Forty years ago today, January 12, 1967, Dr. James Bedford became the first man to be cryopreserved under controlled conditions in the hope of eventual revival. In a very real way, you can say cryonics itself is forty years old today.
Our website includes more detailed information on Dr. Bedford, and a couple of earlier abortive attempts at human cryopreservation. It makes for fascinating reading. We've come a long way since then, but we still have a long way to go.
Peter A. Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of online payments system PayPal, Founder and Managing Member of Clarium Capital Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund, and angel investor in social networking site Facebook, has announced his pledge of $3.5 Million to support scientific research into the alleviation and eventual reversal of the debilities caused by aging, to be conducted under the auspices of the Methuselah Foundation, a charity co-founded and Chaired by Dr. Aubrey de Grey.
Christopher Polge, who died on August 17 aged 80, attained scientific eminence at a remarkably early age: his discovery, whilst still a doctoral student, of how to preserve living cells and tissues at very low temperatures solved a long-standing and intractable problem in biology.
This breakthrough not only formed the basis for the new science of cryobiology but has also had profound and continuing practical implications for agriculture and medicine.
On August 31, 2006, Alcor had 809 members on its Emergency Responsibility
List. Four memberships were approved during this month, no memberships
were reinstated, no memberships were cancelled and no members were
cryopreserved. Overall, there was a net gain of four members this month.
121 info packs were mailed this month, 9 were handed out during facility
tours, making an average of 174 info packs sent per month in 2006 as
compared to 122 in 2005.
The 3rd quarter issue of Cryonics magazine has printed and will be mailed
the week of September 10.
Media in August
RAI documentary, Italy: Tanya Jones granted an interview to a production
company doing a one-hour documentary on the Posthuman era, investigating
how nanotechnology, cryonics, neural interfaces, stem cells research, and
psychopharmology will change human beings, and the ethical, philosophical
and religious implications.
Arizona Republic: Sergey Sheleg was interviewed for this local newspaper
with a focus on the relationship between his work at Alcor and his career
Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, Duke University: A
professor at Duke University is developing a scholarly multimedia DVD-ROM
that explores key ethical issues that have emerged as a result of rapidly
changing relationships between commerce, human tissue, and biotechnology.
The purpose of the chapter on cryonics is to introduce students/readers to
the importance of "temporal manipulation" in laboratory settings. The
author’s goal is to show the continuity between Alcor and the kind of
biological research that goes on every major research institutions across
the U.S.