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June 23, 1997 - Art Bell
02:50:48
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Brian Shock - Cryonics - The Alcor Foundation
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Time Text
Welcome to Art Battle Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd, 1997.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, or a 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.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
And that light that you saw in the sky in San Diego, parts of 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, uh, I just thought 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 Vandenberg 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, Q-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're 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?
Big, uh, not the book, but the movie, uh, Timothy Leary is Dead.
And, um, we talked a little bit about cryonics.
Well, I've got the cryonics guy on the line.
This guy's name is Brian Shock.
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.
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 Nartash and Talkers, and 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.
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.
But, uh, wait a minute.
I can blow my own horn.
I can do that.
Where's my horn?
Doggone it, where's my horn anyway?
Ah, here it is.
I can blow my own horn.
I'll do a little bit of that anyway, as you know.
I have no problem with that.
But here's my horn. Ah, yes.
Hahahahaha. Ah, yes.
Anyway, so there you are.
I did win Best Male 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.
The 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.
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 person and an under-aged person, I've got a story here that I've got to confirm, but it looks like you 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 Schock, and we're going to be talking about life extension through cryonics.
And we're going to find out exactly what cryonics is, what it has to offer, and you can decide if it's something you want to do.
Brian Schock has a BS, uh, degree in biology, briefly attended medical school in Mexico,
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.
Here is Brian Schock.
Brian, welcome to the program.
Good evening, or good morning, I guess, to some people.
Well, yes, depending on time zones.
It's great to have you along.
Brian, you worked originally with this company.
And this company, by the way, you told me earlier, is the largest cryonics company in America?
Yes, and so by inference, the largest cryonics company in the world.
In the world, yes.
So far there aren't any other cryonics companies in any other country.
How many are here in the U.S.?
I know there is one somewhere, or was one, in the Bay Area.
Right, there's a group in the Bay Area called the American Cryonic Society.
There's another very small group in an area called Trans Time.
There's a group that's sort of all over the place called CryoCare.
They don't really have set corporate offices.
They're sort of a virtual corporation.
And then there's a group in Michigan called Cryonics Institute.
Okay, and you are the biggest, and you've been around for some time now.
That's right.
Alcor was founded in 1972.
And of course, hopefully for your customers, you're going to be around for quite some time.
That's certainly the plan.
What is cryonics, first of all, for those out there who have no idea they're going cryonics, huh?
Well, first of all, let's make a distinction between cryonics and cryogenics.
The words are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference.
Cryogenics, the word most people use for this, is actually a very general term.
It's the science of cold temperatures.
Anyone can work in cryogenics.
They could be working with superconductors, or they could be working with rocket fuels for the shuttle.
Cryonics, on the other hand, is a very specific application of cold temperatures.
It's actually freezing people in hopes of someday being able to bring them back and cure whatever killed them in the first place.
Okay, how cold do you have to get and maintain human tissue to keep it in that hopeful condition?
Right now the temperature we keep our patients at is at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wow!
Yeah, that's pretty cold.
It's the boiling point of liquid nitrogen.
And we've estimated that at that temperature we probably have, oh well, at least 10,000 years to wait.
And maybe more on the order of a million years or so.
Hopefully it won't take anywhere near that time.
Not the way things are going.
And we will get some of that, but minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
How are you able to keep anything that cold constantly?
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 doer, a cryogenic doer, 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, and the insulation keeps the nitrogen liquid, it keeps it from boiling away, and the nitrogen keeps the patients cold.
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.
Right.
Right?
With cryonic temperatures, 320 degrees minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, is that kind of thing a consideration at all?
No, it's not really a consideration.
The reason you get freezer burn is because there is some, oh, I guess you could 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.
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.
Is that reasonable?
Well, there are a number of opinions about that among our members and experts and so on.
I'd like to think it's not unreasonable.
Usually we guess between 50 and 150 years.
And I'm really starting to lean towards the lesser number right now.
I'd be inclined to agree with you.
Now, this gets a little gory and people can have either their entire body frozen At no doubt a greater expense, or they can have their head frozen.
And we'll talk about why somebody would want to do that.
But is that basically correct?
Yes, that's correct.
Our company offers either a whole body or what we call neuro suspension, head only.
Neuro suspension.
I want to refer back to a story that I saw on 16 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.
She was D.E.A.D.
dead.
And yet, they were able to bring her back After lowering her body temperature and then raising it again as her blood was put back in.
So, where was that woman for 45 minutes?
Well, I'm actually glad you brought that up, incidentally.
It's called hypothermic arrest surgery.
And I'm quite familiar with it, as you can imagine.
And it's actually being pioneered at the Barrow Neurological Clinic in Phoenix, very near us.
Anyway, though, I forgot to tell everybody that you are in Phoenix.
Is that correct?
Or near Phoenix?
Yeah, we're in Scottsdale.
It's practically the same city as Phoenix.
Right.
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.
That's correct.
Now, if you're asking a spiritual question there, what happened to her soul during that time, I don't know.
I don't think anyone can tell you.
Well, I wonder whether, 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.
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.
And physical solutions to the problem of life.
Science.
Brian, hold tight.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Brian Shock is my guest from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from June 23, 1997.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast AMX-CMX.
Love is good, love can be strong.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Do you remember that day?
That sunny day.
When you first came my way.
I said no one could take your place.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd, 1997.
Good morning everybody, I'm Art Bell.
You know, it just occurred to me that what Brian Schott's company does, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, what they do is actually, when you think about it, it's actually time travel.
Isn't it?
We'll tackle that side of it in a moment.
Now back to Brian Schock and uh...
Brian, welcome back.
Let us finish up with the 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 and 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.
You want to venture into that territory?
Well, I'll venture into the territory personally speaking.
Okay.
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 in 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.
Well, I'm sure they will.
Anyway, we'll leave that now and tackle some other aspects of this.
When you do what you're talking about having done, your brain or your body being frozen with cryonics, you, in essence, are traveling In time, let us say that you're correct, and I think you might be the way things are going with cloning and all the rest of it.
We're making incredible advances.
Let's say you come back in a hundred years.
Effectively, that's time travel.
Yes, that's very true.
One direction time travel, one way.
There's no going back the same way.
But yeah, basically we think of cryonics as sort of an ambulance to the future.
An ambulance to the future.
Alright, there would be a lot of things.
I know a little bit about this.
For example, I know that insurance companies, it's an expensive process.
Per year, can you tell me roughly what it costs to keep somebody in cryonic suspension?
Okay.
Per year, it costs somewhere on the order of $4,000.
Not so bad.
No.
Not so bad.
But in order to do that indefinitely, you have to have some sort of investment set up where you don't invade your principles.
That's one of the reasons it's so expensive, just to name prices right off the bat.
$120,000 minimum funding for a whole body suspension and $50,000 for the head only, the neuro suspension.
So with $120,000, assuming even modest interest rates, you'd never have to really touch the principal.
In fact, things go as they normally do.
Interest rates probably will go up and at the very least you would maintain your principal and your frozen self forever.
That is correct.
That's exactly what we plan.
So far, our investments seem to be working quite well.
We invest very conservatively, of course, and we've managed to stay ahead of inflation.
For your clients?
That's correct, yes.
Is that what you call them, your clients?
Well, if a person is frozen with us, we would call him a patient.
If he just has arrangements to have this done, We would call him a member or suspension member.
All right, now some more delicate territory.
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?
I'm...
The more minutes that tick by after actual physical death, the more cellular damage that becomes irreversible is done.
Is that fair?
That's more or less true.
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.
Okay, how much of an advantage would that be?
It would be a great advantage.
Right now, we have to be waiting there at a person's bedside, and we don't know when it's going to happen.
We don't know when we should have our equipment ready.
It may be that a physician is out of the room or not in the hospital.
Sure.
There can be a terrible delay there.
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 Well, again, we really don't know what the odds are on this.
Presumably, they would be better.
instead of waiting out the two or three months to die my chances would be how good
again we you really don't know what the odds are on that
presumably they would be better you would undergo left uh... warmest came in other words left
time that 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.
A little early, yes.
No doubt there are candidates you have.
Let me ask you this.
How many do you have presently, cryonically suspended?
We have 35.
35.
How many are entire bodies versus heads?
Right now, it's 13 whole body patients and 22 head only patients.
Head only.
What is the hope with regard to the head only patients?
What is their hope?
What do they expect?
When you write in your, you have a brochure which you sent me, which is what caused me to call you today, when you talk to somebody about having their head frozen, what is it, what hope do you give them?
What are you telling them, basically?
Well, what we're telling them is that actually bringing someone out of cryonic suspension will be a pretty good technological trick in itself.
Really worried, for instance, about the disease that killed him in the first place.
Chances are, when we can finally bring someone out, we'll have long since cured cancer and AIDS and everything else.
But the problem of, well, what sort of life can they expect?
How will we give them a body?
There are a number of possibilities.
Obviously, cloning brings up an interesting possibility right there.
It's possible to clone at least an animal right now.
And to not develop the head, or not develop the brain within the head.
