Where are the cryonicists

I’d say there’s less than ten people in the world actually doing it. There’s so few people doing it that it becomes more like a mentor relationship where you try to learn from the people that are already doing it.

In my case, I have a lot of experience with power tools—drilling on bone, cutting tissue, it's no big deal, I do it all the time—so it’s no big leap to do it a little differently. I’m trained in the anatomy of the head and neck, where all the arteries and nerves are, so it’s not that big of a deal. But there’s gaps in my training I have to fill in, like on sub-zero cooling and things like that they don’t get into in Otolaryngology. So everybody comes at it from a different background; they try to fill in the holes in their knowledge as best they can by learning from other people. There is no school for this, not yet—I would really love to see that in my lifetime. Without a school you’re kind of stuck just learning from the people that are already doing it.

A legal grey area

Everytime we deal with other professionals it’s awkward; they never know what to think. Just today I was trying to get a mortician to remove somebody’s head and mail it to us. You can just imagine how that conversation went.

To work in this industry and fight that type of social stigma, it takes a lot of boldness. We have to be willing to put up with all of that.

This is the hardest business that I’ve had to start. When I started my physician’s office, I opened up a medical catalogue and I just circled all the things I wanted to buy and they showed up at my office and away we went. But here, there is no catalogue. There is no local network of repair technicians. With Otolaryngology, I can call my local repair guy and he comes over and he fixes my equipment. I’ve got my local supply guy and he delivers my supplies once a week and sees how I’m doing. There’s no support, there’s not even a known list of equipment or protocol or anything. You kind of have to start from scratch every single time. You try to explain to your insurance company what your business is and it doesn’t fit into any of their neat little categories. You try to get insurance for the truck and they’re like “What are you going to use it for?” and it’s a little hard to explain. Everything we do we run into this obstacle that nobody’s familiar with it. It’s kind of a legal grey area.