he Annual General Meeting on Sunday, September 24, 2006 will be attended by representatives from both Suspended Animation and the American Cryonics Society, including Suspended Animation General Manager Charles Platt and American Cryonics Society Chief Operating Officer Jim Yount. Attending this meeting will thus provide a unique opportunity to meet key players in the world of cryonics.

In the month of May CI Members approved changes to the By-Laws and the Articles of Incorporation of the Cryonics Institute which would allow CI to qualify for 501(c)13 (tax-exempt cemetery) status.

Following these changes we received IRS approval to become tax exempt, but two months later a higher official in the IRS overruled the approval on the grounds that CI does not do burial or cremation. We have filed an appeal against this ruling.

In the month of July a journalist sympathetic to cryonics wrote an article in the British Columbia on-line newspaper THE TYEE which featured CI Member Charles Grodzicki and his difficulties with BC's anti-cryonics law. Not coincidentally, and in association with our appeals, the BC government posted a notification on their website which assured BC funeral directors that there is no legal liability associated with assisting in a cryonics case where a BC citizen has contracted for services with a cryonics organization outside of the Province of British Columbia.

In July I attended the Society for Cryobiology meeting in Germany and took the opportunity to meet with German cryonicists. In July 2007 I will be attending the Society for Cryobiology meeting in Alberta, Canada and plans are already being made for me to meet with cryonicists living in Western Canada at that time.

In August I attended the Local Cryonics Group Summer Party in Toronto, Canada where I gave a lecture mainly concerned with the relationship between cryonicists and cryobiologists. About 15 people attended, including the founding members of the Better Humans Transhumanist group and a very activist Cryonics Society of Canada member who flew from Alberta with her family to attend the event. She is the one who is trying to organize a cryonics training, presentation and social for my trip to Alberta next summer.

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I have been invited to be on a panel at the Alcor Conference being held in Arizona on the weekend of October 6-8. The panel will deal with cryonics organizations and I will speak on the subject of the Cryonics Institute.

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I have been trying to encourage CI Members to place themselves on a website map (called "Frappr") that is devoted to locations of Cryonics Institute Members around the world:

This way, CI Members can look for other CI Members living in the same region and contact those Members by sending an e-mail message through Frappr. Frappr knows the e-mail address, but you don't necessarily. It is then up to the person you have contacted to decide whether they want to contact you in return and to decide how much personal information they want to divulge. Of course, the more CI Members participate in Frappr the more useful a tool it can become for CI Members to find other CI Members living in a location nearby. The Frappr also has a chat facility which offers the possibility for simultaneous chat with many CI Members at the same time. So far only 30 CI Members have placed themselves on the Frappr map, but I hope that many more will do so.

As of 31-Aug-2006 the Cryonics Institute had 623 Members, but 9 of those are lost. We discover that Members are lost each time we do a full mailing to the Membership. Many of the 9 will undoubtedly be found soon, but for this Membership report we will only count the 614 Members whose location we presumably know for certain.

In this Membership report I will analyze the gender of our Members, by location and cryopreservation arrangements.

Alcor is sponsoring its Sixth Conference—An Inside Look at the Science and Medicine of Tomorrow, on October 6^th,7^th and 8^th of this year. The Conference is being held at The Scottsdale Marriott, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The speakers are Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Gregory M. Fahy, Ph.D., David Friedman, Ph.D., Robert A. Freitas Jr., J.D., J Storrs Hall, Ph.D. and Ralph Merkle, Ph.D The attendance fee (after August 31) is $495.(for conference and meals)

For the first time, a television documentary is to present footage of a person being cryonically preserved after death. The hour-long Death In The Deep Freeze, a National Geographic Channel co-production with the independent production company Zig Zag, is to be broadcast this month by Channel Five in Britain.

The documentary, called "shocking and compelling" by the British media, follows a woman with terminal cancer before and after her death, when her body was drained of most of its fluids and "deep cooled" to below -120C in a stainless steel tank.

The documentary was filmed, in part, at Arizona's Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of two facilities in the United States where about 150 people have paid to be "suspended" in deep cold in the hope they may someday be revived and cured of the disease that killed them.

"The human and emotional journey we captured with one contributor in particular, filming prior to her death and the subsequent process of her preservation, in conjunction with the amazing scientific and ethical questions raised by this subject, makes for one of our most challenging and fascinating productions to date," executive director Jes Wilkins told The Guardian newspaper.