Really?
Yes, that actually has been done with mice.
That was done a few years ago, as a matter of fact.
Acephalic mice have been... In other words, you create a clone, but you do a genetic manipulation so there is no brain?
Wow!
It seems quite feasible.
As I said, it's been done in mice.
Of course, there's a big jump between mice and humans there.
But if we can clone a human, probably we can take the final step.
And so we don't have to worry about actually killing a person.
This is more like a tissue sample.
This is more like a body used for donating organs.
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 a sense, and then you took the information from the brain you had reanimated and, in effect, downloaded it.
And people are talking about doing this.
It's not as crazy as it may seem, downloading it to this new brain.
Well, that might be a possibility.
It brings up a number of ethical questions.
I mean, can you have a blank brain?
Any brain that's been sitting around for a while inside a living body, chances are it will have something in it.
And so you could be destroying a real person there.
On the other hand, have we thought about downloading or uploading, as some of our members call it?
Right.
We certainly have.
uh...
i will look a hundred years five hundred years a thousand years into the future
ten thousand years the ethics and morals
uh... as we think of them today which are undergoing constant change i mean
over the last decade uh... maybe very different is
Is that also reasonable to conclude?
It's a possibility.
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 cryotics 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 cryotics patients are revived, chances are it will be in the future with some sort of recognizable ethics.
Certainly, though, if you look at the last few decades, our ethics have changed greatly.
I mean, in many areas of social behavior and function, our ethics, really, and our morality has shifted.
There's no question about it.
Maybe it cyclically sort of shifts back and forth and always maintains a rough center.
I have no way of knowing about that sort of thing.
Now, if you come back in a hundred or a thousand years There is going to be a big culture shock for you.
You're going to need money or whatever is used for money at that time.
What kind of thinking have you all done in that area?
Well, that's a good question.
Right now, most of us are really just concerned about getting there.
We may all end up as As paupers, once we actually arrive, if we do arrive, there are some people, some of our members, who have set aside trust.
You can start a trust in states such as Wisconsin and I think it's South Dakota and a few other places where there is no rule against perpetuities.
So your trust can theoretically last for as long as it can last.
So, they might actually have money when they come out.
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, this money is going to no purpose at all?
They can't get their hands on the money?
More or less.
I mean, you never know what the courts are going to do.
Certainly not in the future.
As you pointed out, things are changing that way.
Yes, that's the general idea.
I mean, people are always endowing trust for various purposes, and this is just one more purpose.
I could consider that with AIDS, for example, you mentioned AIDS yourself, there would be a lot of interest.
Have you had interest from AIDS patients?
We, in fact, have had a number of AIDS patients that we've frozen.
Oh, that you have frozen?
On death?
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?
Well, we haven't had that situation.
We just can't do it.
We have a great responsibility here.
We have to maintain the organization.
We have responsibility for these 35 helpless people who are frozen with us.
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.
Of course.
And the authorities might even want to investigate some of our earlier patients, perhaps try to autopsy them.
In fact, something like that almost happened a few years ago.
Can you tell that story?
Oh yes.
It's actually fairly well known.
It made national news.
This is back in late 1988, I believe early 1989.
This was the Dora Kent case.
Dora Kent was the mother of one of our longtime members, and she was a very nice old lady in her 80s, and she was dying.
She died in our facility under the supervision of a physician, and she was suspended.
She was under a suspension.
Of course, in those situations, you have a body left over.
And normally what's done with that is it's given to a mortician who cremated, and then the relatives do whatever they want with the ashes.
However, in this case, the mortician decided to call the coroner on this.
And I'm not sure exactly why he did that, but he did.
At that time, we were in Riverside County, California, and we did not have a great relationship with Riverside.
In general, the city council didn't much care for it, I think.
I wasn't actually with the company at that time, but I've been told that we were having some real difficulties there.
In any case, the coroner at the time decided that it would be a real boon to his career if he raided a cryotic facility.
He accused Alcor of suspending this woman before she was legally dead.
I see.
He and his deputies entered the facility and quite literally said, give us the head of Dora Kent.
He went to autopsy her to determine, he said, if she was frozen before she was actually legally dead.
Could that determination have been made?
That's a good question.
With a head?
I am not convinced at all that the determination could have been made and some of our medical experts weren't convinced either.
We think the coroner was mainly interested in the publicity that This raid would generate, and it did generate quite a bit of publicity.
He came into our facility and confiscated quite a bit of equipment, arrested our staff members, led them away in handcuffs, and it was a very bad arrest.
In fact, we did two for false arrest and one eventually.
Some of our more influential members managed to get a court injunction against the coroner so that he did not autopsy Dora Kent or any of our other members.
It was touch and go for quite some time.
That's absolutely remarkable.
Have you had a better go of it there in Arizona?
We've had a great time in Arizona.
This is a wonderful place to live.
The climate is perfect.
Well, it's hot, but we like that.
Before we came here, we were very careful.
We introduced ourselves.
We made sure that the officials in the state and the town knew exactly what we were doing and decided it was all right.
And so we have a very good relationship with Scottsdale and Arizona in general.
Helpful.
All right.
This is fascinating.
All right.
Stand by, Brian.
Brian Schock is my guest from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
We're going to take a break for news and we'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from June 23, 1997.
Coast to Coast is a production of the National Geographic Association.
This is a story of a young man who was lost in the middle of a desert.
He was lost in the middle of a desert.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired June 23, 1997.
Good morning, my guest.
Good morning, my guest. My guest is Brian Shunk. He's from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.
You know what they do?
They cryonically 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 Rowland, my webmaster, and we'll find out, by the way, 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, we're reanimated 29 years later.
That's fairly synchronous, I would say, wouldn't you?
We'll get back to Brian Schock and more about the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and your
questions coming up shortly.
Back now to Brian Schock in Arizona, which is where Alcor Life Extension Foundation is
located.
Brian, is it a company or is it a non-profit kind of organization?
Alcor is a non-profit foundation.
Do you by any chance have a website?
As a matter of fact, we do.
You can reach our website at www.alcor.org.
That's A-L-C-O-R dot O-R-G.
We will get that up within minutes.
We get millions of visitors now, over three million since the first of the year to our website, so a lot of people are about to go see your website.
What is up there?
Well, we do have quite a bit of information about our organization, what we do, what we have done.
You can see profiles of our staff members.
You can see details of our procedures.
As a matter of fact, anything I can send you by mail is probably on the website in at least some form.
Wonderful!
It explains the process?
Yes, it explains the process.
We also have some graphics to illustrate what we do in our library section.
I have the entire text of our handbook.
It's called Cryonics Reaching for Tomorrow.
You can get that there.
And it also tells you how to make cryonics arrangements.
Alright.
Do the people at your tax-free organization, Alcor, have a sense of humor?
It's pretty much a prerequisite, yes.
Okay.
Louis in Sioux Falls, Idaho, asks, do you refer to your clients, in quotes, as corpse-icles?
Well, no we don't.
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.
Yes.
And it's important to us and we think it's probably important to keeping them frozen.
If you think of them as corpses or corpse-icles, that doesn't sound very important.
Who's going to care about keeping that thing frozen?
On the other hand, if we think of them as patients, as people.
So in other words, you have some honest reverence for what you're doing.
I certainly do, and I believe the people I work with do as well.
There are those who would charge, of course.
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.
Well, first of all, most of our clients aren't elderly people.
social security money and uh... maintaining them in some sort of
substandard uh... condition and till i pass away and you know take that money for years and
there are those who would make that charge about what you're doing and how do
you normally answer that
well uh...
first of all most of our clients aren't elderly people uh... certainly don't have anything to do with uh... their
social security uh...
if we want to do with the specifics but uh... of course
we uh...
I guess the main way I address that is that we try to be as upfront about everything we do as possible.
I can't guarantee that this will work.
I can't give you any sort of realistic odds that it will work.
I have to explain that right away, and I have to be sure that you are sure of this.
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're 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 Well, yes, and I think so, too.
But as I said, one of the ways we deal with any sort of ethical consequences here is to be as honest as we can.
We try to be forthright about it.
We try to be open about what we do and how we do it.
Sometimes people will come to us and say, well, how do I know you're actually going to keep me frozen?
I mean, the doers that we keep the patients in are Giant steel cylinders.
There are no windows and we certainly aren't going to open them up to the heat so that you can look inside.
Especially in Arizona.
Yeah, exactly.
So how does anyone know that we actually freeze people?
Alright, how do they?
Well, first of all, we don't say to people right away, jump into Alcor, become part of it and we'll take care of you and don't ask questions.
As a matter of fact, we encourage people to ask questions.
Most of us are skeptics and we welcome skepticism.
All I can say is that trust is not something that you have immediately or that you should have immediately.
It's something that takes time.
So we want you to give us the time.
Come to our facility.
Take one of our tours.
Talk to our members.
Talk to our staff.
If you are so inclined, you might even volunteer and help us during one of our procedures.
If you get to know the people at Alcor... Is that what you did, by the way?
You were a volunteer for a while.
