has cryonics taken the wrong path?
The unnoticed conflict between
rescue technology and futurist philosophies.
by
A Quiet Hero
A
friend of mine died this winter. He wasn't interested in cryonics, but what
he didn't do is not the point of this essay. What he did do has saved
uncounted lives, maybe including yours. The way this man went about his life
has given me a clue to what I think is a major hidden problem with cryonics.
Douglas Crichlow was a year behind me at
In
1967 ambulance services in all but the largest cities were provided not by
hospitals or fire departments. They were provided by the local funeral
homes. If you were injured in an automobile accident, the hearse took you to
the hospital. The driver had no oxygen, no CPR, no remote understanding of
trauma treatment. If you didn't make it to the hospital, well, you were
already in the hearse. And in these days, before airbags, shock-absorbing
body frames, and high seatbelt use, there were a
Doug
was a bit overweight, walked with a limp from a childhood injury, was kind
of a nerd, and was a freshman who thought he knew how the world needed to be
changed. But he was also amiable, a persuasive speaker, religious without
being a pest about it, and well read in a wide variety of subjects. In his
favorite subjects, he seemed to have read everything in print.
Doug's enthusiasm about emergency services was contagious with many
students, including his roommate, Steve Collier, and several other older
students, notably Derrick Warner. The three of them and several other
students formed the DePauw Volunteer Fire Brigade. They even talked me into
it. The local fire department scoffed at these students -- until the local
newspaper caught on fire and threatened to burn down Greencastle's entire
downtown. 20 DePauw students showed up to haul and man hoses, fetch food for
the firemen, and stayed to clean up. That made a BIG impression.
By
the time Doug was a senior, the DePauw Fire Brigade was an ongoing
organization working on fires on campus and around the city. (It still
exists today, and this initial cooperation between "town and gown" was so
successful that every DePauw student now has a requirement of community
service.) By this time Derrick had graduated and was living in Greencastle,
so he, Steve Collier, and Doug turned their attention to the problem of no
ambulance service in
After the Blizzard of 1978, Doug moved to
You
won't find much about Doug Crichlow on the internet, although one important
summary of modern disaster management approaches is available at the
following
link.
However, hundreds of people influenced by Doug are now fire fighters, EMTs,
emergency room physicians, and emergency management directors for towns and
cities all over America. He didn't invent emergency services; but if you are
ever injured with your life in danger, and an ambulance with trained EMTs or
paramedics shows up to rescue you -- instead of a hearse and mortician, you
can thank Douglas Crichlow and a handful of others like him.
Comparing EMS
and Cryonics
Although I helped on the student fire department, I wasn't much under Doug's
influence at college. At the time, I was deeply into my major of theatre and
just not that interested in fighting fires and saving lives. In retrospect,
I think I was also too ignorant about the world and not ready to notice what
needed to be changed.
I
wasn't open to ideas about changing the world until 1976 when I met a
somewhat similar missionary for saving lives -- Mike Darwin. Like Doug, Mike
was well read in many areas and intensely well read in the things that
interested him most: cryonics/cryobiology and emergency medicine. He had a
reserve of energy that seemed inexhaustible and he could argue his points
persuasively. And by 1976, there had been a couple of deaths in my family,
and my mother and both grandmothers would die in the next year and a half.
Mortality was sitting on my couch staring at me every night and I was ready
to listen to Mike telling me there was a solution.
Today emergency medical services are available just about everywhere in the
Cryonics, on the other hand, is in some ways still stuck in the 1960's. It's
not popular and still looks like a cult to many people. So far it does not
appear to be on its way to having a lasting effect on the world. A handful
of people have labored mightily to bring forth a lot of suggestive evidence
but not much proof that they can achieve what they plan. Why did
Emergency Medical Services have not been around too much longer than
cryonics, yet the idea of
There is another very subtle difference that might play into the different
levels of success, however -- a difference in the main players. As unusual
as Doug Crichlow seemed to me at that youthful stage of our lives, he was
still much more in the mainstream of American life than was anyone in
cryonics then -- and few, if any, cryonics leaders could be said to be part
of the American mainstream since that time. Doug was a moderate Republican
and he became a respected and successful government leader and businessman.
He had a long, loving marriage to his wife and was the devoted father of two
daughters. He was a sincere Christian without being confrontational about
it. He had no goal for his work other than to save lives. He treated
emergency medical services as the standard service every community should
provide and he didn't load the idea down with considerations of politics,
religion, or race. There were no Bible verses printed on the sides of the
ambulance; no "free Gospel reading with every rescue." It was just good
medicine.