Alcor has been wary of media that present cryonics in terms of human Popsicles, and is even cautious about the word "frozen." The process -- vitrification -- replaces most of the water in the cells with protective chemicals. Freezing creates crystals, which destroys cells, said Cheryl Walsh, a spokeswoman for Alcor.

A few years ago, Alcor agreed to allow another production crew into its facilities, then pulled the plug. "Some of the articles were making us nervous," said Ms. Walsh, who concedes that she cringes a little at the title Death in the Deep Freeze.

Alcor and the woman at the centre of the documentary, who is not named, agreed to take part in the production to draw attention to the procedure and its possibilities. "People are skeptical. But they were skeptical that we could go to the moon," said Ms. Walsh, who concedes that cryonics is "still experimental."

Cryonics "is a belief that no one is really dead until their mind is destroyed, and that low temperatures can prevent this destruction," 1according to Alcor, which currently has 78 "patients" in a state of cryonic suspension and another 800 "members" who have signed on to be preserved after their deaths. Although some members are multi-millionaires, most of Alcor's membership fund the procedure with life insurance, Ms. Walsh said.

It costs US$150,000 to cryonically preserve an entire body and US$80,000 for "neurosuspension," which preserves only the head. Some of the money is placed in trust in perpetuity for the care, Ms. Walsh said. Keeping the tanks at the optimum temperature doesn't require electricity, merely an occasional top-up of liquid nitrogen.

Alcor says those who sign up understand that there are no guarantees they will be revived at some future date. "Members go through a lot of education before we sign them up," Ms. Walsh said. "People who sign up hope they can be reversed and come back to a full life. James Clement posted this message on Cryonet:

Swedish scientists have developed a fast, accurate way to conduct autopsies without raising a scalpel! During the past 18 months radiologists at Sweden’s Centre for Medical Image Science and Visualization have performed 150 virtual autopsies on murder victims.

They are using state of the art visualization software that gives scientists a comprehensive digital model of a corpse – inside and out! Scientists can see detailed 3D pictures of a victim’s body that can be rotated and manipulated so the body can be examined from all angles. The speed at which a cause of death can be determined is extraordinary.

A virtual look inside a body can reveal in minutes what surgery would take hours to discover. Also, in some cases the virtual autopsy detects vital clues that a traditional autopsy would have missed. Thanks to Andreas Vasilous

We at CIHQ (Cryonics Institute HeadQuarters) periodically get enquiries from relatives of potential patients that do not materialize into patients. We have had quite a number of such enquiries since around the time of our 74th patient in the month of May. It may be of interest to describe these.

The first was from the son of a mother who was very near death. The father was still alive, but reportedly had Alzheimer's Disease and would therefore not be a good legal authority for consent. There were six brothers and sisters, and we were assured that all were agreed about the cryopreservation when I said that we would require a consent from every child. Not long thereafter we were called again and told that the mother had died more quickly than expected and that the father is not as demented as previously represented because he still signs checks. We require a one month "cooling off" period in dry ice before we will accept post-mortem cases. The son agreed that this would be done. We did not hear from him again.

On Memorial Day Weekend I received few calls and e-mails from the grand-daughter of a woman who was near death. Our funeral director Jim Walsh, was able to find a funeral director in the region of China that could help do shipment for the case, although he said there could be complicated shipping requirements for China, compounded by the fact that it was a holiday weekend. I e-mailed the relevant information to the grand-daughter and spoke to her again on the phone, but was not contacted thereafter.

We received a few calls from a man whom I had met at a life extension conference a decade ago. His wife was dying of cancer and he expressed interest

not only in cryopreservation of his
wife at CI, but in cash payment for Sus

pended Animation Standby. He discussed the situation with people at SA and this was enough to put that organization on alert, but then we did not hear from him again.
I received a call from a man whose mother was close to death. He said his mother was at home and was competent enough to sign the forms, which he requested that I FAX to him. He said that he would be increasing his available credit. I told him that we would not accept more than $5,000 on a credit card. I did not hear from him again.

Andy received a call from a man whose son had been murdered and autopsied. Andy told the man that his son would need to be placed on dry ice immediately and held for one month. We did not hear from this man again.

I received a call from a man in Turkey who told me that his son had been shot and buried. I told him it is against CI policy to accept an exhumed case.

(I have heard of "good" brain micrographs being seen for an exhumed child accepted by another cryonics organization.)

Andy received e-mails from a man in Australia whose son had not been buried, but was in a crypt above ground and had been there for a few months. We refused the case.