That's right.
It's kind of an interesting story.
I actually got involved with Alcor because one of its former presidents, a man named Steve Bridge, was dating my aunt.
I see.
So I got to know him socially because of that.
I had some tough questions for him at first, and he managed to answer them.
He actually gave me scientific references for them.
Like what?
Now, I may not know the right questions to ask, but obviously you had some good ones.
What did you ask?
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.
And how did he answer that?
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, wow, how do I explain this in non-technical terms?
Basically what happens is when the brain doesn't get blood, it starts to swell.
Well, if your arm swells or your leg swells or something like that, it's no big deal.
But when your brain swells, it's got nowhere to go.
Exactly.
So it closes off its own blood supply.
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 to halt this process or at least retired the process so
Basically it was it was the opening it said to me that we aren't necessarily
losing our memories as the heart stops, but
They may still be in there in some form. Uh-huh well again That's why I brought up last hour the lady who had no blood
to her brain for 45 minutes and yet they revived her and she was normal.
And they did that by reducing her body temperature, not to cryonic levels, by a long shot, but simply... Well, for example, there have been people that have fallen into icy water and have been clinically dead for long periods of time.
And because they were in icy water, I guess the swelling that you're talking about did not occur.
They were revived and their brain was as normal.
That's actually a very common occurrence.
It usually happens, it's usually seen with children.
Actually, what happens there, it's not so much what happens to the brain specifically, as in general, you get slowed metabolism overall in the body.
We know that cooling slows chemical processes, and since metabolism, our body's working, is a chemical process, it's slowed as well.
As a matter of fact, we have kind of a rule of thumb.
We express it in centigrade.
For every 10 degrees centigrade, you lower a person's body temperature.
It reduces the metabolism by half.
One of the first things we do when we get a patient is cool him down.
I know that seems pretty obvious to most people, but the faster we can do that, probably the better chance you'll have someday of being revived.
Now, when you say cool him down, When you get a patient, do you mean when they're close to dying, you can begin the cooling process?
Are you allowed to inject any drugs that will assist?
Because I remember talking with the man who made the movie about Tim Leary.
There was some expectation that there would be some sort of drug possibly used prior to death or something.
I'm a little fuzzy on that.
Maybe you can help.
Well, there are some pre-medications you can give.
For the most part, unless we're working with a very cooperative physician, we wouldn't be able to do that.
No, all the cooling has to be done post-mortem.
I take it you don't find a lot of cooperative physicians?
Well, more and more.
They have to be really cooperative to want to help us with pre-medication.
But you might be surprised how willing physicians are these days to cooperate.
I think one of the reasons is because we present this process as what it is.
Basically, it is a full body anatomical donation.
Our members will sign anatomical donation forms and of course every doctor knows what that means.
They deal with kidney transplants and heart transplants and corneal transplants every day.
If you say anatomical donation to them, they have a good idea right off what we need to do because you have to maintain We've had some good results.
We've had some encouraging results on occasion.
Many times doctors don't want to open themselves to any liability and we certainly understand that.
That's absolutely true.
So they have understanding of that and then some sympathy toward what you are trying to
do occasionally at least.
We've had some good results.
We've had some encouraging results on occasion.
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, OK, what should I do now?
Wow.
All right.
Off into sensitive territory.
Really, this whole thing is sensitive territory.
But this question really, I think, is important.
You know about Kevorkian.
And the big legal battles that are going on with assisted suicide.
Right.
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 laws should begin to be revised Allowing physician-assisted suicide, how would that possibly fit into what you do?
Well, as you can imagine, we've been watching the situation for quite some time.
If physician-assisted suicide was allowed in the United States, we would certainly be very serious about looking at the possibilities of using it.
It could help us quite a bit.
Allow us to begin our procedures earlier and control them.
As a matter of fact, there are members of Alcor who might wish that we could do that right now.
I understand.
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?
What difference in your chances would there be?
Well, I don't know.
I could just pull a figure out of the air and say it probably would double your chances at least.
Again, I don't know.
I don't base that on anything but personal intuition.
I was going to mention a case we actually had a few years ago back in 1990 and 1991 where one of our members I really did want us to do that for him.
His name was Dr. Thomas Donaldson.
He was a mathematician.
He still is a mathematician.
And he discovered in the late 80s that he had a brain tumor.
I remember that story!
That made national news.
Yeah, I remember that story.
And there was a big hubbub, and I don't remember how it worked out.
Well, unfortunately, California did not allow him to to do this. They didn't give him that sort of dispensation,
so we could not have helped him there.
Fortunately, Dr. Donaldson, his tumor went into remission and he's still quite healthy.
As a matter of fact, I just spoke with him
the other day, Friday, and he's holding on.
But who knows, this could end at any time and he could need that again.
Now, could he, for example, move from California?
to a state that would be more friendly to his cause.
Well, it's possible.
There's been quite a bit of controversy about this in Oregon right now, I believe.
As a matter of fact, they really got the assisted suicide law in the books, and then there's been some sort of referendum to repeal it, and it's created quite a stir up there.
I'm not really sure there's any place in the U.S.
where he could safely do this or where we could safely do it.
It's really unfortunate, I think, at least in this regard for this particular process.
But again, cryonics is really fairly small, so there are probably larger considerations right now.
The big problem is if a person commits suicide, that makes them a coroner's case almost always.
And if the coroner gets a hold of you, he will perform an autopsy, and if he performs an autopsy... That's the end of that?
That's pretty much it, yes.
I don't know if you can comment on this or not, but again referring to Tim Leary, he was very actively, for a period of time, considering cryonics.
Was it your company that he was talking to?
Well, Dr. Leary was actually a member of Alcor, a very public member of Alcor for several years.
He was a good friend to a number of our more prominent members, and we really expected to freeze him.
However, in 1985, he announced to us that he decided to change his arrangements to another company, to the company I mentioned called CryoCare.
He just felt that I think that some of their facilities were nearer to where he lived and might be able to help him a little bit more quickly.
We don't exactly know what happened from there.
He seemed to lose interest in cryonics from then on and toward the end he simply decided that he didn't want to do it.
So it is your view that, or at least your guess, that he did not at the end do it?
All I can tell you is that according to our best reports by officials from CryoCare and from his closest friends, he was not frozen.
All right.
All right, Brian.
Hold on.
We'll be right back.
And when we come back, if any of you out there have questions, this is such a fascinating topic.
We're going to open the lines.
Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
And if you go up to my website by now, you'll see a link there.
Take a look, see what you think.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd, 1997.
I don't need to ask you what's going on. I don't need to ask you, baby, this time it's not over.
Don't say that you love me.
Just tell me that you love me.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from June 23rd, 1997.
Brian Shock is my guest from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Actually, the largest cryonics preservation organization in the world.
So, if you have any questions, now would be a good time, and I see you do, because all the lines are loaded.
We'll get to you in a moment.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from June 23, 1997.
Imagine dying and then being taken down to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
and I'll see you next time.
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.
That is a very sensitive question.
I'm not exactly sure what country you'd go to.
I believe the Netherlands have assisted suicide laws right now.
That's correct.
But I don't know if they would allow this necessarily.
Further, I don't know if they would allow us to bring your body back into the country.
As you can imagine, transporting people who are considered dead across Have any of your members considered that?
Some of our members have talked about it.
As far as I know, no one has seriously considered it yet.
Now regarding those who have had their heads frozen, is there any thinking that there could
be a possible reanimation of a head without a body?
Well, I think some people hear this concept and they envision heads on plates or something
I think of heads in boxes.
I don't think any of our members want that.
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.
Although I don't put it past my network to consider the possibility.
They'd get me going in the box and put a little microphone there, and a pretty horrible thought, but... As I said, I don't think any of our members want that, and I don't think any of them would really accept that.
All right, one last question, then to the phones, and that is the typical profile.
Earlier you said something that caught my ear.
You said a lot of your patients are young.
What is the typical profile of somebody that you've got cryonically suspended?
Well, you know, there are so few right now, I don't think there's a typical profile.
But I can outline generally what these people are like.
Most of them are male.
About 75% are male.
Average age is about 45 to 50.
Oh, that's interesting.
Average age is about 45 to 50.
That is young.
Well, we've had, as I said, a number of AIDS patients.
And, of course, they have died quite young.
Our youngest patient was actually about, let's see, she was only about 18, I believe.
Our oldest patient was actually 99.
99?
So, yes, it's all over the board there.
Wow.
Alright, let's take a few phone calls.
Fascinating stuff.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Brian Schock.
Hi.
Hi, I'm Angela, and I'm calling from Nashville, Tennessee.
Okay, Angela, you're going to have to speak up good and loud.
Oh, sorry.
Is that okay?
Much better, yes.
Okay, brilliant.
And congratulations on your award.
You deserve it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, Brian.
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 preserving these people is just going to get worse.
What's going to happen?
Right now medical science has advanced so far that our lives are longer, etc., and now people are getting themselves frozen.
Right.
And another maybe sensitive topic which touches me Is that how many animals have to be tortured for this cloning process?
