Alcor’s 124th Patient A-2531
A-2531, a neurocryopreservation member, was declared legally dead at 10:15am (MST) on Tuesday May 6, 2014 and became Alcor’s 124th patient.
Shortly after 9 am local time, Alcor received a call from a member in Alabama claiming to have been shot by an intruder. After immediately calling police and medical services in the area, we stayed on the phone with him as much as he allowed. It soon became apparent that he had not been shot but was intending to shoot himself in the chest and had already taken a large dose of sleeping pills. Clearly deeply distressed emotionally, he called one or two family members to say goodbye, but still wanted Alcor to cryopreserve him. As we soon learned, hearing the police arriving, he cut off our phone call and shot himself before anyone could prevent him.
We immediately contacted an attorney to be ready to file an injunction to try to block the expected autopsy. (This is a powerful reason never to kill yourself, no matter how distressed you are, if you want to be successfully cryopreserved.) With great good fortune, the police and coroner declared the cause of death obvious, took blood samples, and quickly released our member. Two members of Alcor’s response team got on a plane the same afternoon, did a field washout, circulated medications, and performed a neuro separation. The patient arrived at Alcor on Wednesday at 2:10 am. After a longer than usual perfusion for a neuro case, perfusion was completed at 7:32am.
A-2740 Cryopreserved on April 15, 2014
A-2740, a confidential neuro member, was declared legally dead on April 15, 2014 and the same day became Alcor’s 123rd patient.
A-2740, suffering from multiple medical problems, foremost among which was metastasized cancer, had been hospitalized on the east coast. Alcor suggested to the patient’s son that his mother be moved to Arizona for a shorter transport time. Initially, he declined, resulting in a standby in the area carried out by Suspended Animation on Alcor’s behalf. Only sometime after she had been discharged from the hospital to a senior living center did he change his mind. He then paid for a medical jet which enabled A-2740 to be transported to a Scottsdale hospice on the morning of Tuesday April 15.
A-2740 arrived in Scottsdale at 11:44am. Less than five hours later, A-2740 was pronounced at 4:38pm. The Alcor standby team immediately went into action, seconds after pronouncement, and left the hospital at 5:10pm. Cooling and administration of medications continued in the rescue vehicle. The patient arrived at Alcor at 5:51pm. Perfusion was completed at 10:06pm and the patient began cool down to long-term care temperature.
A-2157 Cryopreserved
A-2157, a confidential neuro member, was declared legally dead on March 25, 2014 and the same day became Alcor’s 122nd patient. Alcor received a Telemed alert on March 14, 2014. The member had stage 4 colon cancer and multiple issues including atrial fibrillation and jaundice. On March 1 a nurse practitioner said they were planning on discharging him to in-home hospice care. Her prognostication was that he may have between 3 and 12 days remaining before his health failed. That turned out to be accurate.
On March 18 the decision was made to relocate the member to Scottsdale so as to minimize transport time and to enable us to avoid remote blood washout and go straight to cryoprotection. Since Medical Response Director Aaron Drake would be out of the country, we asked Suspended Animation to cover the case starting at noon on Friday 21.
The hospice in Scottsdale gave the green light to accept our member on March 19. He arrived in Arizona from California on Sunday March 23 via air ambulance. Steve Graber and Max More stood watch during the afternoon and evening until the first members of the SA team arrived and took over. At the hospice he was monitored with remote telemetry to provide 24/7 cardiac monitoring and an adjacent room was provided to position the stabilization equipment.
A-2157 arrested at 4:24 PM on March 25, 2014. The patient arrived at Alcor at 5:23 PM. Seven people contributed to the procedures in the operating room, where perfusion of the patient was started at 7:43 PM and completed at 10:50 PM. Perfusion appears to have been highly effective, even though an unusually small amount of cryoprotectant was used, although we will be able to check on that after performing a CT scan.
Androklis Polymenis Donates 1 Million NXT to Alcor
Scottsdale, AZ (March 6, 2014) Androklis Polymenis, a digital currency entrepreneur, has recently donated 1 million NXT coins to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation located in Scottsdale, Arizona.
After Alcor converted the 1 million NXT coin donation by Polymenis to bitcoins (and then to dollars) the end result was an approximately $46,000 donation to Alcor. The donation will be used to enhance marketing efforts, special projects and continued day to day operations at Alcor.
Alcor President, Max More, shared that “This was a wonderful surprise to our foundation. Alcor would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to Mr. Polymenis for his kindness and generous financial contribution. This donation will help us continue our research and bring greater awareness of the possibilities of cryonics to a wider audience.
Androklis Polymenis, a 37-year-old digital currency entrepreneur was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and went on to complete a degree in Computer Science. He has worked as a software developer as well as a computer science teacher for high school students. In 2011 Androklis discovered Bitcoin and was completely amazed by this revolutionary platform. He quickly grasped the enormous potential of the technology and went on to become one of the early investors in NXT digital currency.
Today Polymenis has committed his full attention to the exploding field of cryptocurrencies and his own startup company UbiCrypt, with the goal of providing innovative solutions for NXT. In his spare time Androklis works on bringing together the words of promising disruptive technologies such as digital currency and life extension, with the goal of sparking greater public awareness and support for both.
The donation to Alcor was facilitated with the help of Nikola Danaylov, founder of SingularityWeblog.com and host of the popular Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.
About Alcor
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 1972, is the world leader in cryonics, and cryonics research and technology. Alcor performed its first human cryopreservation in 1976. Since then, Alcor has engaged in long-term patient care as well as cryopreservation procedures. Among Alcor’s scientific achievements is the use of advanced cryoprotectant formulas capable of vitrification. Today, Alcor is the only full-service cryonics organization in existence. Alcor has almost 1,000 members with arrangements to be cryopreserved upon legal death and 112 patients cryopreserved. For more information about Alcor and cryonics, visit www.alcor.org.
Conflict of Interest Policy Adopted
At the February 2, 2014 board of directors meeting, the IRS’s recommended conflict-of-interest policy was adopted by a unanimous vote.
Alcor’s 121st Patient
Larry Sharp, member A-1117, was declared legally dead early on January 9, 2014. A neuro member, Larry arrived at Alcor that afternoon. Larry is a long-time Alcor member who some of us remember well from meetings in Southern California in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Alcor’s 120th Patient
A-2699, a whole body member, was declared legally dead on November 22, 2013. Due to the circumstances, the Medical Examiner insisted on an autopsy. Alcor received the patient on November 27, 2013.
Alcor’s 119th Patient
A-2030, a confidential 91-year old whole body member, was declared legally dead on November 22, 2013, and arrived at Alcor at 12:08pm the next day. Suspended Animation took charge of the case on Wednesday November 20 and dispatched a team to the patient’s location on the East Coast. A relative of the patient paid for a private plane, enabling SA to fly A-2030 to Scottsdale Airport, which is about a two-minute drive from Alcor.
This case provides yet another illustration of the uncertainty over the timing of a patient’s final decline. Very early on November 21, the patient’s doctor said that the patient was not in immediate danger. However, the patient declined overnight, was intubated in the ICU in the morning, and pronounced later that day.