Alcor update - 11 Lifequest - 32 · 2017-02-08 · Alcor can offer its members highly discounted...

3rd Qtr. 2000 • Cryonics 1

Alcor update - 11 Lifequest - 32

PAGESOURCE FEATURES

Mike Perry

8

Why Memory? 23Thomas Donaldson

BioTransport Purchases CryoStar Freezer . . . 11

Alcor Membership Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Alcor Membership Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

BLUE by Anthony Dunn......................... 32RE-CREATION by Fred Chamberlain.................... 40

Fred Chamberlain 3

First Thoughts on Last MattersMichael R. Seidl

6

Book Review: The Feeling of What Happens ......................29

“Why Fund Your Suspension with Life Insurance?”.................10

Asilomar ConferenceFred Chamberlain 14

Special BioTransport Announcement

The Baby Boomers’ Guide on sale at a discount ..................5

TechNews

You Only Go Around TwiceJerry B. Lemler

25

Book Review: The Baby Boomers’ Guide .........................30

Member Profile: Klaus Reinhard ....................................44

Miller Family donation ....................................................2

2 Cryonics • 3rd Qtr. 2000

cryonics is a quarterly publication of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation

Contents copyright © 2000 by the Alcor Life ExtensionFoundation, except where otherwise noted. All rights re-served. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarilythose of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, its Board ofDirectors, or its management.

Submissions may be sent via e-mail ([email protected] [email protected] or [email protected]) in ASCII, Word,or PageMaker format. Mailed submissions should include aPC diskette with the file in any previously mentioned format(although printed text alone will be considered). All submit-ted media become property of the Alcor Life Extension Foun-dation unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped en-velope. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation assumes noresponsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, orart. Send all correspondence and submissions to:

Cryonics MagazineAlcor Life Extension Foundation7895 E. Acoma Dr., Suite 110

Scottsdale, AZ 85260

about the cover CGI art by Tim Hubley

ISSN 1054-4305

3rd Qtr. 2000

Volume 21:3

Associate EditorsFred & Linda Chamberlain

[email protected]@alcor.org

EditorLisa L. Lock

[email protected]

FM2030 in Cryostasis(excerpted from the Associated Press

article “Waiting for the Thaw”)

NEW YORK—A nationallyknown futurist and philosopherwho was convinced he wouldlive to be 100 died of pancre-atic cancer Friday, July 7, inNew York at the age of 69. Buthe plans to come back to life inScottsdale Airpark. He had hisbrain cryonically frozen Satur-day night at Alcor Life Exten-sion Foundation, which islocated at the airpark.

A teacher, author, andcorporate consultant who livedin Miami, Fla., FM2030 waslaunched–his word for born–inBelgium to an Iranian diplomat.He lived in 17 countries by thetime he was 11, fostering self-proclaimed identity as a citizenof the universe. He considerednationality an anachronism andoften said, “There are no illegalimmigrants, only irrelevantborders.”

Tributes to FM2030, writtenby his friends and colleagues,will be published in the next

issue of Cryonics.

The Robert Miller family, Alcor members who live inCanada, recently made a generous donation of $100,000for the extraordinarily important purpose of developing amarketing program that will increase Alcor’s membership.

Now, we are asking you to join the Millers’ gesture ofsupport and their confidence in our future by adding yourown contribution to this important membership-buildingcampaign. Your dollars will enable us to communicate ourstory in a positive and compelling manner, develop

marketing materials that will reflect Alcor’s professionalism, and create apresence at important meetings where we can exchange information withscientists from around the world.

We have set our goal at the $200,000 level for the year 2000. With your help,we will quickly reach this important milestone. If you agree that we need tobuild the Alcor membership, for greater strength and safety, now is the time togive a contribution that will truly make a difference.

Donations of more than $1,000 will receive honorable mention in the pages ofthis publication. We ask you to help support what the Miller family has startedby adding your own contribution.

If you need tax deductions for the year 2000, this is the time to take such adeduction and make a major contribution toward your own long-term survivalat the same time!

You Asked for Greater Membership Growth ...

Here Is Your Opportunity to Help “Make It So!”


An announcement you recentlyreceived said, “BioTransport isDeveloping an Extraordinary NewProgram for Viable Cell CryogenicStorage.” The flyer also indicatedthat the service would be madeavailable exclusively to fullysigned-up Alcor Members at asubstantial discount, prior to adver-tising to the public. It said that moreinformation regarding pricing andprocedures would be available toAlcor Members by early Septem-ber. So, it’s early September!What’s this all about?

Just in case you missed it, hereare the essentials. The cells stored(human or animal) will be fullyviable, able to grow in culture(make copies of themselves) bothbefore and after cryogenic storage.This means thatthey should besuitable fortherapeutic clon-ing in humans(growing organs),reproductivecloning of pets,diagnostic pur-poses such asgenetic analysis,gene therapyapplications, andreanimation tissueengineering.

What aboutreproductivecloning? Will thecells stored be

About That Special BioTransport Announcementdated 26 July 2000!...

(which was sent to all Alcor Members and subscribers of Cryonics)by Fred Chamberlain

suitable for this? Yes, they shouldbe fully suitable. Use for thispurpose will be promoted to thepublic, for pets. Legal prohibitions,ethical questions, and technicalconcerns may delay cloning inhumans, but pets appear to be aperfect proving ground. Many ofthe technical concerns with humancloning may in fact be resolved bywidespread pet cloning. As petcloning becomes commonplace, theidea of human reproductive cloningshould become more widely ac-cepted also. This will be an evolu-tionary process.

The announcement said soon(after availability to Alcor Mem-bers) BioTransport would “open itsdoors” to the public. Service feesand quality levels are expected to

be highly competitive. What’savailable right now? Companiesproviding this service are as yet stilltiny and appear to rely on collec-tion techniques that may not pre-serve true viability.

Prices available now throughother firms are $300 to $500 ormore, for limited periods of time.Negotiations with Alcor mayprovide for reciprocal “backups,”with the samples at Alcor having notime limits whatever, and no addi-tional charges either.

Alcor will get excellent visibility.In addition to being acknowledgedas a “time without limits” backup,Alcor can offer its members highlydiscounted prices, since Bio-Transport can contract to serveAlcor Members at “cost.” The

service could evenbe a “fringe ben-efit” of BioTrans-port’s cryotrans-port service rolefor Alcor. Bio-Transport can alsoengage in publicservice relatedprograms fundedby donations toAlcor, with Alcoras the primarystorage site andBioTransportproviding thebackup storage.Along with thiswould go wide-

Left to right: Fred Chamberlain; Linda Chamberlain; TerryGrossman, M.D.; Dale Howell; Karla Steen; and Ron Wise.


Letters to the EditorSLetters to the editors are most

welcome on all topics, includingcounterpoint on previously pub-lished materials and suggestions asto future content. We especiallyinvite questions about cryotransport(cryonics) that are original and far-reaching.

If you are seeking information

spread public recognition ofBioTransport’s role in thecryotransport rescue of Alcor Mem-bers. All of these factors shouldaccelerate Alcor’s membershipgrowth.

As the announcement said, ifyou had been contemplating thestorage of your cells for any ofthese purposes, you might wish towait a short while longer, to seewhat BioTransport is about to offer.The higher reliability and qualityBioTransport will provide, at verysubstantial discounts for AlcorMembers, may more than make upfor the short delay in your beingable to take advantage of theservice. With that in mind, yournext question may be “So how faralong are we toward this goal?”

BioTransport’s team includesTerry Grossman, M.D., as Supervis-ing Physician. Dale Howell, a cellbiologist, is now working full timeat Alcor (for BioTransport), settingup a cell culture and preservationlaboratory and conducting marketsurveys and analyses. An AlcorMember with a Ph.D. in cell biol-ogy presently serves as our ScienceAdvisor-Consultant and may laterbe named as “Chief Scientist” forthe company; his name is withheldpending that announcement. RonWise, VP for Corporate Communi-cations and Marketing for a major

medical services firm, guides thedevelopment of our PR and market-ing plans. Karla Steen, Alcor’sLegal Assistant, is in charge ofcontract formulation and legal riskassessment as well as our futureofferings of shares to investors.Linda Chamberlain, Alcor’s Execu-tive Director and (also) a Directorof BioTransport, will guide thedevelopment of our administrativesystems for close control of cellsamples and will implement most ofthe early marketing activity. My jobis to make sure that nobody gets intheir way.

Equipment is being ordered andinstalled. Cell culture experimenta-tion to trade off collection ap-proaches began even before the labat Alcor was set up, at other loca-tions. Marketing strategies arecoming into sharp focus. Thequestion on your minds, of course,is “How soon are we going to beginoffering services to Alcor Mem-bers?”

The answer to that question maybe in your hands already. Thisarticle, of necessity, had to bewritten for publication earlier,weeks earlier. Check the separateBioTransport mailer for details. Stillmore information will follow as theprogram develops.

This is a brief synopsis of whatBioTransport will be doing to gain

strength and improve the publicvisibility of Alcor. Thanks to all ofyou who invested in BioTransportand donated to Alcor. Many of you,as Life Members, paid dues on anaccelerated basis, which directlyenabled Alcor to support the launchof BioTransport. All of you AlcorMembers deserve the best servicesthat BioTransport can provide, atthe lowest prices possible, andyou’re going to get them. l

about Alcor, please consult our website, at www.alcor.org. If you havequestions about developmentalprograms within Alcor, you maystir us into talking about them evensooner than we might have other-wise.

If your letter is lengthy andinvolved, we may use it as a sepa-

rate article and may ask you toexpand it. We need your ideas,your personal visions. This is theplace to start.

Please send letters and/orarticles to:

[email protected],[email protected], or

[email protected].

!In the last issue, Vol. 21:2, onpage 27, is printed the state-ment that all Alcor membersmust have changed their lifeinsurance policies to nameAlcor as owner and benefi-ciary by January 1, 2001.

Actually, Alcor requires thatyou make this change andsend an updated “schedule”of your policy to Alcor by

January 1, 2002.

We apologize for any confu-sion this may have caused.


Name: ______________________________________________________________________

Mailing Address: ______________________________________________________________

City: ________________________________ State: ___________ Zip: _________________

email: _______________________________________________________________________

phone: (____________) ________________________Alcor # _________________________

Regular price: $19.95Cost to Alcor Members: $17.95 (10% discount)Cost to Alcor Life Members: $15.95 (20% discount)

Number of books ________ x price ____________ = $ ____________

Plus $4.00/book handling and shipping (US only) $ ____________

Add 20% for shipping overseas $ ____________

Total $ ____________

Use your VISA or MasterCard to purchase online on our secure server (www.alcor.org) orfax (480-922-9027) or mail this form to: Alcor, 7895 E. Acoma Dr. #110, Scottsdale, AZ 85260

Name as it appears on credit card: _______________________________________________

VISA or MasterCard Number: _________________________________________________

Expiration Date (Month/Year): _________________________________________________

Signature: ___________________________________________________________________

The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living ForeverThe Promise and the Future Impactof Trying to Live Foreverby Terry Grossman, M.D.

About the Author:

Terry Grossman, M.D., is thefounder and medical directorof Frontier Medical Institute.Prior to moving to the Denvermetro area, he spent 15 yearsas a community family doctorin the Colorado mountains,during which he deliveredalmost 1,000 babies. Dr.Grossman is a licensed ho-meopathic medical doctor anddevotes most of his profes-sional time to running a busynutritional medicine practice.Dr. Grossman has writtennumerous articles for health-related magazines and lecturesfrequently on topics related toalternative medicine.

This book presents the thesis that radical extensions of human life span are onlya few decades away. The problem is many baby boomers may not live longenough to avail themselves of these breakthrough technologies—but they willbe close! This book offers a way to live a healthier life now, so that anyone canmaximize his or her chances of being alive when this new wave of life extensionand rejuvenation really begins to take hold.

“A must read for anyone who wants to live to see (and enjoy!) the remarkablecentury ahead. Grossman has brilliantly synthesized an immense array of insightand scientific knowledge.... This beautifully written book provides a very walk-able bridge to vastly enhanced longevity and fulfillment.” Ray Kurzweil,author of The Age of Spiritual Machines

“I’ve long known Terry Grossman as a gifted lecturer and teacher ofdoctors...this marvelous new book makes his wealth of innovative medicalknowledge clearly accessible to the public...a must for ‘boomers’ aspiring tomaximal health and longevity.” Ronald L. Hoffman, M.D., author of Intelli-gent Medicine: A Guide to Optimizing Health and Preventing Illness for theBaby Boomer Generation


“Are you the two newest Alcor mem-bers?” my wife and I were recentlyasked at Asilomar, as we unabashedlyflaunted our barely 10-day-old shinystainless steel bracelets for all toadmire.

“I would think so,” I instinctivelyreplied, “though I rather hope not.”

“So, how did you get interested incryonics?” ensued the inevitablefollow-up query.

“Let me give you the Reader’sDigest version,” I countered, not wish-ing to drive my new acquaintance intoR.E.M. spindles on the spot. “I wasbrowsing in the science section ofBarnes and Noble a few months ago,and I picked up a copy of Eric Drex-ler’s Engines of Creation. Two dayslater, I had finished the book, and I feltdistinctly privileged to have an entirenew universe open up before my eyes.

“I tried to call Alcor using thephone number Drexler listed in En-gines, but since the book was publishedback in ’86, they had moved. I finallywas able to track them down over theInternet, and here I am!” brandishingmy right wrist while shaking the flap-pable bracelet in tambourine fashion.

* * *I am positively delighted to offer

my thoughts, feelings, and generalmusings on a quarterly basis in astandard column form, here in Cryon-ics. I would be remiss if I didn’t thankour new editor, Lisa Lock, along withtwo new (yet not-so-very old) friends,

Linda and Fred Chamberlain, for sug-gesting I do so. Thusly, “You Only GoAround Twice” has its inception withthis issue.

Now then, since you are obvi-ously free at your own discretion toturn the page, casting me aside withoutany discernable adverse recriminations,permit me to embellish just a bit, as tohow I was so dendritically receptive toDrexler’s stunning propositions.

I was sitting on a damp, soiledblanket between my wife and 15-year-old son, and wedged amongst whatlater would be estimated as 299,997others when the light went on. And, itwasn’t good. Just the night before, I’dgotten a restless 4 hours sleep in amakeshift, self-assembled pup tent,after being forcibly tossed against amesh wire fence, and herded like asheep onto an overcrowded creakyschool bus, for a none-too-comfortable90-minute ride, all for the “privilege”of being stuffed into a massive,crowded field.

I sensed a growing desire tourinate, but after all I’d gone throughto secure a prime location for our blan-ket, I dared not risk losing my positionat the mere expense of a potentiallydisobedient bladder. It would have towait. I was noticeably perspiring in thecopiously muggy early afternoon air ofmid August, while my mouth wasablaze with the aroma of several hal-itotic ingredients.

Joe Cocker, aged almost beyondrecognition from 25 years before, was

about to complete another animatedperformance, while the much-antici-pated Shannon Hoon and Blind Melonwaited in the wings.

“See you at Woodstock III in2019!” Joe pronounced with a farewellwave, as he exited the colossalSaugerties stage.

It was at that precise moment,assimilating the premonitionary wordsof “Cocker the Rocker” that I wasblindsided into acknowledging my owninevitable mortality; or so I imaginedback in August of ’94. Turning 30, andcoming to grips with the end of bound-less youth some 14 years previously,had only been the opening jab. Inresponse, I’d rearranged my early mid-dle years and, accordingly, managed toweather the storm’s leading squall.Now, though, after nearly a decade anda half of quiescence, came the penetrat-ing impact of a solid right hook to thechin, triggered by an unlikely pugilisticprophet, dressed not in a coat of manycolors but in the form of an aging rockstar.

I flunked algebra twice in highschool, but being married to a formermath teacher for nearly a quarter cen-tury enabled me to compensatinglycalculate with alacrity that I’d be 69years old should Joe’s vision be ac-curate. I surmised he and I both wouldrequire more than just “a little helpfrom our friends” to make it so.

Shannon Hoon performed withtypical reckless abandon, and thentragically died of an accidental drug

You Only Go Around Twice

by Jerry B. Lemler, M.D.


overdose a scant year later. After thesoaking rain and the good-natured fro-licking of the mud people, Crosby,Stills, and Nash graced the Woodstockstage for the second time in 25 yearsand, as customary, highlighted thefestival. Try as I did, though, Icouldn’t make myself recall ever hav-ing been “here before.” Then, DavidCrosby nearly died shortly after Wood-stock, his life thankfully prolonged byreceipt of a transplanted liver.

“Weren’t we all teetering on thebrink?” I asked myself, not wishing toupset my son, Russell, who at age 15, Ijudged, would be upset by participatingin such a morbid father and son dia-logue. In fact, perhaps the pervasiveimpact of the Woodstock moment wasinescapably augmented on account ofmy parentally imposed limited acquain-tance with the grave. In my youth I hadlargely been sequestered from the stingof death; arguably to excess. When Iwas a lad of 12, I returned home froma sleep-away summer camp when Inoticed a different bird was occupyingmy pet parakeet’s perch. I literally hadspent hours upon hours with Cookie,vainly trying to teach him to talk, aswe both mindlessly (and silently)listened to the annoying lady’s instruc-tions emanating from the portablerecord player, coercing the bird with-out success to say, “Hello.” In anyevent, when I inquired of my parentswhat had happened to Cookie, I wasreluctantly informed he had died whileI was away.

“I spent a whole morning at thepet store,” my mother complained,“watching all those birds flying around,trying to find one that looked just likeCookie. I didn’t think you’d notice thedifference. Oh,” she added, “I made apot roast for your first supper back athome.” So much for the encourage-ment of grieving, and I never attemp-ted to cajole Cookie II into discourse.

The very next summer myfavorite grandfather died, secondary tomultiple metastases, prolifically seededfrom a cancerous prostate. I went off tocamp having been told he was merely

“not feeling well.” When I returned,fully three weeks after his burial in aLong Island cemetery, I was noncha-lantly given the essential veneer ofinformation. My parents never askedhow I felt about the loss, thoughthankfully they hadn’t tried to deceiveme a second time by procuring a re-placement “Grandpa Harry.”

Even if we don’t purposefullywhitewash the issue, like my misguidedparents, we humans have a way, asperhaps most vividly demonstrated inour commonality of language, ofsanitizing ourselves from the grippingreality of the termination of our earthlyexistence. Let’s take a casual glance atthe many euphemistic synonyms for“dead” we consistently construct. It’s avirtual struggle to say to another personthat someone they know well is ac-tually “dead.” Instead, what we usuallyhear is how they are: “no longer withus,” “resting in peace,” “in heaven,”“gone to their eternal reward,” “withJesus,” “gone,” “passed away,” “methis/her demise,” “the late,” “in a betterplace,” or “come home.” We physiciansoffer little more comfort in this quag-mire, as we’re prone to saying thepatient is “deceased,” or “expired.”

In my time, I too have distancedmyself from the word “dead,” to thepoint where I truly wonder if dancingaround such a periphery has been ofuseful validity—for any of us. It cer-tainly had been counterproductive forme, and promised to remain so, whenfortuitously the daring world of cryo-nics came along and put a dead certainend to it!

* * *

This writer’s pen is going to seeplenty of action in the coming months.Perhaps the most significant long-rangeproject is already under way as thiscolumn is being written. Reaching forTomorrow has served Alcor faithfullyas its introductory manual to cryonics.Nonetheless, it is understandably some-what outdated, especially in consider-ation of the interest and progress innanotechnology and related disciplinesover the last seven years. The new in-

troductory text is tentatively titled “Im-mortality for Beginners,” and buildsupon Reaching for Tomorrow withstate-of-the-art updates and the inclu-sion of a newly scripted “De-Anima-tion Ceremony.” Further details will beforthcoming in this column, and theprojected completion date is Decemberof this year.

On the subject of books, I’d liketo recommend The Baby Boomers’Guide to Living Forever by Dr. TerryGrossman. As a fellow physician, Iread Dr. Grossman’s new publicationwith an eye focused on detail. Hemakes a most compelling case for cryo-nics and offers an in-depth rationalewith concomitant strategies for stayingalive as long as possible, in a decidedlyeasy-to-read format.