I mean... Well, you're asking something out of his field of expertise.
And with respect to the population question, I'm not sure it exactly bears on that.
You presently have 35 people.
Right.
In comparison with the population of the world, we're pretty insignificant.
Even if we froze a million people, which, compared with 35, it almost looks impossible now, but who knows?
Even if we froze a million people, that's just a million people added on to billions.
Billions, yes.
A drop in the bucket.
A teardrop in an ocean.
It's nothing.
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.
Good point.
We're going to have to deal with anyway.
And I don't know what the solution is.
I mean, the obvious, heartless solution is for people to stop having quite so many children.
You bet.
But, you know, that's something that other people are going to have to work out.
All right.
Here's something to consider.
Somebody faxes this.
Barry in Arizona.
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.
Hmm.
Well, it's an interesting question.
I don't... 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 all right let's talk you know it's a one thing we haven't
really talked about and that is what I keep calling reanimation
um has there ever been a reanimation or how close have we come what have we
actually done other than the story I told you about the lady
Right. Well, okay, here's what the research has done so far.
It is possible to take animals and people down very near to the freezing point and revive them without any serious damage.
Right.
However, the freezing point presents a barrier, sort of like the sound barrier used to be, but much more difficult.
It really has presented a problem for us.
Once something is actually frozen, We just can't bring it back.
That's what we're dealing with right now.
What we know is that tissue samples can be frozen and revived.
Individual cells can be frozen and revived.
In fact, it's done with embryos of 16 cells or less all the time.
And certainly it's done with sperm samples quite a bit as well.
As a matter of fact, that's one of the technologies that really inspired cryobiological research.
We've been freezing, or people have been freezing, sperm samples since World War II, practically.
That's right!
And they've got many frozen, and they've got a lot of court battles going on about them.
Right.
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 Engines of Creation by a man named Eric Drexler, a very fine gentleman.
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.
Correct.
And that such devices would be so small that they could perhaps, they could certainly fit inside the human circulatory system, perhaps even inside human cells.
Sure.
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.
Wow.
That sort of technology would allow the repair of individual cells.
And certainly that's more than enough to bring back a cryonics patient.
Or it should be.
You would also think it would be enough to keep somebody who is presently alive, once the technology exists, virtually alive forever?
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.
Sure.
It could clear up your bloodstream just like that, and that would go quite a ways towards improving human life.
It sure would.
Wild Card Line, you are on the air with Brian Schalk.
Hi.
Hi.
I can barely hear you, ma'am.
You're going to have to speak up for us.
Where are you?
I'm in San Diego.
Okay, go ahead.
Uh, I wanted to ask Brian, like he was kind of talking about it a moment ago about, uh, like regeneration of cells, or that, what is that, nanonics?
Nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology.
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 have this done, and, uh, you're revived, and you come back like 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.
Sure.
Is there something that could be done that could straighten it out?
Because you wouldn't want to come back with other deformities.
It's a good question and I'm sure it's one that many of the members have asked.
In other words, what finally kills them may not be their only malady, plus they're older.
So how do you address that with them?
How do you talk to the patients about that?
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 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.
Another comic out there asks the following.
Could you ask your guest, would the politically correct term for those who have been frozen be the thermally challenged?
It could be.
I would not feel bad about using that term.
Ah, I see.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Schock.
Good morning.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Hi, where are you?
St.
Louis.
All right, extinguish thy radio, please.
Okay, I didn't think it was that loud.
Just one second.
All right, holding while you do that.
Okay, that's better.
Now, a couple of things.
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 fifties, actually, Robert Heinlein's novel, Adore in the Summer, comes to immediate mind.
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.
About what Alcor is doing with regard to popular acceptance.
I've noticed there was an episode of ER 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 recognize the actors holding a copy of Cryotics Reaching for Tomorrow.
Right.
Yeah, I actually talked to them about that.
The writers for the show called me and asked about some information.
So I sent that to them.
I would have been interested in seeing that episode.
I didn't happen to see that one.
I clearly recognized it because I have a copy myself.
Oh, that's great.
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.
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.
Incidentally, I talked to Schumacher Productions, the art department, about that as well.
As far as I can tell, they didn't use any of my advice at all.
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?
Would you say?
Would you call it technically correct?
Let me see.
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, 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.
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 Alcor or some other cryonics.
Good question.
Well, I get that a lot.
All I can say is that even among our confidential list, I don't think there's anyone whose name you would really recognize.
There are people who are prominent in their chosen field, but no one that you would call famous.
We don't have any famous actors or any real celebrities.
Are these people generally that are wealthy?
Are they people who are head of corporations?
That's what I was asking about a profile, and I guess there is no real typical profile, but does it tend to go in that direction?
I would say that our membership is probably wealthier than average.
I would not say that they are terribly wealthy for the most part.
We do have people who are millionaires who have made these arrangements, but then again, we also have people who are quite poor.
Well, not quite poor, but let's say quite lower middle class.
I think I have to count myself among that, too.
What happens, by the way, this is a horrible question, but if somebody's money somehow runs out?
Okay, well, that's probably not going to happen.
You see, the money is pooled.
We have a patient care trust fund, and it's not a number of individual accounts, it's one big account.
Oh, it's pooled investment.
Yes, exactly.
So we don't have to worry about individual clients' money running out.
You do have to worry about the entire account, though, and you said you are very conservative with your investments.
Right, right.
As a matter of fact, the trust fund itself is a fairly recent development for us.
Our investment manager for that is Smith Barney.
Smith Barney.
All right, very interesting.
All right, listen, sit tight, Brian.
Fascinating stuff.
We'll do more.
There's a good break, so go relax, and we'll be back in about ten.
All right?
Brian Schock is my guest, and he is from Alcor Light Extension Foundation.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd, 1997.
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My guest is Brian Shock from the largest cryonics preservation organization, and I say that because it is a tax-free organization, in the whole world.
In the whole world.
Certainly in the country, and therefore in the world.
It's called Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
And yes, what they do is freeze people.
Freeze brains, heads, bodies, whole bodies.
It is an amazing, amazing thing, in the hopes that one day they'll be able to bring them back.
And I have a comment.
I've been thinking during the news about this, and I'll bring it up in a moment.
Now we take you back to the night of June 23, 1997, on Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Alright, once again, back to Brian Shock, 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.
Is that the way some of your members look at it?
I certainly hope they look at it that way.
I think that's a very, very reasonable viewpoint.
I don't think we're at odds with religion in any way.
I mean, you don't see Anyone standing outside a hospital protesting open-heart surgery or something like that, and that's just one more life-extending procedure.
I don't think that we have to make a great distinction between that and cryonics.
I mean, in the case of heart transplants or open-heart surgery, we know the odds of that working.
Sure.
Cryonics, we just don't know the odds yet.
Okay, fair enough.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Brian Schalk.
Hi.
My name is Nova.
From Oklahoma?
Nova from Oklahoma.
Okay.
And a little while ago, you asked Brian if any regeneration had been taking place.
Yes.
And he related sperm, eggs, pieces of tissue, etc.
Right.
But the thing is, all of those are taking their life when they're frozen.
The sperm is alive.
They wouldn't freeze if they were dead or expired.
There's a time frame there.
The eggs, the tissue, etc.
They're all alive when they're frozen.
That's correct, but legally they're bound that way.
Second thing, one last little comment.
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.
It would be a horrible thing to come back to.
It's like bronzing old fingers that are worn out.
Yeah, I understand, but are you listening carefully?
Uh, nanotechnology, uh, things that would allow you to, in essence, be revived.
I mean, look, ma'am, if you think about the, uh, the amount of scientific medical advance in the last thirty years, and you project that for a hundred, or two hundred, imagine what's going to be possible.
Okay.
I mean, nobody's saying that it's for sure.
Even Brian isn't saying that.
You're right, your last comment was very lucid, because it made sense.
When I was listening to you, I thought, hmm, well, okay.
But there was one little comment that got me, and it was something about giving life.
I don't believe they can take care of the body, they can keep it in good shape, they can maybe make it look a little better.
I don't believe that life comes from man.
Well, okay.
There you are, Brian.
Okay.
I'm not really sure how to address that question.
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.
And yet, they come back.
Right.
How can we draw a distinction between living tissue samples and a body that has been deemed dead, really for legal purposes, if nothing else?
The cells in that body are still functioning to some degree.
Death isn't just an event.
It's a process.
And in various types of tissue, it can be a very long process.
This is kind of a strange question, but when a person dies, O'Brien, is it possible that the thinking process or that the awareness process at some level continues for some period of time?
Do we know anything about that?
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, and so probably no consciousness.
To that I respond, good.
Yeah, I agree.
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?
I have no idea.
I would not speculate on that.
I don't blame you a bit.
I've always wondered about that.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Brian Schock.
Hi.
Yes.
Brian, have you tried to bring back Anything like an animal?
I had understood that it was not successful to thaw a person.
Yeah, so far, from cryogenic temperatures, the answer is nobody has ever been revived.
Correct, Brian?
