by Chip Walter
Every great endeavor requires four forces to make it a reality. First, there has to be a need: a desire, a market. The second is the will and drive to fulfill the need. The third, resources: tools, money, expertise. And finally, people talented enough to succeed and achieve the dream. The human race—baby boomers, especially—had already provided plenty of need. But was all the rest in place too?
That was the ringing and elemental question. Because this was big. Nothing could possibly change the world more profoundly than the end of The End. Accomplishing that would represent the greatest scientific achievement in all of humankind.
But where to begin the quest? I couldn’t think of a better place to start than the one place where absolutely no one wants to die.
| PART ONE |
NEED
———
Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity, and will you yet call yourself young?
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Henry IV, Part 2
1 | THE BIG WAIT
In the end, it did not go well for Dr. Laurence Pilgeram, Alcor Life Extension member A-1245. He was dead.
The best anyone could tell, it happened when he had been strolling outside his Goleta, California, home on a chilly April evening in 2015. The sky was clear that night, with a brisk breeze coming off the sea. Down on the beaches—beyond the Biltmore Hotel, beyond the adobe houses that still lined many of the otherwise prosperous streets of nearby Santa Barbara—the black, foam-ridged waves of the Pacific crashed beneath a starry sky. And then, Laurence Pilgeram’s heart gave out. There may have been a moment, a split second, when the final, horrible revelation struck home: This was it. His time had come.
Santa Barbara’s first responders arrived soon afterward, but promptly proceeded to make a mess of things. They never called in the Alcor Field Cryoprotection Team (FCP). Had they somehow missed the bracelet, right there on Pilgeram’s wrist? The one dangling in plain sight with an engraved message: “Call Now for Instructions! NO EMBALMING/NO AUTOPSY!”
If they had, the Alcor team could have arrived within hours—maybe sooner—to chill his body close to freezing and undertake the Final Protocols: the ones designed to return Pilgeram among the living. But now, all that time had been lost. Santa Barbara’s medical personnel had consigned the 90-year-old biochemist to the dark, refrigerated confines of the medical examiner’s morgue, just like any other poor stiff. This was not a good thing—because when it comes to cryopreservation, cool is not cold. And cold is very important once a heart has thumped its last.
To make matters worse, the good doctor had passed away late on a Friday evening, which meant that once Alcor finally did get the call, it didn’t come until Monday morning. By that time, the trillions of cells that the doctor’s mortal remains comprised were already imperceptibly moldering, becoming chemically separated from their living versions—incalculably complicating not only Pilgeram’s freezing, but his chances for future revival. Had everything gone according to plan, his body would already be in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Alcor could place him in the canisters that would preserve him, precisely as he wished. Because Laurence Pilgeram did not want to die. Not on that April night, not on any night. He wanted to live forever.
* * *
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SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA, sits on a skillet-flat mesa so parched it could turn an oyster to dust. There are no weeds, no kudzu or ivy—anything that green would just dry up and blow away. Back before Julius Caesar was conquering Gaul, the Hohokam people lived and farmed the land here. Then, 500 years ago, they mysteriously disappeared. Sometime later, the Pima and O’odham, probably Hohokam descendants, returned. They were still living there when, in the early 1880s, an enterprising army chaplain named Winfield Scott came upon the sun-drenched, cactus-littered land and thought it might make a good place to grow oranges, figs, potatoes, and almonds. A few years later he founded the settlement of Orangedale, which in 1894 was duly renamed after him.
Nowadays, Scottsdale’s network of roads and highways looks like the diagram of a silicon chip cut into the dirt and stone: a sharp grid filled in with car dealerships, office parks, and strip malls, punctuated here and there with a resort hotel and the occasional gated community.
