A-1949 is now in Permanent Storage

October 8, 2009 7:39 PM

A former employee speaks out about what goes on at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Namely, the alleged treatment surrounding one of their most famous members on his way into the cryonic chamber. He has a book. They have a statement.
posted by dr_dank (48 comments total)

When I moved to Phoenix in 2001, I took a series of jobs with a temp agency as I got my feet under myself. One of these jobs was working for a lighting analysis firm out in the Scottsdale Air Park. They were testing the efficiency of various skylight configurations by taking measurements at various times of day (gauged by the movements of the sun), and my job was to be the muscle working on the roof, pushing the bits of the skylight around on top of this giant wooden box which was painted black inside and had the lighting sensors. It was a tedious job, and involved a lot of horrible AZ summer heat cooking me slowly while I muscled these things around.

Over the back wall, one day, I saw what looked like an unmarked ambulance pull up and unload what looked an awful lot like a body on a gurney. They took this into the back door of this facility and the entire operation had some bit of an odd, secretive, shady appearance to it Obviously they were supposed to be doing this unobserved, but people NEVER look up, and they didn't see me there watching them from 3 stories up.

I later drove around the block to see what the hell was going on, and soon was lost on the internet looking up information about Alcor. It was less than a year later when I heard about Williams being sent there for preservation.

Very peculiar thing to witness without knowing what was going on. I'm not sure it would have been any less peculiar if I'd know, actually.
posted by hippybear at 7:51 PM on October 8, 2009 [10 favorites]

*known

Where's that three-minute editing window again?
posted by hippybear at 7:54 PM on October 8, 2009

This guy comes across as someone trying to cash in on stuff that's shocking, but ultimately what people wanted (that is, to be frozen and have their heads cut off).
posted by delmoi at 7:55 PM on October 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

If excerpts from the book are blocked by lawyers, does that mean we can still have it preserved here?
posted by Hardcore Poser at 7:55 PM on October 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

Nightline made efforts to investigate Mr. Johnson's many fallacious claims. Mr. Johnson was caught in his own web of deceit when one of his claimed errors in the Ted Williams case was exposed as false. He was also forced to admit that he tried to profit from the death of baseball great, Ted Williams by charging visitors to his website $20 to view alleged photos of Mr. Williams' cryopreserved head.

Wow.
posted by delmoi at 7:57 PM on October 8, 2009

Related This American Life ep
posted by kmz at 7:57 PM on October 8, 2009 [5 favorites]

Er, related to cryogenics, that is, not this specific case.
posted by kmz at 7:58 PM on October 8, 2009

I really wish I had the kind of job where I'd be called upon to say things like "at no time did I prop Ted Williams' frozen head up on a can of tuna and smack it with a wrench".

Having said that, it certainly seems like Alcor is telling the truth here. I don't see why they don't just use Torgo's Executive Powder though.
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 8:01 PM on October 8, 2009 [3 favorites]

You know, I have been hovering around this story all day, and I decided to read the article in the first link, but I saw the words "hammer" and "chisel" and I had to stop. This stuff skeeves me out.
posted by msali at 8:06 PM on October 8, 2009

I really hope someone makes this into a movie.
posted by doctor_negative at 8:08 PM on October 8, 2009

Obviously they were supposed to be doing this unobserved, but people NEVER look up, and they didn't see me there watching them from 3 stories up.

But what were they supposed to do had they seen you? Reload the body and try again another time? Shoot you? Hang around watching you till you drove away and hope that you don't call the cops?
posted by moonshine at 8:19 PM on October 8, 2009

My little brother, Yehuda Nattan Yudkowsky, is dead.

He died November 1st. His body was found without identification. The family found out on November 4th. I spent a week and a half with my family in Chicago, and am now back in Atlanta. I've been putting off telling my friends, because it's such a hard thing to say.

I used to say: "I have four living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out." I still have four living grandparents, but I don't think I'll be saying that any more. Even if we make it to and through the Singularity, it will be too late. One of the people I love won't be there. The universe has a surprising ability to stab you through the heart from somewhere you weren't looking. Of all the people I had to protect, I never thought that Yehuda might be one of them. Yehuda was born July 11, 1985. He was nineteen years old when he died.
posted by Rhaomi at 8:24 PM on October 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

By the way, I have the real goods on cryogenics. It's not going to work.

