bgwowk

Your points are mostly well-taken, Mike. Not everything is better than it used to be. While the basic cryopreservation technology (vitrification) is better, and some important aspects of service delivery are better, Alcor does not have in-house expertise comparable to the era of you and Jerry Leaf. With the benefit of hindsight, I would say that people of such caliber willing to devote their life to cryonics are a historical anomaly not amenable to formulaic replication.

With respect to communications, the two new potential O.R. surgeons I spoke of were not a public announcement being withheld because Alcor is opaque and untrustworthy. Contact was made with them only within... (read more)

Mike, let's be fair about this. Veterinary surgeons for thoracic surgery (after loss of Jerry Leaf) and chemists for running perfusion machines were also used during your tenure managing biomedical affairs at Alcor two decades ago. You trained and utilized lay people to do all kinds procedures that would ordinarily be done by medical or paramedical professionals, including establishing airways, mechanical circulation, and I.V. administration of fluids and medications. Manuals provided to lay students even included directions for doing femoral cutdown surgery.

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/1990manual.html

The good cases that you were able to do with lay help (and being only a dialysis technician by credential yourself) are the stuff of cryonics legend.... (read 447 more words →)

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... (read more)

I'm doing a text search, and I can't find where I used the word "catastrophic." In any case, the damage done by present cryopreservation techniques is extreme by conventional medical standards (e.g. decapitation). The real question is the significance of the damage in the context of preservation of brain information encoding memory and personal identity, which is what cryonics seeks to preserve.

For decades Alcor has sought to be conservative and perform the first hypothermic stages of cryonics to a standard closer to that of medicine rather than mortuary science to make the early stages of cryonics closer to reversible. This has drawn criticism from two opposite directions. Bob... (read more)

If I recall correctly, SA charges CI members $60,000 for field standby, stabilization, and transport. SA does approximately one or two cases per year, apparently using contract perfusionists and surgeons when available for the blood washout phase of procedures. The alternative for CI members is simple packing in ice some unspecified period after legal death, and shipment by a local mortician; no cardiopulmonary support, no associated rapid cooling, no blood washout.

As I understand it, Maxim makes two claims:

1. SA underdelivers and overcharges for services, ("incompetence") while representing itself in a disingenuous and probably legally prohibited way.

2. The industry SA operates in should be regulated because of claim 1.

If so, she is... (read more)

There's another point that should be obvious, but perhaps not to those not familiar with cryonics procedures. The reason the patient cooled from approximately +20 degC to +12 degC during the long surgery was because HE WAS PACKED IN ICE. That's the same treatment he would have gotten for those five hours had SA not been there.

Before and after those five hours, the patient's treatment was enormously better than it would have been had SA not been there. Prompt cardiopulmonary support (CPS) and ice bath cooling after cardiac arrest supplied oxygenated blood and medications to the brain, and accelerated the initial phases of cooling compared to just packing on... (read more)

Is it Dr. Wowk’s position, the vitrification solutions are so very toxic, it’s acceptable to subject Alcor and Suspended Animation’s clients to additional injury, via grossly incompetent personnel, when delivering those solutions? Wouldn’t it make more sense for organizations advertising the possibility of future resurrection, (and charging up to $200,000 for their services), to provide the best possible care? Shouldn’t they be doing as little harm, as possible?

My position is to do the best you can within available resources, and that criticisms should be in-context and constructive. As far as available resources go, of the $200K of Alcor's new 2011 whole body minimum, $110K is set aside to fund long-term storage,... (read 678 more words →)

Something else that may not be apparent to casual observers is the selectivity of Ms. Maxim's criticisms. For the first two years after she left SA in 2006, SA was practically the exclusive target of her criticisms. Alcor officials, including myself, had cordial correspondence with her about a variety of perfusion topics in which she kindly shared her expertise. In August, 2008, one of my emails to her said:

I agree with you about the value of professionals in cryonics field work. I hope cryonics can manage to make that transition. It is regrettable that you ran into the obstacles that you did.

In 2009, for reasons unrelated... (read more)

these are testable claims that you could be testing.

If this wasn't clear from my last post (the one with "OF COURSE" everywhere), let me say it again. I participate in the leadership of a cryonics organization (Alcor). Speaking for myself, I stipulate to the correctness of Melody Maxim's central claim that cryonics procedures do not meet the same standards, or sometimes qualifications of personnel, as hypothermic medical procedures. There's nothing to test. It's true. It's the significance of this that is dispute, not the fact of it.

The moral outrage, indignation, allegations of fraud and self-interest, and claims of no progress in cryonics in 40 years are... (read more)