Scottsdale’s slogan is “The West’s Most Western Town.” That makes some sense. The sprawl hasn’t yet entirely obliterated the ancient landscape. Just beyond Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Taliesin West, a visitor can still glimpse a bit of the old, primal lands that existed out there when the Hohokam ruled the roost. Just below, housing developments with names like Eagle Ridge and Paradise lay on the rocky landscape: house after tan-and-stucco house constructed for the 20 percent of Scottsdalians over age 65 who have sought to retire in the land of hot sun and antiarthritic air.
A desert might seem an odd place to deposit frigid canisters filled with frozen bodies, but that was where the Alcor Life Extension Foundation had located itself. There were good reasons, actually—the main one being that this sector of Arizona was one of the least cataclysmic places on Earth. When it comes to seismographs and Richter scales, it’s an absolute flatline of geologic serenity. Never had an earthquake killed a single Arizonan, at least not as long as any records had been kept. And if any volcanoes ever were here, they had gone silent eons ago. No blizzards, tornadoes, or hurricanes either—because, truthfully, Scottsdale has no weather to speak of, except for the occasional torrential rainfall in late summer.
These traits make Sky Harbor International Airport, in nearby Phoenix, one of the nation’s least likely to ever suffer a flight delay—and for Alcor, that was important. Even the airport’s name seemed to fit Alcor’s mission: Sky Harbor. What could be more fitting when making a pilgrimage to the foundation’s frigid dewars than a harbor in the sky, a safe haven from earthly cares? Yes, when it came to transporting and lodging the temporarily deceased, everyone agreed, you couldn’t ask for a better place than Scottsdale.
And so that was where all Alcorites found themselves immediately after being pronounced clinically dead: all 150 of them (with another thousand signed on), ice-bound in the hope that once science someday divined how to unfreeze and cure them, they might be free to go on living healthfully, forever. Housewives and science fiction writers stood chilled in Alcor’s canisters; infants and centenarians, professors, doctors, scientists, dreamers, and hardheaded businesspeople. Kim Suozzi, a 23-year-old suffering from terminal brain cancer, is among them. She had learned about cryonics when she came across the writings of Ray Kurzweil, then raised some of the money needed for her preservation through the website Reddit. She became Alcor member A-2643. Ted Williams, probably the greatest pure hitter baseball has ever seen, is also there, along with his son John Henry Williams (who, before his own death from leukemia in 2004 at age 35, fought to have his father frozen at Alcor). Marvin Minsky, the great MIT computer scientist whom many called “the father of artificial intelligence,” also joined the Alcor experiment when he passed in 2016.
Each of these people had giggled as children, struggled as teens, laughed and cried with their friends and lovers, raised families, built a life on their talents and hopes and dreams. And then one day Death came calling. A doctor or nurse made the “pronouncement,” and Alcor’s Final Protocols began.
That was the big, common experience that all of Alcor’s denizens shared. Unlike those of us still living, each had stared into the abyss, had looked the Specter square in the eye, and, at the last yawning moment, known they were about to…blink…out. Or had they? Now, each occupied separate canisters, not very far from one another—proof that they also shared another thing, an overwhelming yearning to keep on living. Maybe they couldn’t escape the thing that had stopped their hearts—not just yet. But wasn’t this a helluva lot better than certain death? Assuming, that is, that someday they would reaw
aken.
* * *
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LAURENCE PILGERAM first entered my life not long after he had departed his own: just a couple of days before I made my pilgrimage to Scottsdale by way of Sky Harbor. Serendipity brought us together and gave me an opportunity to learn how Alcor went about freezing its clients. Max More, Alcor’s CEO, is a man who knows all there is to know about the Final Protocols. He approved of Ralph Merkle’s lab rat analogy: the one in which the control groups all die, but the experimental one might not. There was a certain compelling weight to that argument. Absolute death versus a shot at resurrection? Which would you choose? More thought it made perfect sense. “You mean to tell me they used to burn all of those slightly damaged people, or put their bodies into holes in the ground, when they could have frozen and saved them?”
