Post #31 — Cryonics

🧊 Lawrence Pilgeram paid $120,000 to have his whole body frozen. They cut off his head.

In 2015, 90-year-old biochemist Lawrence Pilgeram died in Santa Barbara. While alive, he signed a contract with Alcor, the world’s oldest cryonics organization, to preserve his entire body. $120,000 through life insurance. Fully paid up.

Alcor preserved only the head. The rest was cremated and the ashes were sent to his son Kurt. No warning.

The explanations kept changing: first the body was too decomposed (after several days in the morgue), then unpaid membership dues, then transport problems between states. Kurt sued for $1 million.

This is not an isolated case. It is a symptom.

Alcor: 53 years in the desert

Alcor is a single building in Scottsdale, Arizona. More than 220 patients at -196°C. Founded in 1972. Price: $220,000 for a body, $80,000 for a head.

The problems are systemic:

• One facility. Patients die all over the world, but the body has to be transported to Arizona. Every hour of delay means lost neurons
• In 1979, another organization from that era, Cryonics Society of California, went bankrupt. Nine bodies thawed and decomposed. Chatsworth is the ghost that haunts the entire industry
• Former CEO Max More was criticized for focusing on aesthetics (sci-fi lighting in the storage facility) instead of operational quality. The current CEO is James Arrowood

In 2025, Alcor invested in infrastructure: a CT scanner, a bypass lab, and a second operating room. But can you repair a reputation that took 53 years to build?

Tomorrow Bio: “What if you go to the patient instead of waiting?”

Berlin startup Tomorrow Bio (founded in 2020) asked a simple question: why move a body across half a continent when you can send a team to the dying person?

Cryo-ambulance. 24/7 teams in Berlin, Zurich, New York, California, and Florida. The goal is to begin cooling and cryoprotectant perfusion within the first minutes after death, not days later.

The result: 20 patients in 3 years. 800+ contracts in 45 countries. Nearly 400 new members in 2024 alone. A €5M seed round in May 2025.

But the romance ends when you start asking questions:

• €5M is pocket change for biotech. 24/7 teams in five cities cost millions a year. Where does the rest come from?
• A proprietary cryoprotectant without a single publication. Alcor uses M22, backed by dozens of peer-reviewed papers. Tomorrow Bio uses... what exactly?
• The 20 patients are not stored by them, but by European Biostasis Foundation, a separate organization in Switzerland. What happens if that partnership falls apart?
• Revenue is less than €5M per year. This is a startup promising to store bodies for centuries
• The company is 5 years old. Alcor, for all its problems, survived 53. Tomorrow Bio still has to survive recessions, leadership changes, and fading interest. For now, that question is still open

The real question

Organ vitrification is real science (rat kidneys have already been vitrified and transplanted). Human vitrification with the hope of revival 200 years from now is a bet on a technology that does not exist.

And yet 5,000+ people are paying. 30-40 new patients a year. Because the alternative is a guaranteed zero. Cremation, worms, nothing. Cryonics is the only product on the market offering “maybe.”

Five thousand people at $200,000 each is $1 billion. That would be enough for a Phase 3 clinical trial of a geroprotector that could delay death for millions. But no such trial exists. Alcor and Tomorrow Bio do.

People are paying for hope because science is not offering them a plan.

🧊 Lawrence Pilgeram paid $120,000 to have his whole body frozen. They cut off his head. In 2015, 90-year-old biochemist Lawrence Pilgeram died in Santa Barbara. While alive, he signed a contract with Alcor, the world’s oldest cryonics organization, to preserve his entire body... A separate news hook, because the mechanism here and the practical takeaway differ from the closely related previous posts.