More also touches on a sore spot that is really the elephant in the room. In a candid moment, he admits that the science of cryonics at the moment is weak. “We need more evidence,” he says, “This isn’t a faith-based practice.” Or, I think he means, it shouldn’t be.
THE NEUROSEPARATOR
A few minutes later, during the next intermission, I’m curious to see how well they’re able to get people rapidly cryopreserved, so I sidle up next to Aaron Drake, Alcor’s medical response director. I’m guessing he would be the best witness to the sorts of resistance and hostility that More described. Bald, chunky, slow-talking, and reassuring, Drake reminds me of a calm, competent EMT (which he used to be in a previous life). He’s exactly the sort of guy you’d want to rely on, if you’re dead.
There’s just one problem. Now that I’m a few feet away from him, I can’t stop thinking about patient 113. John Monts. Remember him? The guy who underwent a neuroseparation. Drake was the guy who did that.
Now that Drake and I are facing each other, and now that Drake is waiting for me to say something, I’m really wishing I didn’t know about John Monts. Because all I can think about is that Drake is the guy who performed Monts’s . . . neuroseparation.
But Drake is polite and friendly, and he’s waiting expectantly. So I ask him how much progress they’ve made, because when John Monts died in 2012, several days passed before his head was cryopreserved.
With vigilance, Drake says, they’ve been improving their response times. In the ’90s, there was a 30 percent chance of getting Alcor at your bedside at the time of death. By 2012 it was 86 percent.
The best news, though, is that at some point Alcor won’t need to rely on families at all. He talks excitedly about various alert technologies that are coming online. Of course there are the companies that already offer the service of sending a response if you hit a panic button. (Think of the infamous “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” Life Alert commercials of the ’90s.) But Drake’s dream is more ambitious. He sees a future of wearable devices that detect heart rate, breathing, and motion (or lack thereof) and send a signal to Alcor: “He’s fallen and he really, really, can’t get up.”
As Drake is talking excitedly about the potential for monitoring, it seems as though he’s also envisioning a new, reinvented community. Gone are the days when we all had a family and neighbors who supported us and watched over us. But now, in their place, there are devices and monitors and information. That’s our new community. That’s our new family.
THE FUTURE BEGINS TOMORROW
In all of this talk about science, there’s one piece that’s missing. It’s the one piece that no one, yet, has touched on. Money.
If you’re planning to be frozen for a thousand years, you need to protect your assets. You also need to make sure that someone is taking care of you, so you don’t end up like James Hiram Bedford, parked in a self-storage unit surrounded by moldering furniture. And, of course, if you’re lucky enough to wake up on the other end, you’d want to make sure there’s enough money in your bank account to buy a cup of really strong espresso.
But how?
It just so happens that there’s someone in the room who has thought about this. A lot. And he has a plan.
Rudi Hoffman steps onto the stage, sporting a ruddy complexion and green blazer. He looks and acts like he might be a used-car salesman or your local high school football coach. Perhaps in a previous life he was. But now he’s the financial genius behind Alcor’s success.
His brilliant strategy has been to pitch cryonics as a goal for the masses. It’s not just for the megarich, he suggests archly. It’s for everyone. It’s for everyone in this room. It’s for you. You just need to plan ahead.
What follows is a call-and-response litany that’s worthy of a Baptist revival. “How much for a whole body cryopreservation?” he asks the audience. “Two hundred thousand dollars; that’s right, folks. And how much for a neuro? Yup: ninety thousand.” (A “neuro” is cryospeak for the preservation of the head only.)
Hardly anyone can afford that kind of cash, he warns. “Cryonics is an expensive business. If you think you’ve made adequate plans, think again.” It’s at this point that, channeling Nikita Khrushchev, he slips a loafer off his left (not the right) foot and pounds the podium for emphasis.
A moment later, the loafer is safely back where it belongs, and Hoffman goes on to talk about inflation, market instability, and other technical financial terms that seem to be designed to cement his credibility as a financial adviser. But then, like a seasoned salesman going in for the kill, he brings us back down to earth with the punch line. The secret, he says proudly, with the demeanor of a preacher about to reveal the way to heaven, is—wait for it—life insurance.
If you have a good life insurance policy, Hoffman says, you can use that to finance the costs of cryopreservation. You pay just a little bit every month, then the money that would normally be paid at the time of your death to your surviving family members is paid instead to Alcor. It’s like taking out a mortgage on immortality. (That slogan is mine, by the way, not Hoffman’s. But I think it has potential, don’t you?)
Then he segues into a complex discussion of rates and plans that leaves me befuddled. The cryonauts around me are furiously taking notes, though. And the man to my left has a pocket calculator on the table in front of him, which he’s prodding pensively.
“This is complicated stuff, folks,” Hoffman warns us. “It’s going to take a lot of money.” Then: “We don’t even know how much it’s going to cost.”