At the Asilomar conference, Iglanced through a copy of MikePerry’s monumental work Forever forAll, which is due for imminent release.I have also read excerpts from this text,as published in the latest two issues ofThe Venturist. It’s on the high-browside, and you assuredly need to besmarter than the average bear tomeaningfully comprehend it. If youqualify, though, I anticipate it being a“must read,” and I am most eager toget my hands on a first edition. Iwouldn’t wait for the movie on thisone.

* * *Succinctly put, Asilomar was

especially invigorating and, on balance,worth the 15 hours of travel time andmissed connections we endured (that’sone way, courtesy of TWA), in ad-dition to the loss of luggage on thereturn. We met so many fascinatingpeople, made some new and refreshingfriends, and it was a genuine privilegeto converse with the likes of EricDrexler, Ralph Merkle, Linda and FredChamberlain, Robert Newport, LisaLock, Dave Pizer, and Steve Bridge.

I dare say by now you’ve prob-ably heard enough from me. I know Ihave. So, I’ll be seeing you, sooner andlater! l


by Michael R. Seidl

My office overlooks RodneySquare in Wilmington, Delaware.Several times a year, religiousfundamentalists congregate on thesquare, setting up a podium andloudspeakers. They take turnstestifying to their faith, and inbetween the testifying they playChristian rock music to pull in theyounger crowd. What is probablynot very loud at ground levelapparently bounces off the build-ings in just the wrong way so as tomake them sound like they arebroadcasting from my windowsill. Ihate this. I am not simply annoyedby the fact that they interrupt mywork—I resent people who are in-your-face about their beliefs, whothink that they have the truth-market cornered, who touch re-ligious symbols they wear aroundtheir necks when they want toexpress their sincerity. The people Iassociate with mostly seem to feelthe same way; we all agree thatpeople ought to be allowed tobelieve pretty much what they wantas long as they are not acting outtheir beliefs in a way that is destruc-tive to others or forcing thosebeliefs on others. But we do notwant to hear about it. For whateverreason, testifying, preaching one’sbeliefs, seems to me to be illiberal,un-American.

So imagine my discomfort atbeing an Alcor member. I think thatI have information regarding aprofound truth—bodily “death”does not have to mean final death.Nevertheless, because of my liberalbeliefs, I find it exceedingly diffi-cult to muster the proselytizingspirit sufficiently to proselytize onbehalf of cryotransport. I am tornbetween my liberal ideology ofnon-proselytization and the terrify-ing facts that (a) all around mepeople are dying their final deathwhile I sit silent fearing to offendand (b) the movement that mighthelp to save me remains nascentand sputtering for lack of broadinterest.

Make no mistake—pushingcryotransport is pushing “beliefs,”and it does offend, in exactly thesame way the people preaching inthe square offend. I know of nopolite way to reconcile my beliefsabout cryotransport with the beliefsof others, just as there is no politeway to reconcile a belief in medicaltreatment with the belief of aJehovah’s Witness that such treat-ment should be refused. Either wetry to compel others to take up theprinciples associated withcryotransport or we sit silent andwatch them die, just as we either tryto compel a Jehovah’s Witness to

seek treatment or watch him or herdie. There is no middle ground(there is, of course, a more extremeground—the compelling force ofthe State, but that is subject foranother discussion).

Having sneered so long atproselytization, I am slowly, byalmost imperceptible increments,coming to the conclusion that I canno longer sit silent. As distasteful asI find it, I will, at last, have to begin“preaching” cryotransport. I thinkall members of the cryonics move-ment will have to as well, regard-less of the moral/ethical systemeach of you inhabits, for one of tworeasons:

First, you may wish to prosely-tize because you find it morallyuncomfortable to sit silent whenyou know of an alternative“treatment” to recommend, justas you might recommend chemo/radiation to a friend treating hiscancer with herbal teas. Person-ally, I do not believe I have anobligation to tell anyone any-thing; although I may choose toshare cryotransport informationwith some people, it is notincumbent upon me to enlightenthe world. But that’s just me.

Second, you may wish to pros-elytize because of self-interest—

fIRST THOUGHTS ON LAST MATTERS

The Place of Proselytizationin the Cryonics Movement


there are tremendous economiesof scale that we can all profitfrom if cryotransport becomesmore widespread. I do not meanmerely in cryostasis and long-term storage; I mean in hundredsof ways we cannot begin yet toimagine. For instance, right now,when I get on an airplane, I riskmy successful cryopreserva-tion—if the plane crashes andburns or crashes over water,there is unlikely to be anythingof my head to freeze. But planesare not designed with cryostasisin mind today; at some point,their designers concluded, “well,everyone on board will die whenthe plane slams into the groundat 500 miles an hour regardlessof what we do, so let’s direct ourattention elsewhere.” A genera-tion of aeronautical engineersaware of the possibility ofcryotransport might think differ-ently, designing a fuselage tosurvive impact and extinguishfires, knowing that everyoneinside is dead from the force ofthe impact but wishing to pre-serve the fuselage intact toprotect the bodies within forcryopreservation. One day, allairplanes may have super-strongfuselages, passenger restraintsystems to keep us from flyingaround on impact, and under-the-seat crash helmets for cranialpreservation. But we will not seethese benefits—or others that wecannot imagine—with only a fewhundred active cryonicists.

So I conclude that, for my ownbenefit and perhaps for the benefitsof others, I have to preach cryo-transport. Going about this will behard, and the purpose of this forayis to seek ideas for successfulproselytization. Here are severalinitial observations:

As I see it, three significantbeliefs deploy in cryotransport: (1)cryostasis works—it freezes people;(2) given sufficient time, ourtechnology will develop to thepoint where restoration of previ-ously frozen people will be techno-logically and economically pos-sible; and (3) if I am properlycryotransported, I have a goodchance of coming back from the“dead” personally, and I want tocome back.

Selling point (1) requires onlythat people change their mortuarypractices; some people want to beburied, some want to be burned,some want to be shot into space,and some want to be frozen. Weshould approach the funeral homeindustry and the public healthindustry with cryonics as an alter-native to internment or immolation.We need to get the cost ofcryotransport to the point where itis, at least, less than interment evenif more than immolation, and itneeds to be put forth with the sameeveryday approach. Just as thefuneral home industry now helps tomarket burial plots and insurance tocover funeral costs, we need topush an active plan of cryotransportas an alternative to traditionaldisposal.

Selling point (2) requires asystematic education of people inthe basics of a scientific world-view(i.e., technology works, it solvesproblems, it develops along apredictable continuum, and sayingit “will” be able to restore people isa semantically and scientificallymore reliable statement than horsex “will” win the Triple Crown orJesus “will” return). We need aprogram of public lectures toprivate and governmental groups atall levels, from the Rotary Club tothe Senate. We need to prepare setlectures with audiovisual support

that we can make available to ourmembers, to offer lists of standardorganizations that might be inter-ested with contact people, and toprovide minimal training to lectur-ers. We need people to writeeditorials to their newspapers and tomagazines they read. We need tomake the views associated withcryotransport as ubiquitous ineveryday life as the proponents ofthe various religions have madetheir beliefs.

Selling point (3) is the hardestbecause it requires (a) people totake a gamble (I’ll be properlyfrozen, will not die in a crash overwater or from a degenerative braindisease that liquefies my cortex)and (b) people to take a leap offaith in themselves and the world.However, I suggest that the suc-cessful traversing of points (1) and(2) will add a significant number ofpeople to the cryonics movement.Point (3) is and will continue to besomewhat intractable, and somepeople, for whatever reason, willstill balk at that last step. I proposethat, for the moment, we put aside(3) and focus on (1) and (2)—surely there is a vast mass ofmiddle-of-the-road people out therewaiting for conversion, waiting forthe freezers of men and women totake the place of the fishers of men.

The Gideons put a New Tes-tament in every hotel in America.Let us put a cryotransport brochurein every mailbox, an editorial inevery paper, a lecturer before everygroup willing to hear us. Let us takeour Alcor medallions out fromunder our shirts, or, better yet, finda new symbol, one that transcendsparticular cryotransport groups andthat stands for the idea itself, andwear it proudly, and be ready,when someone asks, “what’s that,”to testify about life eternal.

l


Why Fund Your Suspension with Life Insurance?

by Rudi HoffmanCertified Financial Planner

“I expect to have the money to fundmy suspension in cash eventually. Mr.Hoffman, why should I take out a lifeinsurance policy to fund my suspen-sion?”

This question in some form comesup often in discussions with peoplewith an interest in cryopreservation.The good news is that there areanswers that are mathematically valid(i .e., not merely opinions) and thatmake sense to most people.

The purpose of this article is toanswer this question in a clear, con-cise, understandable manner. Addi-tionally, we will see that there is anempirical way of determining the op-timum funding that will appeal to mostrationally minded cryonicists.

Let’s personalize this with a discus-sion of a hypothetical individual“Jack,” who is a 45-year-old softwaredeveloper.

Okay, Jack, so you want to becryogenically frozen with the possibil-ity of future reanimation. You havethought about it for some time, butyou are of a skeptical and questioningnature, and you have a constituency inthe form of a wife and family who arenot at all sure if you have not gone offthe deep end and do not share yourenthusiasm for the possibilities oftechnology.

You want to create $120,000 for afull-body suspension with Alcor. Youare excited because your mutual fundshave been growing well, your career istaking off, and you expect to be ser-iously wealthy in the future. You wantto do the best thing to assure yourfunding. You have negotiated with

your wife, and you and she have deci-ded that you can spend $1,000 peryear toward cryonics funding.

Here is the key question. Is it betterfor Jack to spend his $80 per month ina mutual fund, or a life insurance pol-icy, to fund his suspension?

Here are the facts. Jack, a healthynonsmoker, can create an instant$120,000 to fund his suspension in apermanent Universal Life policy. Oncehe pays 80 bucks and qualifies, there isan immediate and sure payment to hiscryonics organization to assure hissuspension. The money does not go tothe cryonics organization at the ex-pense of the survivors. This $120,000does not have to come out of the estateJack is leaving for his wife, Mary, andthe children. Nor do they have the op-portunity of second-guessing Jack’schoice and delaying or litigatingJack’s wishes.

On the other hand, let’s say Jackputs his $80 per month into a mutualfund. Even if he averages a greatreturn, it will take decades to generatethe required $120,000.* What happensif Jack is struck by a truck on the wayto work tomorrow? There is no fullfunding, and Jack will not be sus-pended.

What if Jack lives long enough tohave adequate funding in his account?When Jack “dies,” there is $120,000that Jack has earmarked for his sus-pension. But this $120,000 is a muchclearer target for any of Jack’s poten-tial heirs to contest.

Jack’s kids all turned out great. Ex-cept for the youngest, Leroy, who feltthe world owed him a living. Jack had

left each of his children $200,000 inhis will. But Leroy wanted at least partof the $120,000 Jack had earmarked forsuspension! Do you think Leroy couldfind an attorney who would take thiscase? Could the money be tied up in alegal battle? Do will and estate contestsoccur over far less controversial issuesthan funding cryostasis? Absolutely!And these funding controversies haveand will continue to occur.

There are other issues. If Jack is notinsurable due to health reasons, he willnot be able to obtain life insurance tofund his suspension, and he would beforced to fund his suspension from hisestate.

Most people become uninsurable atsome point in their lives. It thereforemakes sense to find out how affordableit can be to fund your suspension withthe incredible financial leverage thatonly life insurance provides. In the caseof cryonicists, the policy can trulybecome life insurance—not deathinsurance.

Cryonicists tend to be lifeextensionists who take great care ofthemselves and thereby can usuallyqualify for the best possible insurancerates. (I spend a good deal of timeexplaining this information to insur-ance companies!)

In conclusion, for most people itmakes sense to use life insurance tofund the exciting possibilities ofcryonic suspension. l

* $80 per month = $960 per year$960 annual payment12 % after tax compound yield25 years to grow to $128,001(22 years at 15% after tax yield)


A non-profit,tax-exempt 501(c)(3)

California Corporation

Alcor’s Mission:The Preservation

of Individual Lives

Medical Director:Thomas Munson, MD

MedicalAdvisory Board:

Terry Grossman, MDG. Mario Isidron, MD

Ravin Jain, MDJerry Lemler, MD

Robert R. Newport, MDAnthony Pizzaro, MD

ScientificAdvisory Board:

K. Eric Drexler, PhDBart Kosko, PhD

James B. Lewis, PhDRalph Merkle, PhD

Marvin Minsky, PhD

Patient Care Trustees:David Brandt-Erichsen

Gary S. Meade, EsqCarlos Mondragon

Warren L. RobertsonRobert A. Schwarz

Alcor Board ofDirectors:

Stephen BridgeLinda Chamberlain

Hugh HixonGary S. Meade, EsqRalph Merkle, PhD

Michael Riskin, CPA, PhD

Advisors to theAlcor Board:

Kathleen Cotter, DCDavid Greenstein, OD

Joe HoveyCarlos Mondragon

Judy MuhlesteinMark Muhlestein

Stephen Van Sickle

Alcor Officers:Fred Chamberlain, Pres.Stephen Bridge, V. Pres.

Michael Riskin, Treas.Linda Chamberlain, Secy.

Alcor Update

In late July 2000, Alcor’s Patient Care Bayreceived a new piece of equipment pur-chased by BioTransport, Inc. The freezershown could accommodate up to 12(more likely only 6) neuropatients in avitrified state at between -130° C and-140° C. At this temperature, the patient’sbrain would be expected to be in a“glasslike” state rather than containing avery large number of tiny ice crystals,which present-day thinking suggests couldonly be restored to normal function bynanotechnology.

BioTransport has also purchased allof the constituents for improved base per-fusates and very advanced cryoprotec-tants, paying an additional $10,000 li-cense fee for use of these formulations.Both varieties of “freeze blocker” fromTwenty First Century Medicine, Inc.(21CM) have also been purchased, asneeded with this approach to combat cry-stallization. Immersion fluids for very ra-pid cooldown have been procured, as ad-vised by 21CM, and Alcor’s cooldownapparatus is being modified (at BioTrans-port’s expense) for this procedure.

In a recent Alcor suspension, surgerywas pioneered for making use of this“vitrification” approach with neuros. OneAlcor Member has consented to have thisprocedure applied in the event of need,instead of the more standard approaches.Interestingly, the member is signed up fora “whole body” procedure, but this

BioTransport PurchasesCryoStar Freezer

approach can only be applied at the“neuro” level presently. In order tomake use of this procedure, the memberhas conditionally consented to theswitch of options, in the interests ofbetter brain protection.

Alcor is still studying how to pricethis advanced neuro option, termed“neuro-plus” by some of those who aredeveloping the procedure. The optionmay require a level of funding compa-rable to “whole body.” Also, the Cryo-Star freezer is only the first step alongthe road of studying how to eventuallyprovide neuro-plus storage at costs thatare equivalent to those for today’s neurooption. If that can be achieved, then it ispossible that the vitrification option maybe opened for existing members withneuro arrangements, without a need forincreased funding.


ALCOR’SMEMBERSHIPGROWTH

I’ve noticed in recent conversations and through variousmedia that most people are a little confused about member-ship growth and growth rates. 1) Having a high growth rateis relatively easy when you don’t have many members tobegin with. 2) The definition of “membership” can varywidely, making cursory comparisons difficult. Someorganizations include in this definition such categories asthose already in cryostasis, associate members, subscribers toancillary services, etc. Alcor is much more restrictive indefining members, including only those who have fullcryotransport arrangements.

To illustrate point 1), the best way to look at Alcor’slong-term growth is to imagine an empty swimming poolthat is being filled with a hose. Initially, the percentage offilling (growth) is very high. Liquid levels double in amatter of seconds, but then doubling quickly stretches outfrom seconds to hours.

Looking at the details, 1985 was a banner year in Alcor’smembership with a growth rate of 61.4%, a net increase of27 new members, which was largely due to the absorption ofthe Cryonics Society of South Florida. But if we were to add27 new members to Alcor’s current membership of 504 (asof July), that would be equal to a growth of 5.3%. Alcor’sgrowth rate in 1999 was 8.2%.

1991 was also an important year with a net increase of90 members, which was an increase of 45% (larger actualnumber than in 1985, but a smaller percentage of the total).Many have argued, however, that high growth in the late 80sand through the early 90s was a combination of the publicityfrom the Dora Kent crisis and that Alcor raised its suspen-sion minimums. The increase in suspension minimumshelped to create a burst of new members who wanted to begrandfathered into the previous pricing structure.

Between the early and mid 90s there was a dramatic dropin our growth rate, culminating in 1994 with a net loss of 14members. Many believe this was primarily due to the splitthat led to the formation of CryoCare, in the same year thatAlcor moved to Arizona.

by Mathew SullivanFacility Operations Manager


Others have countered this argument and stated the de-cline in growth was due to the increase of suspension min-imums and that our current pricing structure is too high. Ifthis were the case, that price is more important than quality,our largest competitor would have a membership base in thethousands. You would not expect to see Alcor’s membershipbase larger than all the other organizations combined. If Al-cor and/or the entire industry were making money hand overfist, you would expect to see new venture capitalists enteringthe market in an effort to capture a share of the profit. Thiscertainly is not the case.

By March 1995, according to Joe Hovey’s notes (Alcor’sbookkeeper), Alcor had a total of 89 ex-members sinceabout 1990. 52 members had switched to CryoCare, 17 werecan-celled for non-payment of dues, and 20 were lost formiscellaneous or unknown reasons.

Alcor’s average growth rate per year since the split hasbeen 6.3%, or a net growth of 25.6 new members per year.Not nearly as high as we would like, but we are steadilygrowing.

With the recent influx of ex-CryoCare members, youmight expect to see a spike in membership growth. In fact,net growth in the first half of 2000 has dropped slightly dueto the fact that Alcor’s staff have performed an exhaustiveoverhaul of the membership files and have found a numberof members whose financial arrangements were inadequate.Many of these situations are being resolved, but a number ofothers have resulted in cancellation of membership.

Although secure funding is important for Alcor’s long-term viability (see article by Linda Chamberlain in the 2ndquarter Cryonics) it is always a serious matter to see a mem-bership cancelled, and it does have a long-term effect on thegrowth rate.

The graph below is useful to the extent of predictingpossible growth trends, but it certainly does not guaranteethem. When an individual starts the sign-up process, it doesnot necessarily mean he or she will become a member.

The value of the above graph increases by cross-refer-encing when the applicant started the sign-up process (seenext column). If most applicants had been in the sign-upprocess for many years, one might consider conducting areview to find out if there was a problem.

As you can see, most of those who are in the sign-upprocess have been there no more than a few years. Theremainder have been in the sign-up up process for 8 or moreyears—a result of an old policy that allowed individuals tobegin the sign-up process with a one-time payment. This waslater changed for obvious reasons.

More recently, our membership has surged upward to504 members, an increase of 21 members in two months, ora net increase (minus losses due to non-payment of dues,funding inadequacies, etc.) of 16 for this year so far. In spiteof more productive follow-up and an improved marketingapproach since 1998, this was a surprise in light of all thecleanup of funding inadequacies that resulted in lost mem-berships. We had expected overall membership growth to belargely stagnant for the year as a tradeoff, to strengthenAlcor’s long-term stability.

So, if you hear someone preaching that the sky is falling,that our movement is dying, ignore them because theevidence clearly states otherwise. l

Alcor has 504 Suspension Members (including109 Life Members), and 39 patients in suspension.These numbers are broken down by country below.

