Pre-Mortem HibernationPre-Mortem Hibernation
This planful procedure takes on a different meaning when the person does not “die,” but slides into cryonic or brain-bank hibernation. This option is called “pre-mortem suspension.” It was ruled legal in California, in a case brought by the Alcor Foundation.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the world leader in cryonics, cryonics research, and cryonics technology. Cryonics is the science of using ultra-cold temperature to preserve human life with the intent of restoring good health when technology becomes available to do so. Alcor is a non-profit organization located in Scottsdale, Arizona, founded in 1972.
What is Cryonics?
Cryonics is a speculative life support technology that seeks to preserve human life in a state that will be viable and treatable by future medicine. It is expected that future medicine will include mature nanotechnology, and the ability to heal at the cellular and molecular levels.
Cryonics is the speculative practice of using cold to preserve the life of a person who can no longer be supported by ordinary medicine. The goal is to carry the person forward through time.
Cryonics is the speculative practice of using cold to preserve the life of a person who can no longer be supported by ordinary medicine. The goal is to carry the person forward through time, for however many decades or centuries might be necessary, until the preservation process can be reversed, and the person restored to full health.
Three little know facts:
1) Life can be stopped and restarted if its basic structure is preserved.
Human embryos are routinely preserved for years at temperatures that completely stop the chemistry of life. Adult humans have survived cooling to temperatures that stop the heart, brain, and all other organs from functioning for up to an hour. These and many other lessons of biology teach us that life is a particular structure of matter. Life can be stopped and restarted if cell structure and chemistry are preserved sufficiently well.
2) Vitrification (not freezing) can preserve biological structure very well.
Adding high concentrations of chemicals called cryoprotectants to cells permits tissue to be cooled to very low temperatures with little or no ice formation. The state of no ice formation at temperatures below -120°C is called vitrification. It is now possible to physically vitrify organs as large as the human brain, achieving excellent structural preservation without freezing.
3) Methods for repairing structure at the molecular level can now be foreseen.
The emerging science of nanotechnology will eventually lead to devices capable of extensive tissue repair and regeneration, including repair of individual cells one molecule at a time. This future nanomedicine could theoretically recover any preserved person in which the basic brain structures encoding memory and personality remain intact.
What this means is, if survival of structure means survival of the person; if cold can preserve essential structure with sufficient fidelity; if foreseeable technology can repair injuries of the preservation process; then cryonics should work, even though it cannot be demonstrated to work today.
The object of cryonics is to prevent death by preserving sufficient cell structure and chemistry so that recovery (including recovery of memory and personality) remains possible by foreseeable technology. If indeed cryonics patients are recoverable in the future, then clearly they were never really dead in the first place. Today’s physicians will simply have been wrong about when death occurs, as they have been so many times in the past. The argument that cryonics cannot work because cryonics patients are dead is a circular argument.
Hibernating Andy
Andy Warhol, the modern artist, became interested in cryonic immortality—as he so quaintly called it—when he learned that Walt Disney’s soul—brain—and flesh is being hibernetically frozen and preserved until Eric Drexier’s M.LT. nanotechnology—atom stacking—has mastered the logical steps to re-animate and restore him—i.e., Walt Disney.
Andy shared the almost universal belief that Walt Disney was one of the most important members of the 20th Century. You see, Walt Disney created “screen-iconic” entities of such global-mythic attraction that they are immediately recognized and loved by almost every quark on this globe. Andy told me over and over again that Walt Disney created pop culture. By pop, Andy means the popularization, humanization of ideas.
Andy was well aware of my assignment as publicity director of the Alcor Foundation to personalize, popularize, humanize, Disneyize the cryonic-hibernation re-animation option. And neither did he!
The Legal Authorization
The first logical question in anyone’s mind is: Did Andy choose neurological (head-soul) freezing? Or total body cryonic hibernation?
At first he was undecided. Andy could, of course, afford total body ($100,000), but he seemed more interested in the neurological option ($35,000). Andy liked the idea that, when his meat functions flat-lined, his brain—soul—could be preserved, awaiting the kinky moment when an attractive young person of either or both sexes would—as the tragic result of some car accident after the Junior Prom or a crack-house shoot-out—be lying comatose in the emergency ward, a brain-dead neo-mort, available for a transplant from a super-attractive brain.
I promised Andy, on three occasions, that I would do everything necessary to prevent him from being buried by the MOMA or the equally insidious Valerie Solanis/Saint Patrick Cathedral gang, or turned over to the M&O—maggot and oven—crowd, i.e., destroyed by legally sanctioned DNA-killers. In return for this promise, Andy gave me his power of eternity, which I transmitted by American Express.
On these three occasions, Andy begged me, “Please don’t let my body be exhibited publicly in the Museum of Modern Art or Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”
There is no greater gift of charity you can give than helping a person to die well.
—SOGYAL RINPOCHE
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
The documents signed by Andy authorizing his hibernation-re-animation have been properly affidavitted. Andy’s plans will remain, as per his wishes, secret.
There were several witnesses: Ultra Violet, who still wants to rock ‘n’ roll like days of old despite the fact that she’s become a Mormon or a Christian Scientist. I have witnesses! Viva, two. These were two, fine pioneer women that Andy signed up in his weirdo wagon train. Edie Sedgwick, three. Andy, by the way, recorded these conversations and shot Polaroid pix of all present.
Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details.
—ANDY WARHOL
After Andy Deanimated
Andy wrote about death: “I don’t believe in it, because you’re not around to know that it’s happened. I can’t say anything about it because I’m not prepared for it.”
