Letter from Art Quaife To all friends of Alcor: This letter confirms that I am happily donating $1,000,000.00 to Alcor as a booster to its all-important mission. The following is a brief history of my own involvement in cryonics. When I was about four years old, my maternal grandmother died. My mother explained to me what that entailed, and told me that we all have to die someday. I was traumatized by that vision and shouted loudly “But I don’t want to die!” before crying myself to sleep. From that time on I was never comfortable with the prospect of eventually becoming rotten and forgotten, and speculated on ways to avoid that end. Then in 1963 I read a Playboy article “Intimations of Immortality” which outlined Robert Ettinger’s proposal that we should begin freezing the newly dead in hopes of later revival. I was very much stricken by the article, and over that Christmas vacation I flew back to Michigan to meet Ettinger. I joined Evan Cooper’s Life Extension Society in 1964, and joined the Bay Area Cryonics Society (now called the American Cryonics Society) in 1968. From 1972 thru 1998 I was the first President of Trans Time Inc., offering cryonic suspension as a commercial service. I became an Alcor Suspension Member in 1998, and I now regularly attend the Alcor Northern California meetings. I am happy that my early cryonics colleagues Linda Chamberlain, Hugh Hixon, Ralph Merkle, Max More, and Mike Perry are still alive and working at Alcor. Saul Kent read the same 1963 Playboy article that I did, and I believe that among cryonicists still living, Saul and I are tied for the longest involvement in cryonics. I have made several contributions to the cryonics scientific literature, including the articles listed below. Mathematical Models of Perfusion Processes, Manrise Technical Review Vol 2 # 2-3 pp 28-75, March-June 1972. Concentration of DMSO-Q3 Solution as a Function of Temperature and Specific Gravity, Manrise Technical Review Vol 3 #1, March 1973. Heat Flow in the Cryonic Suspension of Humans: Survey of the General Theory, CRYONICS Vol. 6 Issue #62 pp 9-30, September 1985. Evermore, Art Quaife, Ph.D. (Mathematics)
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Cryonics / 1st Quarter 2022
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