AlcorMembership Status

Applicants

MembersApplicants

Subscribers

MembersSubscribers

Country

Argentina 0 0 1Australia 12 3 6Austria 1 0 2Brazil 1 0 0Canada 12 3 11France 0 0 1Germany 3 1 2Ireland 0 0 1Italy 0 2 2Japan 2 0 2Netherlands 2 3 1Russia 0 0 4

Country

South Africa 0 0 1Sri Lanka 0 0 1Switzerland 0 0 2Taiwan 0 0 1U.K. 26 6 8U.S.A. 445 72 226

TOTALS 504 90 273

No. of Countries: 18


Asilomar Conference

by Fred Chamberlain

President/CEO, Alcor

“I think on a technical front, wereally need to gain acceptance fortwo ideas: one, that there is very

little damage, or that we canpreserve physical structure withvery little damage, and second,that we can restore damagedstructure, that we can in factrestore extensive structure.”

Strongly emphasizing the implica-tions of nanotechnology forcryotransport with words like this,Ralph Merkle introduced EricDrexler as the Keynote Speaker atAlcor’s Fourth Conference onLife Extension Technologies atAsilomar, California, onJune 17th, 2000.

About two hundred persons, manyof them scientists and physiciansand about half of them AlcorMembers, had gathered at scenicconference grounds by the PacificOcean, just north of the Pebble

Beach golf course in NorthernCalifornia. The next two days werefilled with presentations and infor-mal discussions on extending lifespans, with no thought of simplygiving in to near-term mortality.

Modern and restored rusticlodges were sprinkled along ahillside of tall pines, interspersedwith conference halls of all sizes.An extensive dining hall filled withlarge circular tables permitted theattendees to share meals with oneanother on a convenient basis, noordering or waiting. Theoretically,

Asilomar can handle conferences ofup to 1,000 persons, but the AlcorConference attendees accounted forabout half of the tables at eachmeal. We were clearly the largestevent in progress, at the sameconference center that hosted thehistoric debates on control ofgenetic engineering in the early1970s.

In each of the lodges, gather-ing areas with couches and otherseating, along with pianos, pro-vided a way for special interestgroups to explore ideas informally.

Left to right: James Swaze, Rob Frietas, and Ralph Merkle


Late Saturday afternoon, in areserved area by paths to the beach,an outdoor meal (BarBQ) broughteveryone together at picnic tables,for what has to be the largest suchevent so far attended almost exclu-sively by those who envisionthemselves as prospective startravelers, centuries hence. (Remem-ber, this was no science fictionconvention. It was a purposefulgathering by a very high-techcommunity in which the membersare creating and using practicalmeans for life extension.)

One event, among all the oth-ers, highlighted the conference. Justbefore the Saturday evening pre-sentation and panel discussion, oneof the attendees briefly lost con-sciousness and fell, striking hishead. Inside the conference hall, asthe news of this came to me, thefirst question (naturally) was “Doesthat person have an Alcor braceleton his wrist?”

The answer was “Yes!” In thenext few minutes, over a dozencertified Alcor rescue team mem-bers were gathered and coordi-

nated. In the Sunnyvale area, a fewhours away, other Alcor rescueteam members were alerted andpreparations were made to deploy aset of transport equipment, ifneeded. The partner of the “down-ed” member was a certified teammember herself, having been partof the group that performed astandby and cryotransport opera-tion less than a year before. Eventhe downed member was trainedand certified as a rescue team mem-ber. As the member and his partnerwere being loaded into the ambu-lance, an Alcor physician and Iwere already on our way to the hos-pital to set the stage for a standby ifneeded. It turned out that there wasno need for that, and the memberwas fine, but it was reassuring toknow that so many hands werethere, ready to help if the situationhad become critical.

The synopses of talks that fol-low are brief and cannot begin tocapture the full content of thepresentations, but they may giveyou at least a glimmer of the scopeand quality of the speakers andtheir subjects. In time, vid-eotapesof selected talks will be madeavailable, and these summaries mayhelp you decide which you willwant to obtain.


K. Eric Drexler, Ph.D.,Foresight Institute

“The Conservative Treatment ofTransient Inviability; or, Your

Computer Crashed—Shall IThrow It Out?”

Keynote Speaker Eric Drexler chal-lenged anyone to offer proof that“freezing erases the brain.”

Many in the audience sug-gested mechanisms of freezing thatmight erase the brain, but nonecould offer evidence that in fact thisdoes happen. The point that Eric setout to establish, and relentlesslyargued, was that we cannot disputethe possibility that our “minds” areconserved by preserving our brains,though he admitted the uncertaintyof recovery.

In leading up to his challenge,Eric contrasted the preservation ofbrains for future recovery bycryobiologists vs. molecular scien-tists. He observed that early at-tempts at manned flight wereguided by ornithologists, prior tothe emergence of aeronauticalengineers, and that success inmanned flight was only achievedwhen birds were abandoned as thebest models. In like manner, Ericasserted, the recovery of personspreserved by present technologieswill require technologies far be-yond those entertained in ourpresent thinking in terms of medi-cations and the preservation ofbiological viability.

Arguments from the audience

asserted that the brain might berendered irreparable by ischemia,freezing, and many other hypoth-esized mechanisms. Eric acknowl-edged that such damage wasirreversible by present technolo-gies, but he repeatedly returned tothe question of whether or not, inany way that could be convincinglydemonstrated, information essentialto the reconstruction of the brainand restoration of memory andidentity was “erased” by freezing.

The advice Eric gave, at the end ofhis talk and after considerableinteraction with the audience, wasthat in order to reach the future, ifone could not stay alive to do sowith the help of current medicaltechnology, one should at least stay“intact” (through cryostasis)!

James Hughes, Ph.D.,Trinity College, Hartford,Conn. (also Webmaster for theMedical Ethics Center, Dept. of

Medicine, Univ. of Chicago)

“Our Evolving Definitions ofDeath: Looking Ahead”

“Treating someone who is dead asif they were alive is almost as oddas treating someone alive as if theywere dead! Given the gravity ofthese two potential errors, it’s awonder that there isn’t more publicdebate about the lines we drawbetween life and death!”

James Hughes, Ph.D., a sociologistand bioethicist, thus introduced thedifficulty of the blurred distinctionsemerging in the context of cryo-stasis, and then moved into anumber of principles that lie be-neath our current civil behavior andrelated the life-death distinction tothe increasingly controversialperceptions of levels of conscious-ness in animals, a central issue inanimal rights activities. Dr. Hughesthen turned the focus of his discus-sion to topics related to cryostasis,connecting this with various evolv-ing definitions of the word “death.”

“Whole brain death” was anearlier standard, for example. It hadmany flaws, gray areas in which anunending controversy now exists.Dr. Hughes noted a protocol now inuse leading to a “non heart-beatingcadaver,” for permanently uncon-scious coma victims. This suppos-edly converts an ambiguous state ofdeath (acknowledged irreversiblecoma) into a less ambiguous stateof death (cessation of heartbeat) bythe removal of the respirator andwaiting two minutes beyondcardiac arrest. Then organs areharvested. Consent of the family isrequired. In effect, he said, “Who iskidding whom?” He pointed outthat many of the leading pioneers inthis field are fed up with intermi-nable debating of nebulous issueslike this.

Dr. Hughes stated that itshould be of interest to cryoniciststhat organ transplant teams are per-


mitted to insert cannula and admin-ister anticoagulants while thepatient is still alive, prior to conver-sion of coma victims to “non heart-

beating cadavers,” even thoughthese procedures have nothing todo with prolonging life. Proposalsare now being made to eliminatethe necessity of going through theritual of removing the respiratorbefore taking the organs. (It isimportant to remember that theseprotocols are considered ethicalonly with long-term coma patients,where even brain-stem functionsmay have been supplanted by ICUtechnologies for keeping patients’bodies alive.)

In terms of fundamentals, Dr.Hughes said he thought many ofthese arguments would spreadupward into distinctions of biofun-damentalism vs. transhumanism.Then he suggested that cryostasisbring about an even further broad-ening of definitions. Will the degreeof damage upon cryotransport leadto a number of levels of “death?What about the prospects forreanimation? Will a person betreated as “dead or alive” in termsof changing probabilities of even-tual recovery? How does thisintersect with assisted suicide?

The complexities can onlygrow. Dr. Hughes pointed out thatat some level of loss of memoryand identity, a line will have to bedrawn between a repaired cryonautand a virtual clone. How to do this?

nicists, or can be easily replaced,then suddenly you have the entiremedical profession allied with you,and very strong interests because ofthe shortage of organs for organdonations.”

“Cryonics could be simplyviewed as a donation to medicalscience, where you specify that youreally don’t want to be part of thecontrol group, but part of the exper-imental group” (following fromRalph Merkle’s description of whatcryonics in essence is). “It wouldbe extremely low cost, in fact Iwould think that hospitals mightfoot the bill for a large part of it.”

Dr. Stock’s basic approach isto bypass the step of organicreconstruction entirely and rely on“strong nanotechnology” to recoversufficient information to fullyemulate the behavior of the brainbefore final loss of conscious, thus(from the standpoint of identitybeing a dynamic process) restoringthe person concerned to conscious-ness and the experience of “life.”

Would it even be practical toachieve biological reconstruction,by comparison with the relativeease of uploading? This was a keyquestion for Gregory Stock.

“Before you reach that point,the line between biology andtechnology has to be very blurred,if not having disappeared almostentirely; and in fact I think that purebiology is going to seem extraordi-narily primitive and that there areall sorts of limitations to purelybiological structures. And it’s notclear to me, from the vantage pointof that changed environment, thatone would even really want to be abiological creature. I think much ofthis would be the case for thepossibility of uploading, and thetechnologies required for that, but itwould definitely be the case for therequirement of biological recon

Will there be subjective criteria?Continuity of consciousness will besure to figure, he said, but how?

Finally Dr. Hughes examinedwhere all of this was going. In aslide titled “Threats to LiberalIndividualism,” he itemized thedilemmas to include (1) Conscious-ness Desaggregation; (2) Memory& Personality Malleability; (3)Identity Cloning; (4) IdentitySharing; (5) Distributed Identity;and (6) Group Identity. He alsopointed out that at major bioethicsconferences, many issues of emerg-ing technologies are simply notaddressed. He invited the attendeesto get involved in these discussionsat an early stage, so as to influencedecisionmaking that could easilyaffect them.

Gregory Stock, Ph.D.,UCLA School of

Medicine

“Who’s Afraid of Freezer Burn?”

“Freeze the head, but donate theorgans! If the head is not frozen, noorgans!”

This was, in essence, one of thesuggestions Greg Stock had forgetting the cooperation and accep-tance of the medical community.“If you let medicine do whatever itwants with the parts that are reallynot going to be any use to cryo-


struction; and you know, there’s aquestion of what the status ofpurely biological creatures, hu-mans, would be relative to a farmore advanced machine realm, ifyou postulate those kinds of devel-opments.”

The audience, while express-ing various levels of skepticism andconcerns that improved cryopro-tection might answer the problem,seemed open to the idea that wehave to be prepared for a future inwhich our current views of “hu-man” will be progressively out-dated. Accepting the possibility ofuploading while the person concer-ned was still alive, questions aroseas to “who is the real person?” Dr.Stock, in some interactions with theaudi-ence, found himself having totake the conservative position, pro-bably a different situation than withmost audiences to whom he speaks.

Conversely, some in theaudience could not relate emula-tions of mental states to the identi-ties of humans and questioned thevalidity of “simulations” as substi-tutes for biologically sentiententities. One of the speakers oncryobiology pointed out thatapproaches immediately on thehorizon might permit recoverywithout the need for strongnanotechnology, and Dr. Stock’s

response was, “If you can do that,of course, that changes the wholeball game!”

Robert T. Newport, M.D.,BioTransport, Inc.

“The Fear of Death and ItsImpact on the Rational Process”

“The age of immortalitylooms,” began Dr. Newport. Then,he addressed the question of whymost do not sign up for cryonics, ordrop out. “The fear of death pro-vides polluted data which interfereswith our ability to be fully alive,and prevents our making rationaldecision about our own lives!” Incompact form, this introduced awide range of topics exploringmotivations, rationality, and valuesaffecting decisionmaking about lifeextension.

“Most of us, most of the time,believe that we know what wemean when we say I, myself, me.That is to say, most of us believethat we know who we are.” Byreference to the difficulties of this,including a summary of manypersonality models, Dr. Newportpointed out that confidence that we“know ourselves” is highly illusory.“Content of awareness” we canknow. But the full extent of “whatwe are” will be far more difficult todefine, if at all. Emotions, he

pointed out, are common to animalsas well as (possibly) forms of plantlife. They become part of our “selfdefinition,” and our “self defini-tion” is a fiction of our own cre-ation, interfering with our moment-to-moment perceptions that (withthose distractions and limitations)are the only source of our selfdefinition.

In extended discussion, Dr.Newport pursued the question ofself perception and all of the thingsthat might stand between realityand how we in fact perceive our-selves. There is no good way tosummarize the content of thispresentation, but there is one areain which quotes may be helpful—dealing with Dr. Newport’s hypoth-esis that birth trauma is instrumentalin our reluctance to pursue lifeextension. (The excerpt below isfrom Dr. Newport’s talk. The text isavailable in its entirety at http://www.alcor.org/Fear.htm.).

“The vast majority of all of us,95% by some estimates, are almostcompletely irrational when it comesto ourselves, and live within theconfines of the synthetic ego,limited by our own self definitions,our own self story, attentive tomostly the sound of our ownthoughts, and thereby disconnectedfrom the incredible machine that isthe body and from the fabulouscomputer that is our own brain.Unhappy, full of existential angst,low grade misery, anxiety, depres-sion, missing out on the full joyousexperience of being alive, unawareof the origin of our misery, but,most likely willing to talk about itand explain it all day long. Why?

“Stanislav Grof, a Czechoslo-vakian psychoanalyst, workingabroad in the 1960s, inducedaltered states of consciousness in alarge number of psychiatric patientsand found that the patients had

James Swaze – “No matter howgood the simulation may be, I’llknow it’s a simulation!”


access to memories and symbolicexperiences that had heretoforebeen entirely unconscious, manydating to the first few weeks ofneonatal life and including longforgotten (or repressed) physicaltraumas. Very many, includedintra-uterine experiences of a closeencounter with death.

“These experiences Dr. Grofconstellated and called Basic Peri-natal Matrices and classified theminto four stages. BPM I through IV,which corresponded to the fourmain categories of experiences ofevery human being’s early life. E.g.BPM I: Intra-uterine peace, support,and nuturance. BPM II: The begin-ning of the birth process when theearlier peace is rudely disturbed byuncomfortable contractions aboutthe head along with a change in thechemical composition of maternallysupplied blood due to the rapidhormonal shifts which bring aboutthe labor, and emotional changes inthe mother (who is understandablyaroused). BPM III: The progressiveagony of being squeezed into thebirthing canal. Squeezed to thepoint of death, Squeezed, slowlycrushed, to the very point of death.(Sounds like some medieval tor-ture.) And BPM IV: The shot ofadrenaline and the release from thevagina into a very novel and harshlight of day.

“In all cases, the experienceswere remembered as traumatic andthe arousal was experienced asterrifying. Known to all, now,simply as the Birth Trauma, in mostcases this constitutes the firstconscious content involving pain-and-adrenaline-prompted arousal,which in our later years we come toknow as fear and rage. This is thefirst experience of the FEAR OFDEATH!”

This fear is extremely uncom-fortable, Dr. Newport explains.When parents see this in the manyforms it takes, they shut down ourexpressions of it through shame orhumiliation, which just makesmatters worse. What are the conse-quences? Quoting Dr. Newport:

“The chronic illnesses, hyper-tension, gastritis, ileitis, colitis,auto-immune disorders of all kinds,anxiety disorders, depression,(depression is diagnosable in 10 to25% of the adult population at anyone time), hormonal disorders, andcancer. Have I covered everybodyin the country yet? Not quite, welllet’s add ten million alcoholics andsubstance abusers.”

Methodically, and with a senseof compassion for those caught inthese many traps, Dr. Newportcontinued to explore the underpin-nings of resistance to the idea of“living on indefinitely.” He con-cluded with the following twoparagraphs:

“People are moved to cryonicsone of two ways: by the LOVE oflife, or by the FEAR of death. Isuspect, and I will shortly beconducting a study to either affirmor disabuse myself of this notion,that those who drop out oncesigned up were motivated by thefear of death (conscious or uncon-scious) and have finally gotten tiredof living an unhappy, fear-drivenlife. Having had no hope in BPM

III, they cannot maintain hope intheir own future.

“Many of you might say ‘Icame to cryonics because it’s theonly rational course of action, it hasnothing to do with fear or love.’ Towhich I would respond, ‘Yourthinking rational mind outlined thecourse, but it was your emotion thatmoved you. Joy has the potential tomake it worth staying the course.Fear—conscious, subconscious orunconscious—does not. It will onlykill you in the end.’”

Glenna Burmer, M.D.,Ph.D., LifeSpanBioSciences, Inc.

“Identifying Aging Genes byUsing DNA Microarrays”

Founder and Chief ScientificOfficer of LifeSpan BioSciences,Dr. Burmer started by talking about“discovery”—in particular, the firstinklings that microorganismsexisted in the early days of themicroscope. Now, the search is forgenes that have to do with aging,and how to control them, to keep usyoung.

Of the 100,000 genes in thehuman genome, only about 10,000have been classified as functionaland the rest are as yet a mystery.Dr. Burmer pointed out that al-though she has “twenty top-notchbioinformaticians analyzing” genes,


they are barely scratching thesurface.

Decoding the genome is whatBioSciences is all about, Dr.Burmer said. This is true whetherit’s for big pharmaceutical compa-nies as clients for near-term drugdevelopment, or for themselves,where aging is the arena of study.However, even though the genesare becoming accessible, they mustbe mapped into the body. To quoteDr. Burmer:

“The simple fact of the matteris that the human body has over1,500 cell types; we have over 200organs; the brain itself is probably50 organs, minimally; and inaddition to that, each cell of thosecell types is expressing 20,000 to50,000 different genes. So, decod-ing 100,000 genes into the blue-print of the human body is reallythe complexity of the task we haveto work with.

“What do you do with num-bers like 100,000? Well, the easiestthing to do is put them on somekind of chip. And so what we do isclone these genes, put them on achip, and then we take pieces ofdiseased tissue, pieces of normaltissue, grind it up, make a probe outof it, and then look to see whatgenes are turned on or off in adisease. We thought this was theHoly Grail about three years ago,when we started down the path ofDNA chip technology, and whatI’m going to explain is that it’s notthe Holy Grail, it’s “step one.” Andstep two is decoding it.

“What we are doing is what wethink is the next step, after DNAchip technology, which is reallywhat we call molecular pathology.And that is actually identifyinggenes we think are up- or down-regulated in a disease process, wethen take that and then go directlyinto human tissues, and I’ll show

you how this is done. And then wemap it. We map exactly what celltype has that gene turned on. Wemap whether or not that gene isturned on in disease, and whether itis not present in normal. You canidentify cancer genes this way,rheumatoid arthritis genes this way,Alzheimer’s genes this way. And Iwill talk about how this is done.”

This should give you an ideaof where Dr. Burmer’s talk started!The rest of it was a detailed analysisof how her tools could be appliedto the problem of aging. Geneexpression vs. aging in various celltypes raises fascinating and tantaliz-ing possibilities, yet this also opensup new questions and enigmas.Trends show up and beg to beexplored. Strong up-regulation ofspecific genes in aging suggeststhat therapies could be designed toreverse aging, but hundreds ofgenes show this kind of behavior.

Near the end of her talk, Dr.Burmer showed four genes whoseexpression seems highly correlatedwith aging, in over 140 differenttissue types. The genes are notrelated to mutual biochemicalpathways, based on current knowl-edge, yet they all seem to havesomething important to do withaging. “Why these genes arerelated, we don’t have a clue!” Dr.Burmer said.

In other cases, she pointed outthat there are strong correlationsbetween multiple genes that arebiochemically related and impli-cated in the aging of specifictissues. But still, this is only onepiece of an enormous puzzle. Isthere any hope of addressing theseproblems in a time scale compatiblewith near-term solutions in aging?Dr. Burmer put it this way:

“What we are in the process ofdoing is building high throughputtissue chip robotics, and using these

robots our target is really 500 to1000 genes a day, which meansthat in the period of about a year,we will have localized all the genesin the human body, to all the tissuetypes in the human body.” Thatgave the audience a clue as how itmight be possible to tackle theproblem. While the complexity ofthe problem boggles the imagina-tion, the speed with which Dr.Burmer is plowing into this investi-gation is equally awesome.