That's correct.
And we haven't been able to revive animals from those temperatures either.
But then again, two years ago, we couldn't clone people, ma'am.
That's true.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
That really has to be the answer.
And five years ago, People would have been all over your case, Brian, saying it's ridiculous, it's not possible, but I think people have already had so much future shock that today you're finding people more and more hesitant to say it's not going to be possible.
I think more today you would find people saying, well, yeah, maybe.
Do you find that?
I really do.
We really had sort of a jump in interest once the cloning of the sheep was announced.
Really?
Yeah, I mean it wasn't a major jump, but it certainly was more interest than we've gotten lately, quite a bit of interest from the press in particular.
In other words, once cloning is possible, then people imagine, if resuscitated, there might be a way to have a new body.
Right.
And if nothing else, it's a nice little proof of principle.
I mean, it certainly demonstrates that medical technology is advancing.
Advancing at a speed no one would have guessed before.
Quickening, I call it.
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.
Yes.
Certainly, the first step is always going to be work on tissue samples.
We're not going to sacrifice animals unnecessarily.
Right.
If nothing else, it's very expensive.
These days, animal experimentation costs a great deal of money and is under FDA regulations.
Scrutiny, right.
So, we want to be as careful as possible on this.
There has been a great deal of research done, but again, not nearly enough.
Right now, cryonics research, research directed towards cryonics goals, is carried out only by cryonics-related organizations.
Universities don't do it, as far as we know.
So does that mean an organization like yours?
To some degree, we have done experiments.
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.
May I ask this?
Is there, without answering what it would be, is there research going on, or that has gone on, that you really would not feel comfortable to discuss?
I can't really think of any.
That's the nature of research.
If it's out there, it needs to be known, and it has to be reproduced, and it has to be demonstrated again and again.
So, I mean, even if it's an unpleasant fact, even if it would make listeners angry or indignant, I would feel obligated to mention it.
Okay.
All right.
Wes for the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Schalk.
Hi.
Hi, this is AJ in Sacramento, California.
Hi there.
Hi there.
I was interested, 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.
That's correct.
Okay.
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 all right.
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 Decade or so longer than that.
Actually, that's a very intriguing question.
What about it, Brian?
Well, the sort of experiments we're doing right now don't seem to point to that.
Although, I do recall that they found lower body temperatures in general seem to be correlated with longer lives.
Currently, there's not much we can do in terms of really cooling someone down to extend their life.
Okay, fair enough.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Shaw.
Hi.
Howdy.
Howdy.
Where are you?
I'm in South Dakota.
Okay.
My question is, with the possibility of the cryogenic 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?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean.
I'm not either.
Well, what I mean is different things that could cause different changes within a person's body.
I still don't know what you mean.
Um, rephrase it.
Okay.
All I'm asking is that if... Okay, what would the problems be from arising from, like, the thawing process?
The what?
For the thawing process?
Thawing process.
All right, well, they don't have that down.
As far as we know, there is no way presently to thaw somebody and reanimate them, not from the kind of temperatures that, um, I really can't speculate on that because we don't know how we're going to go about that exactly yet.
You've got a magazine out called Cryonics, and that is your magazine, right?
That's right.
And the one that I've got in my hand that you sent to me, or your company, or your organization, excuse me, says, Cryo Transport Case Report, and it gives a name, patient number A1110.
Right.
What can you tell me about this?
Well, it's all pretty much there in the article.
I can mention the man's name.
His name was Ed Kurt.
He lived in New York.
He was a long-time member, a long-time cryonicist, as a matter of fact, back from the 1970s, I believe.
Mr. Kurt had cancer, and it actually came up on us quite rapidly.
Most of the time when a person is dying, we do have some sort of lead time on this.
With Mr. Curt, it was actually a matter of days.
His cancer was working quite rapidly.
I got the call and I reported it to our cryo-transport manager and she took it from there.
I actually went out to scout the area to see if we could get some cooperation from the hospital and other personnel.
And everything went fairly well that way, and when she went back out for the actual suspension, it seemed to go fairly well.
We were not too displeased with it.
That actually was sort of a last minute thing as well.
After she scouted the area, she came back, and then one morning, very early, we got a call from the man's wife saying, well, the doctor has only given him an hour to live or something like that.
So we put our personnel out on a search.
Sure.
When was patient one for you?
For me or for Alcor?
I'm sorry, for Alcor.
For Alcor.
Well, it's kind of an interesting story.
Alcor was started really for one patient, for one person.
That person's name was Fred Chamberlain, Jr.
Colonel Fred Chamberlain, Jr., in fact.
He was the father of one of our founders, Fred Chamberlain III.
Fred and his wife, Linda, started Alcor back in 1972.
The reason they did that was because Fred had promised his father a good cryonic suspension.
Fred had been an enthusiast on this for many years, and his father was quite ill.
He had had a stroke, I believe, at the time.
He said, Well, Dad, I'm going to get you frozen.
His father said, Thank you so much.
I really appreciate that.
They had an understanding.
Well, Fred III looked at the other organizations at the time and what he found really disappointed him.
These were the very early days and people really didn't know how to go about this.
His concern was that they couldn't necessarily get to a patient quickly enough.
Sure.
So he said, what could we do?
We couldn't just take this chance away from my father.
We had to do something.
So they started their own organization.
It's really amazing that they would do that, and it really speaks well for their dedication.
However, Fred's father hung on until about 1976, and they suspended him then, and it was probably one of the better suspensions done up to that time.
Alright, next question.
From patient one through today, would I, being frozen today, I believe so.
I see a real improvement in procedure.
It goes by fits and starts.
It's not always possible to evaluate what we're doing better in one case than another.
And every case is still unique.
There have been so few so far It's really hard to make some overall judgment, but I would say in general it is improving.
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?
Most definitely.
Not all those were early cases either.
We allow our members to decide what they would consider to be an acceptable suspension.
That's part of their contract.
Some people feel that it's better to be frozen than not to be frozen.
It doesn't matter what condition they're in.
If they could have been lying out in the sun for two days, it's still fine with them.
They want to be frozen.
We won't necessarily argue with that because we can't say that there is a zero chance they'll ever come back.
It seems unlikely, but we won't say that.
On the other hand, we have some members that feel very strongly that if they are not tended to within minutes or hours, there's no chance at all.
Sure.
So they would not consider, they would say, don't continue with my suspension.
So you would, well, we'll have to pick this up after the bottom of the hour, stay right there.
branch office like this and we're discussing something that has always
fascinated me biogenics suspension
for the future time travel you're listening to our bills somewhere in time on premier
radio networks tonight on four presentation of coast to coast a m from june
twenty third nineteen ninety seven
the the
the Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired June 23, 1997.
My guest is Brian Shock.
He's from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Really, it's time travel, in a way.
They freeze you.
They freeze you after clinical death.
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.
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.
I will get back to Brian and your questions in a moment.
Now we take you back to the night of June 23rd, 1997 on Ark Bells Somewhere in Time.
Now we take you back to the night of June 23rd, 1997 on Ark Bells Somewhere in Time.
Back now to Brian Schock.
Brian, a lot of people want to talk to you here and have questions.
As 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've 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 of 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 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.
That's what I always thought.
And so I can 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.
Well, that's true since, but there are lots of moral, ethical reasons why they have not and could then.
And believe me, it is true because I got a copy of it.
It was published, and I put it up on my website.
So you might check into it.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Shock.
Hi.
Turn your radio off.
Oh, yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I've got to do that.
Yes, you do.
I've got to get out of the room.
Somebody's listening to it.
Yes, that's quite interesting.
My medical training goes back to late 1937, but I'm not I'm anxious to ask him about liquid nitrogen.
That's what they're preserved in, I presume, right?
That's right.
What is that Kelvin or centigrade below zero?
That's about minus 196 degrees centigrade.
I used to be an analyzer of gas samples, low boiling point gases, methane and so forth.
I had 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 the blood and everywhere.
Doesn't that turn into ice?
Don't those ice crystals destroy any possibility of any good cell life after rejuvenation?
Well, that's the big problem.
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.
There you are.
To Art's statement about a 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.
I believe they call it sleep apnea.
It could be.
Now, because of my age and experience, I want to make a statement that it's appointed unto every man once to die, and after that, the judgment.
How do you deal with that?
Well, he doesn't.
He doesn't.
Is that correct, Brian?
In other words, you're not making these judgments.
No, certainly I wouldn't think to do that.
Excuse the pun, I didn't really hear that one.
No, I understand.
We're dealing with a religious issue here.
Yes.
As I said, I think the question of death is quite open.
We have to think of death, 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 person is clearly dead.
Where are they retrievable?
One more for you and then back to the phones.
This is from my board operator at KIDO in Boise, Idaho.
Art, please ask Brian if there is any truth to the rumor that Walt Disney was frozen.
Well, no.
There is no truth to that rumor.
Walt Disney, as far as we can tell, was cremated after his death in 1966.
And his ashes reside in the family vault in Forest Lawn in Los Angeles.
Alright.