Do I get on TV now?
posted by dhartung at 8:27 PM on October 8, 2009

COMPANY FREEZING DISEASED DEAD PEOPLE FOR FUTURE REHAB IN CHARLATAN SHOCKER!
posted by forallmankind at 8:32 PM on October 8, 2009 [2 favorites]

Alcor was funded in the demise of the internet crash in the early 2000's? Where in the hell are they getting funding now?
posted by Benway at 8:37 PM on October 8, 2009

But what were they supposed to do had they seen you? Reload the body and try again another time? Shoot you? Hang around watching you till you drove away and hope that you don't call the cops?

None of the above. But the design of the location for the drop off and the manner in which the men were moving made it pretty clear that they were supposed to be doing this out of public view.

Not everything that people don't want to have watched is protected like they do in the movies or on television... They were performing their paid duties at at legitimate business. I would imagine that moving around dead bodies or the nearly dead just isn't something that they want to have happening through the main driveway.
posted by hippybear at 8:38 PM on October 8, 2009

None of the above. But the design of the location for the drop off and the manner in which the men were moving made it pretty clear that they were supposed to be doing this out of public view.

LoL, yeah I know. I was just amused at the way you phrased things.
Cynical me doubts they felt they were paid enough to look up/ make sure they were really alone.
posted by moonshine at 10:43 PM on October 8, 2009

I've told my wife to "freeze the head" but I'm not quit sure if I am joking or not.....
posted by bottlebrushtree at 11:57 PM on October 8, 2009

Both parties seem to warrant little trust. Alcor is obviously full of it. This guy obviously wants to make some cash. But come on, cryonics is bullshit. Really, it's not going to work and if the employees realize this (and I'm sure they do) then it's just another job, so why not use a hammer and chisel or a tuna can head prop.
posted by IvoShandor at 12:14 AM on October 9, 2009

Alcor is obviously full of it... cryonics is bullshit.

From what I know, Alcor is pretty serious about what it does, funds relevant research into cryopreservation, and has respected people on its science advisory board

Care to support your statements?
posted by crayz at 2:37 AM on October 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

This guy comes across as someone trying to cash in on stuff that's shocking, but ultimately what people wanted (that is, to be frozen and have their heads cut off).

Except in this particular case, that may be the diametrical opposite of what the person wanted.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:11 AM on October 9, 2009

Sorry, forgot the link.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:11 AM on October 9, 2009

Care to support your statements?

Surely. Bullshit may have been a strong term, but maybe charlatans would have been better. The company CEO: “This is an experiment—it’s speculative science at best

In addition, no one has ever reanimated a cryonically frozen human, ever, and this stuff has been around for decades. This screams to me "giant con". But if you want to freeze yourself don't let my opinion stop you, seems like an incredibly expensive procedure with no evidence it will ever work how it's supposed to, but hey, you never know.
posted by IvoShandor at 4:01 AM on October 9, 2009

I don't see how quoting the company CEO calling their product 'an experiment' and (in the same article) admitting some early patients may have been too damaged to ever be revived supports the idea that it's a con. It sounds more like they're being upfront and honest about the unknown nature of what they're doing

Maybe we'll never develop the technology needed to reanimate a frozen human. Or maybe we will, but the technology will require a new freezing process and any existing corpses won't be viable. Or maybe we'll have the technology but laws will prevent it from being used, or Alcor will go out of business, or nuclear war will wipe out humanity, or...

I think most people signing up for this process have a pretty good idea what they're getting for the money. I see it as sort of a real-world Pascal's wager - toss some life insurance money at Alcor and cross your fingers, and maybe you'll wake up in 2100 when they've got a cure for 17 stab wounds to the back. If not well, you're still dead, and won't have much of a chance to be angry about it
posted by crayz at 4:38 AM on October 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

toss some life insurance money at Alcor and cross your fingers, and maybe you'll wake up in 2100

With claw hammer indentations all over your face and a tin of tuna stuck to your head.
posted by fire&wings at 5:42 AM on October 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

And no body.
posted by fire&wings at 5:43 AM on October 9, 2009

Yeah, the part that gets me about cyro is when they freeze just the head. How on earth is that supposed to work? I can follow the concept that they are trying when they freeze a whole body. Maybe you can reanimate the body and heal whatever was wrong with. What do they expect to do with a head that has no life sustaining organs?
posted by Librarygeek at 7:26 AM on October 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

Because, by the time we have the capacity to revive a frozen head and repair the informational damage probably done in the freezing process, growing a new body will be a freakin' cakewalk. We've done ears. We're getting close to teeth. We've made itty-bitty kidneys for cattle.

