Race,” BBC Worldwide Limited. ISBN 0-00-721299-2.

9) Brzezinski, M. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age, Times Books, (2007). ISBN-10: 080508858X

[1] 288 billion 1945 US dollars in 2000 US dollars = 5 trillion dollars

[2] I include the Korean and Viet Nam wars, as well as other related conflicts as part of the Cold War.

[3] The devices were to be removed upon the death of the patient and returned to Los Alamos Laboratories for safe disposal of the plutonium power source. However some are unaccounted for and were interred or cremated with the patient they were implanted in.

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Thus Spake Curtis Henderson, Part 1

Posted on February 7, 2011 by admin

Thus Spake Curtis Henderson, Part I


By Charles Platt and Mike Darwin

Curtis Henderson, Esq., Winter, 197

For almost thirty years now, Curtis Henderson[1] has been trying to cheat death. Like most people, he doesn’t enjoy the idea of winding up in a mortuary. Unlike most people, he’s spent a large part of his life trying to do something about it. Henderson was one of the founders of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY) – a group of activists who decided that since no one else was tackling the challenge of freezing people, they would have to do it themselves.

Back then, in the mid-1960s, Henderson had a job as an insurance adjuster that required him to work only two to three days a week. He also derived income from trust funds passed down from his grandmother, enabling him to buy a house on Long Island, a boat big enough to live on, and a single-engine plane that he kept at a small airport half a mile from his home.[2] He had a beautiful wife and a young son, and the last thing he needed was an obsession that would cause him to give up his job, sell his airplane, break up his marriage, and spend all his money.

Today, in his late sixties, Henderson is a glorious wreck of a man, but he grins and says he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s still a cryonics activist, still infected by the same bug that bit him almost three decades ago.

As I arrive at his house, on a little dead-end street in a residential backwater, he’s prowling around in his front yard, gathering firewood. He’s an eccentric figure, wearing a dirty old yachting cap, with a pair of glasses dangling from one ear. “Here you see the ruins of numerous failed enterprises,” he says, laughing as he gestures at the relics on his front lawn. There’s a tow-truck, starting to rust, with spare tires heaped against it. Next to it is a small yacht, with its paint flaking off. Further back, a Triumph TR-4 sports car stands amid tall weeds. Behind that, in the rear corner of Henderson’s yard, there’s a rusty steel cylinder – an actual cryonic storage tank, one of the first ever made.[3] It once contained the body of the first person ever frozen, a woman whose name is now lost to history, and who occupied the tank for only a few brief weeks before her son changed his mind and had her conventionally interred.

The first cryogenic storage unit designed for human patients, the CC-101, acquired from John Flynn, in Curtis Henderson’s garage in Sayville, L.I., New York, circa 1967.Photo by Curtis Henderson.

In a garage, there’s a 1966 Buick Riviera, on flat tires. Parked behind the house is a VW truck, rusting into oblivion. He drove all over the country in the truck, taking his family with him. When they stopped along the road, his two kids slept inside the tank occasionally, although they used a tent most of the time. Not long after that, his wife, Janet, left him and took the children away to Florida. Henderson eventually won a costly custody battle with his wife and subsequently raised both of his sons on Long Island.

The Henderson family bomb shelter located behind the family residence at 9 Holmes Court in Sayville, LI. The blast shelter was constructed of concrete reinforced with welded steel railroad track and steel rebar. The walls were 4’ thick on all sides, including the bottom. The surface terminator was a steel reinforced pill box equipped with machine gun mount and military surplus aircraft searchlight. The shelter was constructed by Henderson working alone and without earth moving equipment. The photos above were made by Henderson circa 1969. Photos by Curtis Henderson

I follow him into his house. The kitchen is a disaster area: ceiling tiles have been ripped away, and glass-fiber insulation dangles dangerously. Wooden shelves have been set up on milk crates. A scrawny white cat wanders in, mewing. “That cat,” says Henderson “is thirty years old.[2] My children learned to walk holding onto that cat’s tail.” He thumps the cat with absent-minded affection. “She’s blind, but apart from that, she’s in good health. I’ve been giving her vitamin E. Seems to work pretty well.”

Cryonicists Are Born, Not Made

And so, inevitably, we’re back to the subject of old age and death. Why does Henderson find himself so obsessed with the subject? And how did it all start?


“If you go through the history of cryonics you’ll find everybody who’s into it, they accepted the idea within the first fifteen minutes of hearing it. They said, “This is it!” So, I think it’s genetic. I think we’re dealing with a whole new race here, a whole new species, and as soon as we get rid of all these other people – “He laughs heartily.”

“At some point in childhood, you realize what death is all about. One of my kids saw a dead mole out in the back yard, and he said to me, “Is daddy mole going to fix it?” And I said– (He chuckles and shakes his head.) I gave him a cynical answer.”

“Most people know the average life expectancy, whatever it is, seventy, seventy-five. And they expect to live about that long. At the same time, they know that 150 years from now, they’re not going to be here. So they’re bracketed in there. What they don’t normally consider is that they may die in the next thirty seconds. So they’re not assured of seventy years. And yet, they seem to count on it. Now, people like me, cryonicists, we have a little voice in our heads saying, ‘in my case, there may be an exception.’”

Curtis Henderson's first wife, Janet, circa mid-1990s. Photo by Curtis Henderson.

“When you get to be my age, whenever you pick up a paper you see somebody that’s younger than you dropping dead of a heart attack. In this neighborhood alone, two people back there dropped dead last month. I’m now the oldest one in this whole neighborhood. So, the casualty rate is very high. You’d be surprised how many people die of heart attacks at fifty, or fifty-five. And when you get to be sixty-five, you notice that the balance is beginning to swing. There obituaries are of people younger than you, not older than you.”

“Now, cryonics doesn’t promise you anything in the absolute sense. But nothing promises you anything in the absolute sense. There is no such thing as certainty. A meteor could hit the earth tomorrow, and nobody would even know what happened. Nothing can guarantee that you will live another second, or another 100,000 years. But what cryonics does do is it relieves you of the absolute certainty that you’re going to die. In our hearts, we are immortal, because we have the prospect of immortality, now. We’re doing something, and however slim the possibility may be, the absolute certainty that we won’t be here in another 150 years is gone. So, in a sense, you’re getting the same emotional release that somebody who absolutely believes in one of these religions gets. To me, this is the most important thing about cryonics. And yet most people don’t see it. They just don’t get it. It changes your own perception of yourself more than anything else. It changes your basic relationship with the universe, eternity, everything. It’s like religion, but religion is a passive thing, while cryonics is an active pursuit.”

“For people who are real activists, cryonics becomes almost a reason for existence. I don’t know exactly why that is, but we’ve taken many trips across the country, meeting cryonics people, and it changes everything, because you have a purpose.”

“This probably has a lot to do with my upbringing. I was raised as a person with a cause. My parents were both members of the Communist Party. So emotionally, I was always geared to a cause. One of my brothers is still a Trotskyite, after all these years.”

The Good Life: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit[5]


The ERCO Eurcoupe. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

“One day in 1964 – I had a very good job, a very cushy job as an insurance adjuster. I had bought this house, I had a big boat, I arranged to do my job in the city in just three days a week, and I had a company car and a company credit card. I had a wife and a son – my second son hadn’t yet been born (when he was, he was named after Robert Ettinger, the father of cryonics). I used to spend most of my time reading, working on my boat, or riding my motorcycle. I saw in The New York Times Book Review, a review of Ettinger’s book.[6] I bought the book, and that was when I heard that little voice telling me, maybe there could be an exception in my case. Reading Ettinger’s book, I thought, was a penance, like reading Das Kapital for the communists. I think it was terribly written. But the idea was what mattered. I wrote to him, and he gave me the names of two other people who had written to him. One was Saul Kent, and the other was a man named Jimmy Sutton. He lived in Queens,[7] and he told me to come and meet him at the Frank Charles bar, under the El (elevated subway), there. This was a typical dingy Queens bar, and this guy was dressed in a pink shirt with big cufflinks.”

The Prospect of Immortality by Robert C. W. Ettinger, 1964

“Now at that time there was a fellow in Washington D.C., who had started something called the Life Extension Society (LES). He wrote a book previous to Ettinger’s proposing the same kind of thing.[8] But Cooper, Ev Cooper was his name, was even less of a writer than Ettinger; and he lacked the science background that Ettinger had. So, his book never got published.”

“In those days, of course, the assumption was that all we had to do was explain the idea to the powers that be, and obviously Rockefeller, and all these other people who want to live forever, would jump on the bandwagon; and Union Carbide would make the tanks for us. [At that time, there was no such thing as a cryogenic tank big enough to hold a human body.] And all we had to do was tell the world about this wonderful idea.”

E. Francis (Ed) Hope in January of 1967: Hope was a wig salesman and real estate investor who founded Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation in 1966.Photo by Henry Groskinsky.

“Actually, I had a lot of trouble finding Sutton, at first. He didn’t answer my letters. I went to his apartment, just a room in a completely dilapidated, end-of-the-world type of place. A long narrow hallway, one light bulb, one watt, unpaid bills all over the place. I left one of my cards under his door, with a note for him to call me. Finally he called me, and he told me he’d contacted another guy, Saul Kent, who he said was a genius. Saul was in his early twenties. I was already 39 or 40 at the time.”

“I was very spoiled. My grandmother always told me, there’s nothing that will destroy ambition in a man like a small, unearned income, and she was right. I had it made. I had a pretty wife, and two kids, and that boat – I loved that boat it; was a thirty-two foot Richardson. We sailed all over the place.”

Saul Kent, circa early 1970s

“I met Saul Kent, who was clearly the brains of this thing, and I met Sutton, who was exactly as Saul has described him: He had the least talent and the most ambition of any man he’d ever met. He went on about how he was a businessman, and he was a type who comes to cryonics all too often. Most of them have been eliminated, but they still appear from time to time. ‘Mister Wonderfuls,’ I call them. Sutton would complain about the way Saul dressed. I always had a suit on, because I had to go into the city once a week. I had to change trains at Flushing, so I would walk the two blocks to the Frank Charles bar. So, I always had a suit on and I think, maybe something stupid like that, whether you have a suit on or not, the whole world’s fate hinges on these things. Saul – Saul always wore sandals.”

