Suspended Animation Inc. accused of incompetence

CronoDAS

I recently found something that may be of concern to some of the readers here.

On her blog, Melody Maxim, former employee of Suspended Animation, provider of "standby services" for Cryonics Institute customers, describes several examples of gross incompetence in providing those services. Specifically, spending large amounts of money on designing and manufacturing novel perfusion equipment when cheaper, more effective devices that could be adapted to serve their purposes already existed, hiring laymen to perform difficult medical procedures who then botched them, and even finding themselves unable to get their equipment loaded onto a plane because it exceeded the weight limit.

An excerpt from one of her posts, "Why I Believe Cryonics Should Be Regulated":

It is no longer possible for me to believe what I witnessed was an isolated bit of corruption, and the picture gets bigger, by the year...

For forty years, cryonics "research" has primarily consisted of laymen attempting to build equipment that already exists, and laymen trying to train other laymen how to perform the tasks of paramedics, perfusionists, and vascular surgeons...much of this time with the benefactors having ample funding to provide the real thing, in regard to both equipment and personnel. Organizations such as Alcor and Suspended Animation, which want to charge $60,000 to $150,000, (not to mention other extra charges, or years worth of membership dues), are not capable of preserving brains and/or bodies in a condition likely to be viable in the future. People associated with these companies, have been known to encourage people, not only to leave hefty life insurance policies with their organizations listed as the beneficiaries, to pay for these amateur surgical procedures, but to leave their estates and irrevocable trusts to cryonics organizations.

...

Again, I have no problem with people receiving their last wishes. If people want to be cryopreserved, I think they should have that right. BUT...companies should not be allowed to deceive people who wish to be cryopreserved. They should not be allowed to publish photos of what looks like medical professionals performing surgery, but in actuality, is a group of laymen playing doctor with a dead body...people whose incompetency will result in their clients being left warm (and decaying), for many hours while they struggle to perform a vascular cannulation, or people whose brains will be underperfused or turned to mush, by laymen who have no idea how to properly and safely operate a perfusion circuit. Cryonics companies should not be allowed to refer to laymen as "Chief Surgeon," "Surgeon," "Perfusionist," when these people hold no medical credentials.

I recently found something that may be of concern to some of the readers here.

An excerpt from one of her posts, "Why I Believe Cryonics Should Be Regulated":

It is no longer possible for me to believe what I witnessed was an isolated bit of corruption, and the picture gets bigger, by the year...

For forty years, cryonics "research" has primarily consisted of laymen attempting to build equipment that already exists, and laymen trying to train other laymen how to perform the tasks of paramedics, perfusionists, and vascular surgeons...much of this time with the benefactors having ample funding to provide the real thing, in regard to both equipment and personnel. Organizations such as Alcor and Suspended Animation, which want to charge $60,000 to $150,000, (not to mention other extra charges, or years worth of membership dues), are not capable of preserving brains and/or bodies in a condition likely to be viable in the future. People associated with these companies, have been known to encourage people, not only to leave hefty life insurance policies with their organizations listed as the beneficiaries, to pay for these amateur surgical procedures, but to leave their estates and irrevocable trusts to cryonics organizations.

...

Again, I have no problem with people receiving their last wishes. If people want to be cryopreserved, I think they should have that right. BUT...companies should not be allowed to deceive people who wish to be cryopreserved. They should not be allowed to publish photos of what looks like medical professionals performing surgery, but in actuality, is a group of laymen playing doctor with a dead body...people whose incompetency will result in their clients being left warm (and decaying), for many hours while they struggle to perform a vascular cannulation, or people whose brains will be underperfused or turned to mush, by laymen who have no idea how to properly and safely operate a perfusion circuit. Cryonics companies should not be allowed to refer to laymen as "Chief Surgeon," "Surgeon," "Perfusionist," when these people hold no medical credentials.

I am, as you know, deeply sceptical concerning the prospects of a cryonics technology that works any time in the foreseeable future, for scientific and technological reasons.

The organisational issues are a whole other reason to worry, however. You have a lot of financially shaky organisations (it's an expensive business to run as a charity) run by people who radiate weirdness signals and thus make it less likely for the rest of the world to take their concerns seriously. Which is a failure in instrumental rationality. And Alcor (Mike Darwin in particular) is famously litigation-happy against those it perceives as critics, which is a BIG cultural warning sign these days.

I must stress that I do not see any reason whatsoever to assume villainy. I am struck by the deep sincerity of pretty much any cryonics advocate I have ever encountered. However, organisations of smart, sincere people are remarkably capable of stupidity.

And engineer hubris is endemic amongst technologists. Reinventing the wheel is perfectly normal behaviour, unfortunately.

I think the questions Maxim asks can be asked in a reasonable form, and are the sort of questions that cryonics advocates need to be able to answer. That is, you can separate the factual questions from the tone of the piece. And you in particular need to, because you're a staunch advocate.

You get the critics you get, not the idealised ones you'd like. Do you think you could go through and extract the reasonable questions to ask? Someone really, really needs to. The issues Maxim raises are not inherently unreasonable questions, even if you want to set the "villain bit" on her. She won't stop asking, and her questions sound reasonable and others will start asking and wondering if there aren't answers.

CI suspension reports appear to include made-up and misunderstood medical terms. What is going on here?
Where did EUCRIO come from? Where did 26-year-old David Styles find the many qualified, trained, cryonics-friendly medical personnel he says he has on call? Who are they? [*]
How closely aware of the state of mainstream medical technology are cryonics advocates, so as to avoid reinventing the wheel?
etc., etc.

You must also remember that every other human endeavour with thousands of dollars sloshing around (even from life insurance) attracts a vast ecology of financial parasites, who are in it for a buck. Compare a technology that sells hope but works, such as IVF - there the technology works well enough, but the bit that involves selling hope attracts an amazing range of parasites who have caused much more of its regulation than the philosophical issues did.

I'm frankly amazed that, as far as I can tell, cryonics hasn't attracted this sort of parasite, and divining the reasons it hasn't would be worth study. However, you can't expect people to just believe the parasites aren't there, because that's out of step with reasonable human expectation based on the way it plays out in almost every other field. Cryonics has to look extremely honest as well as being honest.

[*] and please note that I'm not in any way doubting David Styles' sincerity either. I do, however, think it sounds like previous cases I've seen of someone who's in way over his head and doesn't realise it yet.

I am, as you know, deeply sceptical concerning the prospects of a cryonics technology

And yet, it still seems more likely to succeed than bury-and-allow-to-rot technology, or burn-at-a-high-temperature technology.

6lsparrish16y

This is a good point. But... at the same time, there are limits to who should be taken seriously. If a person insists on questions on the order of whether you've stopped beating your wife yet, they aren't a critic worth replying to. That said, in this context the term would have to be "bozo bit" not "villian bit" as far as I'm concerned -- I tend not to paint things black and white as far as character goes, but I accept that there are those who are pointless to reason with (at least at given points in time, for given topics). It seems very plausible that Melody has laudable motives. I'm not particularly good at ignoring noise, unfortunately, and I am not an expert at what goes on at cryonics organizations. If someone who is wants to step in and reply that's great. (I am definitely glad this topic has reached the attention of Less Wrong.) My own staunch support for cryonics is not aligned with the success of any particular organization. I think some stabilization is better than no stabilization, but I don't have an opinion on whether SA is grossly incompetent or not. It does seem likely to me that they are at least under-utilizing available technologies and probably not using specialists to the degree possible.

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