Between 40-50 people attended the June 24 Open House at the Cryonics Institute, resulting in four immediate new Members and other less tangible benefits. I am hopeful that this will contribute to the building of a local community of cryonicists, perhaps eventually including hospice care and mutual aid volunteer standby. The benefits of deanimating close to CI rather than at a distance are very great in terms of reducing ischemic damage.

Those who missed the Open House or those who attended and noted that I was the only Director present should strongly consider coming to the Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Sunday, September 23.Many Directors and Advisors as well as special guests attend the AGM. The AGM is an excellent opportunity to not only see the current state of the CI facility, but to see the people running the organization as well as the issues we are struggling with. An informal dinner on the Saturday evening before the meeting provides an additional chance for socializing.

There are now five candidates for the four available Cryonics Institute Board of Director positions up for re-election in September: Royse Brown, Jim Fitzgerald, Alan Mole, Marta Sandberg and John Strickland. A considerable part of Director discussions occur by e-mail so the fact that Royse mostly lives in Europe and Marta lives in Australia should not be regarded as serious handicaps. Our very actively involved Director and Vice-President John de Rivaz lives in England.

With CI having so many Members worldwide, CI By-Law V-A has become not only obsolete, but dangerous because it allows changes to CI corporate policy to be both proposed as well as passed by two-thirds of Voting Members attending a meeting. I believe it is dangerous for a handful of Voting Members to be able to attend an AGM and change corporate policy for a membership that numbers in the hundreds (and over 80 patients). Mailed along with the Director candidate ballots will be a proposal to repeal CI By-Law V-A.

Well over one hundred people attended the Suspended Animation conference in Florida on May 18-20, which provided excellent insight into current cryonics technology. A notable outcome for CI policy is that I became much more favorable to the idea of overseas Members being vitrified and then shipped in dry ice.

Dr. Pichugin has believed that devitrification (freezing) would not occur in a vitrified patient shipped in dry ice and I am now inclined to believe so too. Additionally, I am more hopeful that cryonicists in Germany and Australia may be able to deal with the challenges involved in doing vitrification overseas. The fact that the formula for CI-VM-1 has now been disclosed to the public eliminates what was formerly a sticking point.

There has been no let-up in the influx of new patients at CI in 2007 -- about one new patient per month. The 81st patient benefited from Suspended Animation standby. My case report for the 81st patient appears in this issue of LONG LIFE and a case report written by SA concerning their handling of the 81st patient is expected within a few weeks.

I am scheduled to give a presentation entitled "Evidence that cryonics may work" on September 9th at the third Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference being held at Cambridge University (www.sens.org).

This presentation should become an article in the peer-reviewed journal REJUVENATION RESEARCH, becoming the second technical article in PubMe(www.pubmed.gov) with  "cryonics" in the title (the first being Ralph Merkle's 1992 MEDICAL HYPOTHESIS article).

As of 29-June-2007 the Cryonics Institute has 664 Members, 299 of whom are funded with contracts of whom 32 have Suspended Animation contracts. A geographical breakdown of the 664 Members by state/provincial, etc. and country location..

Olaf Henny posted a digest of this article on Cryonet. It was originally carried in the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

OTTAWA -- Seven in 10 Canadians believe doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients should be legal, says a new poll. conducted, just after the release from prison of American Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a well-known champion of assisted suicide.

The poll says nearly three quarters of Canadians agree that it should be legal for a doctor to assist in the death of a terminally ill patient. And the same number agree with the "right to die" concept for individuals who want to die before enduring the full course of a deadly illness.

The numbers are virtually identical to 14 years ago when Sue Rodriguez, a British Columbia woman suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease -- more properly known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- fought unsuccessfully to have the law against aiding and abetting suicide struck down.

It took place within days of Kevorkian being paroled after serving eight years of a prison sentence for second-degree murder. Kevorkian has said he helped more than 100 people die by lethal drug injections. In the case that landed him in prison, he had videotaped such a death and dared the authorities to come after him. The poll showed the highest level of support for doctor-assisted suicide is 84 per cent in Quebec, and the lowest is 61 per cent in Alberta. Similarly, support for the concept of right to die is highest in Quebec at 87 per cent and lowest in Alberta at 66 per cent.

The 76 per cent who support the concept of the right to die includes 49 per cent who strongly support it and 27 per cent who somewhat support it. Just 21 per cent strongly oppose it. Those with a university degree (79 per cent) are more likely to support the right to die, than those without a high school diploma (38 per cent). And men (78 per cent) are slightly more likely than women (74 per cent) to support the concept of people having the right to die.

CanWest News Service

I may be opening an antique store in the Prescott/Mayer (AZ) area. If so, I will be looking for a couple of employees, one who knows about antiques and one who is familiar with selling on ebay. If you are interested in relocating to Arizona and are a cryonicist with experience in either of these areas contact me.

David Pizer pizerdavid@yahoo.com

THE DIRECTOR ELECTIONS

Congratulations to Marta for throwing her hat in the ring! Is there any possibility of our having an online debate with the candidates? We could even use the Chat function of the group.

Kevin

The Chat function is turned off. I don't think it is particularly useful and the messages would not be moderated. The great thing about The Internet is that it is asynchronous. That is to say that people can take part in a discussion even if they are displaced in time. Or to put it more simply, they can still communicate without being at their computers at the same time. This is particularly useful as membership of CI spreads over the entire world, and 1/3 of it is asleep at any one instant.

Another advantage of asynchronous communication is that people can read through and edit their messages. This is still possible with chat. You could compose your message with a word processor and cut and paste it. But time will have moved on by then and taken the chat with it. So most people would bash out whatever comes into their head and then press "send".

Also chat rooms have a bad name for spreading viruses and other scams. Apart from that, an online discussion with the candidates is a good idea. Just post your comments and questions to the group and all candidates can answer or not as they chose.Having a good choice can only strengthen the board. I hope that Brent Fox and Paul Batista consider applying again.

Obviously each year the incumbents are likely to get elected again. But this should not put off other people, and obviously times will come when incumbents resign or are cryopreserved themselves, and it will be helpful to have a good selection of others who are already known amongst the membership.

John de Rivaz

This comment is highly relevant insofar as one of the candidates (Royse Brown) lives in Europe, one lives in Australia (Marta Sandberg) while the other three live in the Central Time Zone of the United States. Other participants to the discussion could be more dispersed than the candidates.

Ben Best

The real power behind CI is not the board, it is not its president, it is not its founder, but what society as a whole will and will not permit, as expressed by the elected legislature of the USA and administered (for fees taken from individual citizens) by the legal profession. Therefore the board can come up with all sorts of wonderful ideas that will reduce members' costs, improve the image of CI, and encourage more people to join and thereby save their lives (if cryonics works), only to have these ideas declared "legally unsafe" by the Institute's legal advisor. It is not his fault of course. (Don't shoot the messenger.) As the board contains no lawyer, it is not possible to judge whether an idea is legally safe and work on it until a variation is found that is OK. It is put to the legal advisor and vetoed or not as the case may be.

The board cannot take risks, because it would be risking the lives of the existing patients in cryostasis. The courts would consider these not to be people, and therefore afford them no human right to remain in cryostasis and could sentence them to be thawed because of an unsound decision by the board. There are many precedents for the "these are not people" idea going back as far as history has been recorded, and despite wars and revolutions it still comes back.

John de Rivaz

Connie Ettinger is a lawyer, although not currently practicing. David Ettinger is not a Board member, but is our chief counsel.

Robert Ettinger