gwern comments on Alcor vs. Cryonics Institute - Less Wrong

27 Post author: prespectiveCryonaut 09 April 2012 01:49AM

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Comment author: maxmore 09 April 2012 05:48:25AM *  28 points [-]

“However, Alcor remains something of a shadowy organization that many within the cryonics community are suspicious of.”

Really? That’s a remarkable statement. Alcor has a long history of open communication with its members and the cryonics community in general. Among the ways Alcor does this:

  • Cryonics magazine
  • Alcor News emailings
  • RSS feed
  • conferences
  • case reports
  • extremely detailed website with information on finances, governance… everything
  • Facebook page
  • Member Forums

See: http://www.alcor.org/newatalcor.html

“Mike Darwin, a former Alcor president, has written at length on both organizations at http://www.chronopause.com, and on the whole, at least based on what I've read, Alcor comes across looking less competent, less trustworthy, and less open than CI.”

Darwin is a member of Alcor, not CI. How do you explain that? Darwin thoroughly enjoys criticizing Alcor (rightly or not) but remains a member. In a related comment, ahartnell says “from what I have read both seem to provide basically the same service”.

This is a remarkable belief. Alcor uses the most advanced cryoprotectant, M22, to perfuse whole bodies and neuros. CI uses a less advanced (and cheaper) cryoprotectant but cryoprotects ONLY THE HEAD, allowing the rest of the body to be straight frozen with massive damage. That’s especially odd since (many of) CI members are insistent about being whole body patients rather than neuros.

Also, and VERY importantly, ischemic time matters hugely. CI members can get standby and transport services from SA by paying a fee (one that makes Alcor neuros significantly LESS expensive). Otherwise, except for CI members undergoing clinical death in the Detroit area, this means long ischemic times and tremendous damage. When I was at CI’s 2011 AGM, Aschwin and Chana de Wolf presented their research findings showing the frightening damage done by extended ischemic time. They also showed that a large majority of CI patients experienced that damage. Staggeringly, no one objected, challenged them, or seem the least concerned.

You mention Mike Darwin, yet note that in Figure 11 of a recent analysis by him, he says that 48 percent of patients in Alcor's present population experienced "minimal ischemia." Of CI, Mike writes, "While this number is discouraging, it is spectacular when compared to the Cryonics Institute, where it is somewhere in the low single digits."

As to Ralph Merkle’s comments: His frank assessment of past practices contradicts the claim that Alcor is secretive. His comments were also about past practices. Unlike CI, Alcor has created robust practices and mechanisms for long-term maintenance and growth of the Patient Care Trust Fund and the Endowment Fund. Go take a look at CI’s financial reports. See how little money is available for the indefinite care and eventual revival of each patient. Also look at the returns on investment of those funds.

For those interested in comparing Alcor and CI, plenty of basic factual information is available here:

http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq06.html#choose

Comment author: gwern 09 April 2012 04:33:39PM 20 points [-]

Darwin has also criticized CI here:

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/04/14/cryonicists-teach-your-children-well/

And this situation isn’t hypothetical either, because when the Cemetery Board came down on the Cryonics Institute (CI) , CI, and thus the American Cryonics Society (ACS), decided to surrender control of their patients to the state. Now, it is the laws and jurists of the state of Michigan that determine the conditions under which a patient can be removed from a cryostat at CI, and be relocated elsewhere, not the CEO or the Board of either CI, or ACS. If you want to understand the practical implications of this, you can go to http://www.bhsj.org/forms/disinterment%20and%20reinterment.pdf and to http://law.onecle.com/michigan/333-health/mcl-333-2853.html and read what you find there. It isn’t pretty.

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/13/on-the-need-for-prosthetic-nocioception-in-cryonics/

I do not want to seem too harsh on Alcor here, because Alcor did have cameras, and does lock its patient dewars. The Cryonics Institute does not even lock their patient dewars – this is an issue I have raised with their management several times over the years, but to no avail. Any careful reading of Johnson’s book, Frozen, should eliminate any doubt as to why locking access to the patients on multiple levels is not only desirable, it is essential.