“That bar was like, I guess, a thousand other bars in Queens: A redneck, blue-collar kind of place with a TV and endless football games running. They served horrible food. Most of the clientele were serious drinkers; they didn’t want to fool around with food. They had a room at the side where there were booths, and that’s where we would meet each week.”

“So, the question was: what were we going to do? Well, for starts, we were all going to be members of this Life Extension Society. We wrote to Ev Cooper and we got back vague letters, in which he would never send us the names and addresses of other people who had written to him. So, we asked if we could print up stationery. He didn’t want us to do that.”

“I had stock in Union Carbide. They were the biggest manufacturer of cryogenic tanks in world. We felt one of the biggest problems was to get a tank that you could store people in. I don’t know why, but we focused on that. So I went to one of their stockholders’ meetings and suggested they should build tanks for us, and of course they looked at me like – well, I got used to that look later on.”

“You understand, all through this, Ettinger would say, ‘Once we freeze the first man, then it’s going to go. That’s when it will really take off.’  But Ettinger didn’t do it.  There were opportunities, but he didn’t take them. He lost his nerve. And of course, there were no tanks to put people in.”

END PART I


Footnotes

[1] Curtis Henderson was born on September 28, 1926.

[2] The ERCO Ercoupe is a low wing monoplane first manufactured by the Engineering and Research Corporation (or ERCO) shortly before World War II. It was designed to be the safest fixed-wing aircraft that aerospace engineering could provide at the time, and the type still enjoys a very faithful following today.

[3] This unit was the very first Cryo-Capsule ever made by Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation (CC) of Phoenix, AZ; model CC-101. It was sold by CC to John Flynn who had started a company called Biopreservation. Flynn had Cryocapsule stored in a warehouse in NYC, but he could not pay the rent. Curtis paid off the back-rent and acquired the dewar. MD

[4] The cat’s name was “Crockett,” after Davy Crockett, and he died in his mid-20s – an amazing feat for an outdoor cat. MD

[5] Henderson often likened his life at the time to the one portrayed in the 1956 movie, ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ starring Gregory Peck, saying that it was an almost a perfect cinematic rendering of the kind of life he lead. MD

[6] The Prospect of Immortality, by Robert C. W. Ettinger, Doubleday, New York, 1964.

[7] James Sutton lived in Jamaica, Queens, New York. MD

[8] Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now by Evan Cooper writing as Nathan Duhring, 20th Century Books Foundation, Washington, D.C., 1962. http://depressedmetabolism.com/pdfs/cooper_immortality.pdf. MD

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A Brief Pictorial History of Extracorporeal Technology in Cryonics – Part 5

Posted on February 7, 2011 by admin

By Mike Darwin

CPB at BPI

When I left Alcor and started BioPreservation, Inc., (BPI) in 1992, the same high standard of care was continued. Where there was adequate notice, cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) was initiated in the home using mechanical cardiopulmonary support (CPS) as a bridge, and the quality of CPS was greatly improved by combining active compression-decompression CPS (ACD-CPS) with high impulse chest compressions. Again, Michigan Instruments was enlisted to build a pneumatically powered machine that could deliver this modality, and which could also eliminate the pauses in chest compression (and thus interruptions in blood flow), required to administer ventilations.37

Figure 45: Active Compression-Decompression High Impulse CPS machine first put into clinical application on 12 Dec 1995.

In-home CPB was continued until BioPreservation ceased operations in 1996.38 The original ECMO[1] cart developed by Jerry Leaf had many modifications and improvements added to it by the time it was retired, including a CDI monitor for continuous in-line arterial and venous pH and blood gases, a computerized ACD-HI CPS machine, and increased battery life and oxygen carrying capacity (see Figures 46 & 47, below).

Figure 46: MALSS being set up in a patient’s living room for in-home CPB on 12 December, 1995.

Figure 47: Patient undergoing in-home CPB following immediate post arrest support with ACD-HI CPS.

In cases where the patient was remote from BPI’s facilities in Southern California, and where in-home CPB[2] was possible, a Remote Standby capability was deployed. BPI maintained two fully equipped ambulances as well as two complete Remote Standby kits fully stocked with all of the hardware and consumables required to initiate CPB, as seen in Figures 48 and 49, below.39

Figure 48: CPB set-up deployed in the home of long time cryonicist and cryopatient Jerry White, in Northern California. Jerry was cryopreserved on 05 February, 1994.

Figure 49: Extracorporeal circuit and portable ice bath in position in Jerry White’s condominium in February of 1994.

As was the case during my time at Alcor, cryoprotective (CPA) perfusions at BPI continued to be carried out using standard extracorporeal technology with virtually all of the perfusion and monitoring equipment used having been made by well respected medical manufacturers.40-42

Figure 50: Experienced experimental animal perfusionist from UC Davis Veterinary School (under contract to BPI) withdrawing a perfusate sample for analysis during the cryoprotective perfusion of Jerry White in 1994.

Figure 51: Cryoprotective perfusion tableaux at BPI in 1994.

Figure 52: Cryoprotective perfusion circuit used for Jerry White at BPI in 1994. The only ‘non-medical’ pieces of equipment in the circuit are the perfusate reservoirs, and the magnetic stir stable and stir bar, used to mix the CPA concentrate with the recirculating perfusate; a requirement unique to human cryopreservation operations.

The same was true of the surgical instruments and cannulae used for cryoprotective perfusion. My philosophy was, from the beginning, not to re-invent the wheel and, wherever possible, to use existing hardware and existing technology. Aside from the commonsense and practical reasons inherent in such an approach, it offered the incalculable advantage of allowing me and my colleagues more time to spend on solving problems not yet solved, and, where necessary, to fabricate novel hardware for which there was a pressing need – but no supplier.

Figure 53: Some of BPI’s cardiothoracic instruments on the back table during the cryopreservation of Richard Marsh at BPI on 06 May, 1994.

Figure 54: Cannulae and tubing configuration (median sternotomy) employed at BPI (cryopreservation of Richard Marsh on 06 May, 1994).

Figure 55: Board Certified clinical perfusionist performing the cryoprotective perfusion of Richard Marsh at BPI on 06 May, 1994.

One of the more bizarre fixations to emerge in the recent criticism of cryonics is the notion that cryonicists have had no contact with extracorporeal medicine or professional Board Certified perfusionists. Nothing could be further from the truth. The first perfusions carried out at Cryovita were pumped by a Board Certified Perfusionist who was a former colleague of Jerry Leaf’s. This allowed Jerry to concentrate his efforts on surgery to cannulate the patient and prepare him for connection to the extracorporeal circuit. Jerry was himself a Board eligible perfusionist, with countless clinical hours, in addition to his research CPB experience; he was the primary perfusionist at the UCLA cardiothoracic surgery research laboratory, and he was a skilled ‘surgeon’ who instructed clinical cardiothoracic surgeons at UCLA during their residencies.

I put apostrophes around the word surgeon when using it to describe Jerry Leaf; because it has recently been has implied that the use of this word to describe the position of the person who performs ‘surgery’ on cryopatients constitutes ‘practicing medicine without a license’[3] and ‘misleading or defrauding the public by projecting an image of medical certification and licensure.’ Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, and both Jerry and I were always careful to state who and what we were – including the absence of doctorates, medical degrees, or professional certifications. In particular, I have been accused of passing myself off as a ‘nurse,’ and to have otherwise misrepresented my qualifications. This is a lie, pure and simple, and I have never advertised, nor allowed to stand, any notion than I am anything other than a secondary school educated man with 3 months of additional training as a hemodialysis technician.

I have also been ruthlessly honest about the near absence of my math skills (and abilities) and have been blunt that this defect alone would have precluded me from ever obtaining a Ph.D. in any science, let alone an M.D. While I wish I could have been better formally educated, I am very proud of what I have achieved absent a university degree, and I am very glad I persisted in my pursuit of the sciences. My achievements are what they are, and they have been extensively documented in writing; and most of that work is available on the Internet today. The reader may access these materials and judge for himself to what extent my work has merit.

Similarly, BPI employed two perfusionists: one a practicing Board Certified clinical perfusionist, and the other a highly skilled and very experienced research and clinical veterinary perfusionist who had trained and worked at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. One of these perfusionists was present at every case BPI pumped. Going beyond perfusion, it should be noted that both Jerry Leaf and I were, in cryonics terms, very successful at recruiting people into our cryopreservation teams who were licensed biomedical professionals.

At any one time, the teams had an RN, LVN, perfusionist, Medical Technologist, Respiratory Therapist or physician (and usually combinations of the aforementioned). Dr. Thomas Munson, now a patient at Alcor, was a physician-surgeon with many years of experience who scrubbed in on almost all Alcor cases from shortly after the time he was recruited as a member from a lecture I gave in San Diego, until (at least) after I left Alcor in 1991. Dr. Steve Harris, who became involved in cryonics after I contacted him about an article he had written in regard to aging in the early 1980s, was also a great source of expertise, and was not infrequently present at Alcor cryopreservations. One young man who literally showed up on our doorstep, Scott Greene, put himself through EMT[4] training and then worked as an EMT while he put himself through nursing school (he often had two jobs at a time). Scott was an integral and highly valued member of the team until I left, and he took work as an RN at far remove from Colton, CA where BPI was first located.

BPI and Alcor also employed several highly skilled professionals who were not directly involved in human medicine, but who were uniquely (indeed enviably) qualified to participate in cryonics cases. One of these was a veterinary cardiothoracic surgeon who made his living, in part, by implanting novel prosthetic heart valves, left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) and total artificial hearts  (TAHs) in sheep and cattle for long-term evaluation prior to human clinical trials. He was a superb cardiac surgeon and perfusionist with an enormous reservoir of experience – he had even done some of the chronic implants of the Jarvik TAH in calves. These people did not want to be publicly associated with cryonics for reasons that anyone who has read these recent attacks should readily be able to appreciate.

