Survival Arts

Blast from the past: helping transfer Dr. James Bedford to a new dewar

I'm testing out a new scanner (an Epson 1260 Photo) which I've obtained to help bring a bit more order to my archives: I'm digitizing as much of my archives as I can manage. I hate paper, but I have too much of it.

I found a 12-13 year old pamphlet from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, entitled "Why Cryonics Can Work". I'm a member of the organization, and before I moved to Europe for a few years in the early 90's, I was pretty active as a weekend volunteer. Here's a bit of that history, the front of the aforementioned brochure:

I believe this is one of those "what I did on my spring vacation" types of photos: to the best of my recollection, this happened in the spring of 1991 when I was back in the States for a couple of weeks from London. Instead of taking it easy - which I have a hard time doing anyway - I heard that Alcor was in need of, um, warm bodies to help move a cold one from storage in an old style dewar to one of the recently manufactured Bigfoot units. The guy in the sleeping bag was the first man successfully frozen and maintained continuously since 1967.

From left: Dr. Michael Perry, Mike Darwin and (back to camera) me. I believe, from the hair, that the 4th person may be Steve Bridge. Notice the heavy gloves and my care in reaching around the body: the sleeping bag was saturated with liquid nitrogen. Cold.

Posted by Russell Whitaker at April 21, 2003 04:33 PM | TrackBack