An audience survey ratedGlenna Burner’s talk at the very topof the list. All of the quotes in thisreview probably account for nomore than one minute of actualspeaking time, and of course it’snot practical to include any of themany colored visuals she used inher talk. (Get the video, when Alcormakes it available, if you want thefull picture.)

Michael West, Ph.D.,Advanced Cell Technologies

“Human Therapeutic Cloning”

Drawing parallels from ancientEgyptian history, Michael West firstforeshadowed the recognition ofgerm lines as immortal colonies.Then, he observed that the somaticcells by comparison have almost nosuch potential. Clearly, the differ-ences had to be matters of geneexpression, he pointed out, and this


pointed to some very fundamentaldifferences that should be subject todiscovery.

Telomere shortening was adistinctive difference between thetwo classes, and it soon becameclear that this was a universalcharacteristic of somatic cells.When telomerase, which causestelomere length to be maintained,was added to lines of somatic cells,their capacities to maintain thecolony were similar to those of truegerm lines. Was this the answer?

As a founder of Geron Corpo-ration, Dr. West pursued this line ofinvestigation with the goal of anti-aging applications. The results wereencouraging, and he now is con-tinuing this work through a newcorporation, Advanced Cell Tech-nology (ACT) in the Boston area.The present focus is on medicaltherapeutics vs. direct interventionin aging, but the issue of cellularaging remains a critical factor. Noone would want an “old” organ as atransplant, and early observationsof Dolly (the first cloned sheep)indicated that there might be aproblem—shorter telomeres. Wouldthere be a way around that?

ACT, Dr. West said, hadindeed found a way around theproblem. Cows cloned by hispresent method do not exhibitshortened telomeres. Their telom-eres are actually longer than anormal newborn’s. Exactly how thecloning process is handled so as toachieve this was not discussed. Thecomparative telomere length data,however, was shown. It is notnecessary to create entirely neworganisms or individuals. By thecorrect guidance, the new tissuescan be guided into forming thereplacement tissues or organsneeded for therapy. Quoting Dr.West:

“These cells are, in a sense,magical cells, in the sense that they

can do things we’ve never beenable to coax cells into doing before.The exciting thing is, of course,think of the combination of beingable to make even a complex tissuethat you might need, that’s yourown, won’t be rejected, won’t needto take immunosuppressants therest of your life, and that are young.That have been taken back in timeand had their whole life span backagain. There are a lot of stepsnecessary to make all this happen.

“We’ve been working hard onthe de-differentiation step, thetherapeutic cloning step, thenuclear transfer step. There’s manyother steps involved. Selecting outthe cells, genetically modifyingthem in some cases, growing thestem cells, and then selecting outthe lineages of cells you need andmaking the particular cells andtissues that you want. We’re hard atwork in all these areas.

“It’s important to remember,though, you know, there’s manyapplications to these new technolo-gies. One, for instance, you couldalso make besides somatic cells,you could make a reproductive cellOn the bottom (referring to theslide) you could potentially makean oocyte. For a woman of any age.Essentially, you can get aroundmenopause.

“Now, when we start talkingabout the germ line, genetically

engineering the germ line, a lot ofpeople get nervous, including me.Where are we headed with all thesetechnologies? Now, first, I’d like topoint out that I believe this is anethical use of these technologies.We’d have to talk longer than wehave today on the ethics. Thereason I think it’s ethical is evi-dence from nature.

“Nature teaches us that at thestage of the blastocyst, this littleball of cells that I showed you acouple of times, that individuation,a person, a human being, has notformed. How do we know that? Ifyou take that little ball of cells anddivide it into two, you get identicaltwins, and that’s how identicaltwins form. As you know, aboutone in three hundred live births areidentical twins. Happens all thetime.

“It’s also possible that twoseparate fertilized eggs can bumptogether in the fallopian tube andmerge together, and then you getunnatural chimera. Two humanbeings in one body. If that happensat this stage, they’re a normalhuman being. You wouldn’t evennotice it, could be one eye’s green,one’s blue, but you could look intheir cells and see that there are twopersons, two different people in thatone person.”

This above quote is a “flash-sample” of what Dr. West’s talkwas like. He explored many ethicaland technological enigmas, in afascinating way, in terms of bothhuman therapeutic cloning andother emerging genetic possibilitiesthat will be far more controversial.“Where to draw the line?” will bethe question in many of these areas,but one I think Dr. West madeclear. The use of human therapeuticcloning will not only be an extre-mely potent tool for improving ourwell being, but it will be far lesscontroversial, far less likely to be


slowed down, than many otherareas which will soon be open toapplication in human reproduction.

Brian Wowk, Ph.D., 21stCentury Medicine Inc.

“Molecular Control of IceFormation”

“We may be able to stopfreezing cryonics patients rightnow!”

Dr. Wowk woke up the audi-ence with that statement, but he didnot mean that members of cryo-transport organizations shouldcancel their arrangements. Rather,he quickly stated that better meth-ods than freezing were not just onthe horizon but, figuratively speak-ing, “approaching the pier.”

Recently it has become practi-cal, through research at Dr.Wowk’s laboratory, to used ad-vanced materials to virtually elimi-nate ice during cooldown to cryo-genic temperatures. He showedcomparisons of biological materialsprotected in this way versus earliermethods and illustrated the arrange-ments of molecules that made thebetter methods possible.

Ordinary cryoprotectioncombats freezing by lowering thefreezing point, but Dr. Wowkpointed out that sophisticatedproteins can be included in smallquantities, akin to natural “freeze-blocking” compounds that protectarctic fish and insects. This further

restrains ice formation. With suffi-ciently rapid cooling, he showedthat a glasslike or “vitreous” statecould be produced, with custommolecules developed in his labora-tory.

Dr. Wowk described the ap-proach developed in his laboratoryby which ice formation can be by-passed entirely. He also pointed outthat an even more difficult problemexists in rewarming, where theglasslike state has the tendency tobe replaced by a crystalline or “ice-like” state as it is heated, “devitrify-ing” with destructive effects on thecells. Using dynamic molecularcomputer models, he showed inanimated analysis how his well-designed, protective freeze-block-ers could help with rewarming.

The talk was highly illustratedbut very complex. On the otherhand, it dealt with the crux of whatwas on the minds of many of theattendees: What are the possibilitiesthat a procedure can be done sowell, that most scientists andphysicians of today can see thepotential of this approach andendorse it? Dr. Wowk’s presenta-tion was evidence that hard sciencewas addressing the challenge oftrue suspended animation.

Gregory Fahy, Ph.D., 21stCentury Medicine, Inc.

“Cryobiological Research at 21stCentury Medicine”

Dr. Fahy, backed by more thanthirty years of active interest andstudy of cryobiology, began withthe statement:

“The central focus of researchat 21st Century Medicine is tocryopreserve large, complicatedsystems, the larger and the morecomplicated, the better. But we’regoing to be starting with somethingrelatively practical—namely, wholeorgans. This would also includeartificial organs, engineered tissues,if Mike West is successful, perhapscloned organs that are prepared inadvance of need and have to bestored. In any case, it’s a finiteproblem and potentially couldchase after a very huge medicalmarket. But we’re the only group inthe world, as far as I know, that’sactively pursuing this, and thisrequires that we try to do somethings that other people don’t haveto face and deal with.”

Brain preservation was thefocus of Dr. Fahy’s talk. In contrastto the broader market suggested bythe quotation above, it was evidentthat the driving motives behind theresearch and the long-range goalswere dedicated to the challenge ofprotecting something not normallythought of as a transplantableorgan.

Hippocampal brain slices werethe initial model discussed, wherethe task was to find optimal cryo-protective agents. Dr. Fahy com-mented that chilling injury wasinvestigated, and one importantfinding was that perfusion at 10° Celiminates chilling injury, and is yetsignificantly better than results at15° C.

Mannitol concentration wasoptimized, and kidney preservationperfusates were evaluated in thework Dr. Fahy reported. Excellentresults were obtained at 50%

continued on page 46


I have spoken at Cryonics confer-ences and in writing about theimportance of memory to us: how itreally works and what memoriescryonic suspension may preserve...or not preserve. Partly because Iwas not able to attend the latestConference at Asilomar, I will herediscuss memory and its importanceonce more. Moreover, simplysupposing some kind of computeruploading totally fails to solve ourproblem, as I shall explain later.

The easiest way to seememory’s importance comes fromrealizing that virtually all neurosci-entists would now agree thatmemory is shown in the connec-tions between neurons. Neural netcomputers basically operate insimilar ways: their learning consistsof marking some connectionsbetween neurons as particularlyimportant and others less important.(Our brains either grow new con-nections or they do not: an impor-tant and critical difference). Clearly,for neural net computers, destruc-tion of enough of these connectionswill wipe out any learning they’vedone, i.e., destroy their memory.This issue becomes even moreimportant because we know that inbrains, the great majority of peoplehave identical major connectionsbetween brain regions: it is the newconnections for their individual

memories that differ... and that justmight end up destroyed either byevents prior to suspension orsuspension itself. Some otherfactors may help us keep ourmemories: unlike electrical circuits,neurons often have many connec-tions with one another rather thanjust one. For a memory to survive,it may not need all connections. Yetif our memories consist only ofspecial connections between ourneurons (not those present ineveryone) then those memoriesmight well become seriouslydisrupted. Suspension may changethe number of connections betweentwo neurons and their locations onthe axons and dendrites enough todisrupt any memories those neu-rons may hold collectively.

In terms of revival I see nodifficulty in preserving conscious-ness, even though we don’t yetunderstand the brain circuits in-volved. Yet if suspension wipes outall your memories, will you remainthe same person? Suspensions mayeven disrupt memories rather thandestroy them, so that your memo-ries turn out not just to be totallyfalse (and remember that you willthink them true) but even fantasticand absurd. Nor does uploadinginto computers help at all: we stillneed to recover our memories,which requires much more under-

standing of those wet messy bio-chemical devices we call brains.

So what do we do here? Andwhat reasons for hope might exist?

The easiest path for futuresuspension consists of working outsome form of suspension thatclearly preserves memories. Be-cause brains of all mammals workmuch the same, if we can suspendrats (say) and have them remembertraining that they had before, thenwe’ll have means to preservememories on suspension. (Freezingparts of brains isn’t enough: Wemay well have to go as far asfreezing whole brains to verifypreservation of memory.) Such anachievement, at least in Dr. GregFahy’s opinion, is not so far away(Greg is a major cryobiologist, notjust a cryonicist). It won’t totallysolve our suspension problems, butit is certainly an important step.

However, we clearly do nothave that ability at present. Justhow long it will take to acquiresuch methods remains unknown, ifonly because the cost and timerequired to develop them unfortu-nately are high, and the isue has notgotten as much attention fromcryonicists as it should. Moreover,cryonic suspension can often occuras an emergency operation, inwhich the equipment (whatever itwill turn out to be) isn’t there or is

Why Memory?

by Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D.

The donaldson perspective


only half there. So there will alwaysbe cases of people suspended byolder and less ideal methods. Sure,such cases will grow less and lessfrequent, but they will still con-tinue. Furthermore, what about allthose suspended before we havesuch suspension methods?

Given the beliefs of virtuallyall neuroscientists, recoveringmemories for suspended patientswill require individual attention.Individual connections betweenneurons may be able to be recov-ered by using a much deeperunderstanding of brain anatomyand chemistry than we now have.It’s not that such understanding willgive automatic recovery, but thatthe connections between twoparticular neurons might be recov-ered by knowing their specialgeometric and chemical relations toone another. Since we need not justthe connections between twoneurons but those between millions,that recovery will probably requirea highly parallel computer, largerthan any that now exists in terms ofnumber of processors (but possiblyonly the size of a PC due tonanotechnological construction).The point to remember here is thatwe’re never dealing with just twoarbitrary neurons: each has aposition in the brain, with someparts remaining and others not, andmany chemical signs may surviveto show that a connection existedbetween the two. Their geometryand chemistry will differ from anyother pair ... so this problem ishardly a simple one.

And could current neuroscien-tists actually not have as good ahandle on how memory works asmost think they do? Perhaps. Oneneurotransmitter important tomemory can also play a major rolein destroying neurons: glutamate.In our brain cortex, pyramidal

neurons use glutamate, while otherneurons (interneurons) do not.Could it be that those others, notour pyramidal neurons, play themajor role in memory storage?Some neuroscientists think so, andthose neurons may survive ourprimitive forms of suspension muchbetter than pyramidal neurons.

Another recent series ofdiscoveries shows not just howneurons grow new connections buteven more striking, provides moreinstances of neurons losing theirconnections (WT Wong et al,CURRENT OPINION IN NEURO-BIOLOGY 10(2000) 118ff; MSegal et al, TRENDS IN NEURO-SCIENCE 29(2)(2000) 53ff). Suchloses, which apparently happenquite easily, may ultimately raisequestions about just how our brainsstore memories. Neuroscientiststalking now about how memoryworks may ultimately turn out to bewrong, and the required experi-ments on living animals remainquite difficult[1]. And if otherchemical factors play a necessaryrole in preserving special connec-tions for a true long-term memory,that will tell us that simple preserva-tion of connections (using embalm-ing chemicals, as some havesuggested) may ultimately fail.

Some additional words forthose who envision being read offinto a computer also need saying.First of all, we have no way atpresent of reading off memoriesfrom brains (as distinct from pro-ducing a machine that acts like you,with your memories). Second, anydevice which really is to be yourequires several things computersgenerally lack: an ability to senseand interact with the world (includ-ing the drives you have: hunger,sex, etc.), consciousness, and mostof all (for those who bring upTuring’s work especially) realtime

computer processing. This lattermeans that it isn’t enough for youto work out that the car speedingdown the highway will hit you...after a year of processing. Youmust do so soon enough to react,and not only that, you must actuallyreact. Whether that may somedaybe done by something we wouldcall a computer remains unknown;it’s easy to state how brains differfrom computers: growing newneurons, forming and destroyingconnections. So far as I know, suchdevices may not even fit the re-quirements Turing suggested for acomputer. As for any present ideas,to find out how to read someoneinto a computer as a functioningcreature requires much moreknowledge of how brains actuallywork.

Unless we can avoid thesequestions about memory by findingsome suspension method thatguarantees survival of a patient’smemories, we’ll inevitably have tolearn more about how brainspreserve memories. And even if wecan (usually) use such methods,they cannot benefit former patients,and there will always be somepatients suspended by primitivemethods. How human brains workwill remain an issue for us indefi-nitely. l

[1] The earliest papers show-ing growth of new neurons in adultmice, by Altman and Das (J COM-PARATIVE NEUROBIOLOGY124(1965) 319ff). Many doubtedthis work, though later work hasverified it. The earliest work show-ing changes in neuron connectionsover 1 month comes from Purvesand Hadley (NATURE 315(1985)404ff).


TechNewsby R. Michael Perry, Ph.D.

It has been a big summer, with theannouncement of the long-soughtgoal of mapping of the humangenome and other interestingadvances. Here are some high-lights.

Mapping the human genome.

A major scientific milestone, thenearly complete mapping of thehuman genome (the chemical base-pair sequence for human DNA,which in turn determines the size,internal structure, growth processes,and much of the functioning of thehuman organism) was announcedin the media June 27. Hailed byBritish Prime Minister Tony Blair as“the first great technologicaltriumph of the 21st century,” it isexpected to provide a starting pointfor much progress in medicine overthe coming decades.

An interesting feature of thenew milestone is that it was not theaccomplishment of one vanguardgroup but, instead, two competingresearch teams who struggled,sometimes bitterly, for the scientificcredit, then finally agreed to shareit. A closer look at this suggests amost interesting tale that I expect tobe chronicled in book form eventu-ally. For now a very brief summarywill have to do, based on my ownimpressions from reports I’ve read.Basically, first you had the multina-tional Human Genome Project(HGP), a publicly funded effortstarted in 1990. It was supposed tofinish mapping the human genomesometime early in the twenty-first

An Exciting Summer century; 2005 became the settleddate. The effort was plodding alongfar behind schedule when, about1998, the newly formed and pri-vately funded Celera Genomics gotinto the act. Celera, it turned out(the name, by the way, comes froma Latin word meaning “swift”),used a nifty new technique thatHGP had overlooked, whichproduced more rapid results. Thefolks at HGP were scornful at first,then they realized just what aserious threat this posed to theirown prestige and credibility, andswung into action. At the day ofreckoning, June 27, HGP wasclaiming they had mapped 85percent of the genome, whileCelera claimed 99 percent. On theface of it, I’m inclined to think bothestimates are reasonably accurate,so at this point Celera is probablyleading the field, though their rivalcan still claim some respect. Bothgroups, of course, deserve creditfor whatever work they did, whichin either case was substantial.

The competition clearly wasgood for the overall result, whichmight have taken much longer ifeither side had been going it alone.As a publicly funded group, HGP iscommitted to making its resultsfreely available to the public. Cel-era is not similarly bound, though ithas promised to make most of itshuman genomic data available toscientists without charge.

Something is worth sayinghere about the method used byCelera in decoding the humangenome. Called the “shotgun”approach, it exploits the power ofcomputers to do gigantic amounts

of rather simple matching opera-tions. The human genome, consist-ing of a total of about 6 billion basepairs, is divided into 46 subunits, orchromosomes, consisting of inde-pendent pieces of DNA and sup-porting proteins. (An individualchromosome is usually also furthercomplicated by doubling of itsDNA strand; the two strands remainphysically attached.) Each chromo-some thus averages around 130million base pairs. A chunk thissize is far too large to map in oneoperation using today’s techniques,so it must be broken down further,which is an uncertain operationbecause at present we lack tools tocarry out controlled cutting at thisscale. In the shotgun approach thewhole genome, chromosomes andall, is first cloned many times over.The copies are then broken up intorandom fragments of a few hundredbase pairs each, which is within thefeasible mapping range. Thefragments are mapped and com-pared by computer, and matchingpieces fitted together to reconstructthe complete sequence. By anal-ogy, we could imagine assemblingone perfect copy of a book frommany torn fragments, each ofwhich contributes some part of themissing text, and which can befitted into the whole by matchingwith other, partly overlapping textfragments. The alternate approach,used by HGP, called for insertion ofnumerous chemical tags or markersthroughout the genome first, toestablish a frame of reference formapping. Celera’s success showedthat this extra step was unneces-sary.


The Human Genome Project isbeing conducted under the guid-ance of the National Human Ge-nome Research Institute in Bethes-da, Maryland. Celera Genomics isbased in nearby Rockville. Bothgroups were expected to publishtheir findings together in the journalScience in early September.

Where to go from here: bettercomputers.

Mapping the genome was a majorscientific feat, but by itself it doeslittle to improve the quality orduration of human life. Much morework will be needed to augmentand translate the new genomicknowledge into useful applications.More generally, there are manyhard problems to be confronted inmastering the secrets of biology.This is particularly true at themolecular level, where such pro-cesses as aging and illnesses mustbe understood if we are to obtainthe degree of control we are seek-ing. Here we are confronted with analmost unthinkable complexity. Thehuman body, for instance, containsabout 1028 atoms, which means thatit could be subdivided into a trilliontrillion or 1024 pieces, each ofwhich would consist of enoughatoms—10,000—to make a fair-sized molecule. There are no easyanswers, but help in various formsis on the way, one being improve-ments in computers, which shouldhave many important uses inaddressing this vast complexity.

Toward this end, the NationalScience Foundation announcedAugust 3 that it had awarded a $45million grant to the PittsburghSupercomputing Center to buywhat will be the world’s mostpowerful, nonmilitary super-computer. The machine is to bebuilt by Compaq and will rate at 6

teraflops (6 x 1012 floating pointoperations per second). It is ex-pected to be installed sometime inthe second half of next year. It willbe used by various scientificdisciplines, including materialsscience, climate modeling, and—importantly—biological sciences.The use of supercomputers raiseshopes that such advances as slow-ing and reversing aging will nottake as long as some have pre-dicted.