That is probably the scariest part of Hoffman’s lecture, at least to judge by the expressions on the faces of my fellow audience members. There are the costs of cryopreservation, of course, which can only be expected to increase as technology becomes more refined. And the costs of storage. And the costs of keeping up with advances in technology. So these cryonauts aren’t just gambling that the science will work, they’re also gambling that they’ll have enough money to pay for that science over the next thousand years.
CANCER GIRL VERSUS SKEPTICS
The conference is beginning to wrap up, but there’s one more person I want to meet before I leave. She’s a relative newcomer to the cryonics world. And yet, despite that, she’s become a cause célèbre for everyone in this room.
At some point in the fall of 2012, a little red button appeared in the upper right-hand corner of Alcor’s Web site. It said: HELP CRYOPRESERVE KIM SUOZZI. That’s all.
This link led to a page that explained that Kim had been fighting a glioblastoma, which is a particularly nasty brain tumor that tends to victimize young adults. Her affinity for cryonics is as inexplicable as her years-long struggle with cancer is inspiring, and I want to know more about her decision to be cryopreserved. I’ve just heard that she is here somewhere, and I want to meet her.
It turns out I don’t have to look far. Kim is sitting right behind me, at the rear of the auditorium, right next to the door. Despite all that she’s been through, she somehow looks younger than the Web site photo from a couple of years earlier. She has an unruly mop of short dark-brown hair and oversize glasses that, together with cheeks that look a little swollen, perhaps from the steroids that are often used to treat brain tumors, give her an appearance of owl-like wisdom. I notice that she moves slowly and carefully, as if her body can’t trust her brain, or vice versa. She speaks slowly too, with pauses and stumbles. But she’s warm, funny, articulate, and someone who is impossible not to empathize with.
I hear some of her story as we chat during a break, and the rest during a short presentation. She’d been a healthy college student, she says, up until about 2010, when she began having headaches that led to her cancer diagnosis. She underwent major surgery and did well for a brief period, but then had a relapse.
She told me she got the idea of cryopreservation back in college, but then it was hypothetical. What did a twenty-
year-old need with cryonics? She’d heard about the life-insurance approach to funding cryopreservation too. Still, how was that relevant to her? It turns out that it was very relevant. But after her relapse, when she decided cryonics was her best hope, she had no money and no life insurance.
Then her story appeared on the user-generated news site Reddit (where the Cancer Girl moniker appeared) and was picked up in local news outlets. Amazingly, she raised $50,000. Then Alcor got into the act and offered her a reduced price for whole-body cryopreservation ($90,000). She still needed more funding, though, and her appearance at this conference is designed at least in part to generate donations.
Given all of that interest and effort, I’m curious to know what she believes. As someone who has endured multiple treatments and tests, surely she must be skeptical of what science can achieve. Are the chances of success great enough?
When I pose this question to her, Kim’s answer seems scripted: “People say there’s no evidence that cryopreservation works. It’s still an experiment. Well, then, if this is an experiment, I’d rather be in the treatment group than in the control group.”
Fair enough. But participating in an experiment comes with burdens and hassles. This quest of hers is burning both time and money, neither of which she has much of. Is this really what she wants to be doing?
She never really answers that question, which is, I suppose, unanswerable. Instead, she focuses on the money, and she does so in a way that puts everything else in perspective.
“Is a chance of a second life worth two hundred thousand dollars?” she asks. In this audience, that’s a rhetorical question, so I just nod.
“Well,” she says, “I added everything up and my cancer treatment so far cost five hundred thousand. Can you believe that?”
Actually, I suspect that’s a conservative estimate, but I nod again.
Then comes her punch line: “How can anyone say I shouldn’t spend two hundred thousand on cryopreservation? The doctors who are telling me not to do this are the ones who told me I should do the usual cancer treatment. And after three years and half a million dollars, that failed. At least this might work.”
Touché. Cancer Girl: 1; skeptics: 0.
Kim died on January 17, 2013. As she’d hoped, she was cryopreserved, thanks to hundreds of donations. In a thousand years or so, we’ll see whether it was worth it. If you’re around then, look her up.
WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
Did Kim Suozzi have the right idea? Even if cryopreservation is a gamble, maybe a gamble is better than certain death. But there are also other risks that go along with cryopreservation. And those risks have nothing to do with response times or ice formation.
The conference is ending, and all of the cryonauts are milling around a picked-over table of Danishes. Then the place at the table next to me is taken by a tiny woman who seems to disappear in an oversize purple fleece pullover and baggy trousers. Her head of silver hair pokes up from the folds like a Christmas decoration. Now she turns her bright blue eyes on me and introduces herself as Maryann. Maryann tells me she’s been an Alcor member for twenty-one years, but she doesn’t seem proud of that record in the way that others do when they share their history. There’s no boastfulness there. She’s just stating a fact.
“You know, Rudi was the one who sold me my policy, and my husband’s. He died two years ago.”
I express my sympathies. Then I ask the utterly bizarre question that I’ve learned is routine in this crowd.
Was he cryopreserved?
Maryann shakes her head and stares off into the middle distance. She shakes her head again, but still doesn’t say anything. It seems like she has something to say, though, so I wait.