Finally, a word of caution: When confronted with evidence that is contrary to their stated opinions or conclusions, these critics have, in the past simply denied or redefined that evidence. A case in point is the photograph shown in Figure 56, below. This photo was originally included in a report that a former perfusionist who worked at Suspended Animation, Inc., received a copy of during her employ there. She subsequently stated on the Cold Filter cryonics discussion forum that this photo showed the presence of air in the extracorporeal circuit, in particular in the pump ‘shoe’ or raceway. If this was indeed the case, it would be indicative of gross incompetence on the part of the perfusionist – who in this case happened to be me.

Figure 56: Pump raceway showing serum separation from blood (arrow) following termination of active cardiopulmonary support in a canine resuscitation dog experiment conducted at 21st Century Medicine in the late 1990s.

I tried to point out that she was mistaken in her assertion, and that what she was stating was air, was in fact separation of the red cells from the serum due to sedimentation of the cells under the force of gravity. This could (and did) occur because the pump was shut off, and had been shut off for some time. In this model the animals were severely vasoconstricted at the conclusion of the period of post-ischemic extracorporeal support due to the administration of vasopressin, and it was not possible to return much of the blood present in the extracorporeal circuit until many minutes after the animal was weaned from the pump. As a consequence, blood remained in the extracorporeal circuit and was gradually re-infused into the animal as the vasopressin was metabolized, and the vasoconstriction subsided. During this period, red cells fall to the more dependant part of the circuit under the influence of gravity. This sedimentation of red cells was further enhanced by the presence of therapeutic drugs that elevated the sedimentation rate.

Figure 57: Air bubble in silastic tubing during cryoprotective perfusion of a cryopatient in 1975. The high surface tension of water causes the bubble to have spherical contours as consequence of its interaction with air at the air-liquid interface.

In point of fact, it is a bit surprising that a perfusionist, whose attitude and remarks would appear to indicate she is all knowing on any subject related to CPB, would not know that water has enormous surface tension, and thus water-air (or blood-air) interfaces exhibit a meniscus, as can be seen in Figure 57, above. Not only is there no meniscus in the tubing in Figure 56, close inspection reveals that sedimentation is also underway (though much less complete) on the side of the tubing raceway that is on the opposing side to where it was asserted there was a large amount of air present (i.e., the right side). Yellow tinged serum can be seen to be appearing in this tubing; although the degree of red cell sedimentation is not as pronounced.

To sum up, this new generation of cryonics ‘critics’ has no sincere interest in improving cryonics, or in helping cryonicists. It is unfortunate that the first contact with cryonics for some of these individuals has been with utterly incompetent practitioners of cryonics.  Much of the criticism of SA that been leveled at the operation during the period of (at least) 2006-7 were, in my opinion, valid – and I say this based on firsthand experience as an unpaid consultant to SA in 2006. However, it is even more unfortunate that these critics went no further, and that they have based their evaluation of the use of extracorporeal technology in cryonics during the period from 1981 to 1995, as practiced by Jerry Leaf and I, based on their adverse experience with institutions where neither Jerry or I had any authority or responsibility.

This in no way constitutes an excuse for their indiscriminate reign of terror – indeed, my first experience of perfusion in cryonics was unarguably vastly more shocking and at variance with anything even remotely resembling medicine. I could have responded with irrational and non-constructive criticism, but instead, I responded by documenting what I found and putting forth every bit of effort I could muster to change things for the better. And above all, when I had the good fortune to encounter others in cryonics that were both competent and committed to doing the same, I had the good sense to set my ego aside and go to work with them in attempting to make cryonics into a scientifically rigorous and professionally accountable discipline.

The End

References

37) Darwin, M. A new kind of CPR. CryoCare Report #2 online edition, July 1994: http://www.cryocare.org/index.cgi?subdir=&url=ccrpt2.html#GUIDELINES. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

38) Darwin, M. Cryopreservation of James Gallagher, CryoCare patient #C-2150: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereportC2150.htm.  Retrieved 2011-01-29.

39)  Darwin, M. Cryopreservation case report: Jerome Butler White, http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=425990&sortBy=date&highlight=White_Jerome_Butler_Case_Report.pdf&. Retrieved 2011-01-30.

40)  Darwin, M. Cryopreservation case report: Richard Putnam Marsh, ACS 5694.  http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=425990&sortBy=date&highlight=Marsh%2C+Richard+P.+Cryopreservation+Summary.pdf&. Retrieved 2011-01-30.

41) Darwin, M. Cryopreservation of James Gallagher, CryoCare patient #C-2150: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereportC2150.htm.  Retrieved 2011-01-29.

42) Darwin, M. Cryopreservation case report: Jerome Butler White, http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=425990&sortBy=date&highlight=White_Jerome_Butler_Case_Report.pdf&. Retrieved 2011-01-30.

[1] Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO).

[2] Cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB).

[3] Of course, one problem with this charge is that our patients are legally dead. It is only possible to practice medicine on legally dead people under special circumstances, such as performing a medico-legal autopsy.

[4] Emergency Medical Technician (EMT)

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A Brief Pictorial History of Extracorporeal Technology in Cryonics – Part 4

Posted on February 7, 2011 by admin

By Mike Darwin

Reaching for Extracorporeal Excellence

Figure 27: Tamari-Kaplitt Pulsator being used for cryoprotective perfusion of a patient on 12 December, 1988.

From the time Jerry and I took charge of patient care at Alcor, both standard and cutting edge extracorporeal medical technology was applied to cryonics patients with both a high degree of competence and success.[1] That does not mean that we had the latest equipment, or the most elegant surroundings, because we usually did not. Nor do perfusionists or intensivists in New Zealand, or in the UK today, and yet despite (or perhaps because of) a relative paucity of the very latest devices in their ICUs and ORs, their patient outcomes, in terms of both morbidity and mortality, are better, on average, than those in the US – and these outcomes are achieved at markedly lower costs.22,23 Years before US intensivists abandoned the routine use of pulmonary artery catheters (Swan-Ganz catheters), their use had been discontinued completely in New Zealand’s ICUs: there is no substitute for good clinical judgment and the intelligent use of technological resources.

After validating that pulsatile flow was significantly better at facilitating cryoprotective equilibration and controlling cerebral edema in ischemic cryopatients (using an animal model employing the radioactive microsphere technique for determining regional flows), we acquired a Tamari-Kaplitt Pulsatile (TKP) flow device, 24 which was used until the manufacturer, Shiley, ceased making the disposable component of the system. The TKP produced truly effective pulsatile flow, and was ideal for use in cryonics operations, because it could be used with hollow fiber oxygenators and, when used under the asanguineous, low-flow, low and slow pulsatility conditions necessary for CPA perfusion, the TKP did not present the risk of cavitation of the perfusate (and accompanying gas embolus formation) or hemolysis that it did in normal clinical use.25

Figure 28: Disposable pulsator chamber of the Tamari-Kaplitt Pulsator (foreground). A chamber comprised of a flexible membranous section of the arterial line, contained within a hard outer shell, generated pulsatile flow using compressed gas. Shiley discontinued manufacturing this component rendering the device obsolete and unusable.

While inferior to the TKP in generating pulsatile flow, we acquired a Sarns DX Pulsatile Pump early in 1990 at the then (to us) staggering cost of $4,500.

Figure 29: Sarns DX pump (left side of the heart-lung machine console) being used with a Kolobow silastic membrane oxygenator to provide pulsatile flow for a patient on 31 December, 1990. An added expense that accompanied the loss of the TKP was the need to use Kolobow ‘true membrane’ oxygenators in order to minimize damping of the pulse wave that occurs with hollow fiber oxygenators. The TKP pulsation generator bypassed the oxygenator and was positioned in-line, adjacent to the arterial cannula.

However, all the extracorporeal acumen in the world cannot make up for prolonged exposure to normothermic ischemia, and here too Alcor was a leader, both in applying existing technology for cardiopulmonary support (CPS), and in extending it to well beyond what clinical medicine had to offer at that time. By November of 1985 we had deployed emergency response kits equipped with a mechanical heart-lung resuscitator (HLR), 1st generation cerebroprotective drugs, cooling equipment (Portable Ice Baths, PIBs) and temperature monitoring equipment to the US, Canada and the UK.26 Also included were small compressed oxygen cylinders as well as oxygen regulators to interface with high capacity H-cylinders to allow for extended HLR run times.

What’s more, we had also acted aggressively to equip the South Florida Alcor group with full capability for Standby, Transport, and cryoprotective perfusion. We also established periodic training sessions using a survival animal model as well as didactic and hands-on training sessions held more frequently to establish and maintain emergency response and Transport skills. 27

Figure 30: At top, Mike Darwin, with the 1st generation of emergency response kits just prior to their deployment in 1985; and at bottom, the map of the US showing the location of emergency kits and of all Alcor members as of May, 1986.

Figure 31: Operating room in the Alcor South Florida facility in May of 1987; invasive pressure monitoring equipment on cart at left, hot suction on white cart at center, defibrillator & monitor on stainless steel back table at upper left, electrocautery on cart in foreground, and operating table lower left.

These training sessions were held on-site to facilitate participation by the maximum number of local members possible, and additional training was conducted at Alcor’s facilities in Fullerton, and later in Riverside, CA.

Figure 32: Extracorporeal supplies cabinets in the Alcor Florida facility in May of 1987.

Figure 33: Alcor member Gil Ross looks on as preparations are underway for a training session. In the foreground is the American Optical heart-lung machine which was to be used for cryoprotective perfusion in the South Florida facility.

Only someone who was willfully ignorant or malicious could look at these photos and read the published accounts of the time (which are readily accessible on-line) and claim that cryonics, at least as practiced by Jerry Leaf and I, was in any way divorced from extracorporeal medicine and technology. What is seen, and seen consistently, is the use of conventional medical technology, and in particular conventional perfusion technology, to such an extent that it would be difficult to differentiate any of these facilities as being cryonics operations, as opposed to CPB surgical suites in experimental laboratories or clinical environments around the world at that time.