In
contrast, just about all of the early leaders of cryonics had some
combination of extreme minority views and were "outsiders" in many ways.
Most could be labeled as rebels -- atheist or agnostic, libertarian or
Randian or even anarchist, and they usually had family relationships outside
of what most Americans consider the "ordinary" way to live (one-partner,
heterosexual marriage with children). A large percentage of cryonics leaders
and cryonics members have been childless couples, long-term singles, or
homosexual.
Even
more importantly, Robert Ettinger and many others of the early advocates for
cryonics proclaimed that cryonics was part of a radical change in human
nature, that humans would eventually turn into something "beyond" human --
immortal, omniscient, space traveling super-beings, maybe in the form of
robots or computer software. The concept of cryonics as an especially
advanced form of emergency rescue service became clouded in a fog of
transhumanist evangelism. I have even heard people argue that they support
cryonics because they think it will help to overturn religion. For an
immense percentage of Americans, these concepts are bewildering or even
terrifying. "Our grandchildren are not going to be human? And these people
want to destroy our religion? What kind of crazy people want that?" How
could we expect that people turned off by what they see as weird or
offensive futurist ideas would be turned on to the concept of cryonics? Who
wants to be part of a future that will be inhospitable to their beliefs and
ideas -- led by the people who are often gleefully telling them this?
While this was certainly not the intent of Robert Ettinger, cryonics may
have veered from being a mainstream medical rescue technology almost from
the beginning. "Like calls to like." Perhaps the personalities and attitudes
of cryonicists in the beginning actively put off the mainstream and only
appealed to other people swimming down a narrow waterway off to the side.
It
would be interesting to replay history and see what would have happened had,
say, Doug Crichlow and Mike Darwin met at the right time in their lives.
Would they have bonded and worked together in their common interest in
saving lives? Their combined knowledge and drive could have had a dynamic
effect on others. Or would their personalities and very different
philosophical views have bounced them apart like the opposing poles of
magnets? Would a more mainstream, Christian, family-oriented approach to
cryonics have made a difference to the early success of cryonics? If Robert
Ettinger had been a religious, observant Jew, could this idea have become a
part of general medical culture, or even become popular with a particular
sub-group of American Jews? Or is the concept itself too far beyond the
mainstream to have ever appealed to the people that Doug Crichlow got
involved in his grand idea? Could anyone with a personality and background
much different from Robert Ettinger have even come up with the concept of
cryonics?
We
were who we were, of course, and we can't go back and change that; we can
only go forward from where we are. But we can become more aware of where we
are. The really interesting thing is that these options still face us;
although I don't think we have ever called these choices "options" before.
We can still choose where we will place our focus for the next two decades
-- how much emphasis to place on medical rescue, how much to stick with our
appeal to futurists and computer technicians, how much to appeal to the
mainstream culture.
Note
that these choices we have to make are not mutually exclusive. We must
increase our understanding and ability to handle the medical end of
cryonics. If we wish to attract more mainstream members, we want to do so
without losing the futurists among us. But we need to make these decisions
consciously and be aware that they are decisions.
Transhumanists, futurists,
and cryonics
Would a greater emphasis on medical rescue have made cryonics more popular?
How much was the public and medical involvement with cryonics damaged by its
association with the concepts of physical immortality, future superhumans,
expansion into space, libertarianism and anarchy, and an underlying
antagonism toward religion and "traditional family values"? Would
ambulance-based rescue services have been given a chance if presented with
such philosophical baggage?
Mike
Darwin and others liked to shock friends with scenarios of what options
might exist for future humans: group sex in free fall; the ability to change
genders daily or to choose the "hermaphrodite option;" the ability to make
immense changes to one's brain, like implantable language chips or pleasure
switches; the ability to make startling changes to one's body, like
functional wings, blue fur, or replacing your skull and other bones with
titanium. Keith Henson's favorite scenario was making ten thousand duplicate
copies of himself and sending them out into the galaxy to explore. They
would all meet in a few millennia for a party on the far side of the galaxy
to share information, swap tales, and plan their move to other galaxies. It
was interesting to watch the division at parties, as some people moved
toward Mike, Keith, and others and as just as many moved into other rooms
completely.