Are there patients that you have, patients advisedly I use that term, that wish total anonymity?
In other words, you never give out their names?
Absolutely.
We have quite a few like that.
I would imagine so.
So if you had a very famous person, or a luminary or a political person, you couldn't say?
Well, I couldn't give their name.
I really don't like to play games like that, but I can tell you quite flatly that we don't have anyone whose name you'd recognize.
All right.
Good enough.
Wildcard Line, you are on the air with Brian Schock.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Where are you?
I'm in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Okay.
Well, one of the things I wondered, I heard him say that there are four whole bodies to a tank.
And he's only got like 35, so what do they do?
Reopen and add more when the time comes?
Well, if we have a partially filled tank, yes, we would do that.
At no time are the patients who are already frozen lifted out of the liquid nitrogen, so their temperature doesn't change substantially.
But you can reopen them and do something like that later.
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.
Okay, well, I just know that he said they wanted to do an autopsy on this woman's head and they didn't want to... Well, I guess they'd have to put her in the freezer, wouldn't they?
Well, another thing I wanted to ask is, how many employees are there at Elkhart?
That's a good question.
We're a fairly small organization.
Right now we have about seven full-time employees.
And a number of volunteers come in, people who are members of the organization who want to help out.
During a suspension, we bring in our on-call personnel, our medical personnel.
We really perform very few suspensions during the year, so we can't afford to have the medical personnel there all the time.
What about security?
I haven't asked you about that yet, Brian.
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.
So you've got to have some kind of security.
Well, thanks for suggesting that to the public.
Sorry about that.
I mean, after all, you know, the animal rights people raid these things and set animals loose and do all kinds of things.
Well, it's certainly nothing we haven't thought of before.
That's what I thought.
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 and not entirely sane person, there's only so much we can do.
Well, there are ruthless, insane people out there, as unfortunately we read about every single day.
East of the Rockies, you are on the air with Brian Shaw.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Where are you?
Nashville, Tennessee.
Okay.
I was curious, he said, when you're bringing them back, he said earlier that people have died and their brainwaves 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.
It's just going to be a body.
Yes, but it's not very clear-cut, Caller, because as I gave an example earlier, Sixteen 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.
Now, where was she during that hour?
She was in a frozen lake, right?
No.
Is that the one you're talking about?
No, no, no.
No, there are cases like that, but in this particular case, the woman had a brain aneurysm, and they couldn't operate.
So, they literally drained all the blood from her body, They reduced her body temperature and her brain waves stopped.
Her heart stopped.
Her breathing stopped.
Clinical death for 45 minutes.
They operated on the aneurysm.
They warmed her blood and reanimated her.
60 minutes did that, sir.
Now you tell me, where was she for 45 minutes?
Well, I can't say that, but at the same time, during that 60 minutes, she was cooled and everything, and we don't know how long it's going to take for the memories to be deleting and falling out.
You're correct, but the answer to your question is, obviously they don't delete immediately, do they?
No, but there was still something in her body that was giving her cells and everything oxygen.
Right?
No.
No, there wasn't.
There was no blood or anything at all in her body?
No, they drained all the blood from her body.
You see, she had an aneurysm that, because of blood pressure, it was, you know, like, you know what an aneurysm is, right?
Right.
They could not operate, it would have killed her.
So they had to drain all the blood from her body to operate on the aneurysm.
And they don't replace the blood that they take out with any type of fluid?
Wouldn't that cause the veins to collapse or something?
They did not.
It's a mistake to try and equate the brain too closely with the computer.
The brain is not really a computer, and it certainly doesn't operate on the same principles.
Obviously, when you turn off the computer, everything that's in the RAM disappears, but that's not the way it works in the brain.
Our memories are not dependent on electrical processes to be maintained anyway, so that's not really a problem.
Okay, thanks a lot.
Okay, thank you very much, and that was a good answer.
Wes for the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Schock.
Hello.
Good morning, sir.
Good morning.
This is Greg from Eugene.
Yes, sir.
And this is the first time I tried, and it took me all two minutes.
I'm glad you got through.
This is, you were mentioning earlier about the human head having awareness after a guillotine?
Yes.
Well, this is information I've kept in my brain, useless knowledge, for 30 years, just to answer your question.
I'd just be hearsay because I don't even remember where I read the article.
I was a scientific American, I believe, but a French doctor who had the same capacity as, I suppose, an American doctor with the stethoscope after electrocution was following the people that were executed by the guillotine.
Well, to make a long story short, he became interested in that same fact.
The Gill team was considered relatively merciful because it was quick.
In fact, when they executed someone, they didn't tell them the exact date.
They would just tell them kind of a roundabout date.
So they would rush in, grab him off his bunk, run him outside and slam him down and whack.
And perhaps that's why the brain still had some awareness because he was so surprised.
But anyway, he noticed I had, this time it was rather morbid, The man's eyes were flickering, and he called his name, and the eyes followed him.
Well, look, I can even help you out.
I've got a fax here.
Let me read it to you.
From Ron in Birmingham, Alabama, Reid Guillotine.
Dear Art, I believe that I have 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.
Okay, he said the eyes glazed after about two minutes.
Yeah.
And that was it.
So, hopefully... Two minutes, that's a lot of time to think about.
Hopefully he felt no pain anyway.
Hopefully.
Thank you very much for the call.
We don't know.
The truth is we really don't know a lot about the process of death, do we?
No, not really.
Not really.
That's what we're trying to learn right now.
We're making inroads all the time.
But we can't even really define what death is yet.
Exactly.
First time caller to line.
You're on the air with Brian Shaw.
Hi.
Hello?
Hello.
Art Bell?
Yes, sir.
I find it such an honor to talk to you and to add my words to those people who are so
hopeful and creative which founded this country.
I am so glad for this country.
But I just wanted to instill a bit that there are no answers that I could possibly have.
Thank the Lord there aren't any answers.
There is only hope, only dreams, only possibilities.
But isn't, as Brian spoke of earlier, that he might have broke the sound barrier here
in time travel?
If he brought somebody else back to life, their words and what they might have seen, or say by that time surely they were able to add a body or clone a body or whatever for the fella, 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.
I'm not sure what you just said.
What does bringing back somebody from the future mean?
How do you do that?
Well, as you know, the whole world hinges on either free will or predestination in the Lord.
Well, I tend to believe in predestination, although many people believe in free will, 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.
Exactly.
Well, that's basically what I mean.
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.
Yes, but it may well be true, sir.
Certainly God, if he is, is greater than man.
But he continues to allow man to forge ahead technically.
And that's the kind of territory we're in right now.
Hold on, Brian, we'll be right back to you.
My guest is Brian Schott from Alcor Light Extension Foundation.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd
1997 Oh
Oh Oh
The face of time.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd, 1997.
Or, perhaps, bring it back.
Some secret place in time.
Boy, these words really fit.
I love my bumper music.
Good morning, everybody.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd, 1997.
All right, on a note not related to the show tonight, dear Art, any chance of putting Jim
Birkland on again?
His earthquake prediction for the Puget Sound area came true again yesterday at about 12 p.m.
Thank you, Greg in Seattle.
Answer is yes, Greg, and Jim Berkland needs to be given credit.
Once again, he has hit it on the noggin.
Jim Berkland is something else.
So yeah, we'll have him back, sure.
And I wanted to note the correctness of his prediction.
Back now to my guest, Brian Shaw.
Brian is from Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the largest organization of its kind in the world.
They preserve people in very cold temperatures, minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, with the hope of, is reanimating people a fair term to use?
Oh, yes.
In fact, that's the term we usually use.
It is?
All right.
From Mike in El Cajon, here's a slogan that I had read for cryogenics.
It's where the elite beat the heat and avoid having to meet St.
Pete.
Uh-huh.
I've actually heard that.
That's from Matt Groening's Life in Hell comic strip.
He actually did one called Akbar and Jeff's Cryo Hut.
I was back in the late 80s, I recall.
I see.
All right, back to the phones.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Brian Shaw.
Hi.
Hello?
Hello.
Oh, my name is Ernie.
I'm calling from Colorado.
Yes, Ernie.
A couple of things I'd like to mention.
Sure.
First of all, I saw the movie Independence Day on HBO over the weekend for the first time.
Yes.
And it disturbed me.
A lot, because I think we have a paranoia about what's going on with all this alien stuff, and I don't think that we're on the right track here at all.
With cryogenics, you mean?
With cryogenics, or with UFOs.
Well, they're very separate subjects, I think.
As far as I know, yes.
Yes, they are.
So what do you mean we're not on the right track?
Well, we have a... It seems like we're setting up a paranoia about UFOs and what's going to happen.
I don't think... I don't feel that... Sir, we talk many nights about UFOs, but we are not talking about UFOs tonight.
All right, well, you talked about cryogenics.
That's right.
Cryogenics.
I don't... In that feel, I think that it's... I think it's something that we shouldn't be messing with.
Why?
Because...
It's not something that we really understand enough about.
Well, there's lots of things we mess with that we don't understand.
That's how we make progress.