Training sessions in basic emergency response were frequent, lasted several days, and were achievement validated; individuals either mastered the skills sets required and passed the exams, or they were not certified as Level 1 Transport Techs.

Figure 34: Saul Kent practicing set-up of the Michigan Instruments 1008 heart-lung resuscitator during a training session conducted in South Florida, circa 1987.

And no one was exempt from DIY cryonics. There was very little money in those days and the people who wanted cryonics for themselves had no choice but to learn to do it for themselves. Equipment was purchased used, often for pennies on the dollar, and with the exception of myself and Hugh Hixon, no one was paid in any way for their services (and Hugh and I were paid precious little).

Figure 35: Left to right: Thomas Donaldson, Cath Woof and Linda Chamberlain practicing applying and operating the Brunswick HLR-50-90 at an Alcor Transport training session hosted by the Donaldson’s at their home in Sunnyvale, California.28

It is egregiously malicious, as has been done recently, to ridicule some of the very people who were down on their hands and knees in these photos learning to do for themselves, as best they could, what virtually no medical professionals at that time were willing to teach – let alone to do. Even had we had the money (which we did not), it was impossible to find professionals with both the skills and the time to do the jobs we were forced to do ourselves – though let the record note that we certainly tried mightily to recruit such people, and in a few cases succeeded. But it was never enough to equal the task at hand. The need to earn a livelihood, as well as geographical distance, proved formidable barriers.

Figure 36: Mike Darwin and Thomas Donaldson preparing to practice endotracheal intubation skills at an Alcor Transport training session hosted by the Donaldson’s at their home in Sunnyvale, California.

As early as February of 1985 we began the practice of in-field blood washout of cryopatients (TBW) at local mortuaries and this practice was routinely implemented for every Alcor patient who could benefit from it.[[2]] 29-32 Why was this done in mortuaries as opposed to in the hospitals where the patients were pronounced? The answer is that there was no medical facility who would even consider allowing such care to proceed in their facilities – which was a moot point anyway, since no physician or technician on their staff was interested in assisting with, let alone undertaking such a task on their own initiative. One of my most vivid memories of a patient Transport was when a staff physician at the hospital where I was undertaking to Transport the patient – literally connecting the patient to the HLR and intubating him – walked into the ICU cubicle and began to rail at me about what the patient’s future employment prospects would be, and who would pay to reeducate him if he was revived![3] The majority of physicians then, as is the case with those who now attack cryonics, while loudly professing their desire to save it, not only don’t want to help cryonicists – they want to destroy cryonics.

After years of scrounging, scrimping and saving, Jerry Leaf and Hugh Hixon completed construction of a mobile ‘extracorporeal membrane oxygenation’ (ECMO) cart.33 This device was fabricated in-house, not just because we had virtually no money, but because there was no commercial manufacturer for such a piece of equipment when the project was begun in 1982 – and indeed there was no commercial manufacturer after it was completed in 1986, either. In fact, 25 years later, there are still no commercially produced integrated adult ECMO carts! The cart was first applied to a young man, who unexpectedly arrested from sepsis secondary to HIV, on 08 June, 1987.34

Figure 37: Patient undergoing mechanical CPS as a bridge to ECMO support in the Alcor ambulance in June of 1987. Left to right above are: Mike Darwin, CRT, Carlos Mondragon and Scott Greene, RN.

The patient was transported from the hospital where he arrested to Alcor’s facilities in Riverside, CA using closed chest mechanical CPS as a bridge to ECMO. The three photos below illustrate the extracorporeal circuit and the configuration of the 1st generation cryonics ECMO cart, which was christened the Mobile Advanced Life Support System (MALSS).

Figure 38: Jerry Leaf preparing to install aneroid ‘back pressure ‘ monitoring gauge on the arterial filter of the bypass circuit.

Figure 39: Jerry Leaf, preparing to secure the arterial and venous lines to the lower structural support rail of the MALSS, while Scott Greene, RN, suctions the patient.

Figure 40: The patient on CPB undergoing cooling to 15oC prior to blood washout and cryoprotective perfusion.

Where use of the MALSS was not feasible due to distance or logistics, in-field CPB with blood washout continued to be used, as is illustrated in Figure 41.

Figure 41: Jerry Leaf prepares the in-field CPB circuit for connection to Dr. Eugene Donovan, M.D., who was cryopreserved by Alcor on 21 March, 1989. The patient is receiving continuous cardiopulmonary support via a pneumatically powered chest compressor and ventilator.

After Jerry was cryopreserved in July of 1991, Alcor continued to offer extracorporeal and cryonics care that was of extraordinarily high quality. As a result of in-house research on developing improved methods of CPS, Alcor began the use of high impulse CPR (HI-CPR); a modality that has only within the past year become the standard of care in the US. I worked closely with Michigan Instruments, spending a week in Grand Rapids, to develop of a heart-lung resuscitator capable of delivering HI-CPR.35

Figure 42: Patient undergoing high impulse CPS as a bridge to CPB cooling and blood washout on 12 December, 1991.

On 12 December, 1991 Alcor placed the first human cryopatient on CPB in his home. HI-CPR, starting within 2 minutes of pronouncement, served as a bridge to CPB which was initiated within~100 minutes of cardiac arrest.36

Figure 43: CPB supported induction of ultraprofound hypothermia being undertaken in the living room of a cryopatient’s home for the first time, on 12 December, 1991.

Figure 44: Femoral cannulae, arterial and venous lines, pressure monitoring line and aneroid, 12 December, 1991.

End of Part 4

References

24) Kaplitt MJ, Tamari Y, Frantz SL, et al. Clinical experience with Tamari-Kaplitt pulsator. NY State J Med. 1978;78:1090.

25)  Wise EA, Mandl JP, Zaayer WE. Gaseous emboli generation by a pulsatile assist device. J Extracorp Tech. 1978;10:93.

26) Editorial Staff. ALCOR Coordinators:  Training and Equipment Deployment. Cryonics. 7(1);1986:2-4. http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8601.txt. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

27) Editorial Staff, CSSF merges with Alcor. Cryonics. 6(1);1985:2-6: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8501.txt. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

28)  Adventure in Sunnyvale. Cryonics. 7(9);1986:5-8: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8609.txt.  Retrieved 2011-01-24

29) Darwin, MG, Leaf, JD, Hixon, H. Case report: neuropreservation of Alcor patient A-1068. 1 of 2, Cryonics. 7(2);17-32:1986: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8504.txt. Retrieved 2010-08-31. Retrieved 2011-02-25.

30)  Darwin, M, Bridge S. The cryonic suspension of A-1242. Cryonics 11(10)1990:18-22. 2010-09-29. http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics9010.txt. Retrieved  2010-09-29. Donovan, C and Donovan, J. A dream in his pocket: the cryonic suspension of Eugene T. Donovan. Cryonics. 11(2);29-45:1990:   http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport9002.html.  Retrieved 2011-01-28.

31)  Darwin, MG, Cryopreservation case report: Arlene Francis Fried, A-1049: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/fried.html. Retrieved 2011-01-30.

32)  Henson, K, Darwin, M. The Transport of Patient A-1312S. http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport9202.html. Retrieved 2010-08-31.

33)  Leaf, J, Hixon, H, Darwin, M. Development of a mobile advanced life support system for human biostasis operations. Cryonics. 1987; 8(3):23-40: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8703.txt.  Retrieved 2011-01-24.

34) Darwin, M. Cryonic suspension case report A-1133. http://www.alcor.org/Library/pdfs/AlcorCaseA1133.pdf.  Retrieved 2011-01-24.

35)  Darwin, M. A major advance in suspension patient support. Cryonics. 10(8):1989:7-14.  http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8908.txt. Retrieved   Retrieved 2011-01-24.

36)  Henson, K, Darwin, M. The Transport of Patient A-1312S. http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport9202.html. Retrieved 2010-08-31.

[1] Success being defined here is effective cryoprotective loading, absence of iatrogenic events and in those cases where it was possible, preservation of viability until cryoprotective perfusion was undertaken.

[2] Some patients were not candidates for this treatment as a result of being Coroner/Medical Examiner cases, or experiencing unanticipated and distant cardiac arrest.

[3] My retort was that the good Doctor shouldn’t worry about having to pay for those things, because unless he was cryopreserved himself, he would be long dead and buried before the patient was reanimated.

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A Brief Pictorial History of Extracorporeal Technology in Cryonics – Part 3

Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin

By Mike Darwin

A Great Team

In January of 1980 I stabilized and transported a patient from southern Wisconsin for TT to Cryovita Labs. Jerry kindly invited me to stay and participate in this patient’s cryoprotective perfusion (CPA) perfusion and cool down and I readily accepted.

Figure 15: Jerry Leaf at left and Mike Darwin at right performing the initial examination of a patient stabilized remotely in Wisconsin and Transported to the facilities of Cryovita Laboratories in 1980.

Figure 16: Patient undergoing median sternotomy prior to cannulation for cryoprotective perfusion at Cryovita Laboratories in 1980.

Figure 17: Intravascular pressure monitoring set-up (Intraflow™, stopcock manifold, Statham pressure transducer and calibrating mercury manometer) as used to monitor cryopatient arterial and central venous pressure at Cryovita Laboratories in 1980.

Figure 18: Heart-lung machine and extracorporeal circuit employed to carry out cryoprotective perfusion of cryopatients at Cryovita Laboratories in 1980.

