Don't Get Too Comfortable (19 page)
Alcor's primary competitor is the Cryonics Institute in Michigan. Suspension at CI costs considerably less at $28,000, and they emphatically do not offer a head-only package. As they say on their website, “Few things have served to caricature and discredit cryonics so thoroughly as neurosuspension.” Alcor, in turn, feels that CI is not as scientifically advanced. CI rebuts that Alcor's insistence on niceties such as surgical sterility are merely cosmetic, conferring a “medical look” while driving up costs.
This rivalry is squabbling over an anticipatory dream, like the old joke about the family that gets into pitched battle about the car that hasn't been bought yet. “This is the realm of science fiction,” says a scientist at the National Nanotechnology Initiative at the National Science Foundation, who will not even allow himself to be named for a refutation. The extraordinary advancement that will have to have taken place before reanimation is remotely possible is multi-partite: there has to be a cure for the disease that killed you (or anyone else in suspension, meaning essentially a cure for every known malady); aging itself has to be arrested and reversed; the cellular damage from the extremely toxic cryoprotectant chemicals has to be reparable, as do the inevitable shatter injuries from the freezing itself; and in the case of neuros, there is the small added matter of somehow growing a new body to house your brain, possibly through therapeutic human cloning (stem cells). For now, cryonics remains a science of antecedence, as if anesthesia had been discovered centuries before the advent of surgery and scores of patients were just lying about on gurneys, out cold.
I am walked through the place by Hugh Hixon, the facilities engineer. Hixon is the longest-standing Alcor employee, having started there in 1982. He has participated in close to fifty suspensions. White-haired, bespectacled, and dressed in snug khaki shirt and trousers, he looks like a docent in the reptile house. He speaks somewhat slowly, with a flattened affect. When I ask him if it feels strange to work day in and day out in such close proximity to dead bodies and severed heads, he replies that it doesn't bother him much. His concentration is on the smooth technical operation of it all. “It helps that I'm a notably unemotional person,” he concedes. “If I had a family, that might not be an advantage.” Hixon's sangfroid is no posture, because he does have a family. Here on the premises, in fact. One of the photographs on the wall is his own father.
Hixon leads me through the cryonic process. Once your body has been safely transported to Alcor, it is saturated with antifreeze-like cryoprotectants and you are cooled to -230°F. In preparation for your long-term suspension, your temperature is gradually brought farther down to that of liquid nitrogen, -320°F (done too quickly and you'd shatter like an NBA backboard). Finally, you are moved into one of Alcor's dewars, the reinforced stainless steel tanks named after Sir James Dewar of the scotch-producing dynasty. There, you will wait out the years until the glorious flowering of science brings you back.
The five dewars, enough to hold the roughly sixty patients currently in suspension, are kept back in the patient care bay, a garagelike room. At capacity, a dewar can hold up to four full bodies and five heads. There are also a few suspended beloved cats and dogs scattered here and there throughout the dewars, wherever there's a bit of room. In the interests of space, pets are always neuros. Standing near these tanks, I have a hard time remembering that there are human bodies, and parts thereof, in them. There is no sinister hiss of liquid nitrogen. It's not even particularly cold, with none of that ozone smell of frigidity like in a hockey arena. If there is an overriding aroma to the place, it is coming from the small employee kitchen. I have smelled the future and it is redolent of microwave popcorn.
I ask Hixon whether any concessions are made to preserve the neuros' faces. Not really. Neuropreservation is about the brain pretty exclusively. It is not extracted from the skull only to minimize damage to the structure. The hair is removed to reduce any insulating properties it might have and to allow easier access for the burr holes made in the skull for the crackphones—seismograph-like sensors that monitor any fissures that might result from the freezing. Also, the antifreeze renders the skin translucent. “This is not a cosmetic procedure,” is all Hixon will say on record.