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/23/does-personal-identity-survive-cryopreservation/#comment-247 (his longest sustained criticism that I know of, too long to quote in full)

It was a snotty, and probably inappropriate remark. Basically I was commenting on the operational paradigm at CI, which is pretty much “ritual.” You sign up, you get frozen and it’s pretty much kumbaya, no matter how badly things go. And they go pretty badly. Go to: http://cryonics.org/refs.html#cases and start reading the case reports posted there. That’s pretty much my working definition of horrible. It seems apparent to me that “just getting frozen” is now all that is necessary for a ticket to tomorrow, and that anything else that is done is “just gravy,” and probably unnecessary to a happy outcome.

...Even in cases that CI perfuses, things go horribly wrong – often – and usually for to me bizarre and unfathomable (and careless) reasons. My dear friend and mentor Curtis Henderson was little more than straight frozen because CI President Ben Best had this idea that adding polyethylene glycol to the CPA solution would inhibit edema. Now the thing is, Ben had been told by his own researchers that PEG was incompatible with DMSO containing solutions, and resulted in gel formation. Nevertheless, he decided he would try this out on Curtis Henderson. He did NOT do any bench experiments, or do test mixes of solutions, let alone any animal studies to validate that this approach would in fact help reduce edema (it doesn’t). Instead, he prepared a batch of this untested mixture, and AFTER it gelled, he tried to perfuse Curtis with it. See my introduction to Thus Spake Curtis Henderson on this blog for how this affected me psychologically and emotionally. Needless to say, as soon as he tried to perfuse this goop, perfusion came to a screeching halt. They have pumped air into patient’s circulatory systems… I could go on and on, but all you need to do is really look at those patient case reports and think about everything that is going on in those cases critically.

...What is unethical is the sleight of hand CI has engaged in. They want to be able to say that, “No cryonics patient has been thawed out for lack of funding since 19XX…” So, in order to make that so, they get the mortuary industry to freeze the poor devils, and then if things “don’t work out,” it’s the morticians who get stuck thawing the person out. It’s a beautiful “moral switch and bait” in that it recasts the act of cryopreserving a person such, that: You are not a cryonics patient when you get frozen. You are not a cryonics patient if you stay frozen for years. In fact, you are only a cryonics patient when CI says you are cryonics patient. CI has become the Hane’s Underwear, Co., Inspector #12 of cryonics....

Moving on:

Go take a look at CI’s financial reports. See how little money is available for the indefinite care and eventual revival of each patient. Also look at the returns on investment of those funds.

When I posted on the Alcor grandfathering issue, I finished by asking what the situation for CI was. No one but Jason took up the question.

Comment author: ahartell 09 April 2012 05:19:11PM 5 points [-]

This was pretty disturbing to read. I'm not sure I want CI anymore.

Comment author: Nova_Division 10 April 2012 01:52:26AM 2 points [-]

Can anyone here tell me more about Johnson's book "Frozen" mentioned in this comment? I looked it up on Amazon and read Alcor's response to legal issues here: http://www.alcor.org/press/response.html but what I want to know is, from LessWrongians who have read it, is it all a crock, or is there some truth in it?

Comment author: bgwowk 11 April 2012 01:23:19AM 11 points [-]

In my role as an Alcor director, I had the painstaking and unpleasant task of investigating the veracity of Johnson's book allegations to determine which of them required legitimate corrective action or litigation for defamation. Some of the allegations published in New York Daily News and wire services in 2009 promoting the book weren't even anywhere in the book (e.g. allegations that Alcor dismembered live animals). Such lies about the book itself were apparently just invented to get international media attention two days before the book's release. Some of the allegations inside the book were so outrageous that no reasonable person knowing anything about cryonics could believe them, such as Alcor kidnapping teenagers and homeless people and burying them in the desert, or engaging in drug trafficking and wild car chases. Other allegations, such as certain cryonics cases being "botched," I knew immediately were false because I had personal knowledge of the cases, or because they were repeats of false allegations Johnson made during his previous reach for fame in 2003.

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/sportsillustrated.htm

Many other allegations required investigation. In some cases, such as false allegations of illegal waste disposal, public sources were sufficient to refute them.

http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=22461

To summarize, although there was enough superficial truth in "Frozen" and enough real controversy in Alcor's history to establish a veneer of credibility to the casual reader, the vast majority of the book is deliberately crafted to depict Alcor and cryonicists in the worst possible light, and uses literally hundreds of false claims and allegations to do it. It's not just a matter of poetic license, but fabrication of entire anecdotes and conversations that never happened. In some cases there was also editing of conversations to create completely different meanings than the original conversations (editing that ABC News co-participated in, but that's another story). There were accounts of cryonicists having loathsome medical conditions that they did not have (one of the legal definitions of defamation per se), partying with human remains, animal abuse, cultism, brainwashing, deviant sex, and poor hygiene. As one commentator on Amazon.com put it, Johnson could have been more credible had he not go so completely over-the-top.