As we were finishing up this case, another patient, a long-time member of the Bay Area Cryonics Society, experienced unexpected cardiac arrest and presented for cryopreservation. With almost no sleep, and virtually no turnaround time between cases, this patient was cryopreserved, as well. A detailed technical report on both of these cases was published in Cryonics magazine in 1985.12

Doing those two cases with Jerry convinced me that that the most effective and important action I could take to both further cryonics (and improve my own skills) was to shutter the now considerable cryonics operations in Indianapolis, and relocate to work with Jerry in Southern California. That is exactly what I did in the spring of 1981. My reasons for this are best articulated by Jerry in an interview he gave in August of 1986:

“In 1980 I had the occasion to make personal contact with Mike Federowicz, who I had corresponded with before. Mike had transported a Trans Time patient to Southern California and then stayed on to help with a second suspension which came on the heels of the first. Mike had been working in a cryonics group in Indianapolis, Indiana for a number of years. At that time I tried to open the door as far as doing what I could to persuade him that Southern California offered an attractive alternative to the difficulties he was experiencing in Indiana. I needed someone else out here to work with who had a background in clinical medicine, such as Mike did, and he himself had begun to move toward clinical models of perfusion — using roller pumps and so on. I felt that he and I working together would allow us both to accomplish a lot more than if we were working alone. He was the only one else in the world who seemed to be aware of the fact that something needed to be done to upgrade the level of care — and to realize that that meant medical technology.”13

Throughout the early and mid-1980s – often under very trying conditions, and with virtually no money other than that which we earned ourselves, Jerry, I and the small band of committed cryonicists that comprised Alcor at that time, relentlessly accumulated equipment and conducted basic research to determine just how effective (or ineffective) then current cryopreservation techniques were at preserving both viability and structure. We also began the very successful canine total body washout (TBW or blood washout) and extended ultraprofound hypothermic asanguineous perfusion research work which culminated in consistent recovery of the animals from 4 hours of perfusion at ~5oC.14 Our thanks for that was not infrequent harsh criticism, most of which emanated from our fellow cryonicists.15,16

Figure 19: Shiley pediatric blood oxygenator (bubbler) and blood reservoir bags used to hold the animal’s blood during asanguineous perfusion at Cryovita Laboratories on 17 March, 1984. The stainless steel basin was used to collect discard effluent at the tail end of blood washout and replacement.

Over the past two years, this work has been has been decried as useless, scientifically invalid, and it has been implied it was conducted in an unlicensed facility, using illegally obtained animals.  In fact, Cryovita was a USDA[1] licensed facility from well before the time that any animal (other than the human kind) entered the premises. Jerry was inordinately proud of his USDA license, and Cryovita was inspected frequently by the USDA, and never had a serious violation. At the time this research began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, ‘pound seizure’ was an operational and fully legal mechanism for acquiring dogs and cats for research.

While still technically legal in many states, including California,17 pound seizure has effectively been all but abolished, and the result is that each year, according to the US Humane Society, 6-8 million dogs and cats are killed; to no purpose but to dispose of them. I have personally witnessed this process at a variety of facilities and most of the animals die in terror and confusion – many having been injured by others of their species while ‘timing-out’ in local government custody. Their deaths serve no purpose but to dispose of a suffering and ‘unwanted’ commodity produced by irresponsible and cruel people.  The majority of animal research facilities at the time when pound seizure was operational provided exemplary and kind care for the animals they used for experimental purposes. In fact, such care is essential to good research, because a stressed, malnourished and unconditioned animal will yield suspect or meaningless experimental results.

Thus, experimental animals obtained from the pound, or from licensed dealers or breeders must be wormed, vaccinated, well fed and emotionally supported prior to use in experimental procedures. Just as much to the point, the vast majority (>90%) of such procedures employing dogs and cats are ‘acute procedures.’ That means that the animal is placed in deep anesthesia and never awakens from the procedure. In practice, this means additional weeks of life for the animal under humane conditions, and a death that is virtually identical to that it would have experienced if ‘euthanized’ in the pound.

Chronic studies are carefully regulated, and an animal can be used only once for any such study, and indeed, for any experimental procedure.18 A consequence of the Animal Rights Activists’ intervention to prevent pound seizure has been the useless and irresponsible deaths of millions of discarded animals. And keep in mind that one of the biggest beneficiaries of animal research are arguably the animals themselves – since many procedures targeted for human use cannot jump the FDA regulatory or marketing hurdle for human application – but can do so for animals. Joint replacement, NF-kappa B non-steroidal chronic pain drugs such as Rimadyl (carprofen),19 and most recently, joint regeneration (using fat derived stem cells) in dogs20 with degenerative hip disease are but a few examples of treatments developed via animal experimentation that now benefit countless companion animals around the world.

Research Drives Excellence

As to the utility of the canine TBW work, we were the first to demonstrate that intracellular solutions of the kind used for organ preservation were useful for prolonged asanguineous perfusion, the first to demonstrate that extended (4 hour) asanguineous perfusion was routinely survivable in dogs with normal mentation, and the first to demonstrate the conservation of mammalian memory and personality after cooling to ~5oC. The Society for Cryobiology refused to publish our paper, and they worked relentlessly to ensure that no other journal would publish a paper from ‘body freezers.’ This work is available on line, and it is now possible for people to judge for themselves. This work by Cryovita and Alcor, which was carried out in the early 1980s, was not repeated until 1991 with the publication of nearly identical work by Bailes, et al. Interestingly, one of the investigators on that paper (who later became the principal person conducting subsequent work in this area), was Michael Taylor, Ph.D., of the Society for Cryobiology, who also happened to be one of the reviewers who rejected the Cryovita-Alcor TBW study in the 1980s.20,21

As was the case in most animal research labs then, much of our equipment was ‘older but serviceable.’ Indeed, UCLA sometimes had equipment that was no better, and was not infrequently more time worn.

Figure 20: Mike Darwin preparing an ‘ancient’ Travenol RSP dialysis machine for electrolyte normalization and hemoconcentration on the TBW dog ‘Enkidu’[2] on 17 March, 1984 at Cryovita Laboratories.

Paradoxically, sometimes the latest equipment is an absolute barrier to its use in a research application by virtue of its technological sophistication. I used hemodialysis with ultrafiltration to normalize blood electrolytes in the animals after blood replacement and to extract water from the extracorporeal circuit and vascular space – the latter to raise both the oncotic pressure and the hematocrit – this was before the advent of microporous hollow fiber hemoconcentrators in CPB. Because the intracellular perfusate we used (MHP-2[3]) contained 40 mEq/L of potassium, and very little sodium, even after the blood was replaced, the animals had cardioplegic levels of potassium present in their blood. It was most efficient to normalize the blood potassium level via dialysis – but this required that the dialysate be customized to our application.

Figure 21: Continuous monitoring of dialysate pH during rewarming with dynamic adjustment of pH being carried out by the addition of sodium hydroxide solution to the dialysate via the top ‘mixing compartment’ of the RSP dialysis machine. The bottle of Hemastix was used to check the dialysate returning from the dialyzer for hollow fiber breaks that could result in blood leaks from extracorporeal circuit into the dialysate.

Unfortunately, all of the then state-of-the-art equipment, such as the Cobe Sentry II dialysis machine,  used ‘proportioning technology’ to mix the dialysate in real time; and these machines also had built in conductivity monitors that would shut the system down in the event the electrolyte concentration was sensed to be inadequate. It was also impossible to dynamically adjust the pH of the dialysate in a proportioning system. The very technological safeguards and ‘undefeatable’ automation built into the system to make it safe and more ‘foolproof’ also rendered it useless for research! As a consequence, I had to locate batch-type machines from the late 1960s, and single pass convertors from the 1980s, to allow for the use of hollow fiber dialyzers in order to use this modality on our animals. Newer isn’t always better.

Figure 22: Bilateral femoral cannulation was used for the TBW experiments. In this photograph the arterial, venous, dialysis and pressure monitoring lines are visible during the perfusion of TBW dog ‘Enkidu’ on 17 March, 1984 at Cryovita Laboratories.

Figure 23: One unexpected consequence of using hyperosmolar extracellular solution for asanguineous perfusion was the extraction of non-vascular water from the aqueous and vitreous humors or the eyes (as well as the cerebrospinal fluid). As can be seen in this photo (TBW dog ‘Enkidu’ on 17 March, 1984 at Cryovita Laboratories), the eyes become sunken and flaccid during perfusion and this raised concern that retinal detachment might occur. This did not happen, and despite large reductions in brain volume and ‘ocular flattening,’ the animals recovered normally and lead normal, healthy lives, dying of old age in their mid-teens.

Figure 24: The Awakening: This candid photo perfectly captures the sense of wonder and anticipation that everyone who was involved in these experiments experienced at the time. When this photo was taken, Enkidu had just begun to recover a ‘lash reflex,’ indicating the imminent return of consciousness. From left to right: Mike Darwin, Garret Smyth, Max More and Brenda Peters.

Figure 25: Mike Darwin giving ‘assist’ ventilations to a dog recovering from 4 hours of asanguineous perfusion at Cryovita Laboratories in 1981.

Figure 26: Alcor member and volunteer Anna Tyeb restrains a rambunctious ‘Enkidu’ a few days after he underwent 4 hours of asanguineous perfusion at ~5oC.

There are literally hundreds of photographs of these experiments, as well as half a dozen videotapes; most of which have not yet been digitized. They document virtually every facet of the extracorporeal technology used to carry out this research. I do not merely believe, I know (from experience) that the equipment and techniques we employed were exemplary and representative of the standard of care in both experimental cardiopulmonary bypass laboratories, as well as many of the clinics of the day. Alcor cryonicists have a great deal to be proud of in terms of both advances in research, and clinical (cryopatient) care, during this period and throughout the 1980s (certainly up until the departure of Jerry Leaf and me from Alcor in 1991).

Why was this research done? For many reasons, not the least of which was that we hoped that by applying the same technology of intracellular perfusates that had allowed for 12 to 24 hour clinical cold storage of organs for transplant (such as the kidney and liver) to whole animals, we might possibly enable the creation of emergency ultraprofound ‘preservative hypothermia’ as a viable clinical modality. This technology would allow for rapid, in-field, or in-hospital asanguineous perfusion and cooling to a few degrees above 0oC; thus enabling victims of both civilian and battlefield exsanguinating trauma to enter a state of temporary ‘suspended animation,’ buying them time to reach sophisticated medical facilities where definitive treatment would be available. Twenty years later, this idea is now being seriously explored by some of the most outstanding research and clinical institutions in the US. Note the dates of publication on these papers – they come nearly two decades after we first successfully recovered dogs from four hours of asanguineous ultraprofound hypothermia:

1: Bellamy R, Safar P, Tisherman SA, Basford R, Bruttig SP, Capone A, Dubick MA, Ernster L, Hattler BG Jr, Hochachka P, Klain M, Kochanek PM, Kofke WA, Lancaster JR, McGowan FX Jr, Oeltgen PR, Severinghaus JW, Taylor MJ, Zar H. Suspended animation for delayed resuscitation. Crit Care Med. 1996 Feb;24(2 Suppl):S24-47. Review. PubMed PMID: 8608704.

