NEWS & VIEWS

President's Report, October 28, 2005

Nearly 50 people attended the Cryonics Institute Annual Meeting on October 23rd. I believe that the meeting was very successful as an opportunity for everyone to learn more about CI, its Directors, its operations and its Members. A Belgian TV crew was at CI at the time of the meeting. Although there was concern about filming, the crew were not present during the meeting, but got excellent coverage of CI and our Members before and after the meeting -- which worked-out extremely well. The show aired in Belgium on October 4th.

The Cryonics Institute website (www.cryonics.org) was down for two days because of hurricane Wilma. If you had problems accessing the site on October 24th or 25th, you should know that the problem was temporary.

We now have a policy of keeping all prepaid funds in T-Bills. Although the money is with Treasury Direct it has been connected to our checking account. To increase security we have opened a savings account with another bank which requires signatures by two CI Officers for any withdrawal. This will increase the awkwardness of withdrawing the money for Members who want their prepayment money refunded, but there should not be much added delay. Security measures necessarily make things more difficult.

Following the historical piece by Robert Nelson in the last issue of THE IMMORTALIST, this issue contains a review of Chatsworth history by Charles Platt and a reply by Ken Bly. The publishing of these two pieces is the product of a great deal of argument, negotiation and compromise intended to make this the last issue in which there are views presented on this subject. Those interested in more background and the context of Ken Bly's reply should see the extensive postings on the website of Fred and Linda Chamberlain: http://www.lifepact.com/csc.htm

Our local potluck dinner on October 23 was attended by five people. There will be another local potluck at the CI Facility on November 20 where I will give a lecture on "Free Radicals and Ischemic Damage in Cryonics". I will also be giving a lecture at the Immortality Institute conference in Atlanta, Georgia on November 5th, entitled "Cryopreservation of the Brain".

For many months since deciding to use our vitrification procedure we have been struggling with how to prepare our patients for shipment, especially from countries overseas. Vitrification must be done here in Michigan by Jim Walsh, our very experienced funeral director, with direction and assistance from Dr. Yuri Pichugin. We decided on a policy of shipping patients on water ice to Michigan from elsewhere in the United States. Now we are extending that policy to everywhere in the world. We have decided that the extended period of cold ischemia for patients shipped from overseas would probably be less damaging than glycerol perfusion and dry ice shipment. (Alcor has made the same decision.) Opposition by airlines everywhere to dry ice shipment may be inevitable, anyway.

I have been pressuring Dr. Pichugin for many months to find an organ preservation solution which could prevent cold ischemic damage for a period of 24 to 48 hours. He has tested every available organ preservation solution on the market, plus others not on the market plus a variety of additives -- and he has concluded that nothing we know of can maintain measurable brain viability for 24 hours. The main advantage of cold perfusate was the more rapid cooling it provides in comparison to external cooling methods.

In any case, there are practical problems with attempting to do blood washout at great distances. It would be best to try to concentrate the washout on the head, but to do so would mean ruining the carotids for our vitrification perfusion through lower vessels (to include the vertebral arteries). The alternative would be to have the washout done through the femorals. But many funeral directors have no experience with femoral washout, femoral perfusion can be difficult with stiffened vessels of the elderly and femoral washout might do a poor job of washing-out the brain or cause edema, especially if done with an embalming pump. Additionally, for whole body washout Dr. Pichugin recommends an amount of solution equal to twice the weight of the patient for a good cooling effect. Rarely does a funeral director have refrigerator space to accommodate this volume.

So our policy now for all patients outside of Michigan will be for the local funeral director to inject heperin (using CPR to circulate the heparin), then to cool as quickly as possible and to ship the patient to Michigan on water ice, with the heparinized blood still in the body. CI Members who want professional cryonics Standby, ACDC cardiopulmonary support with ice-bath cooling and femoral blood washout with cold MHP-2 before transport to Michigan should make arrangements for the Suspended Animation Local Help Rider. Suspended Animation does not do Standby overseas, however. Alan Sinclair has a Standby team in the UK and there is an equipped local cryonics group in Toronto which has done a Standby. Funeral directors have been paid to do Standby, and family and friends have often been of considerable help.

MEETING PHOTOS

 

Film crew at the facility

Bridgett Hathaway relaxes in the Conference Room after completing her membership papers. Bridgett’s husband became a CI patient in January 2004

Kevin Boyle talks with Dr. Yuri Pichugin about his dog Thor, and his cryopreservation.

TV crew with Belgian cryonicist David Verbeke. They were taping for a Current Affairs type program to be aired by Flemish Radio and Television

A view of the cryostat area, Ben Best’s LN2 demonstration is at the far right.

