Alcor Featured in Phoenix Magazine
Cryonics provider Alcor gets a section in this Phoenix Magazine article on the industries associated with end of life management. It starts half way down the third page of the piece: "Max More, [the] CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is discussing the existential benefits of cryonics - i.e. the preservation of clinically-dead human beings at super-cold temperatures for the purpose of resuscitating them, presumably far in the future. Founded in 1972 by California couple Fred and Linda Chamberlain, Alcor relocated to Arizona in 1994 and currently hosts 110 cryopreserved patients in its hangar-like headquarters near the Scottsdale Airport. ... More isn't just the CEO of Alcor - he's also a longtime member. Known and respected as an advocate of transhumanist principles - a movement that proposes to eliminate aging and elevate the human condition to near godly heights - More first became hooked on cryonics as a 22-year-old undergraduate at the University of Oxford. At the time, Alcor was enjoying a surge in membership and positive international publicity. More, a young deep-thinker steeped in the science fiction classics of Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein, was intrigued. So he took out a life-insurance policy on himself ('At that age, it cost nothing...') to pay for his eventual one-time Alcor cryopreservation fee, which runs $200,000 for full-body patients and $80,000 for neuropatients. More chose the neuropatient option. 'To revive a cryopreserved patient, science and technology would have to advance to the point where minute repairs could be made to a hundred billion neurons. It seems to me that regenerating or cloning a new body would be relatively easy by comparison,' he says reasonably. 'No reason to preserve my broken down old body.' ... More's main focus is to bolster Alcor's membership rolls, which he concedes have stagnated in recent years, due both to the flagging economy and lax public-outreach efforts by previous CEOs. As of February 2012, Alcor had 957 members - still-living future 'patients' who had paid the one-time cryonics fee or taken out life insurance and made Alcor the beneficiary. The members sustain the nonprofit's day-to-day operations by paying $800 yearly dues until their legal deaths. (More is careful not to use the word 'death' without a qualifier; the foundation's entire doctrine is predicated on the idea that its patients aren't dead in the absolute sense.)"
Link: http://www.phoenixmag.com/lifestyle/valley-news/201204/death--un--ltd--full-version/3/