2: Safar P, Tisherman SA, Behringer W, Capone A, Prueckner S, Radovsky A, Stezoski WS, Woods RJ. Suspended animation for delayed resuscitation from prolonged cardiac arrest that is unresuscitable by standard cardiopulmonary-cerebral resuscitation. Crit Care Med. 2000 Nov;28(11 Suppl):N214-8. Review. PubMed PMID: 11098950.

3: Tisherman SA. Suspended animation for resuscitation from exsanguinating hemorrhage. Crit Care Med. 2004 Feb;32(2 Suppl):S46-50. Review. PubMed PMID: 15043228.

4: Safar P, Behringer W, Böttiger BW, Sterz F. Cerebral resuscitation potentials for cardiac arrest. Crit Care Med. 2002 Apr;30(4 Suppl):S140-4. Review. PubMed/ PMID: 11940789.

5: Tisherman SA, Rodriguez A, Safar P. Therapeutic hypothermia in traumatology. Surg Clin North Am. 1999 Dec;79(6):1269-89. Review. PubMed PMID: 10625978

6: Marion DW, Leonov Y, Ginsberg M, Katz LM, Kochanek PM, Lechleuthner A, NemotoEM, Obrist W, Safar P, Sterz F, Tisherman SA, White RJ, Xiao F, Zar H.Resuscitative hypothermia. Crit Care Med. 1996 Feb;24(2 Suppl):S81-9. Review. PubMed PMID: 8608709.

7: Shoemaker WC, Peitzman AB, Bellamy R, Bellomo R, Bruttig SP, Capone A, DubickM, Kramer GC, McKenzie JE, Pepe PE, Safar P, Schlichtig R, Severinghaus JW, Tisherman SA, Wiklund L. Resuscitation from severe hemorrhage. Crit Care Med.1996 Feb;24(2 Suppl):S12-23. Review. PubMed PMID: 8608703.

8: Alam HB, Koustova E, Rhee P. Combat casualty care research: from bench to the battlefield. World J Surg. 2005;29 Suppl 1:S7-11. Review. PubMed PMID: 15815839.

9: Fukudome EY, Alam HB. Hypothermia in multisystem trauma. Crit Care Med. 2009 Jul;37(7 Suppl):S265-72. Review. PubMed PMID: 19535957.

10: Janata A, Weihs W, Schratter A, Bayegan K, Holzer M, Frossard M, Sipos W, Springler G, Schmidt P, Sterz F, Losert UM, Laggner AN, Kochanek PM, Behringer W. Cold aortic flush and chest compressions enable good neurologic outcome after 15 mins of ventricular fibrillation in cardiac arrest in pigs. Crit Care Med. 2010;38(8):1637-43. PubMed PMID: 20543671.

End of Part 3

References

12) Leaf, JD. Federowicz, M. Hixon, H. Case report: two consecutive suspensions, a comparative study in experimental human suspended animation. Cryonics.  6(11):13-38;1985:  http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport8511.html. Retrieved 2010-08-31.

13) Darwin, M, Interview with Jerry Leaf, Part I. Cryonics. 7(7);26-34:1986. http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/Interview-JerryLeaf.html. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

14)  Leaf, JD, Darwin, M, Hixon, H. A mannitol-based perfusate for reversible 5-hour asanguineous ultraprofound hypothermia in canines: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/tbwcanine.html. Retrieved 2011-02-24.

15) Darwin, M. The myth of the golden scalpel. Cryonics. 7(1);15-18:1986: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MythOfTheGoldenScalpel.html.  Retrieved 2011-01-24.

16) Darwin, M, Interview with Jerry Leaf, Part I. Cryonics. 7(7);26-34:1986. http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/Interview-JerryLeaf.html. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

17)  http://www.banpoundseizure.org/yourstate.shtml. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

18)  PUBLIC LAW 101-624–NOV. 28, Protection of Pets. 1990http://awic.nal.usda.gov/nal_display/index.php?info_center=3%20&tax_level=4&tax_subject=182&topic_id=1118&level3_id=6735&level4_id=11096&level5_id=0&placement_default=0. Retrieved 2011-01-25.

19) Committee for the Evaluation of Veterinary Products, European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products, EMEA/MRL/042/95/FINAL. http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/Maximum_Residue_Limits_-_Report/2009/11/WC500011412.pdf.  Retrieved 2011-01-25.

20)  http://www.vet-stem.com/smallanimal/. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

21)  Bailes JE, Leavitt ML, Teeple E, Maroon JC, Shih SR, Marquart M, Elrifai AM, Manack L. Ultraprofound hypothermia with complete blood substitution in a canine model. J Neurosurg. 1991;74:781-788.

22)  Elrifai AM, Bailes JE, Leavitt ML, Teeple E, Shih SR, Taylor MJ, Maroon JC, Ciongoli KA, Devenyi C, Rosenberg I. Blood substitution: an experimental study. J Extracorp Tech. 1992;24:58-63.

[1] The United States Department of Agriculture is the regulatory agency that oversees animal research facilities in the US.

[2] The name for this dog was chosen by Alcor activist and research volunteer Anna Tyeb. Enkidu was a character in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known human book, recorded on 12 clay tablets dated to ~3000 BCE. Enkidu is a wild-man who symbolizes the untamed natural world, and though he is the cultured Gilgamesh’s equal in strength and courage, he is in many ways his antithesis. After a wrestling match between the two, Enkidu becomes a friend and soul mate, and Gilgamesh’s constant companion in adventure; until he is taken ill and dies. The death of Enkidu wounds and enrages Gilgamesh, forcing him to realize that he had “loved and lost a friend to death, and learned he lacked the power to bring him back to life.” This inspires Gilgamesh on a quest to escape death by obtaining physical immortality.

[3] MHP is Mannitol-HEPES perfusate; mannitol is the impermeant sugar-alcohol and the zwitterionic buffer sodium HEPES was the primary buffer.

Posted in Cryonics Technology (General), Perfusion | 2 Comments

A Brief Pictorial History of Extracorporeal Technology in Cryonics – Part 2

Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin

By Mike Darwin

In Pursuit of a Medical Model for Cryonics

When I returned to Indianapolis, Indiana from working with the Chamberlains in 1975, a high priority for me was to acquire the equipment and expertise required to integrate extracorporeal medicine into cryonics. This proved much more difficult than I had hoped. To a man, all of the emerging professional perfusionists I contacted were uninterested in cryonics, or were actively hostile to it. Nevertheless, I managed to acquire training and employment as an acute care (ICU) hemodialysis technician, and this provided entre’ to both experimental perfusion (the hospital where I worked at the time was gearing up to begin a heart transplant program) and, just as importantly, several sources of used medical equipment.

Figure 6: Facilities of Soma, Inc., in Indianapolis, IN in 1980.

By 1979 I had managed to acquire roller pumps, gas anesthesia equipment, an electrocautery, a fairly complete set of cardiothoracic surgical instruments, a re-useable Sarns Torpedo heat exchanger, and all the ancillary equipment required to carry out experimental perfusion of dogs and small mammals such as rabbits. Additionally, a patient Transport vehicle and the necessary heart-lung resuscitation equipment had been acquired, as well as the necessary laboratory equipment and cool down and temporary storage gear.8

Figure 7: Soma Inc., Transport vehicle, 1977.

Figure 8: Soma, Inc., Heart-Lung Resuscitator, 1977.

Enter Jerry Leaf

While I was working to both learn and acquire extracorporeal medical capability for cryonics in Indiana, a new figure entered the cryonics scene; Jerry D. Leaf, a perfusionist and Research Associate in the laboratory of Dr. Gerald D. Buckberg, in the UCLA Department of Thoracic Surgery. Jerry had originally become interested in cryonics after attending a lecture given by Robert F. Nelson, President of the Cryonics Society of California in 1966. In 1977, while Jerry was working at UCLA, he heard about and subsequently attended a cryonics meeting sponsored by Trans Time, Inc., (TT) of Berkeley, CA which had recently merged with Manrise Corporation.9 Later that year, Jerry performed a canine total body washout (TBW) in collaboration with TT, with the dog surviving for 17 hours after complete blood replacement and asanguineous perfusion at 22oC.10 Through TT, Jerry became acquainted with the Chamberlains, and shortly thereafter, Alcor collaborated with Jerry to cryopreserve a dog using the same techniques then being employed on humans, with the endpoint being evaluation of brain histology and ultrastructure by transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

Figure 9: Cryovita Laboratories in Fullerton, CA.

Jerry was acutely interested in improving, and ultimately perfecting reversible cryopreservation, and he was in the process of accumulating equipment to open his own research and development laboratory at the time he first became involved with TT and Alcor. In 1978 he opened Cryovita Laboratories, Inc., in Fullerton, CA and Cryovita cryopreserved its first patient, Samuel Berkowitz, in July of 1978. It was around this time that Jerry and I made contact with each other and began a long distance working relationship. Despite my best efforts, I had been unable to find a heart-lung machine, and Jerry undertook to locate an ancient, but still serviceable PAR machine from the early 1960s, which he shipped to me in Indianapolis in1979.

Figure 10: The PAR heart-lung machine shortly after its arrival in Indianapolis, in 1979.

Samuel Berkowitz was the first cryonics patient treated using then standard extracorporeal technology and vascular access via the aortic root and right atrium (median sternotomy). This case was well documented in an article (with accompanying photos) published in Long Life magazine in April of 1979.11 I’ve selected some photos from Jerry’s case file on this patient, and I reproduce them here to document that as of 1978 extracorporeal medical technology was in use in cryonics in Southern California with both Alcor and Trans Time being paying consumers for the product.