Partial book rebuttals concerning matters they have personal knowledge of have been published by well-respected cryonicists Steve Harris and Charles Platt

http://www.network54.com/Forum/291677/thread/1258263309/The+Instability+of+Larry+Johnson%27s+History

http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=32722

Alcor chose to litigate 32 defamation claims in the present New York lawsuit that is continuing against the publisher, Vanguard Press, and coauthor Scott Baldyga.

http://www.alcor.org/Library/pdfs/NewYorkComplaintAmendedJan2010.pdf

We could have added many more, but those are enough work as it is. Someday, once the litigation is done, I may write a 100-page tome of everything that is false in that book. But in the meantime my time and freedom to do is limited by the fact that the litigation is still ongoing.

It's unfortunate and unfair that news media keep rehashing this stuff. It's so much easier to destroy things than create them.

Comment author: ciphergoth 11 April 2012 06:39:35AM 14 points [-]

coughs er, though I'm sorry that it was said about people about whom it wasn't true, it seems a little unfair on those of us who enjoy deviant sex to include it in such a list.

Comment author: enoonsti 12 April 2012 08:16:33AM 2 points [-]

As I was reading Frozen, I kept thinking: "You know what this book needs? A randomly inserted car chase." Sure enough, OP delivered. Oh, and if I received incompetent death threats, I would have had them checked for fingerprints. But Larry didn't have them checked. Because he probably printed them out himself.

tldr; I hope someday you get around to that tome.

Comment author: melmax 04 December 2012 03:31:05PM -1 points [-]

Partial book rebuttals concerning matters they have personal knowledge of have been published by well-respected cryonicists Steve Harris and Charles Platt<<"

Respected by whom, Dr. Wowk? Other people being funded by LEF, such as yourself? If these two "pillars of the community" are the best you can come up with, Vanguard will mop the floor with Alcor, if their case ever goes to court. Platt has been accused of being dishonest (both privately, and publicly), by an amazing number of individuals, who have had the misfortune of working with him. Harris has committed a number of blunders, such as libeling a medical professional he did not know, (in the interest of protecting a company closely related to Alcor); publishing what appears to be a policy of euthanizing Alcor and/or SA clients who show signs of life during a cryonics procedure; and endorsing laymen having access to propofol.

If your two star witnesses can be proven to have publicly lied, in the interest of protecting Alcor and/or Suspended Animation, (both those companies receive funds from LEF, as does Dr. Wowk's 21CM), how will their testimony hold up in court.?

The laymen reading this, and other forums, might believe the propaganda Dr. Wowk participates in, but things are likely to go differently, in a court of law. Judging by the published court documents, Vanguard is willing to put up a good fight and, unlike Johnson, they are probably well-funded enough to do so.

Comment author: advancedatheist 09 April 2012 06:22:14PM 0 points [-]

CI's threadbare state after all these decades seems especially surprising considering that Robert Ettinger founded it, and apparently he couldn't do any better with it despite his status as one of the the originators of the cryonics movement

Nonetheless, Ettinger's cryosuspension made the national news last summer. By contrast, the suspension of Fred Chamberlain by Alcor a few weeks back went unnoticed in the larger world, despite Alcor's somewhat higher name recognition, because Fred never became the public face of cryonics.

Yet, as others have pointed out, CI operates as a "cemetery," and the bureaucratic mind doesn't allow for the removal of bodies in cemeteries to subject them to experimental medical procedures. A suspension with CI therefore resembles the selling point of the Roach Motel: You can check into the dewar, but you can never check out.

Comment author: gwern 09 April 2012 06:33:14PM 8 points [-]

Yet, as others have pointed out, CI operates as a "cemetery," and the bureaucratic mind doesn't allow for the removal of bodies in cemeteries to subject them to experimental medical procedures

I don't think that really matters: if revivification works, there will be a way around that. The important thing is getting bodies intact to that point. Subjecting them to procedures might be an interesting restriction on CI, except as far as I know, once one is cooled, there are no procedures besides topping up the tanks and every blue moon being switched from tank to tank.