New step toward nanomachines.

Among the many anticipatedapplications of nanotechnology aresupercomputers that would faroutclass those of today—andperhaps be far smaller than pinheadsize to boot and serve as the brainsof tiny, mechanical robots(“nanobots”) that could perform awide range of useful functions.Such possibilities are still a dreamof the future, but progress towardnanodevices is continuing. Asignificant share of this progressinvolves the carbon nanotube, atiny, elongated cage made ofchemically bonded and interlockingcarbon atoms. Nanotubes appear tohave many possible uses, amongthem being structural componentsfor tiny machines. In a simple wayan important step toward suchmachines may have been takenrecently. Researchers at the Univer-sity of California, Berkeley, work-ing with telescoping nanotubes ofdiffering bore or thickness, reportcreating tiny bearings and springs.Initially the nanotubes are formedconcentrically, one inside the other,into a multilayered tube that isclosed at either end. “Peeling” orclipping the outer layers of one endyields a flask holding an inner, stillintact, multilayered tube. This innertube can then be rotated freely

within the flask or can be pushedback and forth to achieve the effectof a spring. The method holdspromise not only for miniaturiza-tion of machine components butalso for virtually frictionless mov-ing parts that never wear out. Ascanning tunneling microscope isused as a positioning tool to ma-nipulate the nanotubes.

Precise, efficient insertion ofgenetic material into DNA.

A very interesting developmentrelating to DNA insertions wasreported in the July 21 issue ofScience by a team at the Universityof Texas, Austin, headed by AlanLambowitz. It involves the use of“introns”—pieces of genetic debristhat litter DNA and may interruptthe coding of many genes. Someintrons, though, have anotherinteresting property, which is theability incorporate themselves intodouble-stranded DNA. (Initially anintron consists of a length of single-stranded RNA together with reversetranscriptase. The incorporation ofthe intron into DNA transforms theintron itself into a double-strandedform, but also preserves its original“message,” or pattern of nucleotidebases.) Moreover, the self-insertionof introns can now be preciselydirected to specific sites in a lengthof DNA or a whole genome. Thisclearly is nanotechnology in action,and of a sort that could soon lead to

Dr. Alan LambowitzSource: <http://www.cm.utexas.edu/research/profiles/Lambowitz.html>


medical applications. The intronsuse a sequence, or “address,”consisting of about 14 nucleotidebases to recognize the desiredinsertion site, which is located by amatching operation as the intronexplores a length of DNA. Chang-ing the address sequence—modify-ing the intron—results in insertionat a new matching site, assumingone can be found. The methodholds promise in treating AIDS,among many other possibilities.The AIDS virus itself can be dis-abled, as has been shown in experi-ments with mammalian cells inculture. Genes that encode a proteinthe virus uses to infect cells canalso be altered to lose their lethalproperty. More generally, thepossibility is opened of geneticallymodifying specific sites whileleaving others unchanged. Previ-ously, precise gene targeting couldonly be done in one mammal, themouse, and very inefficiently,contrary to the present method.

Quantum superposition: macro-scopic states observed in parallel.

In a loop of superconducting wire,electric current flows indefinitelyunless stopped from the outside.The current may flow in eitherdirection. Based on classical phys-ics, though, we’d be inclined to saythat the current cannot flow in bothdirections at once. But here iswhere classical physics partscompany with the newer and morecomprehensive quantum theory.That in turn requires the superposi-tion of different states of a system,and this property is essential inexplaining many effects at theatomic and subatomic levels. Forexample, two atoms that are chemi-cally bonded “share” one or moreelectrons, which are simultaneouslybound to the different atoms, an

impossibility under classical phys-ics. The superposition of states is awell-established phenomenon oversmall distances but had not beenpreviously observed at the macro-scopic level because then it requiresan isolation of the system fromsurrounding effects that is verydifficult to achieve. This raised thepossibility that it would not occur atall at these larger scales, so thatquantum theory itself would befound inadequate, like its classicalrival, and some new theory must besought. Now, however, simulta-neous, macroscopic quantum stateshave been observed—currentsflowing in opposite directions in asuperconducting loop—which meetthe stringent requirements ofquantum coherence, in which twoor more ongoing, independentprocesses happen in parallel. Inaddition to reinforcing quantumtheory, the result is significant forthe continuing effort to perfect aquantum computer, which requiresthat different computational pro-cesses execute simultaneously in asingle device. The work was carriedout at the State University of NewYork, Stony Brook, under JonathanR. Friedman and colleagues.

Reversing presbyopia.

One effect of aging that seemsuniversal and has usually made itsappearance by age 50 is presbyo-pia, the inability to focus the eyeson nearby objects, such as a printedpage. (Generally the ability to focuson more distant objects is retained.)Actually, presbyopia does not juststrike in the 40s but may be said tostart in adolescence, though itseffects are usually not seriousenough to impair one’s readinguntil decades later. Its exact causeis still in dispute. It is known thatthe lens of the eye becomes larger

and thicker with age, but this alonewould not preclude retention offocusing ability. Conventionalwisdom says the lens simplyhardens, losing the flexibility thatpermits it to be focused by thetension of the ciliary muscle thatsurrounds it. But this is questionedby others, some of whom argue thatthe real culprit is that the progres-sively enlarging lens can no longerbe stretched enough by the sur-rounding muscle to be adequatelyfocused, though it still remainsflexible. An advocate of this view isDr. Ronald Schachar, a Texasophthalmologist and physicist. Inthe early 1990s he devised acontroversial procedure known asscleral expansion surgery forreversing presbyopia. The eyeballis expanded slightly to stretch andtighten the ciliary muscle so it canagain focus the lens. To accomplishthis, four small pieces of curvedplastic are implanted in the sclera(white of the eye) surrounding theiris. To date several hundred haveundergone the procedure, withgenerally favorable results, andclinical trials have been scheduledin the United States, where theprocedure is not yet approved. Onehappy recipient is 60-year-old Dr.Stephan D. Plager, himself anophthalmologist, who had thesurgery done in Mexico last March.Two days later, glasses discarded,he was doing cataract surgery in hisoffice. Eight days after that he reada newspaper aloud to a reporter andsaid he was seeing better than hehad since age 35, despite someminor blurring that seemed to beclearing day by day.

There’s a little more to thisstory—another, entirely differentsolution to presbyopia is now beingsought, which is to simply replacethe lens of the eye with somethingbetter. Replacement lenses are


routinely used to treat cataracts, inwhich the natural lens becomescloudy and opaque to light. But thereplacement lenses currently in use,generally of hard plastic, are offixed focus and thus can onlycause, not cure, presbyopia. Hap-pily, this may be about to change.C & C Vision of Irvine, California,has developed a flexible lens ofsilicone that restores vision at alldistances, says president J. AndyCorley. About 200 experimentalsurgeries have been performedalready, with reportedly goodresults, and clinical trials havestarted. FDA approval is estimatedto take 2 to 3 years.

Implantable transceiver offers in-stant, remote patient monitoring.

A tiny, implantable transceiveroffers the twin prospects of moni-toring a patient’s vital signs anddetermining the patient’s location.Dubbed the Digital Angel by itsowner, Applied Digital Solutions,Inc. of Palm Beach, Florida, thedevice is smaller than a grain ofrice and equipped with a miniatureantenna to track such data as heartrate and pulse. It can then broadcastthe data to a ground station with anInternet connection, and can alsoreceive data from the GlobalPositioning System, which wouldbe used to determine the patient’slocation. (The Global PositioningSystem, or GPS, consists of 24orbiting satellites that broadcastprecise timing information to dif-ferent points around the globe. Thesignals will be delayed by varyingamounts depending on where theyare received, so that the location ofthe receiver can be determined towithin a few feet.) The value of thisfor cryonicists hardly needs com-ment; it would be especially usefulfor people living alone who might

experience life-threatening emer-gencies that prevent them fromsummoning help. Other possibleuses range from tracking endan-gered wildlife to locating stolenproperty. A demonstration of thedevice is planned for October in

New York City. The chief scientistresponsible for its development isDr. Peter Zhou of Digital Angel.net,Inc., a subsidiary of AppliedDigital. l

SOURCES:Mapping the genome:Douglas Birch, “Scientists Draw Complete Map of Human DNA,” Baltimore Sun, reprinted inTribune (Scottsdale, Ariz.), 27 June 2000, A1.

Juan Velasco, “Different Routes for a Finished Map,” NY Times Online, 27 June 2000.<http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/062700sci-genome-process.A.jpg.html>;<http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/062700sci-genome-process.B.jpg.html>.

Better computers:John Markoff, “$45 Million Grant Awarded to Buy Supercomputer,” NY Times Online, 4August 2000. <http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/biztech/articles/04compute.html>;referred to by Doug Skrecky, CryoNet #14246 (5 August 2000).

Step toward nanomachines:“Researchers Make Microscopic Parts,” Associated Press, 27 July 2000, 9:31 p.m. (I thank LisaLock for sending this article—MP.)

John Cumings and A. Zettl, “Low-Friction Nanoscale Linear Bearing Realized from MultiwallCarbon Nanotubes,” Science 289, 602-4 (28 July 2000).

Insertion of genetic material:Nicholas Wade, “DNA Innovation Lets Team Undermine the AIDS Virus,” NY Times Online,21 July 2000. <http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/072100hth-gene-therapy.html>.

Evelyn Strauss, “Targeting Intron Insertion into DNA,” Science 289, 374 (21 July 2000).

Huatao Guo et al, “Group II Introns Designed to Insert into Therapeutically Relevant DNATarget Sites in Human Cells,” Science 289, 452-57 (21 July 2000).

Quantum superposition:Kenneth Chang, “Here, There and Everywhere: A Quantum State of Mind,” NY Times Online,11 July 2000. <http://archives.nytimes.com>.

Gianni Blatter, “Schrödinger’s Cat Is Now Fat,” Nature 406, 25-26.

Jonathan R. Friedman et al., “Quantum Superposition of Distinct Macroscopic States,” Nature406, 43-46.

Reversing presbyopia:Julie Sevrens, “Surgeons Claim Reading Glasses Are Nearly Passe,”<http://www.opt.uh.edu/research/aglasser/pressreleases/SJMercuryNews.asp>.

Peggy Townsend, “New Sight for Old Eyes,” <http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2000/May/15/top/stories/2top.htm>.

Abigail Zuger, “Reading Glasses, as Inevitable as Death and Taxes. Or Are They?” NY TimesOnline, 8 August 2000. <http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/080800hth-vision-glasses.html> or <http://archives.nytimes.com>.

Implantable transceiver:“Digital Angel TM Breakthrough Technology Goes Live!” <http://www.adsx.com/ADSX/CDA/News/news_index/0,1136,430,00.html>; referred to by Eugene Leitl, CryoNet #14267 (8August 2000).


The Feeling of What Happens:Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

By Antonio Damasio

Harcourt, Brace, 1999

Book Review by Thomas Donaldson

Damasio haswritten aninterestingspeculativebook abouthow our con-sciousnessworks. Evento explain hismajor thesis Imust describehis definitions

of major terms: core consciousnessis a primitive and basic form ofconsciousness which uses neithermemory or language. Some patientswith neural problems may onlyhave core consciousness; a signifi-cant number of animals probablyalso have it. Extended conscious-ness brings in such things asmemory, particularly memory ofone’s own experiences. Patientsdevoid of hippocampus on bothsides of their brain have core con-sciousness but no extended con-sciousness. Damasio also distin-guishes emotion from feelings:emotion is visible to others andconsists of the external signs of“emotion” as normally considered.Damasio uses feelings to describethe internal signs of emotion know-able only by the person who hasemotion. Finally, objects refersbroadly to virtually anything: spe-cific pains or emotions, people,objects in the narrow sense (ham-mer, window).

Damasio bases his theoryalmost entirely on his own workwith braindamaged patients. Theseinclude not just those lacking me-mory, but also those lacking otherbrain regions. Loss of some brainregions causes coma, others causeloss of memory for particularclasses of object. Other kinds ofdamage cause a person to lose spe-cific memories: they recognize aperson in general, but cannot rec-ognize their relatives.

Most important, loss or damageto some brain regions causes loss ofcore consciousness, of whichDamasio cites two cases: epilepticautomation and akinetic mutism. Inepileptic automation, patients showall signs of being awake, and mayeven perform actions as complex asrising from their chair and goingoutside. Yet they show no signs ofknowing who or where they are.This automatism can go on for onlya few seconds or for several min-utes. Anything the patient doesduring it he or she will have com-pletely forgotten when he comesout of it. Damasio suggests thatsuch behavior gives an example oftotal lack of consciousness whileremaining awake. One point hemakes here is simple: most peoplewould not attribute consciousnessto ants or paramecia, even thoughthey can show emotions, followtrails, and so on. Seen from thatperspective, it’s likely that some

kinds of brain damage mightproduce similar lack of conscious-ness in human beings.

Another feature of these statesalso deserves description: patientswith this automatism also show noemotion during their automaticactivity. Damasio suggests a simplereason for this: core consciousness,and feelings, come from very closeor even identical brain areas. Hegoes even farther by suggestingthat core consciousness itself con-stitutes a feeling, the feeling that Ihave feelings and knowledge. Hisdiscussion provides strong reasonsfor this idea. Yes, it is a feeling ofwhich we normally fail to be awareunless we pay attention to how wefeel. The book’s title, The Feelingof What Happens, gives this pointexactly. His discussion, in general,pays lots of attention to emotion,pointing out that feelings of onekind or another, strong or weak,never leave us, even when we doreasoning that may seem to lackthem entirely.

His arguments with othernotions of how consciousnessworks all proceed from carefulanalysis of one or another kind ofbrain damage, together with a deepknowledge of what we know aboutactivities of the various regions inour brains. One nice feature of his

(continued on page 31)


The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever:The Promise and the Future Impact of Trying to Live Forever

By Terry Grossman, M.D.

The Hubristic Press, 2000

Book Review by Mike Perry

This book is one of a growingnumber that takes seriously theproposition that immortality may beachievable, through remedies foraging and other afflictions, in thelifetimes of many of us now living.Particular focus is on those born inthe years 1946–1964, the Boomergeneration. Many of us in cryonicsare in this group (myself included),and have seen our hopes alternatelyfade and brighten over the years asdiscoveries about aging haveslowly piled up, while it and otherbiological killers remain at large.

“Slowly,” of course, is arelative term, and arguably does adisservice to those who are nowproducing astonishing discoveriesin the biological fields, with theever-present promise of indefinitelyextending our lives in good health.In any case the book is fully insympathy with the immortalistposition that we want to survive tosee the end of aging, or failing that,take steps through cryonics so thatwe can be reanimated, cured of ourafflictions, and go on living. Theright course to follow, then, isstraightforward: do what you can tohold off aging and meanwhile, getsigned up for cryonic suspension.Both approaches are advocated,though the greater part of the bookis taken up with anti-aging medi-cine. This is to be expected for, asthe author explains at the begin-ning, he operates clinics in Colo-

rado and California that specializein anti-aging medicine and chela-tion therapy. (Here and henceforth Iuse “author” to refer to the princi-pal author, Terry Grossman; actu-ally there are ten coauthors.) Thebook, then, is in some degreepromotional, though it is not writtenin an advertising style and itsoverall tone is reasonably dispas-sionate and objective.

Anti-aging medicine, though,is presently a controversial subject,and some of the approaches advo-cated in the book seem particularlyopen to criticism. The most glaringto me is homeopathic medicine, inwhich “very dilute” solutions ofcertain substances are used for

claimed beneficial purposes. Thedilution factor is often so great thatit is unlikely that a single moleculeof the active ingredient remains insolution at all! This, I think, isgoing too far, though the author isenthusiastic. “The fact is thatwhatever its mechanism, homeo-pathy really does seem to work,and this has been proven again andagain in double blind placebocontrolled studies. The fact that wedo not understand its mechanismrelates more to our own level ofscientific ignorance regardingenergenics, quantum physics andsubatomic medicine.”

I am not keen on “subatomicmedicine,” and I have been unableto find any journal papers reportingpositive results of double-blindtesting of homeopathic medicine.But I did have a chance to speak toTerry Grossman at the recent Alcorconference in Asilomar, and thisprovided some additional perspec-tive. He said that homeopathicremedies were not always sodiluted as to exclude the originalactive ingredients, and that smallamounts of said ingredients stillpresent, could be responsible forthe claimed effects, or some ofthem. However he did not comeacross as a strong proponent ofhomeopathic medicine. He said ithad been offered because hisclients wanted it, but that since thebook was written he has discontin-


discussion consists of diagramsof those brain regions suspected toplay a part in the features he dis-cusses. For instance, some neuro-scientists have suggested that evencore consciousness requires lan-guage; Damasio argues against thisby discussing patients who havelost all ability to speak or read andunderstand, but still show manysigns of what he calls core con-sciousness. He also tells of otherpatients with lesser language faults.He gives other arguments, too,against any notion of languagecausing consciousness, all sayingthat core consciousness is definitelynot linguistic. Later in the book, hediscusses extended consciousness,again by looking at patients wholack part of it: some cannot nameobjects of specific kinds, otherscannot remember their past. Eachof these many kinds of conscious-ness exists on top of core con-

sciousness and cannot exist withoutit.

One notion of the brain areasinvolved in consciousness proposesthat some part of the reticularactivating system (an area in ourlower brain which, among otherfunctions, plays a major role inwhether we’re awake or asleep:damage to some parts causespermanent coma). Damasio specifi-cally does not claim this area playsno role in consciousness, but hedoes claim that other areas must beinvolved also (and gives a braindiagram to show the areas and whythey play such a role). Damasioalso does not identify one specialbrain area with consciousness,suggesting instead that even coreconsciousness depends of operationof several brain areas.

Damasio doesn’t claim he has acomplete answer to the problem ofconsciousness. He explicitly pointsout that he’s considering conscious-ness itself, not what he calls ex-tended consciousness. Moreover

many of the more recent techniques(CT scans, MRIs) to see brainactivity in undamaged people needto be used to verify his arguments.Animal experiments may also help:just as they suggest that somespecies have core consciousnessthey may specify (and perhapsstrengthen) some of Damasio’sproposals.

He wrote his book to be read bythose interested in consciousnessbut not experts in neurologicalscience. If interested, you’ll find itfascinating. Most important for ourown concerns, we want not some-one to be revived, but ourselves.That may come only with ourrevival with extended conscious-ness (which requires survival ofmany memories), but core con-sciousness remains essential to suchrevivals. The book also has exten-sive notes with bibliographiccitations, and an Appendix onrelevant issues about the anatomyof human brains. l

(Donaldson, continued from page29)

ued it.But generally, what is now

known as antiaging medicine I seeas a grab bag of various substancesand treatment modalities whoseeffectiveness, at best, is oftenunknown. Separating placebo frommore substantial effects has notbeen undertaken with the care andobjectivity it should have been. Inany case, a fact acknowledged bythe author is that there is no pres-ently available strategy that canhold off the aging process verylong. Interventive therapies thatmight be able to accomplish this,such as use of telomerase to resetthe cellular aging clock, are possi-bilities for the future but remainundeveloped. The best bet today

for delaying senescence still seemsto be calorie restriction, which isunpleasant for many but that is theway it is. Your approach, whateverit is, may gain you a few extrayears, which is of greater signifi-cance with today’s ongoingprogress in the biological sciences,but it could still be too little, toolate. So again, it makes consider-able sense to also have cryonicsuspension arrangements in place.The book is to be commended fortaking this latter idea seriously. Amajor section, extending to severalchapters, is on “immortality medi-cine” and offers details aboutmaking suspension arrangements,including funding through lifeinsurance. (A list of cryonics

organizations is provided too.)In other areas, such as dieting,

the book offers what appears to besound practical wisdom. Its philo-sophical outlook is bright andhopeful. Its weaknesses would, Ithink, make it an easy target forcritics of the idea that substantiallife extension is a serious prospectfor our time, but in the long run itshould not matter much. Goodtechnological approaches will driveout the questionable, and progresscontinues. In the short run, thebook will provoke some thoughtfulconsideration of the issues it ad-dresses. The thinking person canbenefit, knowing that all opinionsmust be weighed objectively andnot simply accepted as dogmas. l


Visions of the Present, Visions of the Future,

Visions of Unbounded Life

LifeQuest Fictional stories reprinted from the late 1980s

Table ofContents

BLUEby Anthony Dunn(Original Publication) ................ 32

RE-CREATIONBy Fred ChamberlainFrom Issue #9, Nov. 1990 ......... 40

BACK ISSUES OF LIFEQUESTIssues #1 & #2 are already“On the Web” ........................... 43

“We’re losing him, we’re losing him.” The soft female voice sounded frightenedand distant.

