For those of us who don't have any experience in this area, approximately how much would hiring "one full-time staff member competent in performing vascular cannulations" cost? How much would hiring "one full-time staff member skilled in perfusion" cost?
Alcor already employs a full-time paramedic with surgical training in large animal models to do vascular cannulations when it is possible to do so in the field. Cannulations at Alcor are typically done by either a contract neurosurgeon or a veterinary surgeon. I've written further details about who does surgeries at Alcor, and who has done them historically, here:
http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/44772-is-cryonics-quackery/page__p__437779#entry437779
It's misleading for people to keep saying that Alcor sends out "laypeople" to do vascular cannu...
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":