I disagree that Dr. Wowk has "nothing to gain by promoting or tolerating any culture of waste or procedural negligence." I think Dr. Wowk probably has HUGE professional and financial incentives, to defend the LEF-funded organizations and Alcor.
This is a specious argument. Plausible motive for defending organization X does not imply plausible motive for promotion/tolerance of supposed practice/culture Y within organization X.
Brian has actually provided a very solid motive for himself and other Alcor board members to oppose waste and procedural negligence. They are signed up for cryonics themselves. If there is too much waste or procedural negligence, they and people they care about could be harmed or killed.
lsparrish writes: "Brian has actually provided a very solid motive for himself and other Alcor board members to oppose waste and procedural negligence. They are signed up for cryonics themselves."
Luke may not know I was encouraged to sign up, while I was working at SA, to appease Saul Kent, so that I could be eligible for the management position. The person encouraging me knew I was not interested in being cryopreserved, at the time. In other words, I was encouraged to trick Saul Kent, the man responsible for funding our very-generous paychecks. ...
I recently found something that may be of concern to some of the readers here.
On her blog, Melody Maxim, former employee of Suspended Animation, provider of "standby services" for Cryonics Institute customers, describes several examples of gross incompetence in providing those services. Specifically, spending large amounts of money on designing and manufacturing novel perfusion equipment when cheaper, more effective devices that could be adapted to serve their purposes already existed, hiring laymen to perform difficult medical procedures who then botched them, and even finding themselves unable to get their equipment loaded onto a plane because it exceeded the weight limit.
An excerpt from one of her posts, "Why I Believe Cryonics Should Be Regulated":