My ghoulish line of questioning is less an attempt to get a rise out of him than to get one out of myself. It doesn't work. The whole place seems quite banal, which isn't that surprising. Every business, no matter how out there, gets its filing cabinets, faux-woodgrain desks, and half-wall partitions from the same few suppliers. It's not like I had been expecting the dark, heavy draperies of an Alistair Crowley decadence—ravens and human-skull wall sconces—but maybe a little chilly steeliness of
Gattaca
might have been nice. Something that would indicate what was actually going on here.
Efforts are being made to convey precisely that. At the time of my visit, a Hollywood set designer was already in the process of redecorating. The barnlike door that leads to the cool-down room will look like a large industrial freezer. The walls will be a two-tone affair of wainscot-high aubergine, topped by an elegant gray, and the dewars themselves might be moved into a more photogenic bowling-pin formation. They will also sport a gleaming mirror-bright surface. Hixon couldn't care less about these cosmetic changes, but he takes them in stride. “People seem to get turned on by the polished finish.”
As I make my way to the stark white operating theater, I stumble upon a room with a large machine that bears a two-foot-long shaft, ending in a saw-toothed wheel about five inches in diameter. The teeth point both up and down in a fairly ragged and aggressive display of tear-apart force. Is this the decapitator, I wonder? No. It's a huge mixer, a kind of gargantuan Hamilton Beach they use to blend the very viscous cryoprotectant. When I ask Hixon to show me the cephalic isolator, he smiles and sighs gently, used to people's fixation on the “yuck factor.” He takes me into a room walled in supply cabinets, opens one, and takes out a very ordinary hand saw, wrapped up in absorbent blue surgical paper, labeled with a handwritten slip of paper “amputation saw.” So it all comes down to this. The back-and-forth motion of a good old industrial-age blade, powered by that most primitive of devices: the human arm.
“But a scalpel's just as good,” he tells me.
JERRY LEMLER, WHO
is president and CEO of Alcor when I visit in January 2003, is in his fifties, bearded, balding, with traces of a Freud-like demeanor, possibly a remnant of his career as a psychiatrist, which he was until quite recently in Knoxville. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law also work at Alcor. They will all be neuros.
Lemler is a patient and friendly man, and the first person to posit a fully rounded vision of a cryonic future. He believes in the coming of “the Singularity.” Coined by the mathematician Vernor Vinge, the Singularity is that point in the future when machines of greater-than-human intelligence will be created, outstripping by far the intellectual capabilities of man. These machines, in turn, will design and create even more intelligent machines, resulting in an unfathomable explosion of intelligence and advancement. Once consigned to the far distant future, the Singularity is now thought to be closer than previously imagined. Vinge himself puts it at no later than 2030.
And what does this mean for the cryonauts? According to Lemler, “Once we tap into the physiologic basis of memory, I think most will opt to be uploaded onto computer disks, which can have multiple copies sent out to various places in the universe, so that if one is destroyed by a cosmic pinball explosion somewhere, another instantaneously can come up and would have all the memories of that first person.”
Our physical presence would be no longer. The body would cease to exist, which would alleviate the need to learn how to grow new ones for the neuros. We would exist in a state of perpetual virtual reality.
I tell him a future as a CD-ROM seems unutterably bleak. Lemler tells me my attachment to the body is a sentimental one.
“They're just transitory and rather poorly formed for safety's sake. Vehicles for our mind, which is the essence of the person,” he says.
But what about new experiences?
A function of programs uploaded for our delectation.
How are children born?
“They're not. It's the end of population as we know it today. There won't be any need to do menial work,” he says with the ebullience of the better-living-through-insert-techno-pipe-dream-here romantic.
Maybe not here in Scottsdale. But Lemler is speaking of something supposedly only twenty-five years hence. There are still vast regions of the globe whose technology even now barely extends as far as potable water. What about the majority of people in the undeveloped world for whom life remains nasty, brutish, and short? How is all this supposed to reach them? It is not. By design. I remind Lemler that at the conference, the Singularity was also referred to as a “technorapture.” He understands what I'm getting at. A rapture by definition is a division of souls where some are called and some are left behind to perish in the Lake of Fire. “We're going to have that whether Alcor is here or not, whether cryonics is here or not. A good portion of the population is going to die off, there's no question about that, much as mankind has done for however many millions of years.”
