Similar to what Alcor has done, will you create patient/case reports once you start having your first patients, and make them public? I think it’s great news to have a new player in the cryonics space, and the relative lack of friction is very nice, now just comes the long haul of establishing trust.
Short answer: we’re going to do something that IMO is even better—third party verification on a per-client basis.
Longer answer: Cryonics is in a difficult place as a medical technique because it suffers from the “no feedback” problem, as Mike Darwin has spoken about for many years. If I am a foot doctor and I hurt people’s feet, then they can sue me and eventually I’ll go out of business. But if I’m a preservationist, it can be very hard to tell whether a preservation actually worked or not, and the ultimate personal experience of the person being preserved may be decades away.
Lots of more normal medical practices have quick feedback to they’re able to achieve good results, and consistently deliver those results over years. But preservation doesn’t naturally have that. So in order for preservation to be rigorous, we have to build a system of feedback ourselves, and ideally make it even more rigorous than most medical techniques to compensate for the fact that we don’t have the client’s personal experience of the procedure.
We’re going to rely on the Brain Preservation Foundation to help keep us honest. Every client’s preservation will be reviewed for quality, and we’ll post our success rate so that people know how likely they are to be preserved successfully. We hope eventually other cryonics organizations will join us and we will have a “preservation leaderboard”. If you want to know more about the kinds of things we’ll be reporting for each client, check out the BPF’s Accreditation Page.
We’ll be talking about this in more detail in an upcoming post as well. It’s really important!
Similar to what Alcor has done, will you create patient/case reports once you start having your first patients, and make them public? I think it’s great news to have a new player in the cryonics space, and the relative lack of friction is very nice, now just comes the long haul of establishing trust.
Short answer: we’re going to do something that IMO is even better—third party verification on a per-client basis.
Longer answer: Cryonics is in a difficult place as a medical technique because it suffers from the “no feedback” problem, as Mike Darwin has spoken about for many years. If I am a foot doctor and I hurt people’s feet, then they can sue me and eventually I’ll go out of business. But if I’m a preservationist, it can be very hard to tell whether a preservation actually worked or not, and the ultimate personal experience of the person being preserved may be decades away.
Lots of more normal medical practices have quick feedback to they’re able to achieve good results, and consistently deliver those results over years. But preservation doesn’t naturally have that. So in order for preservation to be rigorous, we have to build a system of feedback ourselves, and ideally make it even more rigorous than most medical techniques to compensate for the fact that we don’t have the client’s personal experience of the procedure.
We’re going to rely on the Brain Preservation Foundation to help keep us honest. Every client’s preservation will be reviewed for quality, and we’ll post our success rate so that people know how likely they are to be preserved successfully. We hope eventually other cryonics organizations will join us and we will have a “preservation leaderboard”. If you want to know more about the kinds of things we’ll be reporting for each client, check out the BPF’s Accreditation Page.
We’ll be talking about this in more detail in an upcoming post as well. It’s really important!