Ben Best’s LN2 demonstration in greater detail.

A TV crew takes a break from taping a documentary for Canadian Television

Mathew Sullivan, (L) a new Suspended Animation employee, formerly with Alcor, and Curtis Henderson relax. All photos: Debbie Fleming or John Bull
Russian Cryopreservation

There has been (according to a TV program shown this summer) a Russian customer, who arranged with Alcor the storage of the brain of his father. The brain of another patient is stored in Moscow in dry ice. But this was the first case, where a cryopreservation attempt was made from the very beginning and not as an afterthought later (although it wasn't entirely successful).

The timeline:

1) The patient's grandson initially contacted CI, requesting information about cryosuspension to preserve his grandmother (Lidia Fedorenko, 80 years old, living in Saint-Petersburg, Russia), who was in a hospital in a serious condition. CI forwarded the message to Danila Medvedev, who met with the grandson on the next day.

2) We visited a hospital, however, the personnel wasn't very cooperative initially. We decided to do our best to arrange the cryosuspension and started gathering necessary information and organisational resources.

3) We were caught by surprise when the death (consequences of the serious stroke) occured on Friday, 23. The nurse managed to do a heparin injection and the head was cooled with ice. According to hospital regulations, the death certificate is issued by the morgue and it was already to late to receive it today. So the body had to be stored in the morgue until tomorrow morning. While there, the head was cooled with crushed ice in plastic bags.

4) On Friday we managed to contact a cooperative funeral director, who agreed to assist in any way necessary. That was fortunate, because Albin & Sons informed that they could not respond quickly enough to this emergency.

5) Next day the body was taken from the hospital morgue to the premises where the funeral director planned to perform the perfusion. However, we could not find the necessary chemicals on Saturday and, on CI's advice had to resort to freezing in dry ice without perfusion. Soon we found a company that sold dry ice on weekend, purchased the necessary amount and quickly cooled the body with it.

6) Next day a container for transportation has arrived. We added more crushed dry ice and placed the patient there.

7) Even though we started preparing the membership documents on the first day, we haven't completed it by far and decided to postpone this until the body of the patient is stabilized.

8) In two days we insulated the container with foam plastic to decrease the evaporation of dry ice. Indeed, this had a significant effect.

9) After frantically trying to come up with funding, the grandson of the patient realised that he can't realistically expect to find enough money to fund the contract with a US cryonics provider in the foreseeable future.

10) After consulting with Moscow cryonicist Igor Artyukhov, it was decided that in current circumstances preserving the brain in dry ice in Russia is the only realistic option (storing the fully body in either dry ice or liquid nitrogen was considered too complicated to be attempted right now in Russia without time for preparation).

11) An insulated container (and a smaller container for the brain) was acquired and necessary arrangement made with the funeral director.

12) On October, 8 the body (which was frozen by that time) was taken out of the freezer and thawed.

13) As soon as it thawed out enough (on Monday morning), the brain was taken out by the pathologoanatomist and placed into the container. The container was filled with dry ice and closed.

14) The patient's body was buried on Monday, October, 10.

While the cryopreservation wasn't done well, it seems that considering the circumstances and the short notice everything was done almost as well as it could have been. The major problems were late actions by the grandson and lack of funds. The funeral director would have been capable to perform all necessary tasks, if there were some time for advance preparations. We learned that transportation of the patient to the United States would have been a relatively straighforward task and that there do not seem to be any significant legal problems preventing cryosuspension. We learned that hospital stuff may not be cooperative at all, but when it comes to actually doing something, the situation may change and they may do everything that is asked.

Some of the stages of the cryopreservation were filmed, some interviews conducted and a TV report (~7 minutes) appeared on NTV channel on October, 1 (in program called "Program-maximum"). The TV crew was present in Saint-Petersburg between 24-27 of September.

A new website of the Russian organisation "KrioRus" (at http://www.kriorus.ru ) was created. It has some brief information about cryonics and offers cryonics services (perfusion, temporary storage and assistance in singing the patient up with CI or Alcor).

We estimate that a cryosuspension in Russia (including storage in CI) can be carried out for about 40-50 thousand USD in total. We are also considering possible ways to reduce the costs to make cryonics more realistic to most of the potential customers in Russia. The cheapest and the simplest option is immediately freezing the brain in dry ice without perfusion. We intend to explore the range of possible options, find the optimal ones for the Russian market and offer them.

There has been some interest in creating a local cryonics company for some time in Russia. Hopefully, this latest development will accelerate the process (and there are some indications that it will do so).

For additional information, please contact Danila Medvedev: danila.medvedev@mail.ru, +7 921 343-9173.