Notes on Alcor's 2012 Strategy Meeting

Cryonics provider Alcor is becoming more transparent and communicative under CEO Max More, which I see as a good thing. One of the long-term challenges faced by Alcor (and all cryonics providers, for that matter) relates to the common model for customer membership and setting prices, insofar as that is impacted by increasing costs brought on by inflation that takes place over the decades that elapse between a customer initially signing up and later being cryopreserved. It's hard to solve that problem gracefully without a great deal of dialog with the customer community, as it basically boils down to either losing a bunch of money, thus endangering the business, or asking customers to pay more than they originally agreed to:

The 2012 Strategic Meeting took place from Friday September 7 until Sunday September 9. All Alcor directors attended in person, as did Alcor president Max More. The Strategic Meeting is the annual, intensive review of the organizations priorities and performance. You will find a more extensive discussion of several of the outcomes in a forthcoming issue of Cryonics magazine, but here are the main resolutions and priorities on which agreement was reached:

...

As minimum requirements for funding of cryopreservation inevitably go up over time, members who did not take out insurance well over the minimum of the day - or who do not regularly add to their savings in the form of a trust or other fund reserved for cryopreservation - may find it difficult to meet new, higher minimums. For older members, adding to life insurance may be too expensive or not an option. Other assets may be illiquid yet substantial, real estate being a common example. At the meeting, the board and president discussed alternative funding methods and resolved further to pursue possible options.

If cryonics is to become more widely accepted in the general scientific community, we need to add to existing evidence for the effectiveness of our procedures. One way to do this is to gather more data during all stages of stabilization, transport, and cryoprotection. We can also gather evidence of the quality and effectiveness of brain perfusion and structural preservation by routine CT scanning of neuro patients and by conducting biopsies of spinal cord and possibly other samples for all patients. The board expressed general support for carefully moving forward with this, ensuring that members understand what we propose to do.

Link: http://www.alcor.org/blog/?p=2645

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