The bed was firm and warm under my back. It seemed to contour itself around mybody, supporting every inch, every nook and cranny of my six-foot frame perfectly.The gossamer touch of a thin fabric sheet betrayed its presence on my chest. It wastaught and tight, faintly restraining.

“Cortical response weakening; he isn’t going to make it.” Panic in her voice this

The stories that follow appeared in LifeQuest, a semi-annual collection of life extension fiction, from May1987 to November 1990. They ranged from practical cryotransport dilemmas to far-reaching possibilities ofuploading, nanotechnology, and the deep-time aspects of living in space colonies. The contributors compriseda rapidly broadening group of authors at the time publication ceased in 1990.

Now, in a special section of each issue of Cryonics, we bring you reprints from past issues of LifeQuest, alongwith new stories contributed by authors from our wide readership and other sources. If you are a professionalscience fiction writer, or even if you are not, we invite you to submit your stories for possible inclusion.

BLUEby Anthony Dunn

Art

wor

k by

Tim

Hub

ley


time.It was day time. At least it was light.

Even with my eyes still closed it wasbright enough for me to be able to seethat. I didn’t remember going to sleep; Ididn’t remember laying on this bed.

Where am I?The thoughts seemed to crawl slowly

into my mind, accompanied by a sharpstab of fear and a swaying, falling senseof disorientation.

Where am I?The only way to find out is to open

my eyes and look.They won’t open. I want them to, but

they won’t, Why? My arms, my hands,my legs—none of them move when I tellthem to. Oh God why? Nothing moves,nothing’s moving. In a stream ofjumbled, panic-filled thought, one jostlesto prominence. Nothing’s moving, noteven the slow, rhythmic rising and fallingof my chest. I’m not breathing.

“He’s dying, really dying” saidanother flat, dull, bored voice. “I told youhe was too weak, waste of time; he wasalways going to die on us.”

Dying?I’m dying; that was why I wasn’t

breathing.“Time to pull the plug; no need to

waste anymore on this one.” The dullvoice again.

No, no, I don’t want to die, not goingto die, got to breathe, just got to breathe,one breath, just one deep breath. Showthe dull one he’s wrong. Got to breathe.

“Switching off support systems,” thedull voice said.

“Wait, please.” The soft femalevoice, pleading this time.

“He’s dead, D.E.A.D.,” the dull onereplied.

I’ve got to breathe, got to breathe,don’t want to die, not going to die, got tobreathe.

Shards of sharp ice fill my lungs,freezing but invigorating, fresh airsucked in through painfully dry mouthand nose. It smells of clean sheets with afaint aroma of hospital waiting room.

“Yes!” The female voice, excited,happy this time.

Somewhere in the distance an alarmbegan to chime. It seemed to get softerand softer. I’m falling slowly in a longever-darker descent, falling quickly into

sleep.Where am I?

* * *Spring was always my favorite time

to fly over London. The green ocean ofRichmond Park stretching out beyondthe houses of Putney and Wimbledonlooked at its freshest and brightest earlyin the year. Catching sight of it from theearly morning flight home from the Stateswas the best time to see it.

An hour later and thirty miles southand you were driving out of GatwickAirport. At the end of the motorwayapproach road I was always tempted toturn south and head for Brighton and thecoast. To escape back to the haunts ofyouth. The pebble beach, the pier,mingling with the crowds of day trippersescaping from the capital. That’s how Ihad first met Carrie. She was down for theweek with her friends from Harrow. I wasonly sixteen; she was older than me, byten days. Her short dark hair, ebony skin,and graceful movements were theopposite of my pale complexion, blondehair, and gangly clumsiness, but wherewe differed in appearance we were alikein mind. Space was everything. Not manypeople were really interested in peeringat Mars through a telescope and keepingup with the latest interplanetary mission,but we were.

I knew from the first minute that Isaw her that I loved Carrie; when shesmiled at me it made the world a happierplace, but, at first, I could never work outif she loved me or even really liked me.Our shared interests had kept us close.Then it was university that broke us upand, brought us together. She wasstudying at one end of the country; I wasat the other. We didn’t talk for threeweeks. I was being strong, missing her,needing her, but too stubborn or stupid tocall her.

Then one day she was there, in myroom, unpacking her bags and making ustea.

“I’ve changed colleges, I’m herenow,” she said without stopping theunpacking.

“Oh,” I replied.“I missed you,” she said.“I love you,” I blurted out.She stopped for a moment.

“I know,” she replied. “I just hadn’trealized the feeling was mutual untilnow,” and she leaned over to kiss me.

That was eight years ago. Eight yearsof setting up home together, sharing ourlives together, building our careerstogether. We had gone from university toEuropean Space Agency to working onthe NASA Mars team together. It hadbeen eight good years, but three monthsago it had gotten even better. After yearsof trying, after years of not gettingpregnant, of doctors and therapies anddisappointment, along had come Jacob—a son for Carrie and Jack, doting parents,at last.

My four weeks at work in the Stateshad been exciting but frustrating. Adouble shift—Joe’s wife was sick, reallysick, not going to get better sick. I had“volunteered” to cover his two weeks sothat he could spend a last few days withher. All in all I had doubly missed Carrie,and missing so much time out of Jacob’syoung life had been almost too much tobear. He was only three months old, butthe image of his smiling face, the soundof his cry, the twinkling of his blue eyes,were etched into my mind and soul.

I wanted—no, needed—to holdJacob in my arms again and feel his headrest on my shoulder, hear him breathe,slowly, contentedly, in dad’s embrace.Although he wasn’t old enough to reallyappreciate the U.S.A. Teddy Bear I hadbought him, I was sure he would learn tolove it.

I had bought two bears, both thesame except that one held a Stars andStripes and one a Union Jack, but on theflight back a four-year-old sittingopposite me had seemed to fall in lovewith the British bear, so, amid mildprotests from her parents, I had given it toher. She had looked happy and waved‘bye to me as I left the arrivals lounge. Ireached over and stroked the soft,artificial fur of the remaining bear whereit sat in the passenger seat and smiled as Ithought of it nestling next to Jacob in hisbed.

I only took my eyes off the roadahead for a moment, just a second or two,but when I looked up the lorry washurtling toward me across the centralreservation, smashing through the crashbarrier. The metal of my car made a


strange, high-pitched squealing sound asit crumpled and crushed under theimpact.

There was no pain. Just an instant ofshock and fear and then darkness.

The bed felt warm against my back.The air smelled clean. My mind was stillfilled with dreams of crashing cars.

Where am I?Hospital, yes hospital, it had the

faint smell of hospital. The crash was realand now I was in the hospital. This timemy eyes did open.

* * *The bright light hurt; everything was

blurred. It seemed like a hospital room,small, white, and filled with bleepingmachines. High on one wall was a win-dow with something written in bold let-ters across it. The name of the hospital?

It was still too blurred; was it St.Agnes or Charring Cross? The blurredimages coalesced into more distinctshapes. The writing became legible.ALCOR RESUSCITATION FACILITY, itread, and below it, in smaller letters,“Welcome back.”

The bleep, bleep, bleep of machinespushed the images of crashing cars frommy mind. ALCOR RESUSCITATIONFACILITY? Suspension was cutting-edgescience. Resuscitation was, at best,decades away. To be in resuscitation Iwould have had to be frozen. I wouldhave had to be dead, but I wasn’t dead—Iwas alive. The image of the lorry careen-ing toward me flashed back. The instantof shock and the darkness. Could thathave been it? Was this it?

Carrie had laughed when I firstjoined. She didn’t believed that it couldever work. Too many problems, too manyifs and maybes was all she ever said whenI tried to talk her into signing up. Had itreally worked?

The wall farthest away from me helda door. It opened. A tall, thin, middle-aged man in a long white doctor’s coatcame in. He walked slowly, painfully,toward me and sank into a chair. Hisbreathing was hard as if he had just run atwo-hundred-meter sprint. Beads ofperspiration hung on his forehead.

He wiped the sweat away from hisicy blue eyes and over his bald, darkscalp.

“Too heavy,” he said softly, as if tohimself and then looked at me.

“Hello Mr. Roberts.” He waited for areply.

I stared silently at him as his breath-ing eased.

“Hello Mr. Roberts.” He spokeslowly, carefully, as if he were trying hisbest to speak clearly in a foreign lan-guage.

“Hello Mr. Roberts.” He beganagain.

“I can hear you,” I replied, and triedto smile. The muscles in my face hurt. Iwinced in pain and they hurt even more.

“Try not to move; you’ve been gonefor a long time; it will take a while forthings to work normally again.”

A long time. How long was a longtime? The doctor sat and stared at me.

“How long?” I asked.“I’m your resuscitation supporter.

I’m here to help you recover and return,slowly,” he replied.

“How long have I been . . . dead?” Iasked again.

“Suspended,” he corrected me. “For along time,” he answered.

“How long is a long time? Please. . .”I was in no condition to make demands;pleading was my only option.

He placed the fingers of his left handagainst his temple and looked at the wallbehind me. He shook his head and thennodded as if having a conversation withsomeone.

“You were badly injured; there wasbarely enough good material to store.”

“How long?” I repeated.He looked at the wall again. His lips

moved rapidly but silently. Whoever hewas talking to, however he was talking tothem, his body language showed thatthey were arguing.

“It’s too soon—you’re not ready forit,” he replied.

“Please.” I tried to sound moreplaintive this time.

He shrugged, glanced at the wall,and then looked at me.

“Two hundred and fifty years,” hesaid in a matter-of-fact way.

Two hundred and fifty years. It hadworked! I was alive, and it was the futurealready. I wanted to laugh, cheer, runaround the room in celebration. Excepteverything hurt, and I couldn’t really

move. Still it felt good to be alive, again.I couldn’t wait to tell Carrie should justwould not.

Two hundred and fifty years. It was along time, too long. I was alive but Carriewould be gone, long gone. Even Jacobwould be dead. I could still see his babyface in my mind. His smile . . . my babyson had grown old and died before I hadever had the chance to know him. Thefeeling of joy sank in an instant, and thecold touch of misery took its place.Carrie, Jacob were both dead and gone;what was the point of me having sur-vived? The room began to darken. In thedistance an alarm began to gently bleep.

“Medical emergency!” the doctorshouted out.

It didn’t matter. Everyone was gone.it didn’t really matter what happened tome. The light dimmed and then every-thing went dark.

* * *The morning routine always started

the same way. A slow awakening fromdreams of death or images of Carrie andJacob all long gone now but still fresh inmy mind and heart.

“Good morning Mr. Roberts.” Docsat in his chair.

“Call me Jack,” I suggested forexactly the thirty-first time. A wholemonth of mornings since what I nowthought of as my awakening.

“What would you like for breakfastMr. Roberts?”

“Call me Jack.”He stifled a laugh. “We don’t call

anyone a Jack these days, well, not un-less . . .” His voice trailed off.

He said strange things like this allthe time. “Linking to the node,” “im-printing information,” “upgradingimplant,” but he would never explainwhat they meant.

The days had settled into a pattern.Breakfast followed by exercise in thelittle gym in the room next door and thentwo hours of catching up with the past.Two hours of watching old newsfilm ofevents that had happened after mysuspension.

“Early Martian Colonies today,” hesaid with an air of excitement.

I knew Mars, or least had knownMars. The imaging software on the first


sample return mission had been mine,well at least partly mine and severalhundred others who had a hand increating it. I knew Mars. I had watchedthe television images from the landers; Irecognized its cold, harsh, desert surface.That was my Mars.

Not the new Mars, the enhancedatmosphere Mars, greening valleys andslowly filling oceans of the new worldthey had created using technology I justdidn’t understand. Why should I beinterested in the Martian colonies? Theydidn’t hold anything for me; nothing inthis God-forsaken future did.

“What’s your name?” I asked.“You can call me Doc,” he replied, as

usual.“Can I see someone else?” I asked.“You’re not ready.” The usual reply,

again.“Can I go outside?”“You’re not ready.”“Can I find out what happened to my

wife and son?”He paused for an instant, knowing

what would happen next, before givingthe standard reply.

“You’re not ready.”“I want to know about my child, my

wife!” I shouted. “Am I a prisoner here?Tell me what’s going on!”

This was all part of the morningpattern. A month of exercise had broughtthe strength back into my arms and legsbut little knowledge of the world beyondthe three rooms of my resuscitation suite.Only the little window in each chamberoffered a glimpse outside, and all theyrevealed was a green, grassy lawnstretching uphill to meet with a usuallyblue and clear sky. Sometimes out of thegym window, just above the horizon, Icaught glimpses of something moving,flying in the distance. Sometimes theywere big enough to guess that they weresilver spheres, but they travelled too fast.I could never really watch them for longenough to get any real idea of size ordistance.

“Mr. Roberts.” Doc looked andsounded serious. “We know what we’redoing; we’ve been doing this for ahundred and fifty years. You’re notready.” He sighed.

We had this conversation everyday.“The consequences of giving you

information you’re not ready for wouldbe catastrophic. Emotional and intellec-tual overload can be fatal, believe me;people die, permanently die.”

The words “permanently die” wereuttered in a hushed, almost awed whisper.

“We give you information a little ata time, that way you can cope with it.That way you don’t overload and die.You don’t want to die, do you Jack?”

I didn’t even hesitate before reply-ing.

“I don’t care; there’s nothing for mehere; I’d be better off dead!” I shoutedback at him.

One thing, the only thing, I hadcome to know over the last month wasthat I shouldn’t be here. Everything Iknew was useless. What had been degree-level studies had become elementaryschool fodder within twenty-five years ofmy suspension. Fifty years on, about asfar as they had let me learn, everything Ihad ever known was obsolete. All theskills I had developed were useless;everything had changed, even some ofthe bedrocks of social relationships andeconomic life—marriage, money, work—were different from anything anyone halfa century earlier could have imagined.Now all of that was two hundred years inthe past. Whatever kind of world it wasout there wasn’t a world for me. All Ireally wanted was to find out what hadhappened to Carrie and Jacob. To do thatI had to get information either from hereor from somewhere else.

“You’re not ready,” Doc intonedonce more and walked into the gym. Themorning argument always ended likethis.

“When will I be ready?” I shouted.He kept on walking. I waited a

moment longer than usual before gettingout of bed, quickly changing clothes andfollowing him into the next room. I hadto be sure he would be far enough away.If I acted fast enough, I wouldn’t have tohurt him. I didn’t want to hurt him.

“He’s got it bad; worst case I eversaw.” Doc was speaking softly, unguard-edly, as I walked through the door. Ididn’t often overhear things, and evenwhen I did they didn’t make sense. Hestopped talking as I entered the room,placed his right hand against his temple,and glanced at the wall at the far end of

the gym. It looked exactly like the otherthree walls. Tall, white, and plain butonce, feigning exhaustion after a longbout on the rowing machine, I had restedagainst it. It was colder and smootherwith the texture of glass, not concrete. Idon’t know if they knew what I wasdoing, but I was sure they were behindthe glass wall. The ones who werewatching, the ones who Doc talked toand somehow communicated with evenwhen he wasn’t talking. They must be theones in charge. That was why he told meso little. He didn’t know anything. Theywere the ones I needed to make animpression on.

That’s when the plan had cometogether in my mind. The wall ahead, thelittle window on the right, and beyondthat the floating spheres. Sometimes theyadded new machines to the gym and tookaway old ones. Not today. Thankfullyeverything was exactly where it had beenyesterday, and now Doc was far enoughaway . . . perfect.

I walked over to the weightliftingarea and took a medium weight from thebay. It felt cold and hard in my palm.With two rapid pirouettes, like a discusthrower, I launched it toward the far wall.

“No!” Doc screamed as it flew pasthim.

It crashed and smashed into the wall.With a loud crack the wall shattered intohundreds of shards. A woman sat behindit. She was shielding her face with herhands. She looked somehow familiar, butI didn’t have time to stand and stare. Ilaunched a second weight at the littlewindow. It punched a hole through, notvery big but maybe, just maybe, bigenough for me to get through. I jumpedonto the top of the chest-press machineand then dived out through the hole inthe glass. Arms and head through, a sharpdagger of glass ripped the back of myclothing and cut deep into my shoulderblade. I could hear Doc running upbehind me.

“No!” He sounded desperate.Halfway out. I grabbed the short tufts

of grass and pulled a few inches furtherforward. A stab of pain from the rightknee, and then the ankle betrayed a longslashing cut down the calf. One leg out,one to go. Doc’s hand grabbed andgripped my foot.


“No, you don’t understand!” heshouted.

All I had to do was kick out. A quick,sharp blow would force him backwardsand I would be free. I could feel the grassand taste the fresh air. Just one kick and Icould be up and running.

He held tight. I stopped trying topull away. I wasn’t going to hurt him, noteven for this. He must have felt me easeup and for an instant relaxed his grip. Itwas enough, just enough, for me to slipmy foot out of the shoe he was holdingand drag myself out of the window. I wasout and free.

The lawn streched upward to a crest afew dozen yards ahead. Blue sky andgreen grass were all I could see, but Iknew that at the top of the hill there justhad to be more. I glanced back, a streamof red flowed from my leg down the greengrass back to the broken window. No onewas following me, at least not throughthe window. Too dangerous. An alarmsounded, and people appeared fromaround the side of the building.

They ran toward me, but it was toolate. I had already reached the top of thehill.

The city was away across the otherside of the bay. It gleamed and shim-mered in the sunlight as if it were made ofcrystal. Skyscrapers reached up and up,hundreds and hundreds of feet, and dis-appeared, unending, into the sky. Every-where, everywhere, skimming across theclear blue water, weaving around thecrystal towers, were what seemed to bepeople flying unaided and unencum-bered, and above them the floating,flying spheres, thousands of them.

The sound of footsteps grew louder,but they were still too late. The world wasalready growing dark, and the pain in mychest had spread down my right arm.Breathing hurt. My legs couldn’t hold meup. The grass felt warm and soft againstmy cheek and forehead.

“He’s down!” one of them shouted asthey reached me.

Five figures stood above me silhou-etted against the sun.

“Medic coming through, give itspace, give it space.”

They parted and a silver machinefloated past them and hovered over me.

“Cardiac arrest, major damage.” The

words came from the machine.“Can you do anything?” The tallest

man, it was Doc, spoke to it as if it wereanother person. It hovered over me for amoment.

“No, nothing,” it replied.No one moved. The machine had

taken the decision. Had we come to this?The pain got worse, the world

became darker. I wasn’t ready—Doc hadbeen right. The world was too differentfor me to just walk out into it. I wasn’t aprisoner; they were just preparing me fora different reality.

Doc fell on his knees next to me.“Well, I’m not just going to let you dieyou, you Jack.” At least the last fewwords seemed to be directed at me.

“Does anyone else know aboutmouth to mouth resuscitation?” he asked.

No one responded.“Damn!” he exclaimed, and began to

feel for my heartbeat as pain and darknessswept over me.

* * *The familiar sound of the machines

beeped gently in the background. Ihadn’t dreamed. No lorries careeningtoward me. No images of Jacob. Justdarkness, then consciousness. I openedmy eyes. The room was the same—well,almost the same. Doc stood rather thansat at the end of my bed.

“Two weeks.” He intoned sternly andsighed.

I tried to speak, but my mouth wastoo dry. Doc gently put a glass of ice coldwater to my lips.

“Why didn’t you let me die?” myvoice was reedy and weak.