Figure 11: The heart-lung machine set-up to deliver cryoprotective perfusion at Cryovita Laboratories in July of 1978.

The heart-lung machine Jerry had was a prototype unit made by Marquardt Aircraft Company in the early 1960s when they were considering entering the medical device market. While Marquardt decided not to enter the CPB market, they did create a division to manufacture dialysis hardware and consumables – a company that ultimately became LifeMed – a major supplier of hemodialysis consumables in the 1970s and ‘80s. The oxygenator in the photo above was a Bentley Q-100 bubbler.

Figure 12: Out with old and in with new: Jerry Leaf with the Manrise perfusion machine, circa 1979.

Figure 13: Median sternotomy with arterial and venous cannulae in place in cryopatient Samuel Berkowitz in 1978.

Before Mr. Berkowitz could be positioned on the operating table (OR), the Orange County Coroner, accompanied by the Fullerton Police, showed up at Cryovita and demanded entry. A neighbor had seen the mortuary air shipping container being unloaded into the premises and had called the police.

Figure 14: The Fullerton police (top) in the Cryovita facility in July of 1979 photographing the patient and the premises and an article describing the incident which subsequently appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

After some phone consultation with the California State Department of Health Services, and calls to the next of kin, the police and Coroner left the premises and Mr. Berkowitz’s cryopreservation proceeded to completion without incident.

End of Part 2


References

8)    Dewey, P. Interview with Mike Darwin, Long Life Magazine: A Journal of the Life Extension Sciences. 4(2):March/April;32-37:1980, p. 36: http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/LongLifeMag4%282%2917_1980.pdf. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

9)     Darwin, M, Interview with Jerry Leaf, Part I. Cryonics. 7(7);26-34:1986. http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/Interview-JerryLeaf.html. Retrieved 201-02-24.

10)   Leaf, JD. A pilot study in hypothermia using femoral-femoral-jugular bypass and total body washout. Long Life, Nov-Dec 1977, pp 135-140.

11) Leaf, JD. Cryonic Suspension of Sam Berkowitz: Technical Report. Long Life. Mar-Apr, 1979, pp 30-35. http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=425990&sortBy=date&highlight=Berkowitz_Cryopreservation_Report_Mar_Apr_1979.pdf&.  Retrieved 2011-01-24.

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A Brief Pictorial History of Extracorporeal Technology in Cryonics – Part I

Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin

By Mike Darwin

In the Beginning

Figure 1: Jerry D. Leaf with ‘Nanook,’ a survivor of 4 hours of asanguineous perfusion at ~5oC as Nanook recovers a few hours after rewarming to normothermia.

Cryonics was not initially conceived of as a medical undertaking, per se. While there was discussion of the use of the facilities of hospitals and of heart-lung machines, extracorporeal medicine was just beginning in 1964, and the general approach outlined in Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality was one that might fairly be described as straddling cryobiology and mortuary practice.1 The idea was itself radically new, and little attention was given to business planning, or other minutiae of day-to-day operations. A likely reason for this was that many, if not most of those who first espoused or took up the idea, expected that cryonics would become the province of large corporations and establishment medicine, as soon as it ‘caught on.’

When it didn’t catch on, the response was (not unreasonably) to proceed as best as was possible under the circumstances. And the circumstances were not good. There was little interest, and even less money, and cryonics became a strictly do-it-yourself (DIY) undertaking. With one or two exceptions, the people involved in cryonics were involved only because they wanted the service for themselves. Without exception, those who chose to become involved in actually delivering cryonics care – whether perfusion or cryogenic storage – did so only because there was no one else to whom they could turn. Since morticians lack the social standing (and thus pressure to conform) of physicians, and because they are very service oriented and skilled at dealing with disposition of the dead, they became the most willing (if still reluctant) professional partners to cryonicists. Additionally, because the disposition of human remains is governed by a considerable body of regulation, and requires licensure, the mortician, rather than the physician, became the essential professional to cryonics operations.2,3

A not surprising consequence of this was that mortuary technology rapidly came to define how cryoprotective perfusion was delivered in cryonics.4,5 The core piece of equipment was typically the Turner Porti-Boy embalming pump, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Cryoprotective perfusion using a Porti-Boy embalming machine in 1972: Mike Darwin adding pre-chilled Ringer’s solution to the pump reservoir.

The first scientific report on what was actually being done in terms of cryopatient perfusion was published in Manrise Technical Review in March of 1973.6 This paper noted the abysmal conditions attending mortician-delivered  perfusion and called for the application of a wide range of changes to improve the situation. Since I was a coauthor of that paper, I feel I can speak to the strong emotions that prompted it to be written; namely disgust and horror at the kind of care cryonics patients were receiving. I was not alone in this opinion, or in these feelings, and the people who had published this paper, Fred and Linda Chamberlain, were also hard at work on changing this situation. Attempts to interface with the nascent but rapidly growing extracorporeal medical community at that time were unsuccessful. However, one of Fred Chamberlain’s colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory happened to be an engineer who was also on hemodialysis – a truly nascent technology at that time (1972). Fred learned as much as he could from his colleague, and he and Linda also applied themselves to the few textbooks and comprehensive monographs on extracorporeal medicine that were available at the time.

The products of this effort were the Manrise procedure manual7 and the Manrise perfusion machine, shown in Figure 3. At that time roller pumps were cost-prohibitive, and the light weight, high output and small size of centrifugal pumps made them highly desirable for use in perfusion equipment that would have to be stored and used in very confined spaces inside a mobile operating room, or the preparation room of a mortuary. It would be another decade before technological advances in perfusion obsoleted, or outmoded a sufficient quantity of cardiopulmonary bypass equipment, such that quality pumps with substantial working life left to them, became available on the used or ‘surplus’ medical equipment market.

Figure 3: Manrise Model 101 perfusion machine, circa 1973: control panel (upper left), machine interior (upper right), bubble trap (lower left) and the perfusion machine with heat exchanger and reservoir (lower right).

The Manrise perfusion machine consisted of a variable speed centrifugal pump (Micropump), a re-useable bubble trap fabricated from Pyrex glass, pressure, flow and perfusate temperature gauges, and an accompanying heat exchanger (a helical coil of ½” OD, 316 food grade stainless steel tubing). The system was sterilized with 10% formalin and was rinsed with sterile normal saline until the effluent tested negative for formaldehyde (CliniTest urine glucose test kits were used for this purpose). While this system was extremely crude, it was a vast improvement over embalming equipment, in that it allowed for sanitary and particulate free delivery of perfusate, with control over temperature and pressure. Unfortunately, the falling ball flow meter served to provide only the barest indication of the actual flow. In centrifugal pumps, unlike positive displacement pumps, such as roller pumps, there is essentially no correlation between the revolutions of the pump impeller per minute, and the flow produced. Even with the advent of electromagnetic and ultrasonic Doppler blood flow meters, the problem of measuring the flow of a perfusate with dynamically varying concentrations of cryoprotectant agent and electrolytes would remain unsolved for another 30 years.

Thus cryonics perfusions went from looking like this:

Figure 4: Cryoprotective perfusion as practiced in 1972.

to looking like this:

Figure 5: Cryoprotective perfusion as practiced in 1976.

My contribution to the Manrise machine was the bubble trap, which also accommodated a thermistor temperature measurement probe and allowed for measurement of perfusion pressure behind the cannulae. Since the machine was designed primarily for neuro-perfusion, and two large bore internal carotid arterial cannulae were used at low perfusate flow rates, this method of measuring pressure proved fairly accurate. Nevertheless, Fred and Linda laboriously produced a perfusate flow versus pressure drop (across the two carotid arterial cannulae) table that could be pressed into service should higher flow rates be required in perfusing whole body patients.

End of Part I

References

1)    Ettinger, RCW, The Prospect of Immortality. Doubleday, New York, 1964: http://www.cryonics.org/book1.html.  Retrieved 2011-01-24.

2)    Horn, F. Perfusing and freezing a patient in Proceedings of the First Annual National Cryonics Conference, New York Academy of Sciences, 02 March, 1968, Cryonics Society of New York, 1968:40-45. http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/Proc1stAnn+Cryo+ConfNYC1968.pdf. 2011-01-24.

3)    Kent, S. Steven Jay Mandel frozen by CSNY. Cryonics Reports 3(9)1968:162-166.   http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/CryonicsReports3%289%291968.pdf. Retrieved 2011-01-30.

4)    Editor, Will you embalm for the living? Casket & Sunnyside. http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/WillYouEmbalm4LivingCasketSunnyside.pdf. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

5)    Kent, S. Cryo-span Brochure, Cryo-Span Corporation, Sayville, LI, NY, 1969. http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/CryoSpanBrochure.pdf. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

6)    Federowicz, MD, et al. Perfusion and freezing of a 60-year-old woman. Manrise Technical Review. 3(1); 9-32:1973. http://www.lifepact.com/images/MTRV3N1.pdf.  Retrieved 2011-01-24.

7)     Chamberlain, FRC and Chamberlain, LLC.  Instructions for the induction of solid state hypothermia in humans. Manrise Corporation, La Crescenta, CA, 1972: http://www.lifepact.com/mm/mrm001.htm.  Retrieved 2011-01-24.

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Welcome to a New World

Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin

Mike Darwin

By Mike Darwin

I was cold and edgy. We had departed Mosul well before dawn, in order to arrive at Nineveh before the call to morning prayers. Mosul had been a jumble of box-like, recent construction; unimpressive Mosques and the grim and gritty dwellings of the poor. The drive had been the usual terrifying excursion into the pitch blackness of a moonless night, with only the infrequent and very momentary benefit of headlights. A burned out headlamp is a financial disaster in this part of the Arab world, so road travel proceeds at breakneck speed in complete darkness, with only brief flashes of the headlights to keep the driver in position on the road and from colliding, head-on, with any oncoming traffic.