Of
course, these very ideas attracted many people to cryonics in the early
years. Many of these people didn't care about or even completely understand
the basic purpose of cryonics -- to save lives. They simply saw it as part
of something that was interesting to talk about, or possibly just as a tool
that they might be able to use to get them to a future that interests them
more than today's reality. And since they were most interested in the
future, they often did not spend enough time in the present to focus on the
hard tasks of learning physiology and chemistry, getting EMT/paramedic
training, writing technical reports, evaluating procedures, doing both
laboratory and literature research, and the other nitty-gritty daily details
necessary to make cryonics a survival technology where success means "saving
lives." Instead, too many of them (including me) focused on how to make
cryonics popular, where success means "gaining members."
Now
I must admit that some of these visions of the future attracted me to
cryonics: Even though I had read science fiction for many years, this was
the first time that I actually envisioned myself as part of the future. And
in 1977, it was easy to get into cryonics "on the ground floor," to see that
I could be a major part of changing the world. Cryonics was not only a
solution to a problem of life and death; it was a grand adventure and a
chance to defy authority (that was my generation, remember).
So I
am stuck here with contemplating whether or not another pathway would have
been better for the success of cryonics, while acknowledging that that
pathway might well have not attracted me to cryonics at all. And I must
contemplate how much the choices of my friends and myself over the past 25
years have prevented or delayed the success of cryonics, as well as how they
have advanced it.
And
I must further admit that an over-emphasis on future technology is probably
inherent in the very concept of cryonics. We cannot rescue our cryonics
members now. That can only be done by medical personnel of the future. We
are attempting to move these patients through time to a hospital of the
future. Before we invest our money, our time, and our very lives in such a
speculative pursuit, we have to imagine the kinds of futures that will allow
for success. For the limited technological and scientific understanding of
most humans, however, these futures do not appear to be in any conceivable
straight line from today's reality. And most people simply do not have the
imagination to conceive of how the world could change in 100 years or more.
Even the writers of science fiction and futurist speculation, whom one would
think would have a better grasp on the future, have trouble developing a
plausible, coherent vision of a future reality, with rare exceptions.
Where are the medical
personnel?
We
understand -- or should understand -- that cryonics is not about saving
"dead people." It is about redefining the limits of "death." Cryonics is the
last step of medical technology, not an alternate type of storage of the
dead. "Death" means a permanent cessation of life. If a comatose patient is
labeled as "brain dead" by physicians, yet eventually wakes up and resumes
his life, the newspaper headline should not be, "Brain-dead patient
revives!" It should be, "Patient mistakenly labeled as brain-dead revives!"
Likewise, if cryonics works and these patients are eventually resuscitated
to their conscious existence, then we can show that they also were
"mistakenly labeled as dead."
So,
where are the medical rescue personnel in cryonics? Over the past 40 years
of this endeavor, perhaps no more than a dozen people who had a deep
scientific understanding of the principles of cryonics have actually
committed themselves to the scientific research or medical rescue aspects of
cryonics. And only three of them (Jerry Leaf, Mike Darwin, and Steven
Harris) started from a physical medicine background (and only Harris had an
M.D.) Yes, other physicians have been members or board members, but most
have had specialties in psychiatry and were involved much more in the
business and promotion side of cryonics than the medical side. (Alcor has
had other paramedics and nurses as employees and volunteers; but none have
stayed involved long enough to provide many solid long-term contributions.)
Why
have the medical people avoided cryonics? Certainly there has been little
money in cryonics, especially compared to medicine. Leaf,
It's a long list:
1).
We still haven't done a good enough job explaining how cryonics fits into
the field of medicine. Too many medically trained people don't "get"
cryonics, don't see where the "life-saving" comes in.
2).
Even for those medically trained people who do "get cryonics," we haven't
placed our focus on the medical requirements, so these bright people don't
see where their niches are.
3).
Cryonicists on average have not been nearly as welcoming of medically
trained people as we would like to think we have. Some Alcor administrators
over the years have been actively hostile to medical people or generally
hostile to bright people with new ideas. Yes, these ideas are often naive
and simplistic, but none of us automatically understood the subtleties of
cryonics the first time we heard about it, either. Others gave us the chance
to learn. Can we do less for physicians and nurses?