Not that More hadn’t seen the raised eyebrows and dismissive smirks or heard the harrumphs and snickers. He had. Why, for god sakes, would anyone want to freeze themselves like some halibut when they kicked off? That’s just nuts! They have signed up how many people in this place? And what if you could be frozen and resurrected? Would that mean that legions of the temporarily suspended would someday return like Lazarus from the dead? Don’t we have enough people on this planet? How would we handle the glut? And what would God have to say about this? It’s just not right!
But, asked More, has anyone noticed that the definition of death has been changing for some time now? Maybe a process like freezing yourself wasn’t as crazy as some might think. There was a time, for example, when, if Joe had a heart attack, he would drop like a sack of cement and that was that. Then CPR came along. And Joe could be revived! His heart might falter, but this time, it could be restarted and life could go on—maybe for a long time, because eventually statins and defibrillators and beta-blockers and pacemakers arrived to keep him up and running much longer than his years, habits, and genes may have once allowed. These days, people were living into their 90s with 14 or 15 stents spread all over their vascular systems. And what about organ transplantation? How crazy is that?
No, better to think of cryonics as a new form of resuscitation. This made Alcor’s denizens not deceased, but voyagers, temporarily suspended in time. “Cryonauts” was a term that More liked to use.
* * *
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ALCOR’S FINAL PROTOCOLS always begin at the end. That’s what makes them final. It’s an ironic fact that only in death can there be any chance of coming back among the living. That’s because, under the law, Alcor cannot begin to freeze a patient until a doctor or nurse declares the person to have officially passed.
In a perfect world, when an Alcor patient is “pronounced,” the Field Cryoprotection Team is right there to begin the procedures designed to slowly cool the body and halt the deterioration of its cells. This is critical. Otherwise, four minutes after a patient’s heart gives out, the first of the body’s 100 billion neurons begin to die from lack of oxygen. And shortly after that, the remaining 99,900,000,000,000 cells start to degrade: heart, liver, pancreas, muscle, all of them gasping for oxygen, and not getting it, a process known as ischemia.
To reduce ischemic damage, Alcor’s cryopreservation team cools the body in a bath of ice and begins circulating water to accelerate its refrigeration. Once the patient has arrived at Alcor itself, the medical team then fits the cryonaut with an automatic LUCAS Chest Compression System that ventilates and rhythmically thumps the chest to keep blood flowing while the FCP injects 16 different medications into the patient. These include drugs like propofol, the same anesthetic that ultimately killed Michael Jackson, and antacids and anticoagulants, membrane stabilizers, and antibiotics—a postmortem cocktail designed to keep the cellular apparatus preserved in the best possible condition before the really Big Chill is administered later. The idea is to neither revive nor allow patients to deteriorate—just keep them in a perfectly undamaged, steady state: suspended.
This idea isn’t as crazy as it might sound. True, no human organs have ever been successfully frozen and thawed (a human heart can’t even survive five hours of refrigeration). But human eggs, embryos, semen, and stem cells are routinely frozen and then revived. Jacob Lavee, director of the Heart Transplantation Unit at Sheba Medical Center in Israel, preserved the heart of a 220-pound pig for 19 hours at 30°F, then transplanted it into another pig. After some warming, the heart started chugging away, no problem.
In March 2015, a 22-month-old Pennsylvania toddler, little Gardell Martin, slipped into a creek, where the current carried him a quarter mile downstream. After a frantic half-hour search, a neighbor found the boy facedown in 34-degree water, no pulse. His temperature had dropped 20 degrees below normal, and it looked hopeless. First responders and doctors performed CPR on the boy for 101 minutes, and amazingly he woke up, his brain function completely normal! Every neuronal marble in place. Doctors said it was a miracle, and that the profound hypothermia was what had saved him.
