he November/December 2005 issue of MENSA BULLETIN, The Magazine of American MENSA, has a two-page article on cryonics (page 22-23) written by David Pascal. MENSA is the high IQ organization that only admits people as Members if they can prove they are in the upper 2% of the population in IQ.

The article makes every possible MENSA connection, including that both the founders of Alcor (the Chamberlains) and the founder of CI were Mensans. (Robert Ettinger doesn't actually remember if he was ever a Mensan, but he does remember speaking to the group about 20 years ago.) Mensan Isaac Asimov gave Doubleday a "clean bill of scientific health" for THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY. Mensan Mike Perry is the author of FOREVER FOR ALL, a pro-cryonics book which still sells on Amazon.com.

David Pascal alludes to his own Mensan Membership, by describing The Cryonics Society as having "leadership that is one-third Mensan". He mentions my having been Treasurer of Toronto Mensa and having given a presentation on cryonics at the 2003 joint Canadian American Annual Gathering

The compiling of so many Mensan connections to cryonics in a single article is quite an accomplishment of literary virtuosity. Of course the piece is intended to market cryonics to the Mensan readers of the magazine. The last line of the article is "If the history of cryonics is any indication, people with IQs in the top 2 percent have been making the intelligent choice all along."

Unfortunately, the photographs show one of the oldest cryostats and an old storage unit, giving the impression that cryonics is still at the stage of an operation being run out of someone's garage with hand-made equipment. So far the phone has not been ringing off the hook with Mensans wanting to join CI because of the article (the website URLs are given for both Alcor and CI). I wrote a pro-cryonics article for the national Mensa Canada publication over ten years ago and to my knowledge there was a seriously interested response from only one of the readers: Douglas Skrecky. American Mensa is just less than ten times as big as Mensa Canada, so possibly there will be a few people who are seriously influenced.

Part of the problem (with recruiting Mensans) is that Mensans (as a group),

may have great IQ's, but very little JUDGEMENT. Judgment is a mental

quality that can be tested for, but is not part of any standard IQ test, so the existing mainstream IQ tests are grossly incomplete. (Possible such tests include the police training videos that test (using a projected image of a situation), whether the cop should shoot or who to shoot in an instant, or a test to tell if people can detect SPAM at a certain accuracy). (The latter is in effect a simplified situation of detecting fraud or dishonesty, where the more complicated situation would show a person doing a pitch to the testee and have him guess if the pitcher is a con man or not).

It is virtually certain that many Mensans fall victim to a lot of the same type of phishing and Nigerian-type spam that I just finished deleting from my incoming e-mail in 30 seconds flat. That is why Mensans are very interested in UFO's and other controversial topics where Judgment is required to discriminate what is most probably real from what

is not. (For this reason, due to the popular negative image of Cryonics, many of them probably think there is nothing to it.) My uncle was a long-time proud member of Mensa, and his judgment in many areas was the pits, sorry to say.

There are other major mental qualities such as musical ability and social interaction ability which are not tested for either in IQ tests, and play a major role in the success of the individual. I believe that my IQ is above 130, but I have never had any interest in joining Mensa, because associating with primarily unfocused people is not very useful and at times can be very frustrating. Also, the Mensans don't DO anything, they just attend meetings. They are not activists at all. They just do not seem to

be purposeful.

Remember that there are individual Mensans who do have good judgment and are focused, but I just have not seen very many of them compared to people

in other groups I belong to or work with.

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I spoke to Robert Ettinger again about his once being a Mensa Member and he does think that he was, but he remembers

absolutely nothing about being a Member. I wouldn't question that he could qualify, although my personal impression is that Mensans in general aren't noticeably more intelligent than others, although some clearly are. David Pascal has a much higher impression of Mensans than I do.

I regret having come across as being too cynical, although I admit to being a bit cynical. Just because we have not been

contacted by any Mensans wanting to join CI does not mean that no impression was made by David Pascal's article. My

cynicism about Mensans was especially aggravated at the 2003 AG when I attended a talk about life after death by a Coroner (Medical Examiner). The room was packed with Mensans -- a stark contrast to my own presentation about cryonics which only attracted 14 Mensans, some of whom only came to heckle.

It often does take a long time for the message to sink in. Each person we get is really a "gem", such as Douglas Skrecky. Cryonicists spend so much time fighting each other that we often forget to appreciate the fact that we have people to fight. David Pascal is a "gem" for writing the MENSA BULLETING piece and for his persistent efforts to promote cryonics, which has to be one of the hardest sales jobs possible.

We had excellent coverage from a Belgian TV crew of our Members at our AGM, and I understand from the producer that the program about cryonics that aired in early October was a great success. Yet we have not had a single query from Belgium. Imagine the early years when Robert Ettinger would appear before an audience of millions. The same was true of the middle years -- Mike Darwin would appear on TV shows with an audience of millions and return to Alcor where the phone only rang when someone wanted to make

trouble or a journalist wanted another story. Only with the internet has cryonics grown appreciably.

Saul Kent once wrote an article called "The Failure of Cryonics" in which he said that efforts to promote cryonics

have failed. Most people are familiar with the cryonics, but few take it seriously. But Saul has not given up. I understand that one of the next few issues of LIFE EXTENSION magazine will contain material by Saul that explains and promotes cryonics to Life Extension Foundation Members.

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I have personally met only 2 Mensans.

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The subject at hand was the poor results I have had in getting Mensans interested in cryonics. But my sourness is just a manifestation of my excessively high expectations. There are 300 million people in the United States and 2% of that number gives a potential 6 million Mensans, when in fact American Mensa

has 50,000 Members, or less than 1% of those who would qualify. Mensa has good parties and my impression of Mensans is that they are people who are primarily interested in entertainment, which might be more intellectual than usual (playing games).

The highest representation of cryonicists comes from libertarian computer males who take lots of life extension supplements and who have (or have had) an interest in science fiction (a profile that fits me perfectly). Yet the percentage of libertarians and computer people and even of Life Extension Foundation Members who are cryonicists is TINY. The fact is, cryonics only has a tiny, tiny

appeal to any market segment. So the fact that the same is true for Mensans.. We have a high representation of scientists in cryonics as well, but only a tiny percentage of scientists are cryonicists.

So the bottom line is that I see no reason to expect that Mensa would be much worse of a prospective marketing target than any other group. I am somewhat ashamed of the fact that I did not do more to cherish the Mensans who showed an interest because I was too caught-up in my disappointment with the number interested because of excessive expectations.