“This all costs money, Jack.” Hecalled me by my first name and swept hisarm in an arc gesturing to all the ma-chines in the room. “And if you reallywant to die, you have an absolute, legalright to do so, but, you don’t have to. Wedon’t want you to. I don’t want you to.”

“You don’t know me. What does itmatter to you, to anyone, if I die?” I spatback at him.

“It matters. It matters more than youknow,” he replied, “but if you really wantto die just pull another little stunt likethe last one. We won’t be growing youany new hearts again; next time you run,next time you overexpose yourself to

information and stimuli, you will die—permanent death.” The last words wereuttered in the same hushed tones. “If yourun again Jack, no one will be runningafter you; no one will save you; you’lljust die. It’s up to you Jack.”

He didn’t wait for me to answer, hejust turned away and walked toward thedoor. Halfway there he stopped, turned,and walked back. He repositioned thepillow behind my head, wiped the thinfilm of cold sweat from my forehead, andheld the water to my lips again.

“If there’s anything you want Jack,anything at all, just ask.” He smiled andput the fingers of his right hand to histemple.

“Who are you talking to?” I asked.“Talking to? I’m talking to you

Jack.”“No, who are you talking to on the

other side of the wall?”He looked at the wall.“You’re not ready Jack,” he replied

and walked away.The same answer, always the same

answer.

* * *Doc winked as he placed the tumbler

of orange juice in front of me. I knewwhat he meant. This was the one with ginin it. I didn’t know how he got the stuffin. It was strictly prohibited, but he knewI liked it, and somehow he got it.

For a guy who had had troublewalking three months ago, he waslooking fit. Two rowing machines nowrested against the far wall of the gym.One for me, one for him, and in the ten-minute race he always beat me.

“Time for some catch?” he asked.I nodded and we ran out into the

field at the front of my suite. Throwingthe ball and catching it helped toredevelop hand-eye coordination. Afteran hour a day for the past five weeks Iwas almost back to normal. The ball flewtoward me. It was high and wide, andwithout even thinking about it, I dartedto my left, leapt, and caught it one-handed with ease. I stared at it nestled inthe palm of my hand. Sport had neverbeen my strong point. I could never, evercatch like this. I looked up toward Docand caught him looking at me in an oddsort of way; a mix of relief and pride.


“I can’t do this.” I held the ball up inexplanation.

He walked over, placed his hand onmy shoulder and squeezed it gently.“You can now,” he replied.

“No, no. You don’t understand. Icould never do this, not even before.”

“You’re better now, better thanyou’ve ever been.” He stopped andlooked at me as if he was unsure whetherto say anymore. “We optimize you,rejuvenate you—biologically you’re asgood as you could ever be, or at least willbe when you’re fully recovered. As fast,as sharp, as clever as the human body canever be, and then . . .” He stopped again,placed his fingers on his temple for asecond, and then nodded slowly.

“And then we can implant—artificialimplants, internal organs, whole limbs,brain chips. They make you better andstronger, and they last forever. That’sforever Jack—you don’t wear out. Younever die Jack, never.”

A medic sphere floated up andhovered next to me.

“Heart rate normal, cortical responseselevated 10 percent, nothing to worryabout,” it intoned softly.

Doc laughed.“I really shouldn’t have told you all

of that. She didn’t think you were ready,”he gestured back toward the building.“But I thought you were.”

I nodded and smiled back.The last few weeks I had felt better as

I got stronger and fitter. The days withDoc were good. The nights were adifferent story. Dreams of Carrie andJacob, death, and waking full of fear andloneliness.

“Anything else you want to tell me?”I asked as nonchalantly as possible.

“Only that we’re at the collapse ofthe Martian Colonies on the info reels, ahundred years after your suspension.Want to go and learn?” he turned andheaded back toward the main building.

“What about Jacob, what aboutCarrie?” I shouted at him.

He stopped as if he had been frozento the spot. For a second I thought he wasgoing to give me a real answer. Then in ahalting, pained voiced he replied.“You’re not ready. You’re not ready.”

I didn’t wait for anymore. I ran backtoward the main building. As I raced past

him, I scowled in his direction. Tearswere running down his cheeks.

“Wait just a while longer, please justa while longer,” he whispered to me as wepassed. I had never seen him cry before.

* * *It was dark. Even in the future night

was still night. A single machine beepedin the background. Sleeping was becom-ing more and more difficult. Most nightsI was awake for the three or four hoursbefore dawn. I stepped out of bed andpadded into the gym and then through tothe learning area. The screen was still on.Doc left it on most nights. He must knowthat I couldn’t sleep. At least I couldwatch the news from a hundred years agoto keep me occupied. Doc was a goodman, not that I had any other twenty-thirdcentury males to compare him to. In thesixteen weeks since my awakening Doc,and the brief encounter with the men onthe hill, had been my only contact withanyone. It was the tried and tested way ofdoing things, Doc told me. I liked him, heseemed to like me. We understood eachother. In another time, another place,another set of circumstances, we couldhave been friends, good friends, but here.. . . How could he really understand how Ifelt?

How could he feel the sense ofuselessness, hopelessness, loss that I did.I would be no good in his world. ANeanderthal trying to understandrelativity—that was the reality of it all.What did this place, this time, offer me?

Inferiority, poverty, at best curiosityvalue. “Come see the savage from thepast!” I could visualize the fairgroundfreak show advertisements already and ontop of it all the loneliness. Carrie andJacob gone forever. It was too difficult,too much to bear. Deep down inside Iknew I didn’t want to be here.

The view screen flickered.“When and where’s the bar?” I asked

it, wanting to know which events andyears were restricted.

“The bar is off,” it replied.I waited a moment. No bar meant I

could view anything.“Today’s news,” I ordered.An image of a woman, golden

skinned, bleached-blonde hair, satbehind a desk, filled the screen. She

talked in a clipped, odd accent. Thewords were mainly English, but therewere words and phrases from otherlanguages—Spanish, Japanese, and somethat sounded completely unintelligiblethrown in. The image switched to anoutside view. A blue sky but all the plantlife was red. Three huge moons hung. Itwasn’t Earth; it didn’t seem like it couldbe anywhere in the solar system. A figure,tall, well dressed, green, and reptilian,stepped into view of the camera andbegan to talk in the same mixed-uplanguage as the woman.

The world seemed to buckle undermy feet. A falling, disoriented feelingcame over me.

“Stop!” I shouted, and theviewscreen went blank.

I sat and waited. The Earth stoppedmoving, my heart stopped trying to breakout of my ribcage. I sat and waited andthought about it for a long time and thenslowly gave another order to theviewscreen.

“Display all information held onCarrie and Jacob Roberts.”

It answered in an instant, before I hadthe chance to give it dates of birth or anyother search-refining information. “Allinformation on individuals held at CityRecords,” it replied. “Password requiredfor access,” it concluded and waited forthe password.

I didn’t have it.“System will be locked in thirty

seconds without password.”I was too close to finding answers to

lose now, but how could I give it apassword I didn’t know?

“System lock in twenty seconds.”It didn’t care, it would just lock. It

wasn’t a smart machine, just a dumbservant. Trying to reason with it wouldn’tbe any use.

“System lock in ten seconds.” I hadto do something, now.

“Where is City Records?” I shoutedout. It began to tell me the address andstreet reference.

“Print me a map.”As the last syllable rolled off my lips,

SYSTEM LOCK flashed onto the screenin big red letters. Too late, I was too late.

A soft hum issued from the repro-ducer next to the screen. A map, a streetmap, with the City Records Office


marked with an X, slid out.

* * *I had given Doc one last chance.

“Please tell me about my family,” I asked.“You’re not ready,” he replied.Ready or not, today I was going to

find out. The collector always called atthis time of day. Long, cigar-shaped, andfloating silently down the roadway thatheaded off toward the city. It stopped justlong enough to be filled with boxes andtrash and then floated back to where ithad come from.

It was only the second time I hadasked to be left alone to walk around thegarden. Doc had looked suspicious whenI asked him to leave me in peace for awhile. I was sure that he knew I wasplanning something, but his little speechabout not stopping me, or helping me, if Idecided to run again, seemed to meanwhat it said. Just to be on the safe side Iwas still going to slip away rather thanjust walk through the gates.

The collector arrived, stopped, andopened its cargo doors. Carrier spheresbrought out the trash already sorted andready for recycling. It had taken me awhile to realize that not all spheres werethe same. These couldn’t think; they justdid a job, dumb machines. As the lastboxes were packed, I jumped onboard.The hatch closed behind me, and a fewseconds later I felt us jerk around andback toward the city. It had been so easy,perhaps too easy. I sat back and waited.The journey could be a long one.

We stopped twice. Two more placesexactly like mine. Two other resuscita-tion areas? After the second one we setoff slowly and then picked up morespeed.

The journey went on for longer, and,even before we stopped, I could hear thesounds of the city. People talking. Icouldn’t really understand what theywere saying, but there was enoughEnglish in there for me to be able toguess. Snatches of conversation aboutlast night’s sports results, an argumentbetween a young boy and an adult aboutwhat time he had to be home, two female-sounding voices discussing holidayplans. The world may have changed, butpeople still seemed the same. Thecollector stopped, the cargo doors

opened, and I eased my way out into thestreet.

It was crystal, or at least very muchlike it. The ground, the walls, thebuildings were clear like diamond. Theyshimmered rainbow colors in the sun-light. It felt cool and smooth; on thecorners it was almost sharp enough to cutflesh—almost, but not quite. Everywherewas clean and bright, fountains of gentlybubbling water stood at each intersec-tion, flowers and plants decorated theconcourses and perfumed the air, and allof this was in three not two dimensions.Stretching up as far as I could see weregardens and landing pads, fountains,flowers, and people.

“Can I help you sir?” A blue spherefloated down from high above. It intonedthe question in a clipped, difficult-to-understand accent.

“Yes, I want to go to the Hall ofRecords.”

“Follow me sir,” it suggested andquickly shot back into the air. A fewseconds later it returned.

“Follow me sir,” it repeated and thenslowly began to drift upwards.

“I want to walk,” I called after it.“Why?” it asked, a genuine sense of

puzzlement in its voice.“Because I would,” was all I could

think of saying.It didn’t ask any more questions.

“Follow me sir,” it said again and floated,just above my head, down the street.

The wide streets were busy, not manypeople walked along them, but thereseemed to be a preference for sitingrestaurants and coffee shops outside andon terra firma. People still ate dinner,people still drank coffee, some evenseemed to be reading little screens, whichwere probably the descendants of mymorning newspaper. The only differenceseemed to be that when they finishedthey floated up and away to whereverthey had to be next. Money seemed tohave completely disappeared.Thumbprints on more little screensseemed to be the method of payment forevery transaction. This wasn’t so differentto my time. Things had changed, but in aworking, eating, striving for a bettertomorrow sort of way, people seemedmuch the same.

I followed the sphere around a corner

and stopped. A sharp intake of breathbrought an all-too-familiar stabbing painto my chest. An alien on the viewscreenhad been a surprise. Meeting one in reallife was jaw-droppingly unbelievable. Itlanded just in front of me and looked tobe headed for the door behind me. It washalf my size, a beak and three clawlikefingers on each hand. I stared at it and itstared at me until we were almosttouching.

“Excuse me,” it chirped in a high-pitched voice and side-stepped me beforepushing past and through the door.

* * *The chest pain wasn’t getting any

worse, but it wasn’t getting any bettereither.

Another block and the spherestopped at the bottom of a flight of stairsleading up to a Romanesque-stylebuilding, all columns and friezes. I stoodon the bottom step and waited. Insidewere the details of what had happened toCarrie and Jacob and all I had to do waswait for the pain in my chest and arm toease a little and then I would be able toclimb up and go in. The sphere had saidsomething to me, but I was trying toconcentrate on breathing slowly andcalmly. After the third or fourth time thatI failed to reply, it floated away. Icouldn’t be sure, but it sounded as if itwas swearing and complaining about mylack of courtesy.

I glanced to either side of thebuilding to see if there was a lift or ramp,but as everyone else seemed to befloating and gliding in and out and upand down, there was neither. The stepswere there purely for decorative purposes.They made the building look importantand civic in nature, but they also made itdoubtful that I would ever get inside.

At the bottom of the steps, on the leftcorner stood a kiosk; small and rectangu-lar and on its outside I recognized theemblem of the Martian Colonies.

“The Free Martian Colonies,” thewords on the badge now read.

I hadn’t reached the part of the timeline when they had gained independencefrom Earth, but for some reason I sud-denly wanted to cheer. Slowly I shuffledover to take a closer look and see if theword “free” had a date attached.


As I stood outside examining thebadge, a woman appeared. Her imageshimmered and seemed blurred at theedges. I had seen holograms before butnever quite as big or as clear as this one.

“Welcome to Mars,” she said asthree-dimensional images of that worldappeared behind her. Mars seemed to behalf finished. Half green and wet, half redand arid. The problems of terra-forminghad been exacerbated by the changingpolitics and priorities of Earth-boundadministrators and project leaders. Thecolonists had decided to go it alone, butfunds were short and they needed financeand help.

“Please pledge us your credits orgive us your time. Come and join us—Mars needs you.” The woman disap-peared from view.

It had been an interesting sales pitch,but I didn’t have any credits, and the painin my chest suggested that I didn’t havemuch time.

The first few steps were fine. Halfwayup I stopped and gasped for breath.

“Welcome to Mars,” anotherinterested somebody had activated thekiosk. I hoped they had more to offerthan I could. Taking the steps one at atime and resting in between kept the paindown a little. Breathing was hard andpainful. The ground moved and buckledbeneath my feet. One more step and thenI was at the door. If I took it carefully,slowly, I could get the information onCarrie and Jacob. I could know what hadhappened to them; I could find thembefore the pain beat me and carried meoff to the long sleep, the permanentdeath. Just a few more minutes of life andconsciousness, that’s all I needed, all Iwanted.

I stood at the top of the steps andlooked into the records office. Out of thecorner of my eye, I glimpsed the spin-ning, red, blue, green holograph of Mars.

“Come and join us—Mars needsyou.” Her words echoed around insidemy head.

“Mars needs you.”Mars. Work to do, problems to solve,

opportunities to seize. Why hadn’t I seenit before?

I turned and staggered down thesteps toward the spinning planetaryimage. The pain crushed my chest and

raced down my arm. The crystal steps felthard and painful as my knees crashedinto them, their cool smoothness pressedagainst my cheek as I slid to the floor.The pain was worse, a lot worse than everbefore.

A crowd gathered and the darknessbegan to enfold me for the last time.

“Let me through, let me through!”The distant voice sounded familiar. Atall, thin figure stood over me. He bentdown and the accustomed feel of Doc’shand gripped my shoulder.

“I’m not going to let you die,” hewhispered into my ear, and then, cradlingme in his arms, he lifted me from the floorand held me tight to his chest.

The world went dark

* * *The cacophony of bleeps broke my

sleep. I opened my eyes. The roomseemed full of machines. Doc sat on theedge of the bed watching me.

“Don’t try to move, you’re tooweak,” he said.

I nodded. It didn’t hurt, but I didn’twant to take any risks by trying to domore.

“Three weeks Jack, three weeks toput you back together. Do you know howmuch that cost, Jack? Do you know howmuch I had to beg and grovel to getagreement to get that done?”

I shook my head, at least the musclesin the my neck felt fine.

“But we still have a problem Jack.Do you know what that problem is?”

I shook my head again, it movedeasily, painlessly from side to side, it wasa good sign. I would be up and fit foraction soon.

“You’re the problem Jack.”I stopped moving my head and

looked at Doc in amazement.“What?!” I bellowed.The voice sounded strong. My lungs

must be okay. It was getting better all thetime.

“You’re the problem Jack,” Doccontinued. “We can’t keep bringing youback like this. We can’t afford it. Wecan’t spend the time or the money on itso, it’s up to you Jack, what do you want?Do you want to live? Or do you want todie? It’s up to you. Want do you want todo, Jack?”

He sat on the edge of the bed andlooked at me waiting for an answer.

“I want to go to Mars,” I replied.“Mars?!” It was his turn to look

amazed.“Yes, Mars,” the words burst out in a

stutter of excitement. “There’s so much todo, so many chances to make real adifference, so many . . . opportunities.”

He didn’t reply, he just looked at mein that odd, almost paternally proud wayhe sometimes did.

“You don’t understand, Doc, youcouldn’t understand. Coming back afterso many years presents you with a wholenew world of experiences and opportuni-ties. It has so much to offer, Doc, and Ihave so much to offer it. I can make mydreams come true and along the way dosomething worthwhile. When will I bewell enough, when will I be ready toleave?”

This last question seemed to takehim by surprise.

“What about Carrie, what aboutJacob?” he asked.

I thought for a moment.“I miss them Doc. I always will, but

life can, life has to, go on.” For the firsttime since I had been awakened, a tearrolled down my cheek and fell gentlyaway.

Doc put his fingers to his temple andnodded. He stood up and walked over tothe machines. One by one, he turnedthem off.

“Doc!” I shouted in panic.“Don’t worry, you’re not going to

die,” he said. “You’re fit and healthy. Wejust had to be sure.”

I eased myself up. It felt good—nopain, no aches, no fatigue.

“Sure of what?” I asked.He had turned off the last machine

and was headed for the door.“It happens to us all,” he said, “the

resuscitation blues, only you had it bad,real bad. But now you know, like weknow, the future’s bright; tomorrow’salways going to be better. We have somany new opportunities,” he stopped atthe door.

“And, I think you’re ready,” he saidand left the room.

What did he mean we? I was the onewho had been awakened, not him. Whydid he say we?


I jumped up and ran after him.The gym was empty. I caught sight

of Doc as he walked through a small, newdoor in the glass wall at the far end of theroom. I ran after him.

The next room was small, dimly lit,and empty except for a chair placedexactly in its center. A woman sat facingme. I recognized the emblem of the FreeMartian Colonies emblazoned on abadge across her chest. I recognized thedark-brown depth of her eyes, her smile,

the ebony sheen of her skin.“Carrie?” my voice cracked and

broke.If I hadn’t been ready, the shock of

seeing her would have killed me,permanent death.

She stood and raced over to me, tookme in her arms, and our lips met for thefirst time in two hundred and fifty years.Her body felt warm, soft, and familiar inmy hands. Carrie was here, awakened,alive and rejuvenated. I wasn’t alone, we

were together.I pulled my head back and looked at

her.“Jacob, what happened to Jacob?”

the words burst unexpectedly out of mymouth.

The familiar feel of Doc’s handgripped my shoulder. “Hi Dad,” hewhispered.

Carrie, Jack, and Jacob were togetheragain, at last. l

As ODG-941 moved toward thepodium, the hall silenced. 941’s greatform was not that different from theothers’, but the ID codes radiating fromantennae at his wasplike midsection toldthose in attendance who he was. Leaningforward slightly as he approached theramp to the stage, he rolled quickly to thehigher level without the slightest flexingof lower appendages. His head, a spher-oidal sensor assembly, swept aboutsurveying the thousands who hadattended the symposium. Finally, in theradio frequency voice of the Jankx, hespoke.

“As you have heard, it appears analien species has taken residence on thisplanet,” he said. A current of low level

electronic commentary swept the hall.The rumor was true! 941 was the world’smost eminent exobiologist, and thoughthey had yet to discover evidence of lifeeven on other planets of the local system,it was a passionate dream of theirs to doso. If 941 said he had discovered an alienspecies, here on their home planet, theywere most reluctant to doubt it.

“It is the strangest thing. We findthem only in the vicinity of volcanicvents in the deeps of the ocean, and theydie quickly after being captured. Itappears their immune systems cannotwithstand the slightest contact with ourmicroorganisms.”

941 displayed visuals, and most ofthe attendees captured them from video

terminals at their seats. The invadersappeared to be a very primitive sort, atbest a hundred microns long, possessingno intelligence of significance.

“But how could such creatures havecome through space?” came one questionamong many others from the audience,after he was finished. It was from ODG-123, an old friend of 941’s. 941 had nosatisfactory answer, for this or for most ofthe other queries. The very existence ofsuch a strange life form was sufficientreason for the conference, even thoughonly the most preliminary results wereavailable.

