Case Report for A-1546
A-1546 was born in Raton, New Mexico, a city just south of the Colorado-New Mexico border, on November 26th, 1938.  Known as ‘Bucky’, he served with honor in the US Coast Guard, and then attended the Colorado School of Mines to become a land surveyor. He was a husband, father, grand-father and was married to his wife for 41 years.

A-1546 possessed a brilliant and analytical mind, had a keen sense of humor and an unquestionable personal ethic.  A member of Mensa, he eagerly embraced technological innovation, and was a vocal proponent of future developments.

A-1546 became a member of Alcor in 1995.  His health declined in his early 70’s from metastatic gastric cancer and his clinical death occurred at 5:20 PM on November 9th of 2011, at his home in Kirkland, WA.  This case report will be published to Alcor’s website shortly.

Public Education & Media
Alcor has conducted 4 tours this past month with a total of 37 attendees.  This included two separate tours for a local college’s medical ethics course where students could learn and discuss the various aspects of postmortem directives, anatomical donations, interactions with medical providers and cooperation from relatives.

Another tour was provided for Dr. Jaime Lagunez from Cuernavaca, Mexico who is the Scientific Director of the American Association of Cryopreservation.  As a human rights activist, he strongly supports cryonics as a personal choice and is working to promote the continued development of the science throughout Spanish speaking nations.

During 2011, there were a total of 61 tours given for 246 attendees.  Groups included Arizona State University, Ottawa University, Glendale Community College, Tucson Unified School District, Bryman College, Barry Aaron’s office, TEDMED and the World Futurist Society.  International visitors came from Finland, Russia, China, Italy and Mexico.

Medical Event Tracking
During the month of December, 7 Alcor members that had either some type of surgery or significant medical procedure performed that we tracked.  Some events were planned and others were urgent.  Either way, we are pleased that members are being proactive and alerting us prior to events occurring.

A typical scenario involves receiving a call from an individual about an upcoming procedure.  Two forms are often provided to the individual – one that allows them to input all of the specifics of their surgery/procedure including date, time, location, surgeon, contacts, etc, – and the other form they give to their medical providers that articulates the purpose of their directives and requests specific action in the event of a clinical death.  Occasionally, calls will be made to the medical providers, at the request of the member, to answer specific questions physicians and/or administrators may have.  Alternatively, if a procedure is urgent and there is no time for this process, the information is recorded and disseminated to the deployment committee for evaluation.

Membership Statistics
Alcor had 957 members on its Emergency Responsibility List. Two memberships were approved during the month of December, one membership was reinstated, three memberships were cancelled and one member was cryopreserved. Overall, there was a net loss of one member in December.

Applicant Statistics
Alcor had 42 applicants for membership. Two new applicants were added, three applicants were converted to members and one applicant was cancelled resulting in net a loss of two applicants in November. 

Information Packet Statistics
Alcor received 95 info pack requests in December. Fifteen were handed out during facility tours or from special request. The average total of 104 info packs sent per month in 2011 compares to 199 in 2010. The full Information Packet is now available online.

The next Alcor Board of Directors meeting is scheduled for Saturday, February 4, 2012, at 11:00 AM (MST) at the Alcor facility (7895 East Acoma Drive in Scottsdale, AZ). Members and the public are encouraged to attend.

During the month of November the research and development team made a field trip to a local medical CT scanning service, taking with them two recent neuro patients. Due to circumstances surrounding their death, one patient was cryoprotected and the other was not.

Patient safety is Alcor’s main objective, and with that in mind our neuro patients were transported inside individual liquid nitrogen dewars securely tied down and well padded against vibration in the back of our Rescue Vehicle.

Having safely returned from our trip and taking care of returning the patients to the patient care bay, Steve Graber opened up the first of the patient scan files in our 3-D visualization software. This is where the team could really see some interesting things. First, using the ‘Slice’ tool to remove a small section of the skull (Fig. 1) and looking into the brain cavity we could make out the sensor wires which were previously placed into the brain cavity during surgery. Through the slice we can see variations in brain density which is visible in the red and purple range. NOTE: Color designations are entirely arbitrary.

A direct comparison of two brains digitally enhanced in software (Fig. 2) highlights unusual density variations between brains. When one compares these identically composed, sectioned and displayed images of a cryoprotected brain (top image) vs non-cryoprotected brain it is clear that there is a big difference in overall density between these two brains. A-1546 displays a significantly greater electron density than A-1088 throughout the majority of the brain. Overall the A-1546 brain is much more electron dense and we believe this to be evidence that perfusion did occur, at least in certain areas. It is important to note that we do not feel that complete perfusion of cryoprotectant was achieved across the entire brain. This may be due to the fact patient A-1546 was pronounced out of state and experienced a travel time of 18 hours from pronouncement to the beginning of the cryoprotective ramp in the Alcor O.R.

A future test of a variety of substances under the CT scanner in LN2 is expected to help to identify electron density specifics of cryoprotectants, which in turn will make our analysis that much more complete. We also expect to test a locally pronounced patient vs an out of state pronounced patient to determine the quality differences in cryoprotection caused by the time-lag to cryoprotection between these two scenarios.

In November, Steve Graber reported on a table cooldown test to -80C using saline water which demonstrated that the water bags in the cooldown chamber experienced difficulty passing through the ice temperature barrier, resulting in a very long cooldown process. Ultimately the test was stopped before the bags reached any appreciable cooling. Additionally, the research and development team noticed the table was cooling the leg portion much quicker than the remainder of the table.

The test was designed to more closely approximate the cooling characteristics of an actual patient scenario by using a mixture of anti-freeze and water in a 70/30 mix, rated to -65C. Steve’s test was run in essentially the same fashion as the previous run with identical LN2 consumption (two 200-liter dewars), and the data collection continued for an additional day to record the warmup segment. The table cooling tuning has been slightly over-corrected with the head and torso areas now cooling more quickly than the leg area. This should now allow him to dial in corrected vent opening settings for even cooling across the table. In the test the team noticed a significant improvement in the temperature drop vs saline water. At the end of our 10 hour test both the head and torso bags are nearing terminal temperature and the leg bag lagging behind. We achieved close to -80C cooling on our test bladders using LN2 at about the same rate as our current cooldown equipment.