The idea for going back into the time machine, purchasing, and rereading this book was precipitated by the need to get my own contract for cryogenic interment up to date. Shortly after my brother died at the tender age of 56 in May this year, I was contacted by Ben Best of the Cryonics Institute (CI), and encouraged to sit down and draw up the contract, like, now. Continue reading
A New Spirit of PreservationThis is an encore column of mine from 2007, at the time when I had just renewed my suspension agreement with the Cryonics Institute. Since that time, Mr. Ettinger has deanimated, and his body is now stored in a cocoon of liquid nitrogen—along with upwards of 100 clients—at the facility in Clinton Township. I turned 64 this year, losing my dear mother in February. Twenty or thirty years ago I viewed my agreement with the Cryonics Society as insurance I would never need [because someone would have cured aging by now]. Today, after my experience with Mom, I tend to look at cryogenic interment as a matter of efficient disposition of my body, requiring the least hassle and even a faint glimmer of hope. Continue reading
Though we are not precisely contemporaries, Robert Ettinger—author of The Prospect of Immortality and Man into Superman, founder of the cryonics movement and the Cryonics Institute (CI)—and I inhabited the same milieu of SE Michigan in the days when liberty and life extension became primetime, iconic ideas in society (roughly the late 1960s and into the early 1980s).[1] Mr. Ettinger ‘deanimated’ a week ago at his home in Clinton Township, Michigan, where he was perfused and ‘frozen'[2] in a chamber of liquid nitrogen at the CI facility, also in Clinton Township. The Washington Post, and several other periodicals, mostly respectful, carried the story of his passing… passing from a state with heartbeat and respiration into essential biostasis.
So the leader of a great techno-philosophical movement takes his hoped-for temporary leave by practicing what he preaches: taking a prepared respite from life, until the time medical knowledge catches up to reanimate and rejuvenate him. That is the plan. The Wikipedia article on Robert Ettinger is accurate and, again, respectful, no doubt written by those with a personal knowledge of the man and the vastness of the ‘idea-prise’ he created.[3] Here are some comments from Pat Heller, one of the early adopters of cryonics, and a perennial officer of CI: Continue reading