But as I do, I’m starting to see Maryann more clearly. She seems not just quiet, but also beaten down. Is she depressed? Sick? I’ve just met her a minute ago, and yet I’m already worried about her. I’m still wondering about this as she begins speaking in a low voice that’s hard to hear over the white noise of all the conversations around us.
She tells me the story of her husband at a volume that’s not much louder than a whisper. Her husband, Tom, had heard about Alcor and became fascinated—almost obsessed—by the idea of cryopreservation. He had been a paid-up member for years when he was hospitalized with pneumonia. His doctors said it was a minor problem, and that he’d be home in a few days. Except that he wasn’t.
She wipes away a tear and stares hard at the floor for a moment. The conversation around us has died down, and people are starting to head off to their rooms. The atrium is emptying quickly, and I suggest we find a place to sit, but Maryann just starts talking again as if she hasn’t heard me.
He got worse quickly, and was transferred to the ICU and put on a ventilator. She talked to his doctors, and told them about Alcor and cryopreservation. They said they’d cross that bridge when they came to it. And Maryann thought that was all she had to do.
Then things got complicated. Tom got worse quickly and had a cardiac arrest. He was resuscitated, but just barely.
Later that night the hospital called Maryann to say Tom had died. Despite years of planning and a clear understanding of Tom’s wish to be cryopreserved, in that moment, she completely forgot about cryonics. She didn’t think about it at all.
By the time she remembered, Tom’s body had been moved to the morgue and then to the funeral home. More than four days had gone by. Then it took more than a day to arrange an Alcor visit. At that point, she realized that an attempt to cryopreserve her husband was hopeless.
Maryann’s tears are flowing freely now, and I hand her a few napkins from the coffee table behind us. I put a hand on her shoulder. It’s all I can think of to do. Then I tell her it must have been awful for her.
“It was. It was the worst moment in my life. I really mean that. Knowing that this was the one thing he wanted more than anything else. And knowing that it was my responsibility. And that I forgot all about it. And there’s no going back. No way to do that over again.”
We think about that for a while. At least, I do. I can’t imagine what that must feel like. To hear Maryann tell it, cryopreservation had been Tom’s dream. It had become a huge part of his life. And then, at least from Maryann’s perspective, he’d missed his chance. And—again from her perspective—it had been her fault.
The atrium is almost empty now, except for us. She seems to notice this too, and checks the time on an incongruously oversize plastic sports watch. I should let her go. But there’s something that’s bothering me.
The Alcor membership was Tom’s idea, wasn’t it? She was going along with her husband? So is she still a member?
She nods uncertainly. “For now, I still am. But I think I’ll let it go this year. Mostly I just came back to see some old friends. They’re people Tom and I have known for years and years. But honestly, I don’t want to do it. It seems like too much fuss. I’d rather just go.”
Maryann says good-bye and shuffles off, leaving me thinking about what the promise of cryopreservation had brought into her life. It’s difficult indeed to hear her story and think of anything positive. Hopes were dashed. And there was more guilt than one person should have to deal with. For what?
And yet I suppose that’s not so different from what medicine does all the time. How many patients with cancer have I taken care of who have hoped for a cure, only to have those hopes disappear as suddenly and completely as Tom’s did? And certainly I’ve taken care of patients whose families have felt deep, inconsolable, and seemingly unending guilt because they weren’t able to support a loved one in the way that they had hoped to be able to. So Maryann and Tom’s story is hardly unique to the cryonics world. And it’s not fair to blame the technology that incited Tom’s dream any more than it’s fair to blame modern medicine for the hopes that my patients live with.
Still, I can’t help thinking that this technology has introduced
unnecessary misery into many lives, from the struggles that James Bedford’s family faced in caring for his body to Maryann’s guilt to the strife that will no doubt ensue if and when John the ordinary guy decides to shoot for immortality. At the very least, that emotional wreckage is a cost that someone needs to consider. And I have to wonder—even if no one here seems bothered—whether it’s worth it.
6
Crowdsourcing Survival
“WE CAN’T DO THAT”
When eighty-seven-year-old Lorraine Bayless collapsed at the Glenwood Gardens retirement community in Bakersfield, California, on February 26, 2013, no one at the scene could have predicted the national media uproar that was about to engulf them. And they certainly couldn’t have predicted that they’d become the focus of worldwide media criticism. If they had, it’s very possible that they would have made different decisions.
What did they do? They didn’t do anything. And that, it turns out, was what got them into trouble.
Shortly after Bayless fell to the floor in a communal dining room, a bystander used a cell phone to call 911. The dispatcher, Tracey Halvorson, instructed the bystander to reposition Bayless on the floor. Then the cell phone was passed to someone else who identified herself as a nurse named Colleen. That’s when things got very strange.
We don’t know everything that happened, but we do have an approximately seven-minute audio recording of that call, so we can fill in some of the gaps.
First, Halvorson determines that Bayless is unconscious. She doesn’t seem to have a pulse and is not breathing. As per protocol, she advises Colleen to start CPR.
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