Lifecycle of a Business

EPISODE 2 AGAINST ALL ODDS

Bianca: Alright, we’ve heard from a business that is still living in that dreamy space inside a person’s mind, untouched by the realities of this difficult world. Well, what happens when someone actually does go for it? When they make the jump and they put their idea out into the world. I asked Avery to find a business that just seemed crazy, like it could never work and a business owner who persisted because they truly believed in their idea. This is episode two, against all odds.

Soon after hearing about Alcor, a non profit organization based in Scottsdale that stores frozen humans until they can be brought back to life, I bought a plane ticket. I had to see this for myself.

As it turns out, the potential headquarters for human immortality doesn’t reside in some futuristic compound nor a haunted house on a windy hilltop...But rather just your run of the mill industrial park.

Avery: I’m looking for Alcor!

After confusedly trying to find the entrance for several minutes, I think it's fair to say the place is inconspicuous

But somewhere in this building, which also houses a boutique car dealer, a lighting company, and an interior designer, there are 166 bodies, or patients as Alcor refers to them, preserved in liquid nitrogen.

Avery: First and foremost, who are you?

Linda: My name is Linda Chamberlain and I am one of the cofounders of Alcor and my current title is director of special projects.

Linda Chamberlain is, to many, the first lady of cryonics. And to tell Alcor’s story we must also tell Linda’s…

As an Atheist, Linda didn’t believe in an afterlife.

Linda: I pretty much figured when you die, you die, its dust to dust and it's over and that’s just it.

But in 1964 she happened upon a book that proposed an alternative option.

In his book the prospect of immortality, physics professor Robert Ettinger suggests that when a person dies, that their body could be stored at very low temperatures--frozen essentially--until a time when medical advancements allow physicians to revive and cure them.

Linda, a science fiction fan who believed in the power of technology liked what she read

Linda: And so I found that there was a small group of people in California, which is where I lived at the time, that were interested in this idea too

And it was here that Linda met Fred Chamberlain.

Linda: He was a very vibrant, very intelligent, very interesting individual and after a couple of hours of talking about things we went to lunch and it was a round table that had about eight different places and I could not hear the conversation on the other side of the table where he was but I could see him over there and his face was just just beaming with excitement and lightning flashing out of his eyes and they brought this hamburger which was about three or four inches high and he devoured like half of it in a single bite and never stopped talking (laughs) and I said to myself, ‘Now this is somebody that I need to meet.’

That’s right, the history of the world’s largest cryonics organization is a love story.

In a short time Linda and Fred Chamberlain were married. And then they got to work.

Linda: At that very time, his father was very ill. He’d had a couple of strokes, he had diabetes, several different organ problems and we knew he only had a couple of years before he was going to die and we very much wanted to see him cryopreserved.

But when they proposed the idea to their fellow cryonicists they were met with resistance.

At this stage only a few people had ever been cryopreserved, and what Linda and Fred were proposing was a leap that would take cryopreservation from being an essentially mortuary practice into a high-tech medical procedure.

The group though did not share their enthusiasm.

But with Fred’s father in decline, the Chamberlains didn’t have much of a choice.

Linda: So Fred and I decided well if the capability doesn’t exist then we’ll just have to create it. Hopefully in time for his father.

Linda: We were just a couple of young, cockeyed optimists. He was in his mid 30s and I was in my mid 20’s. Neither one of us had a PhD or anything. Neither one of us really had any business experience, any experience doing startups. It’s just that nobody else was going to do this so if we were going to save his father, we were going to have to do it ourselves.

At that time Fred was making a nice salary working for NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory, so he suggested that Linda quit her job and devote herself to Alcor full time.

Linda: So for about the first five years that is the way we did it. I would do things during the day while he was at work and then on the weekends we were trying to put together our first manual on how to do this so Fred and I and our german shepard would go off into the Angeles Crest mountains just east of Los Angeles in a camper we had and we would spend the weekend working on this manual and that was pretty much for five years what we did. (laughs)

And then in 1976 Fred’s father became Alcor’s first patient.

With hygienic plastic wrap over our shoes, Linda takes me into Alcor’s operating room.

Once a person is pronounced dead a team of Alcor technicians work quickly to lower the patient’s core temperature and arrest the body’s natural decomposition. Then the body, or in the case of Fred’s father, who became the world’s first neuro patient, only the head, is lowered into a steel tank filled with liquid nitrogen. And that's where they remain, preserved at -196 celsius.

Avery: What do most people spring for?

Linda: Its about 50/50. There are good technical reasons why neuro is better but for many people emotionally the idea of leaving the body behind is an emotional thing which is difficult for them.

So in 1976, with Fred’s father in stasis, alcor has proven their ability to cryopreserve, now they needed to attract new clients, or in their terminology, members.

To do this, the Chamberlains take every opportunity to promote Alcor they can find.

Linda: it was our very first interview and we were quite excited about the idea of being able to go on television and promote this to people and then when they were making us up and doing things it came out that we were being sandwiched between a retired bullfighter and a prostitute. So that was the caliber of the show.

For Linda and Fred it was always an uphill battle. Many saw cryonics as a hairbrained idea, or worse, a scam.

And often it fell to Linda to convince potential new members to join.

She remembers one particularly difficult case.