At 5am a couple of weeks ago I received a call from a man who informed me that his mother had died in the previous hour. I told him that he would have to keep his mother on dry ice for one month before we would accept her to ensure that he is

not making a bad decision in a state of grief. Of course, there is no guarantee that a one month "cooling off" period is going to be adequate to prevent an emotionally upset person from making an irrational decision.

On the other hand I don't want to deprive a person a chance of future life because of the emotions involved or because the situation makes negative impressions on others -- although the latter impacts the survival of all our patients. This man's mother is currently on dry ice, but he does not have enough money and he cannot persuade his relatives to loan him the money. Quite a number of these "dry ice" cases end-up being buried or cremated.

Recently I have had a number of calls from a man whose mother has been on dry ice for several years. He only had
$15,000 when his mother died and CI would not allow him to pay the balance in installments. He has now spent nearly
$30,000 to keep his mother on dry ice and he thinks that we should believe his resolve to make installment payments.
He says he would sign an agreement giving us permission to cremate his mother if he could not maintain payments.I would not want to be forced into a position of having to cremate a CI patient. Although I sympathize greatly,
we cannot accept his mother under these conditions.

Dealing with people who have notplanned ahead, are emotionally upset and who do not have adequate financial
resources can be very difficult. I do empathize with these people and wish I could help them more than I can, but
our organization must be protected by sound policies.

To make matters more complicated we also receive hoax requests, some of which are not obvious. Today we received a FAX from a man in the UK saying that he would like to place his wife in cryostasis. Andy FAXed a detailed response itemizing costs and requirements as well as asking whether his wife was alive or dead-- and, if dead, for how long.

The FAXed response included the statement "At the moment she's in the garage with the marmots and it's about 82 degrees as we've had a bit of a hot snap. The pets certainly find it a bit unpleasant when in proximity to her so we're very keen to move fast to get her suspended in a tank or vat." He then asked about preserving her poodle. I instructed Andy to reply that we could not accept his wife on the basis of his description of her condition. He replied that his wife is still alive, that he hoped to immerse her before Christmas, that he was sure he could convince her by then and that her poodle is excited by the plans. Andy did not answer.

In another field of endeavor it would be easier to identify hoaxes by the outrageousness of the requests, but some of the sincere requests are no less out-of-the-ordinary. We have accepted patients on the basis of misrepresentations of the patient being in better condition that was actually the case, with funeral directors not clarifying matters.

We must also consider that some people may try to push our limits with "sting" requests intended to discredit us by showing that we will cynically accept hopeless cases from desperate people for purposes of monetary gain. Unfortunately there is no simple formula for distinguishing which cases are hopeless and which are not.

By the Golden Rule I would accept any remains because I would want any of my own remains in any condition to be cryopreserved. CI policy will not allow this. CI policy will not even allow for accepting "neuro" (head-only or brain) cases. I don't like denying someone a chance at future life when there may be a chance.

Although they do not exactly fit within the above time-frame, I think it would be of interest to add that in the last year
Barry Albin (our primary UK funeral director) has held two different prospective patients on dry ice for a period of months.

"human screener" wrote:

In a startling new development, (startling to me, that is)-- CI has officially indicated to me via an email from Andy Zawacki, CI facility manager, that they will not accept embryos for storage and that there are no plans to do so in the future. It appears that this was decided at a recent board meeting of the CI directors.

CI President Ben Best replied: For many reasons I would be delighted if CI could offer cryopreservation services for embryos, cord blood stem cells, etc. On the advice of legal council CI is not going to venture into these areas at the present time.

Some of the regulations can be found among the US government Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), also denoted United States Code (USC)

21 CFR Part 1271 is intended to prevent the introduction, transmission & spread of communicable disease. There are requirements to establish donor eligibility, with all procedures requiring review and approval. Donor screening must test for HIV 1 and 2, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, HTLV I and II,

Storage facilities must satisfy FDA requirements for environmental control, equipment, supplies & reagents, processing & process control, labeling controls, pre-distribution shipment & distribution. Staffing must be approved for number and training of staff.

There are extensive record-keeping requirements. Penalties for failure to comply with FDA regulations can be severe including fines and imprisonment: Biologics are subject to additional precautions based on the Public Health Service Act, aimed primarily at control of transmission of infectious disease:

The Chamberlains attempted to create Cells4Life when they were at Alcor. Although I don't know much about the details, I understand that the result was a financial disaster.

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