Taking the head (the preferred euphemism is "neurosuspension") is done because you can cool down just a head a lot faster than you can a whole body. The cooling is done in stages — it isn't just a straight plunge down to liquid nitrogen levels. First, and most importantly, you want to stop the cells from dying and turning into mush, because that means that all of the interconnections which make you you go as well. Later stages take you down one step at a time so that thermal stresses do not crack your frozen head apart. But mostly you want the cellular metabolism to halt because, at that point, the cellular metabolism is devoted to going ahead and dying, neuron by neuron. The quickest way to do that is to take the head, which is a mere fraction of the mass of the body. Every hour, every minute matters in this process.

Cryonics is definitely, as mentioned above, Pascal's wager writ to science, but it's also one done with compound interest invested in the progress of medicine. Assuming civilization does not collapse, science grinds forward, just a little bit at a time. In three centuries, our medical science could be fairly kick-ass. A mere body just will not be that hard as compared to the task of extracting and rebuilding a mind from a chunk of frozen brain. One is putting together a new PC; the other is extracting all of your files from a hard drive with a head crash. Right now, I can do the former in my basement, but the latter is not so easy.

The whole process will likely be last in, first out. The folks who die in future years will be better preserved than people who got frozen ten years back; that will make them easier to repair. Also, if they had to ship your body around for a couple of days before freezing, the goo factor is high. You can ship heads, though, as mere tissue, rather than qualifying as full on human remains — time is of the essence. Viewed from that angle, whole body preservation is counterproductive.
posted by adipocere at 8:04 AM on October 9, 2009 [3 favorites]

Alcor is obviously full of it.

I don't know where you get this idea. Many of the people working at Alcor have family members in storage, and will be future "patients" of Alcor as well. Alcor is a non-profit company and doesn't advertise. Where's the charlatanism?

Though I'm not a member, I intend to become one.

I'd rather be in the experimental group that might get to come back, than be in the control group which we know turns into worm food.

-
posted by General Tonic at 8:27 AM on October 9, 2009

Cryogenics has always creeped me out but maybe that's because I was on acid the first time I saw ReAnimator.
posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on October 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

I wonder at the strength of non-transhumanist atheists, to accept so terrible a darkness without any hope of changing it.

A transhumanist atheist seems like an oxymoron to me. Their goals seem noble but I shudder to live in a world so economically divided that the poor will slave their lives away to fund one more life cycle for someone rich enough to afford it. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
posted by muddgirl at 9:21 AM on October 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

gets a wrench, cocks his arm back to strike that can to knock it off, misses, and hits the side of Ted Williams' head.

Boy when they wake up Ted is he going to be pissed!
posted by stormpooper at 9:38 AM on October 9, 2009

I was on acid the first time I saw ReAnimator .

Jesus Christ. Are you all right?
posted by Skot at 10:06 AM on October 9, 2009

Librarygeek : What do they expect to do with a head that has no life sustaining organs?

I always figured the end game was, eventually, to either be able to remove the brain and put it into some kind of cloned body, or upload the consciousness as some kind of Artificial Intelligence construction. Neither of which I see happening in the near or even foreseeable future.

I suspect that eventually, cryogenics (or some sort of stasis/ hibernation) will actually be a viable technology. I also suspect that none of the bodies that have been iced as of today will be useful as anything other than fertilizer.
posted by quin at 10:17 AM on October 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

I was on acid the first time I saw ReAnimator .

Jesus Christ. Are you all right?

It was back in the 1980s when it was brand new movie (the full-on uncut version at that) but in many respects it was far less horrifying than any number of Ronald Reagan press conferences (speaking of cryogenics).
posted by philip-random at 10:22 AM on October 9, 2009

WELCOME TO THE WOOOOORLD OF TOMORROW!
posted by Eideteker at 10:40 AM on October 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

muddgirl: I shudder to live in a world so economically divided that the poor will slave their lives away to fund one more life cycle for someone rich enough to afford it. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

That's the least likely outcome of cryogenics I can possibly imagine. If human civilization reaches the point where it's practical to reanimate the suspended, it will certainly be beyond anything we think of as scarcity. Even if, in some bizarre twist, there are still materially poor people yet there's still enough spare resources to reanimate us, we'll only have the assets that the reanimating society decides to grant us: currently, the law considers cryonics patients to be dead, and as they say, you can't take it with you.
posted by khafra at 12:28 PM on October 9, 2009

Being transhumanist and an atheist are hardly contradictory positions; the latter sees no divinity present, the former aspires to kindle it within the bosom of humanity, using our minds and what we can make of the world around us.
posted by adipocere at 12:32 PM on October 9, 2009

I suppose "atheist" was the wrong word. But I find it hard to reconcile the fact that Kurzweil, for example, believes that his unique consciousness will live on without his biological brain. It is not a belief in a God but it is definitely belief in the supernatural.

If human civilization reaches the point where it's practical to reanimate the suspended, it will certainly be beyond anything we think of as scarcity.

Alcor clients will be waiting a long time if a prerequisite for unfreezing them is the discovery of a way to create something from nothing.
posted by muddgirl at 12:49 PM on October 9, 2009

No, Kurzweil's assertion is not a belief in the supernatural if he believes that his mind will be housed in some other kind of machine. I say other because your brain is already a machine, made out of meat. It wasn't designed so much as it beat out the competitors, generation after generation, and it does all kinds of things, and it does a lot of things badly, but it still is a functional machine, mesmerizing in complexity even as we recognize its flaws. The classic SF "They're Made Out of Meat" hits this pretty well.

It would be supernatural if he had a belief in this survival that existed outside of the laws of nature. It's currently outside of our engineering capability, but I can think of no good physical reason why a mind could not be transferred from one platform to another. In some sense, we already do that with adult neurogenesis. It is done very slowly, but new neurons are born — that stuff about having all of them you're going to have by age three is outdated science. We have neuron turnover. It's slow. Very slow. Not so hot. However, yes, our mind does inch its way off of some matter and onto some other matter.

If each one was replaced, synapse by synapse, neuron by neuron, with a tiny, artificial neuron, then yes, his unique consciousness will live on without his biological brain, just as software I have written lives on after it has been transferred to another server.
posted by adipocere at 1:17 PM on October 9, 2009

If each one was replaced, synapse by synapse, neuron by neuron, with a tiny, artificial neuron, then yes, his unique consciousness will live on without his biological brain

I can't remark as to if this is true (it's often a question that novice sailors ask - "How much of a boat do I have to replace for it to be the same boat?"), but this isn't what is going to happen. What will happen is that Kurzweil will die, and he will spend his life savings to keep his head frozen, and if we develop the technology, a brain "exactly like Kurzweil's" may be created, and that brain may have the same memories and behaviors, but Kurzweil won't know it, because he died a long time before.

It was incredibly liberating for me, the day I realized that the continuum of my consciousness is an illusion. I think that must have been in high school, when I read about Clive Wearing.

The people who pay Alcor to freeze their brains imagine that one day, they will "wake up" and experience death as a long sleep without dreams, but it's not much different from the transporter problem.
posted by muddgirl at 1:38 PM on October 9, 2009

To add a bit to adipocere's excellent synopsis of Kurzweil's position: He most certainly is not basing the idea that a mind could someday outlast its host body on any kind of spiritual or supernatural belief. His take is based on a very straightforward extrapolation of trends in computing speed and complexity. A computer processes information much faster than any brain. A brain processes information in parallel on a scale to which no current computer can aspire.

His book, The Singularity is Near, is based on projecting forward computing advances to the point in time when computer parallel processing capability matches the brain's parallel processing. The computer is already faster. When it can match the massively parallel structure of a brain there is no particular reason to assume that the content and complexity of a given brain can't be mapped onto a synthetic version of the brain.
posted by Babblesort at 1:43 PM on October 9, 2009

... The Singularity being Kurzweil's name for the point in time when that capability parity is reached.
posted by Babblesort at 1:48 PM on October 9, 2009

What will happen is that Kurzweil will die, and he will spend his life savings to keep his head frozen...

I should hope that Ray Kurzweil has saved more than $80,000 before he dies. Or $150,000 for the full-body treatment.

Cryonic suspension is not very expensive.

-
posted by General Tonic at 2:16 PM on October 9, 2009

Aside from the fact that nobody has the slightest idea whether the human mind is equivalent to a computer program (much less anything approaching proof that it is), it's a slam dunk!
posted by Crabby Appleton at 4:45 PM on October 9, 2009

I do like the idea that consciousness is the 40hz cycle of brain waves in our meat computers... Not quite sure what the implications of that are, per se, but I like it as a concept.
posted by hippybear at 6:10 PM on October 9, 2009

Who hasn't wanted to smack around Ted Williams' frozen head?

I mean, really.
posted by elder18 at 7:56 PM on October 9, 2009

Maybe we'll never develop the technology needed to reanimate a frozen human. Or maybe we will, but the technology will require a new freezing process and any existing corpses won't be viable. Or maybe we'll have the technology but laws will prevent it from being used, or Alcor will go out of business, or nuclear war will wipe out humanity, or...

Sounds like a con to me.
posted by IvoShandor at 4:23 AM on October 12, 2009