Future Current

Bruce Klein, Tanya Jones, and Aubrey de Grey at the 6th Alcor Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona

Tanya Jones, Alcor’s Chief Operating Officer, has been actively involved with the organization since 1990. She has devoted a decade of work to cryonics overseeing the cryopreservation process, improving procedures, and managing Alcor’s day-to-day operations. She held the titles of Program Architect and Director of Communication at the Foresight Nanotech Institute and has participated in the cryopreservation procedures of half of Alcor’s patient population. At the 6th Alcor Conference she gave a talk on the efforts to provide and protect the wealth preservation trusts necessary to support and eventually revive cryopreserved patients.

The following transcript of the 2006 Alcor conference presentation by Tanya Jones has not been approved by the author. DVDs of the 6th Alcor conference are available for purchase at the Alcor website.

Wealth Preservation Trusts of Cryopreserved Patients

All right, we have one more thing to tell you about. Something that has been of great interest to the membership for a very long time: How do you take it with you? In our copious free time we have been whittling awy at this project. It’s a draft. There are certain things we have completed and established, and there are some problems with it that haven’t yet been solved. But this is the current state of the wealth preservation trust that Alcor has in development.

The purpose is to provide assets for an individual when they are revived. Because this is an irrevocable sort of trust, we also have the intention of helping the individual before they are legally pronounced and the trust goes into effect. In case something happens and a person becomes incapacitated, and they need the resources for their long-term care. Part of the point is also to supplement revival. Right now the patient care trust has the mandate of providing funding for revival, and a fraction of the cryopreservation expense goes into the trust for the long-term care and maintenance, but the principle is protected for revival expenses. However, we are absolutely certain the initial revivals will not be done at the levels of 650,000 for a whole body patient and 25,000 for a neuro. So these funds, depending on a patient’s decision, can be used to supplement the revival expenses and get people out sooner, as the technology is developed.

The trust provisions, it is irrevocable. And this is done for a very explicit reason. A lot of our members have had individual trusts that once they are pronounced and preserved, the only right that you retain when you have been pronounced is the right to donate your body to dispose of it in accordance with your wishes. You don’t reserve the right to make sure that your will is probated, your trusts are enacted, in accordance with your wishes. We have stood in court when families are contesting a cryopreservation and had the judge sit there and say, ‘Okay you can have his body, but I don’t care about the wishes of a dead person. I care about the living.’ And so they break the trusts and give the funds to the family. Now, most of that money isn’t even supposed to come to Alcor. Most of that money is set up to do research. On cancer, on cryobiology, on AIDS. All of these other problems that we know are being solved. But the families can very easily break those trusts in a court of law.

There is a master trust that is the wealth preservation trust. Underneath, each individual will have a separate individual trust in their name. This is to keep segregation of the individual assets that are put into the trust. Because we are relying on financial institutions to act as trustees, one of the concerns that has been mentioned is that we are not entirely certain that the trustees will be looking out for the best interest of the patients and the revival. And as a result, we have developed a role of “protector” above the trustees, someone who is an advocate for the cryonics patient’s keeping an eye on the trustees, making sure the money is being invested wisely and basically supporting the wishes of the individuals who can no longer speak for themselves.

The protectors themselves will have some responsibilities. While people are still alive, if they have assets in the trust and they become incapacitated, perhaps declared mentally incompetent for some reason, and funding is necessary to continue their ongoing health care, funds can be released for that. That’s an individual decision that everyone would make when they are signing up for this trust. It will also support the cryonics organization that is maintaining the patients. This is one attempt to help solve some of the fiscal problems that we have had, by providing services and engaging in an operation that is much beyond what we can actually afford to based on income we receive purely from operations. That is a factor that is a feature of the fee structure, and you need to be aware of that in advance.

So, trust assets can also be released for accelerating revival, supporting the reintegration process, education, physical therapy, whatever predictable sorts of expenses are going to be required to help a person once they are revived and reintroduced to society. So one of the tricky things that we have had to look at is when someone is revived the protectors have to establish the identity of the individual as being the person who established the trust. So we have had some arguments over how to go about establishing identity, and we ultimately went for the simplest one, and we will get to that in a sec. There are decisions that have to be made by each individual when they set this up. You have to select your maintenance organization. The default is Alcor. The percentage that is dictated is 1% going to Alcor, which is very consistent with a typical management fee structure. But you can change that if you want to be a little more generous. You can also dictate what percent of those assets can be used before you are pronounced and placed into Alcor’s or the other cryonics organization’s care, if you want to use it for ongoing health care. That’s all your decision. And you can also dictate up to 100% being used to accelerate your revival from cryonic suspension if for a moment you assume, just wake me up and that’s good enough. I know I’m going to have to work for a living most likely, and you’ll develop those skills. So those are individual decisions that have to be made by everyone when they are establishing a sub-trust.

This is our definition of the establishment of identity, and we would welcome a discussion on this. For the most part we picked the simplest possible mechanism, which is the body and the brain are the same as the person that was cryopreserved, and we are going to assume that it is the same person. We do not, as our contract states when you sign up for cryonics, consider a reproductive clone to be the same individual. However, there are those circumstances where people are not well preserved and perhaps the identity is too badly damaged, and a reproductive clone is the best that you can do on a revival. There is a little bit of leeway that the assets can be released to a reproductive clone if the protectors so decide.

This really is not complete. There are a lot of decisions that we have not made. We need to incentivise the revival process. Right now there is no incentive for the protectors to decide to revive someone. There is no incentive for the trustees to maintain the fund in a growing condition. We need to find a way to do that, and so some of the decisions that have yet to be made on the board level are how to incentivise those processes. The board has the draft, as does the attorney who has been working on these, and we are not entirely sure how long it’s going to take to fix the remaining problems, but we are working on it. One of the main reasons we wanted to do this was because we’ve seen so many times an individual trust has been broken by fairly unscrupulous family members. And what we are trying to do is establish sort of a strength in numbers approach, where the entire master trust can be used to protect the sub-trusts, and hopefully this will grow significantly enough and quickly enough that it will become less vulnerable to external attack. So, we are going to keep you posted. We know this is important. We have had so many people ask us what the status of this trust is, and it’s one of the reasons why we are bringing it to you now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Tanya Jones, Alcor, Cryonics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.