In his editorial in the July-Aug Long Life, John Bull asks whether there is justification for a CI research program, in view of the large new recent commitment to research by 21CM, which is buying a building three times the size of CI's main facility, spending $5 million for the first phase of a program envisioned to take many years, and hiring a half dozen additional professional staff. CI, on the other hand, has only one research employee and the recent research budget, if I remember correctly, has been on the order of $75,000 yearly.

First, it isn't written in stone that CI and 21CM must be completely disjoint. It is perhaps conceivable that there could be cooperative effort aiming at maximum joint efficiency. However, this is probably not feasible because of the history and personalities involved.

That said, an independent CI effort is not as laughable as some might think. Let me make two points. The first is a generality, the second more specific.

1. Many years ago a few of us decided to tackle the problem of mortality, which had been faced (or denied) for ages by the whole of humanity and was currently being almost entirely ignored by the current generation, including scads of people much smarter than us and much richer and much more influential.
The result has been some progress, and some growth of interest, and a new chance for some of us. The disproportion between those few then and the rest of the world was much greater than the current disproportion between CI and 21CM. It might also be pointed out that 21CM itself has been relatively small potatoes compared to the totality of cryobiological research in the world.

2. In the last decade or so Dr. Yuri Pichugin has been doing work for CI, first in the Ukraine and more recently here in Clinton Township, with an intervening stint working with a consortium in California which included 21CM interests, as I recall. In California he was able to make contributions that no one else could, and at CI has developed a vitrification procedure that appears to be at least as good as that developed by 21CM and used by Alcor.

I will not write about pending directions for CI research, leaving that to Ben as he may decide from time to time. But I see no harm in saying that there are definite ideas and tentative plans, with the potential for substantive progress.