As the situation (and available time) permitted, I would see the rest of Nineveh at a more leisurely pace, but for now, my objective was Kuyunjik, and the site where Sir Austen Henry Layard had completed his excavations of the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, in 1847. My guide had assured me he could take me to the site, providing I could supply the necessary baksheesh[1]. War and rumors of war were in the air, and I was by no means supposed to be where I was. The black goatee, the keffiyeh,[2] and the nondescript khaki clothing I was wearing had served me well. The stink of the dihydroxyacetone in the skin bronzer I’d been applying for days further reassured me that as long as I remained silent, and in the company of my guide and driver, I could proceed unmolested. Nineveh is falling to ruins, and Kuyunjik was a cratered mound. The sun, floating higher and higher in the sky, began to take the worst of the chill from the air. This was Kuyunjik, this was Nineveh, and I was here.

I tried to cast my mind back ~2,700 years, and see Ashurbanipal, the last of the great Akkadian kings (685 BCE – 627 BCE) wandering the stacks of the world’s first library. It was Ashurbanipal who had first conceived of, and implemented the idea of a great library, and he had assembled the largest collection of written documents in the history of the world to that time. It is said that when Alexander the Great saw Ashurbanipal’s Library, he resolved to have one of his own, and while he did not survive to see the task begun, it was nevertheless initiated by his successor, Ptolemy I; a project that went on to become The Royal Library of Alexandria. Among those thousands upon thousands of clay tablets covered in cuneiform, 12 particularly important tablets would survive the passing Centuries, to be discovered by Layard in the middle of the 19th. Those tablets comprise the corpus of the first (known) book: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

What did the first man who wrote a book take as his primary subject? Did he write about gods or religion? Did he write about lust, romance, politics, social life, or the law? Did he write a travelogue, or a comedy?

Surprisingly, at least from this civilization’s perspective, the answer is, “No.” Instead this what he wrote:

“It is an old story
But one that can still be told
About a man who loved
And lost a friend to death
And learned he lacked the power
To bring him back to life.
It is the story of Gilgamesh
and his friend Enkidu.”

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh, we are told, is the king of Uruk, who is two-thirds god, and one-third man, who built a great city with high walls; much like Nineveh was 2,000 years ago. Gilgamesh was all things men and women want in man; physically beautiful, highly intelligent and enormously powerful – and these blessing were matched only by his tyranny, brutality and utter disregard for other men. His people cried out in misery and the gods, hearing their pleas, created a wild man, Enkidu, to challenge and transform Gilgamesh. Enkidu does indeed transform Gilgamesh, and the two become soul-mates – great friends and constant companions, who set out to explore the world together.On one of their adventures, Ishtar, the goddess of love, is overcome with lust for Gilgamesh, and he makes the costly error of rebuffing her. Ishtar, in high dudgeon, petitions her father, Anu, the god of the sky, to send the Bull of Heaven to punish him. Seven years of famine ensue until finally, Gilgamesh and Enkidu wrestle with the Bull, and kill it. This grave and unexpected act of defiance prompts the gods to meet and to decide that Enkidu must die, as punishment for this challenge to their authority. And so, in great agony and fear of death whilst beset by tormenting visions of the underworld, Enkidu dies after a prolonged illness.

Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 11, story of the Flood, on display in the British Museum in London, UK.

In Gilgamesh’s grief for Enkidu, he comes to two terrible realizations: not only has he lost a friend to death, whom he is powerless to reclaim, he also realizes that he too will die, that all of his strength, wealth and intelligence are useless against the march of time. Gilgamesh thus sets out to find Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah.After almost exterminating humanity in a fit pique, the gods had granted Utnapishtim eternal life, and in fact they confide in him the secret of that endless boon. At great risk, and after many hardships, Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, and pleads his case for personal immortality. Whereupon Utnapishtim gives him a test: “If you think you can stay alive for eternity, surely you can stay awake for a week?” Utnapishtim asks. Not surprisingly, Gilgamesh fails this test and Utnapishtim commands him to return to Uruk and accept his mortality. Just as Gilgamesh is about to depart, Utnapishtim’s wife convinces him to tell Gilgamesh about a plant that, if eaten, will restore youth and prolong life indefinitely. Gilgamesh finds the plant and begins the journey back to Uruk, only to have the plant stolen from him by a serpent as he rests – which promptly sheds her skin and becomes young again. He returns to Uruk chastened, to rule over his substitute for immortality: the city he has built and the people who will live on thru time.

And so we see that Gilgamesh’s story is our story, and his central problem is ours, as well; principally how to put an end to the tyranny that is time. In The Epic, Gilgamesh masters many of the environmental spheres that man has sought dominion over (he is after all, 2./3rds god). In our recent (Western) history, most of these spheres have, at one time or another, been called the “Final Frontier,” with space being the last to earn that moniker. In fact, as we are instructed in The Epic, there is really only one final frontier, and that is to end time. Not merely to conquer it, nor to transcend it, but to end it. This may or may not be possible, but it is an ideal that is essential to pursue, both for our survival as individuals and as a species.

One sunny summer day 2 years ago, I stood in the British Museum and looked upon a few of the tablets that comprise The Epic. They were long ago transported from the mound that is now Kuyunjik, and are encased in Perspex, and kept safely out of reach of the Museum’s passing visitors. There, before me, was the First Book, by the first man to write of the central problems of the human condition: death, and the tyranny of time.

The conclusion of The Epic is that “personal death is acceptable, so long as mankind lives on,” and that, too, is the position of every society and every civilization that has existed before or after The Epic was written. There is wisdom in this, because to be preoccupied with that which cannot be changed is to sink in ennui, and succumb to death with even more immediacy. This strategy, under those conditions, may fairly be said to have been necessary to the survival of the individual, as well as the species.

But this strategy is not written in stone for us, even if it is so written in clay. Evolution is a mechanism with no credible evidence of a maker. It has no goals, no values, no dreams, and no desires. It proceeds from no plan, and it engineers from no blueprints. And yet, it has produced us. After ~4.5 billion years of blind trial and error, and the accompanying sacrifice of countless living things –  at the cost of even more unfathomable suffering – a species has at last emerged that can see and understand these things, and, for the first time, exercise design, and bring consciousness to the chaos. Still, until the development of the scientific method, and the advent of technological civilization, there was no prospect of our species gaining control of its destiny. These developments are very recent – and they carry with them at least as much peril as they do promise.

The tools of science and technology have also informed us that, absent our intervention, the extinction of our species, as well as that of all life on earth is inevitable. Whether from an asteroid drawn too near by gravity, or the eventual death of the sun, our days are numbered. We know what the men of Akkadia – and those who came before them – could not know, and that is that humankind will not continue forever. We are as mortal as a species, as we are as individual men.

To this some will shrug and say, “So what?” Many will be moved to observe that we can proceed to survive as a species without individual, personal, immortality. Many more will positively assert that any further extension of the human life span will be deleterious to the survival of our species, and that immortality would quickly end it.

These assertions are both specious and deeply dangerous, because we have made an astonishing and incredibly perilous transition. With the advent of scientific, technological civilization, we crossed a great gulf. The only event in our history that is comparable is our mastery of fire – the one thing, more than any other that makes us unique amongst life forms on this planet. However, that first Promethean step is dwarfed by what we have now achieved. We no longer play with mortals’ toys. We command the atom and we have commenced to open the Pandora’s Box of nanotechnology.  As a consequence, we can no longer afford the loss of billions of minds, and many billions of man-years of accumulated human experience every 50 years or so. If we wish to play with the tools of the gods, then we must learn to behave like them.

We have mastered fire; and in so doing have fouled our planet’s air and water. Because we live only briefly, we have little ability to see the long term consequences of our actions, and we (like all others before us), cannot truly suffer the effects of our ignorance and recklessness through our children. If we are to behave responsibly with respect to the long term effects of our deeds, we must live long enough to experience them firsthand.

Approximately every fifty years, the accumulated wisdom and experience of an entire generation is wiped out. Yes, some tiny fraction of the knowledge can be (and is) captured in books and other ‘media.’ But knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is a property of the conscious mind imbued with memory and experience. Wiping out all the hard won accumulated wisdom (and in reality most of the real knowledge, in the bargain) of each human generation is incredibly wasteful – and destructive. This was unavoidable in the past, and it was tolerable because we were barely better than beasts, and we played only with mortals’ things. But it is no longer acceptable. Quite apart from the terrible injustice that death represents for the individual, it is no longer a tenable option for us as species. It has become an expense we can no longer pay, a debt we can no longer afford to service.

Consider this timely analogy. One of the great problems in economies is the loss of institutional memory for infrequent, but disastrous events. Just about the time the last individuals are dying out from the previous round of economic madness and irresponsibility, another round occurs. This timing is not coincidental; you have to live through some kinds of errors and experience them for yourself, before you can avoid them in the future. That’s exactly what a big part of becoming an adult , and growing up are all about; everybody knows you can’t tell a child, or teenager, about ‘responsibility,’ or about being taken advantage of, or about how to manage money wisely. That kind of knowledge comes only through experience. At present, we are manipulating technologies so vast and so powerful that we will get only one chance to get it right (and that only if we are lucky). There will be no forgiveness for playing the technological equivalent of 1929, over and over again, as we have just done now.

It is time for us to grow up and to recover the ‘lost secret of immortality,’ and embrace our duty to shepherd ourselves, as well as all those we love and care about, to the end of time as we now know it.

The challenge we face now is to understand, and to own time itself; the Chronosphere, the very last frontier. It is a world without death, and a world without time.  If you have the courage and the fortitude to engage in the battle for it, it can be your world, and I invite you to join us in the quest for it. But be warned, it is not a world that will be easily won, but it will be the only one worth inhabiting.

Footnotes

[1] The Arabic word for money is “fuloos,” but you will almost never hear it used. Instead the word “bakasheesh,” which translates literally as “the teat,” is used, and it implies bribery and corruption.

[2] A keffiyeh is a traditional headdress typically worn by Arab men around the head and neck. It is made from a square piece of pattern-printed cotton fabric. It is often held in place on the head by use of an Igal, which is usually made of camel’s or goat’s hair, and raw wool. Since I could never fold the scarf well, I always used an Igal.
Posted in Philosophy, Uncategorized | 4 Comments