I take Darwin as pointing out that CI has legal vulnerabilities to outside coercion and pressure that Alcor has apparently avoided; I haven't read his links so I don't know what, but lawsuits and activist public officials and overly broad public health laws come to mind.

Comment author: advancedatheist 10 April 2012 12:38:34AM 1 point [-]

Yet, as others have pointed out, CI operates as a "cemetery," and the bureaucratic mind doesn't allow for the removal of bodies in cemeteries to subject them to experimental medical procedures

I don't think that really matters: if revivification works, there will be a way around that.

That doesn't necessarily have to happen. Peter Thiel in his recent debate with George Gilder argues that most forms of engineering since 1970 have become effectively illegal. Some universities might still offer degrees in nuclear engineering, for example, but that field has horrible job prospects, so it might as well have become illegal. It wouldn't take much to add cryonics to the list of prohibited technologies.

Comment author: arundelo 10 April 2012 02:02:58AM *  7 points [-]

I found the Thiel-Gilder debate.

Thiel's list of fields where "innovation in stuff was 'outlawed'":

  • petroleum engineering
  • nuclear engineering
  • electrical engineering
  • chemical engineering
  • mechanical engineering
  • bio-engineering

I can believe that changes in the law and the legal-political climate have hampered innovation in at least some of those fields, but by "outlawed" Thiel seems to mean "a bad career choice", judging from what he says at 42:17.

Edit: Thiel does not just mean "a bad career choice"; he gives some examples of what he does mean at about 9:50 of this July 16 2012 debate with Eric Schmidt:

I think it's because the government has outlawed technology. We're not allowed to develop new drugs with the FDA charging $1.3 billion per new drug. You're not allowed to fly supersonic jets, because they're too noisy. You're not allowed to build nuclear power plants, say nothing of fusion, or thorium, or any of these other new technologies that might really work. So, I think we've basically outlawed everything having to do with the world of stuff, and the only thing you're allowed to do is in the world of bits. And that's why we've had a lot of progress in computers and finance. Those were the two areas where there was enormous innovation in the last 40 years. It looks like finance is in the process of getting outlawed, so the only thing left at this point will be computers [...]

Comment author: TimS 10 April 2012 12:50:49AM 6 points [-]

[nuclear engineering] has horrible job prospects, so it might as well have become illegal.

That's not a very accurate way to think about legal problems. For comparison, PhDs in English Literature have horrible job prospects, but that's not evidence that English Lit is becoming illegal.

Comment author: advancedatheist 10 April 2012 03:05:24PM 1 point [-]

If your field of engineering, despite its productive potentials, faces political moves to shut it down and throw you out of work, that has about the same effect as making it illegal.

Comment author: CarlShulman 12 April 2012 12:07:16AM *  3 points [-]

Facing threats of possibly somewhat lower salaries and job prospects is quantitatively far less severe than being banned. Cutting the expected value of training for a profession by 10% is very different from cutting prospects by 50% or 90%.

Comment author: gwern 10 April 2012 12:49:27AM 0 points [-]

If cryonics is outright prohibited, then the first part of the conditional is very unlikely to obtain...

Comment author: mkmk 16 April 2012 12:10:36AM 0 points [-]

Robert Ettinger had a superior cryosuspension because he didn't rely on long distance remote standby from SA or elsewhere. He planned and had his ducks in a row so to speak. Many Alcor and SA contracted patients have rotted for many hours waiting for the very expensive far away teams. Some of these things were due to to matters out of anyone on the remote standby team's control but distance cannot be removed as a factor. Robert had set up his own local standby with family, friends etc and the results speak for them selves.

Also the only reason CI ever had to operate under the cemetary statutes is because of negative PR and generated by Alcor with the Ted Williams case. Michigan bureaucrats responded to the negative PR with the current state of affairs. The cloak of cemetery regulation does protect CI to a limited degree in the future from further Alcor PR nightmares because it can be regulated in a way that the Michigan bureacrats can understand. So in the end it worked to CI's benefit. I would hardly blame CI for making lemonaid out of Alcor generated lemons!

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