Leary Severs Ties to Cryonics Advocates

The widely discredited cryonics movement, which advocates freezing bodies upon death in the hope they can be thawed and revived in the future, has lost its most eagerly anticipated client.

Timothy Leary, 75 and ill with prostate cancer, has ended his long association with the movement. “They have no sense of humor,” said Leary of cryonics advocates. “I was worried I would wake up in 50 years surrounded by people with clipboards.”

Leary, who is frail but still a prankster, wouldn’t get any more serious than that in describing the motivations behind signing up for cryonics in 1988 or deciding against it as death nears.

But the former Harvard psychologist, who became an international celebrity in the 1960s by advocating the use of mind-altering drugs, has seldom taken the well-trod path.

His decision to pull the plug on cryonics followed a tense scene over the weekend during which representatives from BioPreserve, a local company that prepares a body for freezing, angrily removed its equipment from Leary’s Beverly Hills home.

The falling out between the Leary and cryonics camps was prompted in large part by the famous psychologist’s plans to end his own life, which he disclosed in a Times interview in August.

Cryonics advocates say legal and medical complications after a suicide make it difficult for them to properly prepare a corpse for “cryonic suspension.” Because of Leary’s notoriety, they wanted everything to go according to their procedures.

And even if Leary did die of natural causes, cryonics officials feared that because he did not have 24-hour nursing care, as they had suggested, there would be a delay in having him pronounced officially dead.

“Our job is to be there to take immediate action to keep his heart and lungs working with CPR techniques, to inject medication to prevent the brain from freezing damage,” said Charles Platt, vice president of the CryoCare Foundation.

Cryonics officials have been especially cautious about legal matters since the Alcor Life Extension Foundation was accused in 1987 of hastening the death of a woman whose head was frozen. The case was eventually dropped.

“It’s a real feeling of defeat,” said Platt of the Leary matter. The foundation, one of two in the country that make arrangements for cryonics, would have received about $50,000 to freeze Leary’s head (full body cryonics costs $100,000) and priceless publicity.

The money would have come from donations and Leary’s life insurance, according to members of his staff.

The scientific world has overwhelmingly dismissed cryonics, whose advocates hope that future technologies will allow frozen bodies to be revived and perhaps even cloned.

CryoCare split off from Alcor three years ago. Platt would not disclose how many people are on CryoCare’s current member list. He said the group has overseen the freezing of only one body.

Leary first contracted with a cryonics company in 1988. “He used to say, ‘Cryonics is the second-stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of,’ ” said Leary’s friend and writing collaborator, Vicki Marshall. “ ‘Being eaten by worms is the first stupidest.’ ”

Leary said he is now considering more “conventional” post-death procedures, including burial and cremation. He said he is still pondering suicide, but has not set a date. Nor has he ruled out broadcasting his death live via the Internet.

Shortly after Leary broke off relations with CryoCare, a fax arrived at his home from Alcor, saying he was welcome to make an agreement with it. But he said he is through with cryonics.

“I guess he is not going to be their poster boy,” Marshall said.