I mean, would you have been sitting there when Alexander Graham Bell was about to try and do a heresy of Of sending voice over wire?
And would you have been saying, now, Alexander, you've got to stop that!
We don't understand about these kinds of things, and you don't want to send a voice over a wire?
We're not talking about an invention here, though.
Alright, alright, then what about a scientist who has already cloned a lamb, and heaven knows, probably out there cloning people right now?
I don't agree with that either.
I don't think that's right.
I think we're into an area that is going to be regretful in the future.
You have every right to feel that way, and I'm sure that you are joined by many, many other people.
I don't know how you answer somebody like that, Brian.
How do you?
I have to agree to some extent.
Technology is always a double-edged sword.
It can cause benefits.
It can cause hazards.
We have to deal with that as we go along, but we don't deal with it by ignoring it.
We don't deal with it by putting our heads in the sand and hoping it will go away, because if we're not doing something, if we're not looking into it, then someone else certainly will.
Cryonics is really just an extension of medicine.
At least I hope that's what it is.
Maybe we can deal with it by putting our heads in liquid nitrogen.
Liquid nitrogen, yeah.
You've got to have a sense of humor.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Chalk.
Hi.
Yeah, I've got another spiritual aspect to all this.
Okay.
The theory of reincarnation.
Yes.
Oh, yes.
Okay, say you're frozen and you thawed out later, you could possibly already be here to meet yourself.
I don't know what to say.
We're off in areas where it's interesting to speculate.
All we can do at this point is guess.
Okay, thank you.
You bet.
We're speculating about the nature of death, and again, it's almost not worth doing because All don't have these answers.
But in a way, it's like time travel.
Now, suppose somebody comes back 500 years into the future.
There is going to be a culture shock and a technological shock that I'm sure Alcor must have considered.
How would you reintegrate somebody into a society that they don't even recognize?
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 is 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.
Right.
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.
Exactly.
You don't just go through an elaborate procedure like this and then kick the person out onto the street.
Exactly.
So what does Alcor plan?
I mean, would there be counseling?
Would there be a reintegration and education?
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 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.
Certainly.
I mean, my wife is signed up.
Oh, she is?
Most of my friends are signed up.
So you would all come back and hang out together?
Yeah, sure.
In Alcor City?
Yeah.
And, you know, as we learn new things, we could venture out into the larger world and see what happens from there.
But I'm not terribly worried about future shock because I I see that human beings are very adaptable.
One of the things you see is people from Southeast Asia coming to the United States.
It's true.
And in technological terms, they may be jumping from practically the Stone Age into the Computer Age.
They have a different culture, a different language.
And yet they make it.
They make it.
In fact, they really excel, actually.
Many of them do.
If that can happen now, I can see how it might happen for us in the future.
Okay.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Brian Shaw.
Hi.
Yes, good morning to both of you.
And belated happy birthday to you.
This is Pat from Burbank, California.
Hi, Pat.
Hi.
Tongue-in-cheek, you're 52 now.
Well, we can all play the darts, playing with a full deck.
There's a little humor there.
Yeah, but what do we say next year?
A little Joker in you?
Listen, I have a couple quick comments, an observation and a question, a real good one.
First, let's see here.
I saw a dog actually be cryogenically frozen for a few hours and then brought back.
Really?
I've seen that on the Elective Discovery Channel or something like that.
Really?
Yeah, definitely.
Next comment.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
If that's true, Brian ought to know about it.
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.
Okay.
The press coverage subsequent to that would sometimes miss the point.
Okay.
Then I also heard from a friend of mine 18 years ago that when there were people that were guillotined, there were some people that were lip readers and actually got confessions out of them.
Yep, yep.
I got a fax just like that, or maybe it was your fax.
It was mine, right.
Your fax.
And they actually confessed after their head, only with lip reading, though.
Right, right.
No vocal cords.
No air to go through.
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 I 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.
That's right.
Fascinating.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Shock.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello, this is David in North Little Rock.
Yes, sir.
Congratulations, Art, on your award.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Brian, I hope this doesn't sound too politically incorrect, but I know the research costs a lot of money.
The entire concept of freezing people is politically incorrect as you can get, so don't worry about it.
Well, what I was thinking was, I wonder if you had approached NASA with the idea, as far as from the angle of space travel.
Well, certainly back in the 60s there was some thought about it, but right now government isn't interested in us.
No branch of government is really interested in funding this kind of research.
That's what I want to know.
Alright, thank you.
What is the temperature in outer space?
Well, I may be wrong about this, but I can't I don't think you can really say that outer space has a temperature.
You actually have to have a substance to have a temperature.
Temperature is vibration of atoms and molecules.
And space is vacuum.
Nothing at all.
But if you're thinking of maybe storing patients in space, I think you should consider that.
Yeah, that's where I was going.
It's a thought.
Certainly the containers we use are cryogenic doers.
are vacuum jacketed uh... it it'll ford's very good insulation because of
the said to have temperature you have to have uh... from substance there to vibrate that
he did basically very fine vibration
uh... vacuum separates uh... the inner layer from the outer layer and uh... and
prevent transmission of heat into it space might just be a very good inflator that way
what is absolute zero uh... well absolute zero is theoretical point where no
vibration occurs at all And as far as I know, no one has ever managed to reach that.
On Earth?
On Earth.
Well, certainly no human technology has ever produced Absolute Zero.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Shaw.
Hi.
How are you doing, Art?
I'm doing fine.
Thank you very much for taking my phone call.
This is D-Man in San Luis Obispo County, KPRL.
Yes, sir.
Question here, Brian.
Did you guys learn anything from the woolly mammoth they found up in the Antarctic and the condition of the body?
The woolly mammoths that were frozen and found with vegetation and all that?
Yeah, and how much damage do you believe would happen to a body, let's say, 300 years out?
Would there be a lot of... Alright, this is a good question.
In other words, as you go out from the moment of the cryogenic freezing, How much accumulation of damage is there as the years go by?
Can you comment on that?
Well, yes.
Actually, these are two separate questions.
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.
Several thousand years?
That's right.
Wow!
That is quite impressive.
So there is no measurable damage, say, in 50 or 100 years?
Nothing measurable?
As far as we can tell, that's certainly true.
And I believe I mentioned that cattle feed had been frozen since World War II.
And in fact, it still is used to impregnate cows to this day.
So we know that certainly it can be kept 50 years at cryogenic temperatures.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Schoch.
Good morning.
Good morning.
This is Kate in Dallas.
Hi, Kate.
And I think it's really good that we have an option to use cryogenics, that that's something that's technologically, you know, possibly or possible at this point.
I think that like a hundred years ago or even fifty years ago to think that someone could put electrodes on a person who looks clinically dead's body and You bet.
It was absolutely outrageous.
Right.
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 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.
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?
That's something we won't know for probably a long time, but it is a thought.
Well, again, referring to the lady that was clinically dead for 45 minutes.
All the blood gone, brain waves gone, heartbeat gone, respiration gone, dead, dead, dead.
She came back and appears to have, well, lots of soul.
Right.
You never know.
So we're off into an area that we all don't understand here.
Right.
Well, it's pretty exciting.
It is.
It's exciting.
It's interesting.
Thank you.
Is that what got you interested in all of this, Brian?
I mean, what led you to it?
Well, I'd been exposed to this from my childhood, really.
This was really quite popular back in the 60s, and I remember magazine covers dealing with this, and it really did look exciting.
It looked really fascinating, and when I found out that this was real, it was really being done, and I knew people doing it, I just had to be involved.
I understand the compulsion.
I have it in my own way, too, about my own things.
All right, Brian, hold on.
We've got 30 more minutes to do, and we will have gone the whole way.
I'm Art Bell.
Be thermally challenged, huh?
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from June 23rd 1997
This way I can survive, I can't stay alive without your love
Oh baby, don't leave me this way, oh I can't exist My child arrived just the other day, he came home in a
hurry, he's a big boy now, he's My child arrived just the other day, he came home in a
hurry, he's a big boy now, he's day.
He came to the world in the usual way But there were planes to catch and bills to pay He learned to walk while I was away And he was talking for I knew it, and as he grew He'd say, I'm gonna be like you, Dad You know I'm gonna be like you And the cats in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy doing the man on the moon When you're coming home, daddy don't know when
But we'll get together then You know we'll have a good time then
My son turned ten just the other day And you're listening to
to Art Bell somewhere in time. Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from June 23,
1997.
Do we really know so much about life and death that we can make judgments about what Alpor
is doing? I don't think so.
And the cats in the cradle and the sigs will live on.
I'm Art Bell.
In a moment, we'll get back to my guest, Ryan Chalk.
I'm Art Bell.
Now we take you back to the night of June 23, 1997, on Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tomorrow night, I'm going to interview a woman who all her life has lived with wolves.
That's all I'm going to tell you about it right now.
Fascinating lady who has lived with wolves.
Imagine that.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Chalk.
Hi.
Where are you?
I'm in Kamloops, BC.
This is Dave.
First time caller.
British Columbia.
All right, Dave.