The most startling example of cryopreservation might be the “Zombie Dog” story recounted in the New York Times Magazine, about canines at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). One day in 2005, scientists replaced the dogs’ blood with a chilled saline solution laced with oxygen and glucose that dropped their temperatures to 50°F. Clinical death quickly followed. The dogs remained that way for three full hours. Then the researchers gently replaced their blood, shocked the dogs’ hearts, and lo! They returned to the living! So maybe, the researchers thought, doctors could do something similar for human patients suffering from traumatic injuries where the loss of blood was so rapid it couldn’t be replaced. Rather than die, maybe they, too, could be chilled and later revived.1
Cooling the body is just the beginning of Alcor’s Final Protocols. By the time a patient has been chilled and brought to the foundation’s medical suite, the place is filled with technicians, a surgeon, and all manner of machinery burbling away. What happens next is not pretty—but then, anything that happens after you’re pronounced dead rarely is. The chest is parted and the heart is linked to an assortment of tubes, while a corps of computers dutifully oversee the slow drainage of the very fluids that until now have been keeping the patient up and running—blood, water, hormones, neurotransmitters. All the while, these are being simultaneously replaced with a cryoprotectant: basically, high-grade antifreeze. This is called perfusion, and takes four to five hours until all of the microscopic nooks and crannies of one’s clinically dead self are as saturated as a beach at high tide.
While this is going on, three holes are drilled into the patient’s skull to provide windows on how the cryonic business is going. The brain, after all, is the seat of the self—the neuronal-synaptic repository of all memory, knowledge, and experience—and no one ever wants to mess with that.
The whole idea of perfusion is to ensure that Alcor’s patients aren’t, strictly speaking, frozen at all. Instead, they undergo something called vitrification, from the Latin word vitrum, meaning “glass.” That’s the goal: Make the body as solid as a Plexiglas paperweight, with every iota of the recently departed—every molecule, wandering atom, and orbiting electron—stopped cold, or at least slowed to an imperceptible crawl.
True vitrification, however, doesn’t set in until the Big Chill itself gets under way. That requires four to five more days of refrigeration that slowly reduces the body’s temperature to minus 148°F at about one to two degrees an hour. In the end, Alcor’s patients find themselves 400 degrees colder than they were when up and about.
By the time Laurence Pilgeram arrived at Alcor, the FCP team had carefully separated the man’s head from his body. That was the way Pilgeram had wanted it when he signed up with Alcor 24 years earlier. The procedure made him a “neuro”—shorthand for patients who didn’t want their bodies preserved, only their brains. It’s a personal choice. The day Pilgeram arrived, 92 of Alcor’s patients, more than half the cryonaut population, were neuros. The thinking is that the day when science can bring an Alcor patient youthfu
lly back among the living, fabricating a new body will be, relatively speaking, child’s play. The key thing is to preserve the memories and knowledge encoded in all of that cerebral architecture—the stuff in your brain that really makes you you.
In the case of Pilgeram, after he was “separated,” no other protocols were applied. His body had deteriorated too much, thanks to his sojourn in the Santa Barbara morgue. He was instead submitted to what Alcor calls a Straight Freeze, which is to say he was rapidly frozen and submersed in liquid nitrogen to better reduce as much of the ischemic damage as possible. Either way—straight freeze or not, neuro or not—all of Alcor’s cryonauts eventually find themselves headed to the Chill Chamber (officially known as the Patient Care Bay), and the resolute attentions of Hugh Hixon.
* * *
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HUGH HIXON EXHIBITS only some of the wear and tear of his 78 years. His skin is smooth as a baby’s, but his hair—what remains—is white and wispy. He’s slightly bent, stick-thin, and carries large, 1970s-style black glasses on the bridge of his straight nose. There’s less spring in his step than there used to be. It turns out he’s had a few of his own run-ins with the grim reaper. There was the quadruple bypass in 1996, the two stents implanted 10 years later, plus the two heart revascularization treatments. Those had worked particularly well. His parents also suffered from heart disease. He says it’s in the DNA.
