The Icemen Goeth

They have boarded airplanes with a human brain as carry-on luggage, turned a bullet-riddled lawyer into a Popsicle and employed a dog surgeon to operate on people who want to conquer death.

Now, after two decades of freezing heads and whole bodies for possible future revival, they have fled California.

Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s leading cryonics company, has packed up its icy clientele and moved to Arizona. Left behind is one of the weirder chapters in state history, replete with murder accusations, a cryonics civil war and a mysterious pair of severed hands.

The move took place last week under a shroud of secrecy--and paranoia. At the firm’s Riverside headquarters, five vats of liquid nitrogen--two filled with frozen heads, the rest with naked bodies in sleeping bags, and pets--were hoisted aboard a tractor-trailer rig and quietly shipped to Scottsdale. A caravan of Alcor members shadowed the cargo across the desert to guard against saboteurs.

“If people out there think whacking ice skaters in the knee is a neat idea,” explains Alcor freezemeister Steve Bridge, “then they might think the same for us.”

Bridge, formerly a children’s librarian in Indianapolis, says fear of earthquakes spurred the exodus. Company officials also were weary of a seemingly unending string of clashes with city, county and state authorities.

To be sure, Alcor’s tenure in California has been anything but peaceful.

The bitterest battle erupted in 1987, when the company decapitated and froze the head of Dora Kent, an 83-year-old ex-seamstress. (Cryonicists believe that by the time science figures out a way to defrost and revive chilled humans, it will also know how to clone new bodies for them.)

The Riverside County Coroner’s Office labeled the case a homicide, saying it found a lethal dose of barbiturates in Kent’s headless body. Alcor insisted that the sedative was injected after death to preserve brain cells. When authorities demanded the head for testing, Alcor moved it to a secret location.

Investigators raided the company’s headquarters, discovering a cache of rifles and pistols, and a plastic jar containing Kent’s severed hands. The weapons turned out to be legal and--after a judge blocked further searches--the case was dropped. The hands are still a mystery.

The publicity, meanwhile, prompted a surge of inquiries and “cryonaut” sign-ups. LSD guru Timothy Leary, for instance, said he wanted his cranium immersed in liquid nitrogen because “I refuse to go belly up when my Blue Cross runs out. . . . I want to wake up . . . with champagne glasses and rock ‘n’ roll music on the record player, if they have those things then.”

Other Alcor recruits include a mathematician who sued for the right to be frozen before a tumor ravaged his brain (he lost and the cancer went into remission) and a former Arizona seat-cover pitchman who did television ads with a Great Dane named Little Woofie.

“Woofie died before I knew a lot about cryonics,” David Pizer told a Phoenix newspaper, but the dog’s replacement is on ice.

Most of Alcor’s 375 living clients are atheists, men (by a 2-1 margin) and Libertarians, says effervescent president Bridge, a cattle breeder’s son who once dreamed of running the first library on the moon.

Some signed up for suspended animation in hopes of seeing the world of the future. Others feel shortchanged by AIDS or cancer and want to be revived when there’s a cure.

A few have odder reasons.

In a “why I want to be frozen” essay contest last year by Alcor and Omni magazine, one reader said he had a psychopathic urge to murder and wanted to come back when weapons of mass destruction were more widely available so he could “rack up a higher body count.”

Another insisted that he had been born in the future, time-traveled to the 20th Century, got stuck and must be frozen to return home.

There were critical essays, too. Said one: “The purpose of every human being should not be to weasel into the future but to make the future worth living.”

Cryonics also has endured withering fire from scientists. Art Caplan, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, has called the concept “goofy beyond amusement. (It) combines . . . screwy science and a secular lust for reincarnation with large-scale refrigeration technology.”

Other researchers allow that cryonics could be possible in the distant future--and some have even signed up--but they insist that there is no chance of reviving anyone frozen with today’s technology.

The cell damage is so extensive that it would be like “trying to turn hamburger back into a cow,” says Arthur Rowe, past president of the Society for Cryobiology, which studies organisms at low temperatures.

Nevertheless, the future frozen of America figure they have nothing to lose. If they’re wrong, well, they’re dead anyway. But if they’re right. . . .

Cryonics, Bridge says, is like “an ambulance to the future”: Doctors of the next millennium will be able to resuscitate people now considered dead by using microscopic machines that repair cell damage and reverse the aging process.

Getting there isn’t cheap. Alcor charges $50,000 to freeze a head, $120,000 for an entire body and up to $20,000 for a pet. Members typically cover the tab by taking out life insurance policies naming Alcor as beneficiary. They also pay annual dues of $324.

Upon death, if all goes well, they are hooked up to a heart-lung machine--to keep blood and oxygen flowing to the brain--and packed in ice, often purchased from the nearest liquor store. Alcor’s aging Ford ambulance then transports the body to company headquarters, where the Arizona veterinarian wields her scalpel.

The chest is cut open and a mechanical heart replaces the blood with glycerol, a “biological antifreeze.” From there, the body--or head--is wrapped in plastic and plunged into a dry-ice bath. Thermometers are placed in the nose, rectum and brain (through a hole drilled in the skull) and volunteers spend the next 24 hours adding slabs of dry ice until the body’s temperature is gradually lowered to sub-zero.