Okay. Let’s get organized here.
I am on American Airlines flight 103 from J. Fitz. K. to Miami, Florida, my flop-top computer lapping-flapping away, writing to the Alcor Foundation to report on how the cryonic suspension—hibernation—of Andy Warhol’s body and soul was accomplished.
At 6:00 A.M. PST on Hybernation-Day-minus-1, I was notified that Andy’s meat vehicle was deteriorating sharply and that cardiac arrest was, at most, two days away. I reserved space on the noon flight to New York. My cover for this mission was to model a Guess gene commercial shoot by Helmut Newton.
My true mission was:
1. To assist in the removal of Andy’s body from the hospital to our mortuary on West 91st Street;
2. To assist in the cryonic freezing of Andy;
3. To ship the cryonic patient—Andy—to the California depository;
4. To attend the Andy Warhol funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and the subsequent ghoulish body-destruction festivities to see if there were any signs that anyone was aware that Andy’s body had been liberated from Christian neuro-terrorists who were so enthusiastically driven to consign all of Warhol’s organic tissue-information banks to the ever-hungry worms. My flight was delayed; so I called Grace Jones from the airport to tell her I’d be late.
Grace was not part of the freezing operation, although she played major roles in some of Andy’s last public triumphs. Andy symbolically married Grace in public shortly before his hibernation. His very last video performance occurred on Grace’s MTV production of “I’m Not Perfect, Nut I’m Perfect for You.” Andy, a Cabalist and numerologist, knew at the time that his nights were numbered.
I suggest you play this MTV tape and observe Andy’s comatic state. How well he concealed his 1968 illness!
Andy’s chronic impression was contagious. It nibbled at my brain like worms. These are certainly strange daze!
Even if you’ve lived your life like a complete slob, you can die with terrific style.
—TIMOTHY LEARY
Design for Dying
Writing become difficulty, and I have to be careful not to let my imagery become too disteanciated. My writing is nothing if not the history of my illness. The entire staff of Interview magazine is in danger of suffering from the same chronic impression.
The role of the Museum of Modern Art in the matter I not exemplary. They showed no great enthusiasm for Andy during his long, long period of dying (1968-1987). And then they go after him con brio as soon as they think—erroneously—that he is dead. The bake-meats are barely frozen cold upon the funeral table when MOMA announces the palladium of a full-scale retrospective!
Well, the joke’s on they who are marketing Andy like a combination of Jesus Christ and Donald Duck, and don’t realize that Andy is not dead, but sleeping. Next to... guess who?
$3,500 Phone Bill Aloft
I was, at this point in time, 35,000 feet high, a nervous wreck, suffering mental fatigue with the portable phone linked to my laptop, jacking into certain counterculture sectors of cyberspace, of which there are literally infinite numbers. I was not phoning my bookmaker, undertaker, pimp, wall-street pallbearer. I was not ordering call girls or fast pizza delivery.
I spent a most pleasant hour on “interscreen” digitizing with the Chaos Hacker group in Germany, who are very well known to Interpol and the KGB. We have developed these hilarious, international, digital intersex romances. I tell you, you can learn a lot about human nature quarking around in Cyberia! Digital intercourse is the best way to prepare for the juicy, sweaty, warm-flash transaction of “hard reality.”
At last, my touchdown in Eastern Metropolis! Am I happy? No way! My bumper sticker reads: I + N.Y. (clubs)
Rapid Cooling of Andy’s
Within an hour, Couri Hay from Team B knocks on my hotel-room door and murmurs the password. We drive in Couri’s limo to the hospital. Our people—nurses, ward physician, attendants, security guards—are in total control of the ward. I wait down the hall with the perfusion team. And the substitute corpse, whom we Andy fans remember from the hoax in Salt Lake City.
At 3:45 A.M. EST we were notified that Andy was experiencing final, agonal respirations. At 3:59 AM, our man, Dr. Mellon Hitchcock, pronounced Andy legally dead.
The switching of corpses was performed swiftly. We immediately started cardiopulmonary support using a heart-lung resuscitator. We employed an esophageal gastric tube airway to secure Andy’s airway against stomach secretions and ventilate him. Andy quickly regained colour and showed good chest expansion. He looked better, in fact, than he had since 1968, the year he was shot by Kynaston McShine, one of the hangers-on at his studio at MOMA.
Andy was then packed in ice and wheeled to the back elevator. We arrived at our mortuary on West 91st Street at approximately 4:30 A.M. and began administration of transport medications at 4:40 A.M. By 5:25 A.M. Andy was positioned on the mobile advanced life-support system, and surgery was underway to raise his femoral artery. In addition to his continuing good skin color, Andy’s arterial blood was bright tomato red—indicating good oxygenation, and he had bright red capillary bleeding into the wound during surgery—all good signs. The coy blandness, pervasive and teasing in its appeal to the media, was gone! The deathless, albino pallor was gone!
I know, I think, how Andy felt at this moment.
Andy often experienced the stigmata of the insane science-fiction artist: alienation, blurred reality, despair. And here he lies, on the hibernation table, no longer looking like the last dandy. Flushing with cool blood, he is no longer the figure of the Artist as Nobody, but the Romantic Stereotype of the Artist—pinkish, involved, grappling with fate and transcendence.
He had already cooled to 29.3°C by the time bypass was started, and he rapidly cooled to a rectal temperature of 9°C over the next forty-five minutes. Imagine that!