Even
worse in some ways may have been people like me when I was Alcor's
President. Under my leadership, we talked about needing medical personnel;
but we weren't ready to receive medical volunteers and employees because we
had no plan for using them. We certainly missed out on people who could have
helped us. Active hostility can be attributed to the problems of an
individual. But lack of preparation and the lack of a plan for bringing in
new technical volunteers or employees lower the reputation of the entire
organization and even cryonics in general.
4).
The very fact we can't show that cryonics produces "survivors" removes some
of the excitement and motivation for why most emergency personnel choose
their jobs -- saving lives is exciting and gives the rescuer a strong sense
of pride. Many medical personnel in general get much of their sense of
self-worth from helping people recover. A patient saying "thank you for
helping me" is a motivation as strong as income. Waiting a century or two
for the thank-yous is probably not going to provide the same emotional rush.
As one medical student said to me, "I just can't get excited about patients
who don't talk back."
5)
Several people have written in the past that one of the biggest problems
with improving cryonics techniques is that we can get very little feedback.
We can't show better survival results from changing techniques, even if we
tried them on animals, because the set of processes of dying, fluid
replacement for cryoprotection, and cool-down to storage temperature has so
many variables. And since we don't know how to revive even animals from
cryopreservation, the end result of one research project can look pretty
much like another. (Yes, we can show small incremental improvements in
certain narrowly-defined details, but nothing that will impress people
outside of cryonics.) In medicine, success or failure can be measured in
terms of "who survives and for how long." We don't have that in cryonics,
and it is frustrating for everyone. Why become a medical rescue person in
cryonics if you can't tell if you are making a difference with your
knowledge and your presence?
6).
We only do 2-5 cryopreservations a year. Rescue workers can do that many
rescue cases on one busy day. Emergency room physicians can have that many
cases going on at the same time. Even if we had rescue personnel as
full-time or part-time employees, how do we keep them busy? Giving tours?
Measuring chemicals? Since we have too few suspensions, we would have to do
animal research to keep people usefully occupied and to learn techniques and
build teams -- which is expensive and uncertain and maybe pretty useless
unless you already have the medical/scientific people in place doing the
planning. Many people have told cryonicists that they need to do more animal
research, like Mike and Jerry used to do.
The
expense of research is a major difficulty, of course, but the costs may not
be where you think they are. We could find the money for any individual
experiment. But the federal and practical requirements for doing animal
research are much more difficult to follow than they were 25 years ago. You
pretty much need a full-time person just to make sure you are following all
of the reporting and filing requirements, plus the requirements for animal
care and handling, medical waste handling, and security of your medications.
Many cities are hostile to animal research and will add extra requirements
or simply refuse to permit it all. And we must not forget that doing animal
research in the same facility in which you care for your patients will
subject those patients to higher risk from animal research protestors.
Mike
Darwin once pointed out, quite rightly, that our need to protect our
patients has made cryonics organizations much more conservative and less
likely to take risks than we were 25 years ago. It may be time to increase
the further legal and physical separation between patient care, suspension
rescue teams, and research. In order to make progress, someone has to be
able to take risks.
7).
Cryonics' dependence on future technologies -- that might take a century or
more to develop -- distances the result from the action so far that the
results are beyond the manageable limit of most people's imaginations. It
becomes hard to take the concept seriously, and this distance probably works
to take away the sense of urgency for the younger cryonicists and younger
medical personnel alike.
8).
Cryonics organization staff are also distanced from the results and may be
willing to make and tolerate more mistakes because "our friends in the
future" will take care of everything.
9).
Our emphasis on telling everyone how great things will be in the future both
chases people away by making us sound like a cult and takes energy and time
away from what our focus should be -- making sure that we are doing well
enough with rescues, perfusion, and cool-down today that we can be confident
we ARE saving individual lives and not merely DNA for cloning.
10).
I'm not sure if this one is more cause or more effect. Jerry Leaf and Mike
Darwin also had that incredibly valuable obsession with soaking up knowledge
and with getting the details right that the best medical personnel have.
Such obsessions are time-consuming, expensive, and annoying to those who are
not similarly obsessed. This approach doesn't make for big jumps in
capability because it focuses on small steps -- a thousand preparations
before the first small step, and a thousand more for every step after that.
It's not sexy; it doesn't make for good public relations stories; it doesn't
get the non-medical people excited and involved. It's hard work. I see a
severe shortage of these obsessions in cryonics organizations today.
It's
the sort of thing that Doug Crichlow did well. And in the
11).