When properly chilled, the corpse is zipped into a Dacron sleeping bag and lowered into a 9 1/2-foot-high thermos tank--nicknamed Bigfoot--full of liquid nitrogen. Bodies are stored upside down, four to a tank, with assorted dogs, cats and rabbits shoved down the middle. (The feet-up position keeps heads submerged in event of a bad leak.)

Among those on ice: a TV repairman, an insurance broker, a microbiologist and a Glendale psychology professor who became the world’s first human icicle in 1967 and was later transferred from a small California warehouse to Alcor’s care.

The company also stores 17 heads in spaghetti-pot-sized aluminum containers inside two concrete vaults filled with liquid nitrogen. All the tanks are secured with thick chains, Chihuahua-sized padlocks (“the kind you can shoot bullets at,” Bridge boasts) and alarms.

Cryonauts who had AIDS (there are four) are not quarantined. “When you’re at minus 320 degrees,” Bridge says, “it doesn’t matter who your neighbor is.”

Instead, there are other fears--such as melting.

In 1976, several bodies frozen inside an underground crypt in Chatsworth thawed when the now-defunct Cryonics Society of California went broke and turned off their liquid nitrogen supply.

To ensure that never happens at Alcor, part of the freezing fee is invested in government bonds, mutual funds and real estate trusts. The interest is supposed to pay for the weekly topping off of the nitrogen tanks into perpetuity.

The company also rents space in a Kansas salt mine to hold letters written by survivors to their icy loved ones. Says Bridge: “It’ll be easier (for an unfrozen Rip Van Winkle) to find out who won the World Series in 1995 than to find out what happened to his niece in 1995. We encourage families to send in personal thoughts and histories.”

In striving to achieve immortality, Alcor members try to follow several simple rules: Always wear a seat belt, keep track of the 24-hour ice machines in your area, and, whenever possible, avoid dying without first notifying Alcor.

They also wear stainless steel bracelets that tell anyone who finds them dead to put the body on ice and call the company’s toll-free hot line.

But it isn’t foolproof.

A Texas client remembered to wear his bracelet. But when authorities found him last year--and promptly notified Alcor--the man had unfortunately made one tragic mistake: He committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

“That’s the worst thing you can do,” cautions Bridge.

A company official flew out to retrieve the brain, placed it in a plastic ice chest and carried it aboard an airplane for freezing back in Southern California. “The situation obviously was far from ideal,” Bridge says, “but we felt an obligation to do whatever we could.”

A similar problem arose two years ago when a Los Angeles lawyer, Michael Friedman, was shot five times in the head by an angry client and autopsied before Alcor gained custody of his brain and body, and froze them separately.

Despite such difficulties, the company trudges along.

With 27 “patients” on ice and a $1.1-million investment fund to take care of them, Alcor--originally known as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia--is the largest and probably richest of the half a dozen or so cryonics companies operating in the United States.

But a civil war seems in the offing.

The trouble began when former president Michael Darwin and physician Steve Harris--regarded by many as the most skilled body freezers in the business--quit to form another company. Although Bridge says the veterinarian who currently leads Alcor’s suspension team is perfectly qualified to perform the sorts of operations needed to freeze people, some members prefer Darwin.

Others worry about Alcor’s finances. Despite the company’s paltry staff and salaries (the top pay among seven employees is $22,000), Alcor has lost money for several years.

Not enough people have been frozen recently to make a profit, Bridge explains. And in one case, the client’s insurance refused to pay, so Alcor swallowed the costs. To offset the red ink, the company has dipped into a multimillion-dollar estate left to it by Dick Clair, a former writer for the Carol Burnett show who died of AIDS in 1988 and is currently on ice.

“I think we’ll work our way back out,” Bridge says.

Not everyone shares that confidence. Early this year, several members left Alcor to start their own organization, Rancho Cucamonga’s CryoCare, which works with Darwin and Harris. One defector was Dora Kent’s son, Saul, 54, who has donated thousands of dollars to Alcor over the years.

Some Alcor officials were happy to see him go. Kent, who runs the Life Extension Foundation of Florida, is under indictment for allegedly selling unapproved vitamins and drugs, and he used to work out of a building donated rent-free by a convicted cocaine dealer. (He also is behind the Reanimation Foundation, which promises to invest the frozen’s money in Lichtenstein and pay them back with interest when they are revived.)

Other departures could be more worrisome.

CryoCare claims that dozens of Alcor members are switching companies. Bridge disputes the figure, saying only a handful have left. He predicts that Alcor will survive, even thrive in Arizona.

Freed from the restrictions imposed by Riverside officials--who halted Alcor’s animal research several years ago--Bridge expects the company to pioneer innovative freezing methods and attract new members.

Maybe then, he says, cryonics will start getting more respect.

But Bridge is well aware of public skepticism. Back in Indiana, when he made the mistake of telling a date that he planned to be frozen someday, “she didn’t speak another word the rest of the evening. I never heard from her again.”

Scottsdale officials seem a little more receptive. “It’s certainly an unusual thing for the city,” says mayoral aide Fred Collins. “But they seem to have a grasp on reality.”

Says Bridge: “We’re not a cult. We’re not running around with our heads shaved or wearing orange robes, and we’re not behaving in bizarre ways, other than freezing people.”

Times editorial assistant Christina Chaplin contributed to this story.