Linda: My mother was very resistant to the idea for many years. And she would tell her friends, oh this cryonics thing that is just some weird thing that my daughter is into and she dismissed it totally.

But Linda had a foolproof plan to change her mom’s mind.

She came to visit Fred and I and I got her drunk and I cried all over her and I told her how much I loved her and I wanted her to be there in the future and to experience it with us and she finally said ‘well, okay, if this really means that much to you, I’ll do it.’

In 1990 linda’s mother’s health declined and a team of alcor technicians assembled.

Linda: We held a standby at her house, and everyone who was trained wanted to be involved in this standby because it was after all Linda’s mother. They were sleeping on mattresses on the floor because there just wasn’t enough room. One of the individuals who was there on standby for her was eight months pregnant. She wanted to be involved so she was there, and so it was that kind of thing that really convinced my mom in the end I’m doing this for me and not just for you.

And so I told her, ‘Okay, I’m so happy to hear that and I’m going to make a solemn promise right here and now that when you are revived, I will take you to the most expensive, most luxurious bar on Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn where they will have the most gorgeous view of the rings and we will toast to life.’

An astounding 47 years have passed since linda and fred took the first step in their audacious plan. But in no small part to linda’s unwavering convictions and tireless efforts, alcor has persisted, and grown into a more robust organization, complete with a president, board of directors and the talent pool that linda and fred had always envisioned

Linda: We knew from the very beginning that we were not the specific people to head up alcor forever. As I said he was a nasa engineer and I was just an office worker. So we saw our role primary as getting it started, helping build it until it was strong enough to attract the phd’s and md’s that would be necessary to make it a strong ethical organisation that could withstand decades, centuries if possible.

But in spite of its longevity, linda tends to still view alcor as a startup

Linda: There is no reason why under normal business protocols that this organization should be here. It was always in the red. We were pretty much living from one donation to the next to be able to keep our doors open and 47 years after we started alcor we only have about 1250 members who have made arrangements and we only have 166 members in stasis so we are still a very small organization.

Public opinion does seem to be coming around though. Especially as younger generations become more comfortable with technology.

Linda: Young people today have grown up with computers and so for them its very easy for them to look at this and say, ‘Ooh, yeah of course, yeah, this makes sense, sure sign me up.’ it's much easier today than in the early days. But it is not a tipping point yet, it's not oh everybody does this.

As for who signs up, to my surprise Linda says it's not just a bunch of rich folks

Linda: We have wealthy people, we have people that just scrape along to keep their arrangements in place. It's less expensive than open heart surgery even for a whole body at $200k. Most people though will fund this by using a life insurance policy, they just take out a policy name Alcor as owner and beneficiary and then we know the money is there when we get the middle of the night call that they’ve had a heart attack.

But she does see one area in which Alcor could improve.

Linda: There is about 80/20 males to females who sign up to this and we’ve been asking ourselves for 47 years why is that? And I don’t think there's any one answer for every individual but I think a very large answer is that up until the last 20 years or so women just did not get technical educations.

So yeah, for now even immortality seems to have a glass ceiling problem

One of the most moving things about my visit to Alcor were the photos. Lining the hallways are pictures of alcor’s patients, the same type of photos you’d see propped besides a casket at a funeral. Pictures of people in their prime. People enjoying life.

And then I saw one that I was not expecting.

Linda: This little girl that you’re referring to, our youngest member was less than three years old. She was a little girl in thailand both of her parents were physicians and when they came to the realization that they just weren’t going to be able to save her life, they made arrangements to have her cryopreserved.

I still haven’t signed myself up for Alcor, but looking at that photo I felt myself being swayed in their favor, suddenly hoping that these cryonicists might be on to something, that they can someday prove the skeptics wrong...That they can bring this little girl back.

In 2012, Fred Chamberlain’s photo was added to the walls of Alcor.

Linda: We knew it was going to happen, one of us was going to be left alone for a while, it was not likely we could go together because suicide prompts an autopsy which is uhh not good for someone who is being cryopreserved and so when he got cancer, umm, prostate cancer we knew that you know it was probably he was going to be the one that went first and that is the way it turned out. In 2012 when they could no longer really do anything for him he was cryopreserved. So I now have three family members in stasis, my father in law who was cryopreserved in 1976, my mother who was cryopreserved in 1990 and my husband who was cryopreserved in 2012.

But if Linda and the other members of Alcor have it their way, the loss of their loved ones will only be temporary

----credits----

Avery: Thanks to Linda Chamberlain, and if you’d like to learn more about Alcor you can check them out at alcor.org.

Bianca: Lifecycle of a Business is a podcast from Mailchimp produced in partnership with Missing Pieces. It’s hosted by me, Bianca Giaever and reported by Avery Thompson. Music by Stellwagen Symphonette.

Our executive producers are Ari Kushner, Kate Oppenheim and Brian Latt. Our line producer is Vicky Illk.

Linda: My husband happens to be right here. People often ask about that.

Avery: Yeah.

Linda: My mother and father in law are further back. Down on this side. And uhh, so...Everytime I come in here I break out in a smile. This is a very happy, hopeful room for me. Any questions.

Avery: I don’t know. I’m at a loss for a second. I like the mood lighting in here.

Linda: Yeah, we like it too.