941 and 123 met for lunch. As theyingested silicon nuggets flavored withtitanium and heavily salted with exoticcrystals of carbon, 941 revealed privatedata not sufficiently analyzed forpresentation in the open meeting.

“We’ve done electron microscopy ofsome of the creatures under cryogenicconditions,” 941 said. “The seat of theirstructure is a fascinating pattern ofcomplex, carbon based molecules.Utterly indecipherable! Also, it looks asif they function by elementary oxidation,metabolically. They appear to have aqueer and laborious energy conversioncapable of functioning by sunlight,though these specimens were taken froman area where sunlight is totally absent.”

He paused. 123 was thoughtfullysilent, then she swiveled in her seat andfixed all of her sensors on 941. “Can youtell me anything more about this pat-tern?” she said enticingly. Her upperappendages danced on the table in a waywhich would have been hypnotic to anysmall animal.

Re-Creation

byFred Chamberlain


Even 941 was momentarily dis-tracted. He had engaged in reproductivedata mixing with 123 several timespreviously, and in the nuances of herquestion was a clear invitation. But shewas an archaeologist, he could not lethimself forget, and archaeologists andexobiologists were virulent rivals. Shewould not hesitate to exploit everykernel of information she could extractfrom him for her own papers, publishingthem without a moment’s delay.

Still, 941 could picture the two ofthem coiled in a reproduction sanctuary,blending data in a bridge from whichwould emerge a new entity. Some of theiroffspring were already preeminent intheir own fields. Oh, what the hell! Hecouldn’t resist. She could wind himaround her slenderest appendage, and sheknew it.

The first day of the symposium drewto an end. After a romantic dinner, atwhich they sipped frothing liquidnitrogen and downed chilled slices of dryice coated with congealed hydrocarbons,941 and 123 retired to the privacy of ahotel suite and began their fourthreproductive engagement. For weeksfollowing the symposium, they wouldremain together in the most deliciousexperience a Jankx could imagine. Thenthe child would go to a growth center,self aware and able to supervise its owndevelopment. The days of extendedparental child care were long past in theculture of the Jankx.

But there was a shocking disclosurethat first night which changed every-thing. Teasingly, the first thing 123wanted to probe was the informationpattern that lay at the heart of the aliens.When 941 let her peek at it, she gaspedand her barriers went up.

123 recoiled, as if she had beencaught in the magnetic vortex of atransportation guideway. Her appendagesdrew in and she turned away. For a periodof minutes, 941 lay beside her in frustra-tion until 123 opened minimal communi-cation channels. Inside, she seemed to beexperiencing a kind of torment anddisgust she could not express. All shewould say was it was a mere hypothesis;she could not rest until she had exploredit. The next morning, 123 broke her

engagement with 941 and left for herlaboratory some thousands of miles away.

The remainder of the symposium wasuneventful. More data was presented, butthe enigmas remained. When the lastwords had been spoken, 941 had onethought in mind, to join 123 and findwhat had so violently distracted her thatshe had broken the engagement.

***The train trip was brief, but enjoy-

able. The long, magnetically levitatedvehicle raced over flat terrain at machthree, but when it encountered mountainsit slowed to subsonic speeds and woundamong the peaks and rivers. The part ofthe journey 941 enjoyed most was thesection near the end, where the guide-ways ran sinuously through an enormouscanyon, following the course of a riverwhich had torn a gash nearly a mile deepin the overlying plateau.

The system designers could havetaken a level route above the canyon andshaved ten minutes from the trip, buteveryone agreed the longer journey wasworth the extra time required. 123 hadspent years in that canyon, tunneling intobedding planes in search of fossils. At thebase of the canyon was one of herfavorite resorts, where they planned tohoneymoon in their current engagementbefore it was terminated. At the maincontinental terminal, on a hunch, 941called the resort and sure enough, 123was on the register. Twenty minutes later,he was back at the canyon and went insearch of her.

It was in a side canyon he finallyfound her. Passing its entrance as hewaded the main stream, he sensed 123’sID code faintly coming from the mouth ofthe tributary and followed it for a quartermile until there she was, mulling oversamples a quarter of the way up a rockyslope. When she saw him, she gave ajoyous greeting and raced down the slopeto the stream. There, her appendageswrapped around him and intertwinedwith his, she apologized and thanked himfor coming after her.

“But why?” he said. “What’s thematter?”

123 was silent for a moment. “Comewith me,” she said, and led the way to ahigh promontory overlooking the

canyon. On a ledge two thousand feetabove the river, she had first shown himthe site of a discovery of hers which hadrevolutionized the Jankx’ understandingof their planet’s past. Now, she withdrewinto the shade of an overhang and invited941 to join her. Then, slowly, she began astory she told him in advance she did notexpect him to believe.

“Look into my thoughts, 941,” shesaid. He let his communication append-ages sink into her high bandwidthrecesses and looked. “See the shapes?”941 saw the skeletons of the ancientones, long departed, who were theshapers of the land long before the Jankxevolved. As he watched, the picturesfilled in and skeletons were covered bylayer after layer of tissue and circulatorynetworks. Finally, an outer layer wasadded. 941 had seen these picturesbefore. Why was she showing them tohim again?

“We modeled our current bodydesigns, to the extent we could, after theevolved efficiencies of these creatures!”123 cried. “We borrowed from theirancient machinery! We owe everythingto them!”

It was a cry of agony. Why was sheso upset?

“The tissue samples we reconstructedwere three million years old, from thewastes of deserts in mountains south ofthe equatorial zone!”

The tones of her words distortedthem almost to the point of incoherency.The pictures began to break down,washed with white noise, and 123’sappendages began to quiver involun-tarily. 941 tried, with a sense of futility,to comfort her. It was no use. He sensedher control centers driving her powersupplies into overload, and there werespurious emissions of erratic transientsindicating internal short circuits ofkilovolt magnitudes.

“It’s unforgivable! There’s no way toatone for it! No decent Jankx could livewith it!” 123 screamed, and with no otherwarning than that she moved quickly tothe edge of the precipice and threwherself into space.

941 could not believe it and wasmomentarily immobile with horrifiedsurprise; then he flung himself to the


light filtered into 123’s recovery room,her sensors came into full focus. 941woke immediately and held 123 astightly as one Jankx could hold anotherwithout hurting. As she swam upwardfrom a state of disorientation thatpulsated still and seemed as if it wouldnever end, 941 beckoned and coaxed heron. It took hours; then suddenly 123 wasfully alert again. Shivers of the joy of lifepoured from her appendages into 941.She promised, in that moment, that shewould never try to destroy herself again.

The aliens were an unspoken subjectbetween them at first. 123 allowed herselfto be drawn into an engagement with 941again, and the two of them spent weeksaway from civilization. Finally, a newoffspring went to the growth center, andthey were completely alone. In a hotelroom near the growth center, 941 sensedit was time. He asked, “Why? What wasit? That day on the ledge?”

123 trembled. Then she said, “Comewith me to the Coastal Museum and I’lltell you.” She would say no more.

Thus it was that one late afternoonthey stood in front of portraits of theancient ones, archives which survived themillions of years since the Great Discon-tinuity. 123 insisted they be seated.Hesitantly, she began to speak. As theminutes passed, she became engrossed inher subject. 941 relaxed. 123 seemed tobe fully in control of herself. Perhaps thistime it would go without difficulty.

“We arose from primitive assemblers,did we not?” 123 said.

941 nodded. It was an almostimperceptible movement of his head, butit served the purpose.

“And our designs, while not fullydeciphered, are a rational form of anengineering systems approach?”

941 nodded again, uncertain ofwhere this was headed.

“The culture of the ancient ones hadthis knowledge, and they could havedesigned us, but there are problems withthat hypothesis.”

“Why do you say that?”123 gestured sarcastically. “Look at

the early forms we took! Look at the firstindications of specialization, as if theassemblers had stumbled by themselveson more efficient ways of cooperation!

Look at the first, clumsy steps towardlocomotion, as if trial and error werebeing employed! See the interspeciescompetition in our predecessors, battlingfor survival. Would the ancient ones havedesigned these mutually destructiveentities? Tell me!”

941’s head inclined downward. Itwas his way of showing he was puzzled.“What are you trying to tell me?” heasked. “Why does it matter whether ornot ancient ones designed us?”

123’s tone was tense. “Our microor-ganisms, our primitive assemblers... theykill your ‘aliens’ at the volcanic sea floorvents. They dissolve my specimens fromthree million years ago if given theslightest chance. Every form of theprofusion of life that was here before theGreat Discontinuity suddenly vanished.Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“What should it tell me?” 941 said,puzzled. His question was sincere, but inhim a horror began to grow.

“The first assemblers, from which wearose, wiped out everything!” 123practically shouted. “They dissolvedeverything except fossils and materials soremote they could not find them. Archae-ologists’ specimens, carefully preserved,and your ‘aliens’ from the ocean floor areall that remains of a world teeming withlife. In its place we have the Jankx and afew primitive, competing species fromwhich we arose!”

She could not go on. Jankx wept bya quivering release of pressurized gases.123 was weeping.

941 contemplated the disaster ofwhich she spoke. He saw primitiveassemblers tearing down the huge lifechain 123 had studied ever since she wasold enough to have a purpose in life. Thelong vanished cities of the ancient ones?The trees, the animals, the sea life thatonce flourished? All those things whichhe and his fellow exobiologists sought inthe void? They had been here, a fewmillion years ago, and now they weregone, destroyed by primitive assemblers.And in their place? Jankx and a few otherthings made of assemblers!

A story from the literature of theancient ones came to 941 suddenly. Alittle girl, Pandora, opened a box, and outcame the evils of the world. 941 had a

brink and stared downward. Even before123 smashed upon jagged rocks fifteenhundred feet below, the echoes of 941’scries of agonized despair reached those inthe resort, and rescue groups were on theway.

***The reconstruction of 123 was as

good as it could be, but even the medicaltechnology of the Jankx had its limits.Their bodies were evolved from coloniesof inorganic assemblers, which multi-plied and differentiated to form operativesubassemblies according to designswhich were encoded in such a way theJankx scientists had yet to fully deciphermany of them.

The Jankx traced their evolutionback through several million years to apoint known as the Great Discontinuity,when they appeared to have sprung intoexistence. Before that, a great profusionof other species had existed, and appar-ently all of them departed or vanished atthe same time. A quest of the Jankxculture, a “holy grail” they sought tofind, was the explanation of their originand the fate of the earlier inhabitants ofthe planet.

The only things Jankx archaeolo-gists had discovered were dried samplesof countless species within which therewere indecipherable patterns, patterns fartoo similar to the patterns 941 had shown123 that night at the symposium. Thearchaeologists had been on the verge ofpublishing their pattern findings whenthe exobiologists had called theiremergency meeting. The competitivenessand secrecy of the two groups defiedexplanation, yet it existed.

941 stayed with 123, day and night,for three full years. Within her, tinyassemblers sought to put the pieces backtogether. 941 warmed 123 when shecooled and drained her heat when hertemperature rose. When she needed them,he supplied the purest of elements.Finally, when she began to stir with signsof consciousness, 941 held her, whisper-ing when she softly called his name,which she had done throughout the fallto what she had expected would be herdeath. For a long while, it was not clear if123 would ever truly be herself again.

One morning, as the sun rose and


flash of a new horror and rose in a panic.“Come with me,” he shouted, anddragged 123 to her feet. He would notexplain, as he rushed to his laboratoryand confronted his supervisor.

“What are you upset about, 941?”444 asked. 444 was the laboratorymanager. He had never seen 941 like this.941 stumbled through the story, assistedby 123.

“But what’s the point?” asked 444.“It’s project 877B,” 941 said

vehemently. “It’s got to stop!”“But that’s your project!”“I know, but it has dangers we never

considered.”“What?”“You’ve heard 123’s hypothesis.

What do you think of it?”“Plausible!”“But then, what about 877B!”“What about it?”“We’re trying to synthesize organic

life!”123 added, “If you succeed, what

you synthesize will be immune to ourmicroorganisms.”

“So?” 444 was showing signs ofuneasiness.

“So if we create a form of organic lifeimmune to our assemblers,” 941 said,“perhaps it will be able to tear downassemblers. Suppose life like that wereturned loose on our planet, to flourish;suppose it were able to dissolve theassemblers of which we’re made. Whatwould that mean to us?”

“It’s too late,” said 444.“What do you mean?” demanded

941.“You’ve been away for years, with

123,” 444 reminded him. “In that time,877B passed a major hurdle. The aliens?Your group found a way to modify theinformation pattern so the aliens areimmune to our assemblers. They call thealtered pattern XB4. It’s like the originalpattern with the addition of a diamondfiber web, and it replicates itself. Lookout that window.”

Outside the window, 941 and 123could see little. “What’s there to see?”123 asked.

“Don’t you see a faint, greenish tingeon those hills?” 941’s circuits felt as ifthey were overloading.

How to Submit Stories to LifeQuestPlease send submissions to:Cryonics magazine, Alcor LifeExtension Foundation, 7895 E.Acoma Drive #110, Scottsdale,AZ 85260, or email them [email protected].

If in hard copy format, pleasealso include a diskette (textfiles orone of these: Microsoft Word 97& 6.0/95, or Pagemaker 6.5. Gra-phics (jpg/gif preferred) should bein color if available, as these arecompatible with Alcor’s web site.LifeQuest stories may be publish-ed on Alcor’s web site barringagreed restrictions to the contrary.

Alcor’s anticipated rightsinclude one-time publication inCryonics magazine and web siteinclusion, nothing more, unlessprovided for in writing. Additionalinformation on submissions maybe found inside the front cover ofCryonics.

You can help others see whywhat Alcor does makes sense, bysharing your feelings, yourdeepest insights with them, in theform of LifeQuest fiction (shortstories) or poems. If you have avision, put it in writing and submitit for consideration.

BACK ISSUES OFLifeQuest

If you’re enjoying thesestories, you’ll be happy toknow that issues #1 and #2 ofLifeQuest are already avail-able on Alcor’s website, under“links.” For ease of findingthem, the URLs are:

http://www.alcor.org/lifeqst1.htm

andhttp://www.alcor.org/

lifeqst2.htm

Issues #3 through #7 will, withtime, be reprinted in CryonicsMagazine, but an influx ofnew fiction could make this adrawn-out process. If youwould like to see the backissues posted to Alcor’swebsite more quickly, let usknow. We try to give firstpriority to projects we knowwill make the most AlcorMembers safest and happiest.

“Don’t tell me...”“You were the one who always

insisted life had to prove itself in thenatural environment.”

“But I didn’t mean...”“No matter what you meant. It’s out

there, now, and let’s hope it doesn’t havea taste for assemblers!”

“It doesn’t,” 123 laughed. “If it did,we wouldn’t be here talking, now.”

941 and 123 dined at the top of thetallest tower in the city that night. 123could not contain her excitement.

“This is it, our chance to redeemourselves,” she said. “We can coax XB4into patterns matching those specimenswe archaeologists have preserved,thousands upon thousands of vanishedlife forms, safe and accounted for. Thesethings can come to life again; the ancientones can once more walk this Earth.”

There was uncontrollable tremblingas she spoke, nibbling on a sliver of icyquartz.

“941, you and your exobiologistshad better get ready. Before you know it,you’re going to have to deal with a trulyextraordinary turn of events. We’re goingto recreate the all species in the life chainthat created us. This time we can worktogether, to find ways we can protecteach of us from the other.” l


Profile Editor: Russell Cheney

Alcor Member Profile

Member Name: Klaus Reinhard.

Profile Editor: Russell Cheney.

Date joined Alcor: September 16, 1991.

Place of birth: Braunschweig, Germany.

City and country of current residence: Kiel, Germany.

Date of birth: May 9, 1959.

Occupation: Computer programmer in a German bank.

Marital status: Single.

Children: None.

Educational background: Study in computer science. In high school and at the university, I had the best pos-sible marks in the exams.

Height / Weight: 180 cm / 59 kg.

Favorite author: Arthur C. Clarke.

Favorite book: Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler.

Book you are currently reading: Diaspora by Greg Egan.

Favorite TV programs: Buck Rogers, Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 (I recommend these only forentertainment, not because they contain any correct prognosis of the future).

KLAUS REINHARD

With the Profile column, we wish to introduce the Alcor membership and the Cryonics Magazine readership toa wider view of itself, by communicating member ideas, beliefs and background. Alcor has hundreds of fas-

cinating members who may now not be widely known in the cryonics community. We intend the Profile to bea relatively easy, informal medium to help provide some of these members the broader attention they deserve.


Political affiliation: I agree to the positions of the Libertarians much more than to those of any other group, butunfortunately in Germany there is no Libertarian party.

Religion: In my life, cryonics plays a similar role as the religion in the life of other people. However, the reasonsthat I am a cryonicist (scientific evidence, logical considerations, and extrapolations of historical trends), aredifferent from the reasons why most people believe in their religions.

Personal strengths: Logical thinking.

Personal weaknesses: My disease (juvenileonset diabetes).

Personal philosophy: Leben und leben lassen (Live and let others live).

Shortterm goal: To increase the number of cryonicists in Germany and to improve the possibilities for cryonicshere.

Longterm goal: To live as long as possible, until all diseases including ageing can be cured (I do not believethat there is a high chance for me to reach this goal without cryonics, but as long as I can I will try).

Immediate goal upon reanimation: Enjoy my new body, which may be artificial or virtual, but will most likelynot be handicapped by any disease.

Longerterm goals upon reanimation: 1. Help revive others; 2. Explore the universe.

Favorite subject in school: Mathematics.

Leastliked subject: Sports.

Greatest fear: Dying and not being preserved.

First became interested in life extension: I have always, even as a child, considered life as the highest value,and have never accepted an end of life. As a child and teenager I believed (without thinking too hard about it)that medicine would conquer all diseases within my lifetime. Later, when I thought more about the complexityof problems in biology and medicine, I became interested in all means of life extension, including cryonics.

Most effective thing you’ve done to promote your own longevity (other than being an Alcor member):Consequent treatment of my disease; healthy eating (calorie restriction with adequate nutrition); not smoking;avoiding alcohol and other drugs.

Least: Not taking high doses of Bvitamins in my youth. If I had done this, I would eventually have preventedthe diabetes. But at that time I did not know anything about the possible protective effect of Bvitamins againstthe autoimmunereaction which destroys the insulinproducing cells.

Why you are a cryonicist: Because I see, as high probability, that future science will conquer death. I have evenwritten a book about that. The full text is now online: http://members.aol.com/klausrei/buch.htm

Advice you have for other cryonicists: Despite all difficulties, do not give up. The unlimited life you caneventually win justifies all efforts.

l


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MOVING?

cryoprotective agent concentration, hesaid, close to the levels needed forvitrification. His work did not applyeither extracellular cryoprotection norfreeze-blocking. With the addition ofthese measures, Dr. Fahy indicated thatthere is a high degree of confidence thatvitrification can be obtained.

Dr. Fahy’s presentation includeddiscussion of experimental models,automated perfusion to accommodate hisinvestigations, and descriptions of howhis work would address both organtransplantation research and brainpreservation studies. The complexity of

what he reported does not lend itself toeven a summary as part of this review,however. Those who want those detailswill need to buy a copy of the videotapewhen it is released.

The work that Dr. Fahy reported isintegral with the work of Dr. Wowk,whose talk preceded Fahy’s. The samecomments on Dr. Wowk are appropriatefor Dr. Fahy, as to the implications oftheir work toward the development ofwhat someday will be perfected humansuspended animation. (It is intriguing, aswell as deeply puzzling, that such workproceeds, almost invisible to the publicwho may soon benefit from it. Perhapsthe imminent demonstration of organ

(continued from page 22) preservation in animals, with subsequenttransplantation, will help to give theirwork more of the acknowledgement itdeserves.)

This article covered only the scien-tific presentations of the first day ofthe conference. The evening event ofthe first day and the presentations ofthe final day will be the subject of acontinuation article in the next issue.

l


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