And finally, there is one possible reason that is so big that "Number 11" is
inadequate to label it. This may be a difficult truth for some of us to
accept -- we may chase away medical personnel and other helpful people
because we are so focused on ourselves.
Almost everyone who has committed themselves to working in cryonics has done
so because they wanted this idea to work for them -- they wanted to save
their own lives. Sure, they were willing to let other people get their lives
saved, too; but they didn't get involved in order to do good for others. And
therefore many cryonicists, and even cryonics organization staff, may stop
well short of the maximum effort needed to make this idea work. Doug
Crichlow was primarily motivated by saving the lives of other people. So are
most emergency medical personnel. They never run out of people who need help
and so they never run out of motivation to keep going.
We
may not be able to get many medical people involved in cryonics if it
remains primarily about saving ourselves. I still maintain that the decision
makers, public speakers, and Directors for cryonics organizations should be
suspension members of that organization. But we need to make room in
cryonics for medically trained people whose major motivation it is to help
others. They may be the ones who bring new knowledge and innovations and who
care about the details, because it is the right way to do things. And to get
these people, we must change our approach to the other problems I listed
above.
Where do we go from here?
I am
not trying to promote one cryonics organization over another in this
article. I write more about Alcor because I know it best. But I want to
emphasize that there has never been a cryonics organization with more than
3-4 people at one time actively promoting and developing medical and
scientific improvements. Even today, after four decades, no organization is
better than one traffic collision away from a major loss of biomedical
understanding and capability. No current organization looks marginally
competent when compared to even a tiny hospital in a rural town.
Most
employees and Directors of all of the cryonics organizations are people who
became interested in cryonics because they are interested in the future and
want to stay alive as long as possible. They became actively involved
because they are responsible people and they didn't see anyone else stepping
forward. But they are typically writers, business owners, attorneys,
accountants, life insurance sales people, etc. with the occasional engineer
(and one librarian) tossed into the mix. They are not medically inclined and
may not appreciate the medical issues and the need for detail involved.
Today's organizations must take the initiative to make cryonics not just
popular, but to make cryonics WORK. This might mean turning down interviews,
spending money on research instead of ads, maybe even placing less focus on
membership growth because management time and financial resources are going
into upgrading our rescue capability instead.
Our Choices
I
expect a lot of disagreement with my proposition and I encourage you members
to express your opinions. We must have that discussion now. If no one is
interested in follow-up to this article, then I may as well devote the rest
of my days to gardening, home repair, and dusting my book collection. I
always thought that my cryonics participation would return results in an
increased chance of a long lifespan and adventures in the future. But I'm no
longer so confident, and I'm no longer sure that I made the best decisions
when I had the opportunity to lead.
Let's look at one key decision that was made a year ago as an example of the
confusion we are faced with. Alcor hired a promotion/production company to
produce a DVD for Alcor. It is called The Limitless Future: A documentary
exploring mankind's quest for a long and healthy life. This production is
basically a well-produced infomercial about cryonics; very obviously aimed
at making a more mainstream audience comfortable with the basic concept. I
(not being mainstream) felt very uncomfortable after I saw it the first time
but I didn't know why. I showed it to a young friend who had just been
introduced to cryonics and who had watched the Discovery Channel documentary
(Immortality on Ice) a couple of weeks previously. She put her finger on the
problem right away -- it was an attempt to appeal to the people least likely
to be interested in the concept. She said that even with all of the fine
camera work, narration, and intelligent heads on view, it was less
interesting than one live lunch with a real cryonicist. Where was the sense
of adventure, of changing the world?
So
here I am in this article arguing against too much emphasis on that futurist
radicalism that got me involved in the first place. But that doesn't mean I
am now happy with the focus of The Limitless Future. I am still
uncomfortable with it; but I have added a second reason -- it doesn't make a
good case for cryonics being a workable part of emergency medicine. But then
we as cryonicists haven't given the producers anything in that direction to
promote, except for a vague dream of the future.
What
do you say, Alcor members (and other cryonicists)? Do we put our energies
into medical rescue? Do we push back all of our talk about transhumanism,
uploading, the Singularity, politics, and conflicts with religion? Or do we
focus on the high tech community and talk more about the future? Do we try
to appeal to the mainstream of the English-speaking world? Do we try to
broaden our focus beyond ourselves?
Remember, the question is not, "What do you want us to do?" The question is
something that should be much more important to you -- "What approach will
be most effective in saving lives?"