NEWS & VIEWS
CI President Ben Best’s Report
As of 2006 Cryonics Institute Members can fund Suspended Animation (SA) Standby with life insurance. This gives any CI Member with an insurance policy worth $100,000 full access to SA professional cryonics Standby and Transport procedures. A background note on this subject by Charles Platt appears in this issue of THE IMMORTALIST, and there is more updated material on the CI website, at www.cryonics.org.
On December 4, 2005 Robert Ettinger retired as Vice President of both the Cryonics Institute and the Immortalist Society, being replaced by John de Rivaz and John Bull, respectively. Mr. Ettinger plans to retire as a CI Director next September. He has our immense gratitude for the years he has devoted to building cryonics and these cryonics organizations. He well deserves to have so much responsibility removed from his shoulders.
CI received two new patients in the last two months. The 70th a 21-year-old man who died in an automobile accident. In addition to suffering head injuries in the accident, the patient was autopsied. We were contacted after the autopsy, so we had no chance to intervene. Normally, we would not accept such a patient, but we were told it was a "light autopsy", that the patient was in refrigeration and there seemed to be no opposition in the family. Also we were believing that holding a person on dry ice post-mortem was not an option because of new airline requirements (this belief is now being re-evaluated). We make no guarantee of accepting such patients in the future.
The 71st patient was John Connole, who has been a Member of CI since 1991. John was at one time our Contracts Officer (the person who verifies that Member contracts are completed properly -- a position now held by Connie Ettinger. John worked in the Aerospace Industry before he retired. He was 84 years old at the time of his deanimation.
His condition has been critical for the last few months. More details of his case will appear in the next issue of THE IMMORTALIST.
Our Potluck Dinners here at the CI Facility appear to be on the road to success, and we are now planning to have a dinner every two months. I will continue to give lectures for those interested, alternating between life extension and cryonics themes. The next Potluck will be Sunday, February 19th at 6pm and the lecture will be "Protein Cross-Linking, Diabetes and Carnosine in Aging" by me.
CI MEMBERSHIP REPORT as at 28-December-2005
As of December 28, 2005 the Cryonics Institute has 563 Members (including 3 "lost" Members), 245 of whom are fully funded with executed contracts. Membership growth in 2005 has been extraordinary (100 new Members), whereas the growth of our patient population has been the lowest since 1999 (3 new patients). Prior to 1994 annual growth of Membership was in the single digits, annually. There were 5 patients in 1992, but an average of less than one per year back to 1976, never more than 2 in one year. (2004 excludes 10 patients from ACS).
CI GROWTH STATISTICS
(since 1994)
---- Patients --- Members
1994 -- 3 -------- 10
1995 -- 2 -------- 13
1996 -- 4 -------- 05
1997 -- 2 -------- 05
1998 -- 5 -------- 19
1999 -- 1 -------- 41
2000 -- 5 -------- 42
2001 -- 4 -------- 62
2002 -- 5 -------- 63
2003 -- 5 -------- 76
2004 -- 7 -------- 63
2005 -- 3 -------- 100
This issue of THE IMMORTALIST was brimming with material and our Editor John Bull was hard-pressed to decide what to include. I had an article analyzing evidence for the duration of tolerable post-mortem delay time in cryonics cases, but have agreed to postpone this article. I feel this is an important question, but Dr. Pichugin has a similar 3-part article which is fairly lengthy and will occupy much space in this and subsequent issues. Our Editor (John Bull, ever-sensitive to our readers) does not like the idea of including so much boring technical information in a single issue of the magazine. I want my article to be included in THE IMMORTALIST some time in the next year. Those who can't wait can read my article on my website: