Brian Shock of Alcor, the world’s largest cryonics organization with 35 suspended members (13 whole-body, 22 head-only), explains freezing at -320°F to preserve viability for future revival via cloning or nanotech—though no one has succeeded yet. Founded in 1972 after Fred Chamberlain III’s father’s delayed suspension, Alcor avoids animal testing but faces legal hurdles like inheritance taxes and physician-assisted suicide restrictions. While skeptics question ethics and identity retention, Shock argues adaptability could ease "future shock," though spiritual debates remain unresolved. Ultimately, cryonics hinges on unproven science and financial trust, offering a speculative gamble against death’s finality. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, or good morning as the case may be, across all these many, many time zones.
Actually, stretching from well beyond the borders of the contiguous states, Hawaii, the Tahitian Islands, all the way east to the U.S. Virgin Islands, good morning there in St. Thomas and elsewhere, south into South America, north to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet.
And that light that you saw in the sky in San Diego, lights in Nevada and Arizona, was a launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
And I know a lot of you saw weird lights in the sky and think that you saw something, and you did.
It was a launch from Vandenberg.
So, um, I'd let you know right off the bat about that.
I know a lot of you are very concerned about it.
And I have received many calls.
Police stations around the West have received a lot of calls.
But this time, folks, it was a launch.
A verified launch from Edinburgh Air Force Base.
It was a beautiful.
You know, when they launch toward the Pacific, and they do it just about sunset, you get some really beautiful curly cue-type weirdness, multicolored weirdness in the sky, and we certainly got that.
Again, I would like to welcome KOGO in San Diego.
And they're AM600.
And by the way, they are carrying Dreamland, and those of you that expect to get it between 6 and 9 are actually going to get it between 10 and 1 for a period of time in San Diego.
So hopefully you were listening and you noticed that we were on from 10 to 1.
If not, then notice now and be listening next time.
I've got a very interesting guest coming up for you.
You may recall we interviewed the author of Timothy Leary's Dead.
Remember the big controversy about whether or not Tim Leary had his head or some portion of himself preserved?
The big, not the book, but the movie, Timothy Leary is Dead.
And we talked a little bit about cryonics.
Well, I've got the cryonics guy on the line.
This guy's name is Brian Schock.
He is from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Think about that name, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
And so in a few moments, we are going to talk to him about having oneself frozen, why you would do it, how it can be done, what the hopes are, and all the rest of it.
It is a riveting, fascinating topic.
And so Brian Schock coming up in a very few moments.
As many of you know, I was in Los Angeles on Saturday, and there's quite a story to go along with that, by the way.
I went to the Nartash Talkers Magazine big confab convention in Los Angeles, and it was really neat.
Mayor Reardon spoke, and there were many luminaries and talk show hosts and all kinds of people there.
And as a matter of fact, I met Michael Reagan there, who was very, very nice.
Michael and I had quite a long talk.
And it was quite a deal.
And I did win an award.
I won the Best Male Talk Show Host of the Year Award, which was a great honor.
And so I guess I want to thank everybody at Nardash and Talkers.
It's nice to win.
So thank you all.
And to all my affiliates that were there, and there were many.
Thank you for coming.
And it was quite a deal.
So I did win.
And a copy of that award is up on the website if you would like to take a look.
When I got home, I did a quick scan of it and slammed it up on the website so you can see a copy of the actual award.
How about that, huh?
These sorts of things are hard to talk about.
I don't really want to be seen as blowing my own horn.
I did win Best Mail Talk Show Host of the Year Award.
There was also an earthquake.
It was a rather shallow earthquake, and I've got it here someplace or another for you in Washington, state of Washington, centered about six miles from Bremerton, Washington, which is east of Seattle across the sound.
It was just seven miles deep and 4.9.
That fulfills a prediction.
And by the way, with regard to predictions, many of you will remember the time traveler from 2055 when we did a program on time travel.
You know what?
You may recall that He said on the 24th, which will be in about an hour, well, depending on the time zone.
He said on the 24th in your newspaper, there is going to be a story about a transportation tragedy.
Well, I'll be damned if there was not a train collision in Texas, and that is going to be a headline in the newspaper of the 24th tomorrow or today, depending on your time zone.
How in the world could he have hit that one on the head with regard to the sex scandal with a public prison and an underaged prison?
I've got a story here that I've got to confirm, but it looks like he may have hit that one on the head too.
Both of these happenings apparently have come true, have come to pass.
I now know how to contact this time traveler.
And so in the next few days, we will do exactly that.
We will contact him and ask him how could he possibly have known and hit all of this on the head.
Amazing.
Anyway, coming up in a moment, we're going to be talking with Brian Chalk, and we're going to be talking about life extension through cryonics.
and we're gonna find out exactly what cryonics is what it has to offer and you can decide if it's something you want to do the the the
Brian Schock has a B.S. degree in biology, briefly attended medical school in Mexico, worked as a writer and computer programmer for several years, has been a member and active volunteer of the Alcor Foundation since 1991, and has been employed as membership manager of that organization since 1995.
His current duties include editing Cryonics magazine and acting as Alcor Corporate Secretary.
He is 35 years of age, married, and lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Okay, well, as you can imagine, if we were to use mechanical refrigerators or freezers, we would be subject to a great number of breakdowns and that kind of thing.
So those aren't really very dependable methods.
What we use is sort of like, I guess you'd say, a giant thermos bottle.
The technical term is a dewer, a cryogenic dewer, basically a very, very well-insulated container.
We put our patients in there and then we immerse them in liquid nitrogen.
As I said, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen is minus 320 degrees.
I'm going to ask some dumb layman-like questions, so bear with me.
When you keep something in your freezer at home, nowhere near cryogenic temperatures, And you keep it there too long, you get freezer burn, freeze burn.
The reason you get freezer burn is because there is some, oh, I guess you'd say, chemical activity going on in temperatures as high as you would find in your home freezer.
There are things happening.
There is oxidation.
There is some decay and degeneration.
Basically, what's happening in freezer burn is something similar to what would happen if you just left meat out at room temperature, except it just happens more slowly.
Once you take the temperature down much further, though, it'll happen so slowly that you won't see it for centuries.
Well, the way things are going right now, genetically and in every other way, one could begin to imagine that some of those people you have frozen might not have to wait more than a few decades at best.
Now, this gets a little gory, and people can have either their entire body frozen, and no doubt a greater expense, or they can have their head frozen, and we'll talk about why somebody would want to do that.
I want to refer back to a story that I saw on 60 Minutes.
I'm pretty sure it was.
It was a remarkable story, Brian.
One in which there was a woman, I don't know if you saw it, with an embolism in her brain.
And, you know, that's a bulged-out vein.
I'm not a doctor, but there was a big bulge in there, and, of course, it was in danger of bursting.
And they could not operate on this woman because they were almost certain that if they opened up her cranium with blood pressure and so forth and everything going on, it would burst and she would die instantly.
So they concocted a scheme to lower her body temperature and actually drain her Body of all of its blood, which they did.
And of course, when they drained all the blood, the bulge decreased, and they were able to go in and surgically remove it and sew it back up again.
And then they warmed her blood back up and put it in her body.
But the bottom line is, and she came back alive.
The bottom line is for a period of about 45 minutes, the big question is, there was no heartbeat, there was no brain activity, nothing was going on.
But as for the question, where was the woman during that time that she had no heartbeat and was apparently dead for what we would consider to be practical purposes now?
That's a good question.
I would say that she was still there.
She was in a non-functional state, but she was still there.
Certainly, when she awakened, she had her memories and her personality, and she was the same person.
Now, if you're asking a spiritual question there, what happened to her soul during that time, I don't know.
Well, I wonder whether that, of course, it leads into what you're doing, obviously, and questions about the soul and spirituality and all the rest of it.
It begins to suggest that if you could preserve the brain, at the very least, the brain, or certainly the entire body, I guess it would depend on individual cases, and we'll get into how you decide what is or is not to be preserved.
But then you could reanimate it, so to speak, if you have properly preserved it.
I think that what you folks are doing would bring a person back.
And God, I'm not sure what that says about the spiritual side of things.
Does somebody go somewhere and then get yanked back?
Or is it true that there really is nothing beyond?
Let me try this question.
We're in such a sensitive piece of territory here.
Could you describe to me the spiritual beliefs of most of the people that you have dealt with?
Well, most of the members of ALCOR tend not to have strong spiritual beliefs.
That's by no means the rule.
We do have a number of members who are, as far as I can tell, very devout Christians, very devout Jews, maybe even a few Buddhists in there somewhere, I believe.
But for the most part, our people tend to be fairly agnostic.
They don't know.
And because they don't know, they want to deal with what they can know, what they can observe, the physical world, the physical body, that sort of thing.
i'm art bell you know it just heard to me that what brian's shots company does alcor life extension foundation what they do is actually We'll tackle that side of it in a moment.
Now Back to Brian Schock.
And Brian, welcome back.
Let us finish up with the spiritual aspect of this.
I would not really expect you to have any answers to these questions, but if somebody can come back after a hundred years, would you dare to suggest that means that they really never went anywhere at all when they died?
That what they are, the cells they are, the memories, the neurons that fire in their brain that you would reanimate, that's what they are.
And it would suggest to many people that when you're dead, you're dead.
Well, I'll venture into the territory personally speaking.
I wouldn't want to speak for our members, and I wouldn't want to necessarily speak for the organization on this matter.
But I'd have to say that from my studies, from my experience, yes, it seems to me that we are physical beings, that the important parts of us are encoded in the neurons and our brains, are objects of matter and energy rather than a spiritual element.
But again, that's just me.
I happen to feel this way, and everyone is welcome to disagree with me.
I don't know a lot about this because I'm not a doctor, but I do know, and I remember with Tim Leary, there was discussion when he became very interested in doing this.
In exactly, let's see, how can I put this delicately?
Would it be true, I'll form it in a question, that somebody who would freeze themselves prior to the natural moment of death, or as close to it as possible, would have a far better chance of being revived later.
The more minutes that tick by after actual physical death, the more cellular damage that becomes irreversible is done.
Right now, of course, we're only allowed to work on people who are legally dead.
In other words, people who have had a death certificate signed for them.
It doesn't necessarily mean that they are completely irretrievable.
It just means their heart has stopped and a physician has decided not to revive them.
If we could work on them before they were legally dead, I think the primary advantage we would have is that we could control the moment of death or non-function.
So in other words, if I, let's say I went to a doctor and I found out I had a brain tumor and I had, I don't know, what do they tell you?
two or three months, six months to live, whatever.
And if I were able to legally decide that I wanted to go into prionic suspension now, instead of waiting out the two or three months to die, my chances would be how good?
Well, again, we really don't know what the odds are on this.
Presumably, they would be better.
You would undergo less warm ischemia, in other words, less time at room temperature without a heartbeat, and so your body would be in better condition when you were frozen.
On the other hand, it may be that the freezing techniques we use right now aren't really good enough.
We can't say for certain.
It may be that the people we have frozen are simply dead, permanently dead, because we didn't freeze them well enough.
On the other hand, it could make all the difference to freeze a person pre-mortem.
Would you imagine then that the brain that has been cryonically preserved would actually be physically transferred to a body without a brain?
Or would you imagine, you know, there's a lot of talk, let's say you created a clone with a blank brain, in essence, and then you took the information from the brain you had reanimated and, in effect, downloaded it.
All right, well, look, 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years into the future, 10,000 years, the ethics and morals as we think of them today, which are undergoing constant change, I mean, within the last decade, may be very different.
On the other hand, I tend to think that unless we have something very similar, at least recognizable to the sort of ethics we have these days, probably we won't be reviving cryonics patients.
I mean, a society that doesn't value human life and doesn't value individuals to some degree isn't going to bother with us.
Frozen people will just be meat to them, and they probably wouldn't even bother to maintain them.
So I can't make a prediction about the future, but I can say that if cryonics patients are revived, chances are it will be in a future with some sort of recognizable ethics.
So in other words, the relatives of this person who has been frozen cannot go to court, get some kind of court order to yank that money away, saying this is ridiculous.
If there was ever a circumstance where you had an opportunity to freeze somebody prior to actual clinical death or the signature of a physician, you wouldn't be able to talk about that, would you?
We have responsibility for these 35 helpless people who are frozen with us.
And if we were to do that, if we were to risk ourselves on a situation like that, we could be accused of homicide and it could bring up some terrible questions.
In fact, we did sue for false arrest and won eventually.
Some of our more influential members managed to get a court injunction against the coroner so that he did not autopsy Doroth Kentz or any of our other members.
He's from the Alcorn Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.
You know what they do?
They bionically freeze people who have died in hopes of bringing them back later.
They take them down to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's really, really cold.
And there is more synchronicity on this night.
I was just talking to Keith Rowan, my webmaster.
And we'll find out, by the way, if Brian has a, if Alcor has a website, and if so, we'll get a link up for you here in a moment.
But it seems that ABC, as their nightly movie, ran something called Late for Dinner about a couple of people who were cryonically frozen and then, of course, accidentally somehow were reanimated 29 years later.
That's fairly synchronous, I would say, wouldn't you?
we'll get back to a brand shock and uh...
more about the alcohol life extension foundation and your questions coming up shortly uh...
That's actually a term, I believe, invented by a science fiction writer named Larry Niven.
There's a good reason, though, we don't do that, and it's because we are really working hard to create the idea that these are people who are potentially alive.
There are those who would charge, of course, that, and this is a downside, and I'm not coming after you in any way.
I'm just going to let you address the question.
There are companies that specialize in taking older people's Social Security money and maintaining them in some sort of substandard condition until they pass away and take that money for years.
And there are those who would make that charge about what you're doing.
Well, it is also fair, Brian, to say that a year ago, if somebody had told me you could clone a human being, I would have told them you are out of your mind.
And now, let me tell you, Brian, there's a company already in the Bahamas that for, I think, $200,000 will clone you.
Now, we may not be doing it here, but you can be damn sure it's being done if it already has not been done elsewhere.
So, with that in mind, I've got to say there's a realistic chance, in some cases, of reanimating a body that has died.
One of the things that concerned me most was the idea that there was anything left of a human brain after even a few minutes without blood flow.
This was a big question to me because as far as anyone knew, you had about four to six minutes after a person's heart stopped that you could actually revive them.
And as far as we knew then, their brain was just wiped clean or destroyed or whatever.
Well, he gave me some references on work done that investigated exactly what happens to the brain during these ischemic periods, during these periods when there is no blood flow.
And, well, how do I explain this in non-technical terms?
Basically, what happens is when the brain doesn't get blood, it starts to swell.
And, well, if your arm swells or your leg swells or something like that, it's no big deal.
So basically what happens is that after a few minutes like that, even if you start the heart back up again, the brain is not going to get any blood.
So the person is as good as dead.
There are medications, on the other hand, that you can give during that process to halt this process or at least retard the process.
So basically, it was the opening that said to me that we aren't necessarily losing our memories as the heart stops, but they may still be in there in code in some form.
well again that's why i brought up last hour the lady who had no blood to her brain for forty five minutes and yet they revived her and she was normal and they did that by reducing her body temperature not to cryonic levels of my long shot but simply uh...
well for And because they were in icy water, I guess the swelling that you're talking about did not occur.
Well, there are some premedications you can give, but for the most part, unless we are working with a very cooperative physician, we wouldn't be able to do that.
No, all the cooling has to be done post-mortem after the certificate is signed.
Many times doctors don't want to open themselves to any liability, and we certainly understand that.
You spend an awful lot of money and years on a medical career.
But then on other occasions, we've had physicians who will look at some of our literature or, say, the medical alert bracelets that our patients have, and they'll start the procedure themselves, and they give us a call and say, okay, what should I do now?
You know about Kvorkian and the big legal battles that are going on with assisted suicide.
If the laws begin to tip toward, and I believe they will, frankly, eventually, I'm kind of a libertarian myself, and I don't believe in suicide, and I would personally never commit suicide.
But I'm a libertarian, and I think that people have a right to do what they want with their own lives.
That's my own personal view.
Now, if the law should begin to be revised allowing physician-assisted suicide, how would that possibly fit into what you do?
May I ask you technically, in your opinion, Brian, how much difference would it make in terms of the probability of being able to eventually reanimate if you're able to prepare and do it prior to actual physical death?
How much difference in your chances would there be?
Imagine dying and then being taken down to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
Either your body in totality or your head by itself.
That's cryonics, and that is what the Alcor Life Extension Foundation does.
They are the largest organization of their sort in the world.
And I have their spokesman, Brian Chalk.
Brian, we've got a bunch of calls, and we're going to get to them in a moment.
But I would like to ask you one more terribly sensitive question.
Suppose I had a lot of money, and I knew that I could not be suspended prior to physical death here in the U.S. Suppose I were to fly to some other country where the rules are not quite what they are here and have it done and then be transported back into this country?
Some of our members are very well-known computer scientists and might want to be uploaded into computers, but that's not exactly the same thing as being a head in a box.
Well, what I've been thinking as I've been hearing all this is the current state of overpopulation and that we don't have enough resources to support basically our current population now, and it's declining.
And I'm thinking, you know, you preserving these people and, you know, I mean, it's just going to get worse.
And, I mean, what's going to happen?
You know, I mean, right now medical science has advanced so far that our lives are longer, et cetera.
And now people are getting themselves frozen.
And another maybe sensitive topic which touches me is that how many animals have to be tortured for this cloning process?
What we really have to worry about, well, population, if population is going to be a problem, it's going to be a problem even without cryonics working.
We have a lot of bacteria and viruses in our bodies at all times.
Bacteria on your skin, in your intestinal tract, viruses, even AIDS.
Now, suppose by the time the technology is available to bring these people back, and I really personally don't rule it out, the bacteria and viruses in the future may have evolved so that these bacteria and viruses from the late 1990s could be a health threat if released.
And is it not possible that, for example, with AIDS and other things, some future CDC would virtually order the people you have destroyed because they might be a possible public health threat?
I really don't have any sense of that happening because, as I said, bringing someone out of cryonic suspension is a real trick, a real technological trick.
And we're just not going to make that jump without all the intermediate steps.
Among those intermediate steps will probably be technologies that can deal with any sort of bacteria or virus that we have today.
Actually, I was actually thinking of cattle semen, but it's all pretty much the same thing that way.
It's the same principle.
So it's not possible yet to actually freeze someone and bring him back.
Unfortunately, even with our best technology, there is a certain amount of tissue damage, very subtle, sometimes very obvious tissue damage, that we just can't get around yet.
Now, if you're asking how will we eventually do it, we have some guesses.
And this gets us into a topic called nanotechnology, which you're probably familiar with.
Oh, I certainly am.
It's become much more well known in the last few years.
Nanotechnology really started as an idea in itself from a book called Engine of Creation by a man named Eric Drexler, a very fine gentleman.
And he's been working with many of our members, and we are very interested in what he has to say.
Basically, his idea is that you can build devices, machinery, electronic circuits, with individual atoms or molecules.
He has suggested, he has proposed that you might even be able to fit the equivalent of a modern mainframe computer inside a human cell with a lot of volume to spare.
Well, I don't know about forever, but I see a real possibility of extending human life with this technology.
That's a direction we seem to have been going during the last few years, and I'm encouraged by it.
Imagine a very small machine that could just fit inside the human circulatory system and could deal with atherosclerotic plaques around coronary arteries.
Well, my problem was I'd like, I would, well, it's not a problem.
I had no plans to do this, but I was wondering, like, if you're older, like in your 80s and you had this son and you revived and you come back, like you're 50 years later or so and you died from a brain tumor, but before that you had like arthritis or something and you were crippled all up.
Well, again, there's the idea that medical science must continue to advance if we're going to bring these people out.
Right now, geriatric medicine and life extension medicine is a very real endeavor.
It's being investigated all the time.
They started with experimenting with human growth hormone injections, and they're going from there.
I don't know if we can say that we'll ever be able to rejuvenate people, although I certainly hope so myself, but I believe that we will be able to certainly give people many more years of life, even if they are in their 80s or 90s.
And the cosmetic end of it, making them look younger, is probably not even all that difficult.
First off, I wanted to note that some of the social issues involved with integration of a reanimated person back into society have been dealt with back in the 50s, actually.
Robert Heinlein's novel, Adore in the Summer, comes to immediate mind.
And also the problem of voluntary suicide with regard to a life-extended society was touched upon in Time Enough for Love, which he also wrote.
I was wondering about what Alcor is doing with regard to popular acceptance.
I've noticed there was an episode of VR this season which dealt with a patient who arrived in the emergency room with a life extension company bracelet on his arm and they had to freeze the body while waiting for somebody to come from California to collect the body.
And on The Nanny of All Places, they did an episode where they talked about cryotics, and I recognized the actors holding a copy of Cryonics Reaching for Tomorrow.
But, yeah, we try to help the media whenever possible.
We understand that television shows and films are going to portray cryonics in the most entertaining way they can.
That's their job, to be entertaining.
And if we can make it any more accurate, certainly we're happy to do that.
But we don't feel really bad if they go off and do something like Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin, which incidentally, I talked to Schumacher Productions, the art department, about that as well.
And as far as I can tell, they didn't use any of my advice at all.
unidentified
I'm wondering, other than the other aspects that don't have to do with the actual science and technology of cryonics, for those who may have seen it, was the depiction of the doers in the X-Files accurate?
I've actually talked to the X-Files on two or three occasions.
I remember one show early on.
I haven't watched it all that much recently, but in the first season, I think they did a show on cryonics.
They weren't terribly accurate, although I sort of admired them.
I thought they looked very good, quite useful.
Actually, our doers are much larger, I believe, than what they had.
We need to conserve liquid nitrogen as much as possible, and so we try to keep the patients in as compact a container as we can.
So it's like four people per doer.
And so in that sense, they didn't look terribly accurate, although as large steel cylinders, I guess they were.
unidentified
Finally, other than Dr. Leary, without violating the confidentiality of your patients, is there anyone, a public figure whose endorsement has been given to cryonics, you know, someone who says, yes, I'm going to do this?
I know Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw got a big push out of the fact that Clint Eastwood announced he was using their life extension supplement some years ago.
I was wondering if someone had made a similar announcement or was wanting to make a similar announcement with regard to alcohol or some other cryonics supplementary.
Art Bell, Somewhere in Time All right, once again, back to Brian Schock, and he is from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
They cryogenically freeze people after clinical death, presently, to a temperature of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit with the hope that one day they can be revived.
And the way medical science is going right now, it does not seem that unreasonable to me.
And one more thing, Brian.
You know, going back to the beginning of our conversation when we were talking about the spiritual aspects of all this, in a lot of ways, even somebody with fairly deep religious conviction could look at it this way, that they've got nothing to lose.
Because if, in fact, when you die, you're dead, your spirit goes elsewhere, you have an immortal spirit of some sort, and I don't rule that out by a long shot, then your freezing their head or their body will not stop that spirit from moving forward.
If, on the other hand, through some process it can either be brought back or remains or can be reanimated, then they win.
So really, you could look at it this way, that you win either way.
I know there are probably people who are drawn to this type of thing, but it just seems like an old, used-up, cellular, aged body would be a horrible thing to come back to.
He's talking about nanotechnology, things that would allow you to, in essence, be revived.
I mean, look, ma'am, if you think about the amount of scientific medical advance in the last 30 years and you project that for 100 or 200, imagine what's going to be possible.
What I was hearing first, I think, was you were drawing a distinction between freezing living tissue and freezing a dead organism, a dead person.
Well, I don't think we can necessarily draw that distinction because death is a very open concept right now.
It used to be that a person was dead when their heart stopped.
Well, clearly, that's not the case because people are revived from that condition all the time.
It happens every day.
Right now, we can't even necessarily think of cessation of brain activity as real death because, well, people who go in for this hypothermic arrest surgery we've been talking about, they have no brain waves.
I don't know a great deal about that, although from what I can infer from the information I do have, I would say that probably when a person's heart stops, when the blood stops flowing to their brain, they are not conscious to any degree at all.
As I said, in that condition, brain waves will stop.
We know that fairly well.
And so, for all intents and purposes, there is no brain function.
One other horrid little thing that I've always wondered about, maybe you can answer it, probably you can't.
In the old days of guillotines, when they would chop off somebody's head, again, you would suggest that function would stop immediately, or would there be some number of seconds of conscious thought which sort of faded to black?
We really had sort of a jump in interest once the cloning of the sheep was announced.
Really?
Yes, I mean, it wasn't a major jump, but I mean, it certainly was more interest than we'd gotten lately, quite a bit of interest from the press in particular.
How extensive, Brian, have the animal experiments been?
In other words, with animals, horrible as it may sound, you could imagine that while they still live, you could fill them with all kinds of pre, what would the right phrase be, all the chemicals you wanted to put into their body while they were still alive that would aid in the preservation process and then put them into cryonic suspension while they are still alive.
Horrible as it may sound, these kinds of experiments are what you would want to hear about if you were considering doing it for yourself.
Right now, our research program is directed more towards improving our suspension methods.
So we are, it's not pure research, it's more like technological research, improving the rate at which we cool patients initially, and that sort of thing.
Brian, I think it was last hour you made a comment on the freezing barrier and how it was possible to just before that point you've slowed the metabolic process enough to have a pretty good chance of resuscitation.
I was wondering if any experiments have ever been done.
Forgive me if I'm asking something that's pretty simple, but I know little or nothing about this.
Quite alright.
I was wondering if any experimentation or anything has been done on whether or not you can increase the length of life by slowing the metabolic process.
Obviously, it wouldn't be indefinite, but maybe it would be for maybe a decade or so longer than that.
My question is, with the possibility of the cryogenetic sleep process, when a person's body is revived, is there a concern that there might be a for like newer ailments or abnormalities to the unfrozen body?
As far as we know, there is no way presently to thaw somebody and reanimate them, not from the kind of temperatures that are being used with cryogenics.
And the one that I've got in my hand that you sent to me, or your company, or your organization, excuse me, sent, says cryotransport case report, and it gives a name, patient number A1110.
From patient one through today, would I, being frozen today, have a better chance because of technological advances since patient one than patient one has?
Well, when you look at your patient inventory right now, would you say that there are some cases which you would regard as far better, far better chances for reanimation eventually if that technology becomes available than others?
Personally, my own feeling is that a person would have a much, much better chance to be frozen just prior to clinical death, and I'm sure Brian shares that view with me, but the laws presently do not allow it.
But you know something?
The laws are in the process of being changed.
And if physician-assisted suicide is finally ruled to be legal, and by the way, I'm a libertarian in that sense, and I firmly believe that you should have a choice, the right to make that choice for yourself.
Well, then I think there would be a pretty good chance if you were still in some form of animation, even close to death, and frozen.
That's my own personal view.
We'll get back to Brian and your questions in a moment.
unidentified
*Skiss* *Skiss*
Now we take you back to the night of June 23, 1997, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell, Somewhere in Time Back now to Brian Schock.
Brian, a lot of people want to talk to you here and have questions.
I've got a, matter of fact, I've got a fax from a pastor here, of all things, a pastor who says, Art Great Show tonight, I find the subject of great interest.
It really makes one wonder at what stage death really occurs And at what stage, if any, the spirit leaves the body of someone who has been frozen.
Back in the early 1970s, there was a series named Night Gallery.
They had one episode in which the spirit of someone who had been frozen wanted no longer to be frozen because it prevented him from passing over.
And what he was now experiencing was more of a hell than anything else.
Really makes one think.
Then there was a study back in the early 1900s.
Brian, I have talked about it on the air from time to time.
A doctor did it.
And what he did was, at the exact moment of death, he measured the weight of the body.
And he did this as an actual clinical study.
And he discovered there was actually three quarters of an ounce of weight loss at the instant of death.
Now, this was a clinical study, not just somebody messing around.
And they did it again and again and again.
They were unable to document any of it in animals, only in human beings.
Three quarters of an ounce gone at the instant of death.
Well, I've heard about that, and I've always thought it was interesting because my understanding was that the soul, whatever it might be, was a non-physical thing, a non-physical entity.
And so I can't understand why it would have weight.
I also have to wonder about this study to some degree because I am not aware of it being in any of the textbooks I've ever read about pathology, and I don't think anyone's really pursued this line of research.
I used to be an analyzer of gas samples, low-boiling plant gases, methane and so forth, in a lab way back before I went into the Army and finished my med training.
But I'm interested in just asking you about what happens when you freeze a body with all the water that's in the body and in the blood and everywhere.
Doesn't that turn into ice?
Two more questions, Al after that.
Don't those ice crystals destroy any possibility of any good cell life after rejuvenation?
That's always been the problem with freezing tissue.
One of the things we do, one of the parts of our process, is to remove as much of that water as we can.
It's a fairly common sort of cryobiological technique, cryopreservation, cryoprotective perfusion.
We use what's been used for years, glycerol, to replace the water and to prevent as much ice crystal formation as we can.
So that's how we get around that.
It's obviously not perfect because we can't actually bring people back.
And to some degree, glycerol is toxic as well.
But it seems to be better preservation than just a straight freeze.
unidentified
There you are?
To Art's statement about life leaving body and about stopping breath, I've had my heart stop two or three times for a while at night, and I wake up and realize it's stopped.
But it starts again when my consciousness wakes me up.
As I said, I think the question of death is quite open.
We have to think of death as, or at least my organization has to think of death as a real destruction of the person, a point from which there could not even theoretically be a return.
You can think of a person right now as not having a heartbeat and not breathing, not having brain waves, but still being potentially functional.
And that's not really death.
On the other hand, there's somewhere along the scale, certainly by the time a person is just a dry skeleton, that the person is clearly dead.
If they're in liquid nitrogen, ma'am, if you're immersed in liquid nitrogen, you're going to stay cold whether it's open or not.
unidentified
okay well i didn't know they said they wanted to do an autopsy on this woman's head and they didn't want to Well, another thing I wanted to ask is, how many employees are there at Alcos?
While certainly you and your company, excuse me, organization, are doing everything you can to be sure these people remain in the frozen condition, there is always the possibility that some nutcase out there would decide to come in and tip over tanks and, you know, undo what you have done.
We've thought about this quite a bit, and we have personnel on the premises 24 hours a day.
There's never a minute that goes by when the phones and the patient care bay, we call it, where we actually keep these people, where that's not attended.
So certainly we do have someone there to watch out for these people.
We also have alarms on the tanks.
If anyone should try to move them or open them, we would know about it immediately.
But then again, if we were up against a very ruthless, not entirely sane person, there's only so much we can do.
I was curious, he said when you're bringing them back, he said earlier that people have died and their brainwave's still going on when they're dead, and they've been brought back.
Right?
Yes.
But if they're gone long enough, the longer you're gone, you can come back as a vegetable or you may not even make it back at all.
And oxygen is mainly what's supporting the brain and keeping it going.
And without having, you know, it's kind of like a computer without having power for a long time.
The information is going to be deleted.
And if you bring back a brain without information, you're not going to have anybody there.
Yes, but it's not very clear-cut, caller, because as I gave an example earlier, 16 Minutes did quite an extensive story on a lady who had no blood to her brain for the better part of an hour, and they brought her back.
Well, this is information I've kept in my brain, useless knowledge for 30 years, just to answer your question.
But it's just to be hearsay, because I don't even remember where I read the article.
It was a scientific American, I believe, but a French doctor, who had the same capacity as I suppose an American doctor with the stethoscopy after electrocution was following the people that are executed by the guillotine.
Dear Art, I believe that I've heard of at least one case in which the condemned prisoner told the executioner he was going to try an experiment, and the executioner reported that after the prisoner's head was separated from his body, he winked.
Whether this is true or not, I can't say, but I've heard doctors and even pathologists say they believed it.
If true, it seems to confirm the brain continues to function for at least a while after being separated from the body.
unidentified
Okay, he said the eyes glazed after about two minutes.
It's such an honor to talk to you and to add my words to those people who are so hopeful and creative.
We founded this country.
And I'm so glad for this country.
But I just wanted to instill a bit.
There's no answers that I could possibly have.
And thank the Lord there aren't any answers.
There's only hope, only dreams, only possibility.
But isn't as Brian had spoke of earlier, that he might have broken the sound barrier here in time travel, if he brought somebody else back to life, their words and what they might have seen or said by that time, surely they were able to add a body or clone a body or whatever for the fellow, if he just had a head, he might change the world.
If he changed the world at that point, and it was possible to bring somebody back from the past, then it's quite possible to bring somebody back from the future.
And the whole system would sort of be proven at that point to be true.
And I wanted to add one little thing at the end of our conversation.
I just wanted to know what you and Brian's opinion would be of that.
And surely the people who have died and decided to go through this process believe that they have the power to preserve themselves and not die and go on to another transition.
Being that the whole world hinges on this thing, my final words that I wanted to add to the hopes and dreams and creativity which made this country great from the very beginning, that needs to come back, was that God is greater than man.
Well, the first part of that question is answered by pointing out that unless some sort of organization is there to maintain people, then no one's going to be brought back.
It's not going to be as though you can free someone, put him in a dusty corner, and forget about him.
And then incidentally, he's brought back later and he has no friends and so on.
There has to be an organization, there has to be continuity of organization through that.
And whatever organization eventually does bring this person back is going to almost certainly feel some responsibility for taking care of him.
Well, of course, I can't say exactly what there will be, but I think it's fair to speculate that, yes, there would be some sort of counseling, some sort of re-education.
Probably it'll be some sort of community.
I mean, I can see how we'll have a number of people who are being brought back, and they're all from about the same period, and they may know each other.
Well, I think this is sort of a misinterpretation of some work that's been done.
A few years ago, there was an experiment by a company called BioTime, which received a lot of publicity, and over the years, people have really sort of misinterpreted what happened.
Basically, they were reproducing some of Alcor's earlier experiments where dogs were taken very near the freezing point and then revived.
But the press coverage subsequent to that would sometimes miss the point.
unidentified
Okay.
Then I also heard from a friend of mine 18 years ago that when there was people that were guillotined, there were some people that were lip readers and actually got confessions out of them.
My observation, and then my question that leads up to it, I would imagine that this company, in the best interest of every which way, without any deceit or anything, started off, you know, probably quite honestly to do all of this.
And then I bet you technical people came into the picture afterwards, started realizing that, you know, the ice crystals and all the problems, I have a feeling that, gee, we started this, but we're not going to have a way of doing it.
We thought in the beginning we could have, and now it's kind of like it's not going to work out the way we thought.
And leading up to my question, is it possible that in the future, have you guys ever thought about that maybe that they could come up with a new type of fluid that they have tested and thaw some of your people out and then reintroduce the new liquid and then refreeze them?
Well, certainly there's research going on to find new cryoprotective solutions, but I don't think we'd be doing our patients any favors by thawing them.
The thawing process in experiments has been shown to cause damage in itself.
So regardless of the benefits of any new solutions, any damage that's going to be done has been done, and we just have to deal with it.
So the best hope, in view of the damage you know is done, is perhaps nanotechnology or the advances that are being made or promised to be made in nanotechnology.
Did you guys learn anything from the woolly mammoths they found up in the Antarctic and the condition of the body that was the woolly mammoths that were frozen and found with vegetation do you believe would happen to a body,
let's say 300 years out, would there be a lot of, well, let's see.
The sort of animals you find frozen in the Arctic are frozen at what we would consider to be relatively high temperatures.
When you examine their tissue microscopically, you'll find that there is very little cellular definition, very few nuclei that is almost no genetic material, at least not arranged as one would expect in regular tissue.
So although you may see something that looks like an animal, it's really, there's not much there that could be alive.
On the other hand, when something is frozen at the sort of temperatures we use, minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, there is virtually no damage from the moment it reaches that temperature.
Or at least you wouldn't begin to see any sort of damage for several thousand years.
And I think that it's really good that we have an option to use cryogenics, that that's something that's technologically possibly or possible at this point.
I think that like 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, to think that someone could put electrodes on a person who looks clinically dead's body and knock them back to life was absolutely outrageous.
And this kind of technology, I think, can be useful, even though it's in its, I guess, kind of beginning states and still trying to figure out how to do it and all of that.
As a nurse paramedic, in our training, we were taught that when we come across someone who's been exposed thermally and appears clinically dead, there's no breathing or heartbeat or any electrical activity, that they're not actually dead until they're warm and dead.
So you warm them up.
And most of them don't have any brain damage, or they might have a little bit.
The one thing I wonder about, and of course this is speculation, is after such a long period of time being frozen and you come out, do you have a lot of soulless people walking around?
It's something we won't know for probably a long time, but it's just a thought.
Well, again, referring to the lady that was clinically dead for 45 minutes, all the blood gone, brainwaves gone, heartbeat gone, respiration gone, dead, dead, dead.
