The lifeboat — and what it could do today
James Arrowood runs the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, the cryonics organisation that has been operating since 1972. It is the place most people picture when they picture cryonics, and almost everything most people believe about it is wrong.
It isn’t, for a start, only for the very rich. Most members fund it through life insurance, which brings the cost closer to that of a funeral than to the headline number people repeat. Members carry a necklace, a bracelet and a wallet card with a phone number on them.
When that number is called, Alcor stops. James keeps a red phone; if it rings, the research halts and the building empties. A DART team — Deployment and Recovery — assembles and travels, aiming to be on a flight within two hours and willing to go anywhere. They have recovered someone off the coast of Africa. The teams are three to five people: nurses, hospice workers, first responders, lawyers, sometimes doctors, and a contingent of former special forces, recruited because people whose lives once depended on the contents of their kit do not arrive somewhere remote missing a piece of equipment. They must pass tests and simulations, not merely attend a course.
But the part of his argument that matters most has nothing to do with reviving anyone. The brain, he points out, is an organ — a very complex, very fragile one. A kidney is a simpler one, and today a donated kidney stays viable for only six to ten hours. If preservation can be made to work in a simple organ, even partially, it becomes organ banking — and that saves lives immediately, not eventually. That, not revival, is what he wants Alcor to prove.