That's right.
Listening on KOMO out of Seattle.
All right.
I just got a quick comment.
That lady that called just before the top of the hour and said, you know, what would be the purpose or where would people even want to wake somebody up a hundred years from now?
And it just made me think that, you know, if we had somebody from a hundred or two hundred 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 hundred years ago that, you know, you'd be interviewing some night.
Yeah, they'd probably wake up, take a good look around, say, what the hell's the matter with you people?
Yeah, that's probably true.
Thank you.
There is that, isn't there, Brian?
In other words, if we were to be able to bring somebody back from, say, 200 years ago today, Would they be able to assimilate?
Would they even like it?
Would they even want to be around?
Or would they say, I'm out of here?
Oh, I think it really depends on the individual.
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.
Of course, that was never done, though.
A cask of wine?
Interesting.
Interesting.
Wine is a preservative, isn't it?
It could be, the alcohol content, yes.
And just laid out in the sun?
And I don't know exactly how one might do that, but I really think it was more of a joke than anything else.
Maybe it was, but I wonder if he was right about the flies.
Now that's tempting to try.
I mean, no organization is going to come after you for trying to put a fly in some wine.
I mean, they get in there by themselves enough as it is.
First time caller live on the air with Brian Shock.
Hello.
Yes, good evening.
Good evening, Brian.
My name is Debbie.
I'm calling from Puyallup, Washington.
And I'd like to precede my question with a comment on the religious aspects of this.
I don't believe that any of this is actually against any of the Ten Commandments.
Not that I could determine.
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.
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.
Well it's true, however, the religious person might say the following, I die, I get up to
the pearly gates and I am asked a few questions, I have a life review and they ask me if I
had great faith in God.
And I say, well, yes, I did.
I had great faith.
And then they look down and they see what's left of me in a vat down there.
And that'd be hard to answer, you know.
Your great faith is somewhat suspended from our point of view.
I mean, there you are in a vat.
Yes, but still, I think that we do have the obligation to reach our full potential.
Well, that would do it.
I really do.
My question for Brian is, or originally was, I'm sure that all of these legalities 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 the government think about taxing them?
Well, I don't know how the future might tax them.
Currently, these people are legally dead.
And so they are treated exactly the same as any other dead person.
Their estates go through the same legal convolutions as anyone else's, and they just have to think in those terms.
Well, but what if in some future generation the tax rate rises up to 90% for people with that kind of money?
Then truly they'll be taxed to death.
That's possible.
One never knows.
I mean, someone once suggested, well, you know, a lot of people pay for this through life insurance, and if these people ever come back, maybe the life insurance company will come to them and say, hey, wait a minute, we want our money back.
Oh, God, I hadn't thought of that.
That's right.
If they're back, they didn't die, therefore they're not really due the life insurance.
Yeah, but it's one of those questions that I'll worry about when it happens.
At least you would be there to have to pay the money back.
Right.
I'd rather be alive and in debt than dead and free.
Right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Brian Shaw.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm in California 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 their father in the sky and the ashes would
return to the mother on the earth and they were very careful and thorough about cremating
because first they burnt the body then they gathered the charge and 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.
Right, well they would be very unlikely to spring for cryonic suspension.
Yeah, and it's kind of another example of our disregard for the laws of nature which are actually causing our atrophying.
Yeah, but who's law?
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.
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 we are, by separating ourselves from nature, we're kind of like becoming like conflict.
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.
You could ask Hitler that question.
He had the same idea.
Well, what about Einstein?
I mean, come on, we can bandy back and forth with names, but the fact of the matter is, people have been doing that kind of screeching forever.
And what do we know?
We don't know about We really hardly know about life, much less death.
So, I don't know.
I think there is nothing unnatural about pursuing the cutting edge of science.
I worry about it from time to time.
How about you, Brian?
Do you worry about it?
I mean, we are out on the severe cutting edge here.
I worry about it all the time.
As much promise as nanotechnology might have for reviving cryonics patients, at the same It opens a real can of worms.
Machines small enough to fit inside human cells to rewrite the human genome would be wonderful for medicine, but would be equally effective as weapons.
In fact, they would be incredibly effective weapons on the... well, even better weapons, say, than virulent microbes.
These things could spread anywhere and do just about anything you could program them to do.
So, it could be frightening.
As I said before, technology is always a double-edged sword.
Indeed.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Schock.
Hi.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
Good morning, Brian.
Art, I'd like to congratulate you on your award.
Thank you.
This is Leo in Fredonia, New York.
We don't have a station that carries you close enough to really get a strong signal.
I have to use the internet.
So I've been sitting kind of blind until I happen to get through.
Thank you for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
Okay, Brian, I was curious.
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 happen 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 in your body down here?
Yeah, somebody would be walking down the street and suddenly they'd be a soulless hunk.
Yeah, that, you know, would 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.
Is that the proper answer, Brian?
I'd say so.
Not only are we presuming the soul here, but we're also presuming reincarnation and a number of other things.
Ask yourself about the nature of the soul as it is.
Most people have no memory of past lives.
In fact, I would hazard to guess that a vast majority of people cannot really be scientifically demonstrated to have memories of past lives.
If you are a devout believer in reincarnation, you have to ask yourself, I think, what exactly was being transmitted here.
I mean, if we are not our memories and our behaviors and all the little things from our experience, then what are we?
What good is the soul if it doesn't have us in it?
I guess I just have to think that way.
I'm my memories.
I'm the sum of my experience.
So, again, you will be frozen, your wife will be frozen, instructions will be left that you will be brought back at the same time, and that if one is able to be revived before the other, that one will be held up, and you will be revived only when both are able to successfully be revived.
Well, probably so.
Who knows?
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 Edinger, who is still with us, actually has a wife in suspension, but is also married currently to his very living wife.
I have to think he's a little nervous about what would happen if they're both brought back together.
And his present wife may not be so wild about it either.
No, no.
I have to think there's going to be a little bit of a battle there.
He probably has a problem with it, yeah.
Oh my goodness.
What's to the Rockies?
You're on the air with Brian Schock.
Hi.
Well, good morning Art and Mr. Schock.
This is Sherry from Pacific Grove.
Hi Sherry.
By the way, congratulations on those awards.
I'm very happy to hear about that.
Thank you.
I had a very good question for you Mr. Schock.
I missed the first two hours.
I have to catch up with those when they repeat.
Maybe the question was brute.
Please forgive me if I'm asking the same question.
Assuming that this whole operation works.
And it's been around so long, Lydie, but I'm not sure.
I mean, we have to wait until someone actually comes up and says hi there.
Say someone's in there for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, whatever the timeline may be, assuming they can be solved out, cured, or whatever was 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 like a 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.
We did discuss this a little bit.
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.
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 of years.
There will be a progression of people who have been in suspension and they may choose to help the people who come after them to adapt.
So it's sort of a little ready-made hierarchy of therapists, I guess.
I understand.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Brian Schock.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm just wondering about if 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.
I want to hang up and kind of listen.
All right.
Interesting question.
It's an awful lot of money to be embalmed in that fancy way.
I'm really not aware of anyone who feels that way.
The Pharaoh Syndrome?
Yeah.
As far as I know, everyone who wants this done to them is really hoping that they can be revived someday.
I can't imagine anyone really Uh, spending the money and taking the time if they didn't intend for it.
Alright.
Uh, now listen everybody.
He has made, uh, Brian has made a very unusual offer.
He's got, uh, a magazine, a very nice magazine called Cryonics, which has a price of $4.50 on it.
Um, he will send you information and a free copy of his Cryonics, uh, what is it, a quarterly?
It's a quarterly, yes.
Quarterly.
Uh, free of charge.
Free, free, free.
All you've got to do is call during the day, 9 to 5, Pacific Time, 1-800-367-2228.
And you're going to be sending a lot of these out, Brian.
Well, I hope so.
I hope to spread this information around a little bit more widely.
We really depend on the kindness of the media, interviewers such as yourself, to 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, and may I ask how old you are?
Oh, no, I know, you're thirty... Thirty-five.
Thirty-five.
Pretty young to be considering all of this, eh?
Well, I suppose so.
Of course, no one really knows how much time he has.
Isn't that a fact?
Isn't that a fact?
And that brings up one last question, and that is, you don't know.
So suppose you sign up for all of this, and then you are hit by an 18-wheeler, and there's nothing really left to cryonically preserve.
Mm-hmm.
What would happen?
Well, I mean, I certainly wouldn't be any worse off than if I hadn't done this at all.
But what I mean is, if you sign the contract and you're all ready to go, but the manner of your death is roadkill, does that invalidate the contract?
Well, I put in my contract that they should freeze whatever they can find.
Why not?
Well, it's true, especially with cloning and all the rest of it.
Freeze whatever you can find.
Right.
Well, listen, Brian, we are out of time, and I really, really appreciate the time you've devoted to doing the program.
It has been a comprehensive look at cryogenics.
Thank you very much, my friend, and get some sleep.
I'll need it.
Good night, Brian.
Good night.
That's it, folks.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
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