She came back and appears to have, well, lots of soul.
That lady that called just before the top of the hour and said, you know, what would be the purpose or why would people even want to wake somebody up 100 years from now?
And it just made me think that, you know, if we had somebody from 100 or 200 years ago that we could wake up, geez, we'd be putting everything we could into doing that.
I think it'd be real interesting to have somebody from a couple of hundred years ago that, you know, you'd be interviewing some night.
I mean, if you pick someone like, say, Benjamin Franklin, I think he would be overjoyed at seeing the present day.
As a matter of fact, Benjamin Franklin actually wrote something like that.
He had observed that if flies were drowned in Madeira wine and then allowed to dry out in sunlight, they would frequently appear to come back to life.
And he rather fancifully suggested that perhaps when he was near death, he might be preserved in a cask of wine, and who knows, maybe someone might bring him back.
And I think that regardless of any religious belief, that we have to look at the fact that we were put on this earth to fulfill our greatest potential as a race, not only human beings.
And to live up to that potential, we have to ask all these questions and we have to find out all these answers.
And that's part of what this quickening is about, is we're finding out things at a greater rate because things might be getting closer to the end of our time on earth.
My question for Brian is, originally was, I'm sure that all of the illegalities that you have looked into connected to all this whole procedure, how does this actually affect people's inheritance taxes?
That has to be addressed because if they plan to come back, they haven't actually died.
How can they be the government think about taxing them?
And the American Indians that lived in this Southern California area prior to the missionaries coming here had a pretty simple belief system that by cremating the dead body, the spirit as smoke would return to the father and the sky, and the ashes would return to the mother and the earth.
And they were very careful and thorough about cremating, because first they burnt the body, then they gathered the charge and the ashes and whatever, and they bundled them up and they burned them again all night long.
The reason being was to make sure that no part of that person lingered here so as to be impeded in his furthering.
How do you know that they're right, or that Christians are right, or Buddhists are right, or that anybody's right?
We don't know.
unidentified
I don't think it's a matter of anybody being right.
I just think that there are certain things that apply through nature that we are kind of overlooking and going beyond because by separating ourselves from nature, we're kind of like becoming tonsils.
But how do you know, sir, that separating ourselves is really wrong?
In other words, how do you know that man, as the lady said a moment ago, is not meant to live up to his or her fullest potential, which may mean taking advantage of every advance that science can offer?
I happen to be a believer in, I don't know, a few different aspects of reincarnation.
And I was wondering that if you died and had your body cryonically suspended, and you happened to, you know, went to whatever's beyond, you're on the astral plane or you are reborn, and your body is brought back to life, wouldn't it be a possibility and wouldn't it be a heck of a shock if your soul was captured back out of where you were and put back into your body down here?
Yeah, somebody would be walking down the street and suddenly they'd be a soulless hunk.
unidentified
Yeah, that's, you know, it'd be quite a surprise for the person that you were, and it'd be quite a surprise if you maintained your memories when you came back into your former body.
And it's like, I tend to think that I'd probably send myself back out of that life as quickly as I could.
Well, this presumes the existence of the soul, and it is something that is not necessarily presumed by Alcor or the people who do this kind of thing, who are generally agnostic.
If I were to go into suspension first, my wife might decide she wanted to remarry, and that would be an interesting problem.
Sure would.
As a matter of fact, it's kind of an interesting little situation.
The man who came up with the whole concept of cryonics, a man named Robert Ettinger, who's still with us, actually has a wife in suspension, but is also married currently to a very living wife.
So I have to think he's a little nervous about what would happen if they're both brought back together.
But maybe this question was brooched, so please forgive me if I'm asking the same question.
Assuming that this whole operation works, and it's been around so long that even I'm not sure.
I mean, we have to wait until someone actually comes out and says, hi there.
Say someone's in there for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, whatever the timeline may be, assuming they can be sawed out, cured, or what was ever wrong with them.
Has anyone either at your facility or in the field in general considered the idea that, first of all, the future shock is going to scare these people.
I mean, no matter how prepared you think you are, and you put your books and all your things in storage, everything that was important to you so you have something of that period.
You're not just thrown out naked into the new world.
Is there any talk or any plans for counseling for these people to help them re catch up and get used to things and not get so freaked out?
Because that could, I mean, we could blow their minds.
I guess I could also expand upon what I said before by suggesting that the first people to come out of suspension are probably going to be helping the later people to come out of suspension.
Because it seems likely that everyone won't come out at the same time.
The sort of scenario we're looking at now, presumably, is the last in will be the first out, simply because our ability to freeze people is improving as time goes on.
So people who went in at the beginning may take 100 years to come out, but people who come in 50 years in the future may only be in for a couple years.
And so there'll be a progression of people who have been in suspension, and they may choose to help the people that come after them to adapt.
And so it's sort of a little ready-made hierarchy of therapists, I guess.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Brian Schock.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi.
I'm just wondering about if anybody, any of your patients or clients have no intention of being reanimated, if they just want to use it as sort of an embalming process, want to hang up and kind of listen.
Well, I wanted to really hear what it was all about.
And tonight we really have had that opportunity extensively, as you cannot do on television or in newspaper articles where they just get a little bit out.
We've really been able to ask the interesting questions this evening.
But what I mean is if you've signed a contract and you're all ready to go, but the manner of your death is roadkill, does that invalidate the contract?