At least there is a welcome touch of regret in his voice. Ralph Merkle had opened the proceedings with the statement that “more life is better.” It seemed like an unimpeachable axiom, until it became clear that he was referring fairly exclusively to those in attendance. When the less fortunate did come up, it was briefly, during a discussion of how much some of the nanotech innovations might cost. A scientist seated behind me stood up to joke, “I think we'll see a lot of bootleg third world respirocytes.”
Oh, those funny Africans with their broken-record insistence on access to lifesaving medications! Lemler, a liberal, is something of an anomaly within the cryonics community, which I have been told anecdotally is about seventy percent libertarian. It makes sense that they would subscribe to that Platonic ideal of uninterrogated politics. The collective perception in Newport Beach was that this was a convocation of mavericks, fringe radicals doing things their way with no outside help. That libertarian myth of the Lone Wolf gets a little shaky when one turns on a working faucet, stands under a lit streetlight, or realizes that every one of us got here by driving vehicles filled with highly subsidized foreign oil along a governmentally maintained freeway system. It is a troubling and downright inaccurate no-fault view of one's disproportionate allocation of privilege in this world. Why, it's consequence-free and limitless! More life is better!
And if it's simply a matter of cryonicists having a Rabelaisian vigor that compels them to seek years beyond their natural allotment, how does that jive with the Singularity scenario of a future as a computer disk, unable to experience anything new or organic? Why would one bother?
ROB FREITAS SAID
in his lecture, “If you're physiologically old and don't want to be, then for you, aging is a disease.” But that's not true, either philosophically or histologically. The equating of catastrophic illness with no longer being able to fuck like a jackrabbit goes to the very heart of the problem. It's that prototypical baby boomer trick of pathologizing those things that stand in the way of one and one's desires, however unrealistic or selfish.
Another of the lecturers ran through all the usual antilife extension bromides and arguments. One of them was that aging is good “because it gives life its meaning.” This occasioned derisive snickering in the room. A joke I fail to get. Aging
does
give life some of its meaning, if you're lucky. Those changes in our bodies—the masteries that are acquired, the capacities that dissipate, the people we love and lose along the way—all form the basis of wisdom. They provide a sense of consequence and context. I feel fairly comfortable characterizing as sad, for example, that a man as old as Hugh Hefner still seems to aspire to nothing higher than dating twenty-four-year-old twins. Seven and a half decades is an awfully long time in which to not grow up. When is it enough? Why are we coming away from the table—laden with a plenty never seen before in human history—still feeling so hungry?
The Alcorians will think me a fool, no doubt, and there are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn't strike me as one of them (and as a gay man who lived in New York City during the eighties, I know a thing or two about people disappearing before their time). Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind. From that distance, shouldn't an empty tribute like an Emmy Award be just about the last thing you'd even think of putting on your table?
Given the choice, I'll throw my lot in with the rest of us whose deaths will be irrevocable, we Dustafarians. In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.
Acknowledgments
I
am grateful to many people who helped to make happen much of the writing herein. All certainly helped to make it better. Alphabetically, they are: Kate Betts, Lindsay Borthwick, Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, Diane Cook, Mary Duenwald, Andrew Essex, Ira Glass, Susan Lehman, Joel Lovell, Laura McNeil, Jim Nelson, Julie Snyder, Mim Udovitch, and Andy Ward.
At Doubleday, I was coddled by the wise Bill Thomas, indulged by the serene Kendra Harpster, cleaned up beautifully by Karla Eoff, and kept out of the hoosegow by Amelia Zalcman. Thanks also to Christine Pride, the twenty-something Rachel Pace, and, as always, the lovely Adrienne Carr-Sparks.