From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Mon Mar 17 2003 - 13:57:47 MST
My wife subscribes to Men's Health magazine, and in the April 2003 issue
there is a pretty good article on Alcor, titled Ted Williams Sleeps Here.
One oddity is that the author is listed as Michael Perry, which I think
happens to be the name of an Alcor employee, however the article is
written in a style which does not suggest any previous acquaintance
with cryonics. So I guess this name similarity is just a coincidence.
The overall tone of the article is breezy and somewhat irreverent, but
reasonably positive. The author goes on a tour of Alcor's Scottsdale
facility, sees the operating room and storage facilities, talks to
Jerry Lemler, president of Alcor, and Bill Haworth, P.R. consultant.
Of course Alcor cannot confirm that Ted Williams is suspended there, but
the author assumes it is so. "Ted's in there, I think. Ted. In a tank."
He also interviews some skeptics: Aby J. Mathew, director of hypothermic
preservation services for BioLife Solutions. "It would not be correct for
us to say it's crazy," he says. "And we would not necessarily discount
the possibility that if we preserve people now, future technologies may
be able to resuscitate and regenerate them."
Also, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and columnist for
Scientific American: "Even if they find a way to repair the cellular
damage, no one has any clue how to restart the motor, other than
a Frankensteinian thing where you just electrocute it and see what
happens." (That strikes me as a peculiar objection, I haven't heard
that one before.)
Shermer goes on more favorably: "Most of the practitioners are realistic
about the probability of working. It's not like these are cranks scamming
people out of a lot of money. They're not." And asked if he'd accept
a free suspension: "I guess if they'd give me a free freeze, I'd go
for it. I hear they offered one to Isaac Asimov and he turned it down.
I wouldn't turn down a free freeze."
That's about it for skeptical commentary. No "hamburger into cow"
or claims of fraud. Even the skeptics admit that it could work, and
Shermer would even consider being frozen. And the author concludes:
"But I'm over the idea of cryonics as some sort of creepy secret.
Dunking someone in liquid nitrogen isn't really any stranger than the
other socially acceptable things we do with the dead. Seems to me that
Alcor's clients are simply operating on the theory that they have nothing
to lose. They're buying a $120,000 lottery ticket."
Hal
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