Society for Venturism

The Society for Venturism helps cryonicists with support and advocacy,  offers members "Do Not Autopsy Cards", and also provides a Cryonics Assistance Fund that helps with charity cases and is a reserve of money to help suspended members in case something happens to their cryonics organization:


1. Membership:

To be a Venturist full member you must be signed up for cryonic suspension with Alcor, KrioRus or CI and you have to agree to our two principle: to support trying to end death with technology, and to agree to always try to do what is right.

If you are signed up and funded for your own suspension with one of these organizations and if you agree with our two principles let us know and we can add you to our list of members. We hope you'll be able to pay our 25 dollar annual fee-but if you have hardship let us know.

Otherwise if you agree with our two basic principles and are not signed up yet you can apply for associate membership status.


Contact details:

Society for Venturism
David Pizer, pizerdavid@yahoo.com
Telephone 928-632-1825 ... at the prompt, extension 120.
The address (snailmail) is
11255 SSR 69,
Mayer,
AZ 86333,
U.S.A.

Web Group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/venturists/

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Cryonics Organisations Offering Suspension Services to the Public:

Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 7895 East Acoma Drive, Suite 110, Scottsdale, AZ 85260; 800-367-2228; 480-905-1906; fax: 480-922-9027(fax); info@alcor.org http://www.alcor.org/.

American Cryonics Society, 1901 Old Middlefield Way, Suite 17, Mountain View, CA 94043; 800-523-2001; 415-254-2001; fax: 415-967-4444; Cryonics@AmericanCryonics.org www.AmericanCryonics.org

Cryonics Institute, 24355 Sorrentino Court, Clinton Township, MI 48035; 586-791-5961; fax: 586-792-7062; cryonics@cryonics.org http://www.cryonics.org.

Trans Time, Incorporated, 3029 Teagarden Street, San Leandro, CA 94577; 510-297-5577; fax: 510-297-5579.

KrioRu, Russia:: http://www.kriorus.ru/english.html

2. Information about our "Do Not Autopsy" cards is on this page

The Society for Venturism runs cryonics charity campaigns for those who were signed with a cryonics organization and had life insurance set up but lost the funds due to a debilitating disease, or cryonics advocates who are unable to qualify for life insurance due to health problems. If you are interested please contact us. The Society for Venturism has run four charity funds in the past, three of them were successful and one was not. Whenever someone donates to our charity fund the money will go to the cryonics organization that the recipient contracts with, in the event a recipient is not cryopreserved the donation will go to help the next recipient.

The following story was written by Mike Darwin for the charity fund the Venturists ran for Marce Johnson, who sadly was unable to be preserved. Anyone who donates for a particular cryonics charity case can have their donation back if the intended recipient is not preserved, some did so after Marce's case, or they also can let their funds go to the next case that comes along. Many choose to do that after Marce's case and soon after another Cryonics Charity Fund recipient was chosen. The third cryonics charity fund was run by the Venturists for William O'Rights shortly after Marce Johnson passed away and was successful. The Immortality Institute/LongeCity jointly assisted with raising funds. William O'Rights was a cryonics advocate who had contracted cancer at a young age and was then unable to obtain life insurance. He was successfully preserved at Cryonics Institute in 2009. The fifth cryonics charity fund is currently being run for Aaron Winborn. Please read the following story about Marce's case to get an understanding of why donations to cryonics charity cases are needed.

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Our share of night to bear 
Our share of morning 
Our blank in bliss to fill 
Our blank in scorning 

Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way!
Here a mist, there a mist,
Afterwards Day!

-- Emily Dickinson


                                     Marce
                                                      By: Mike Darwin

Cryonics. What does the word bring to mind? What other words? What 
images? What feelings? What people? For me there are a lifetime of words 
and images, emotions and people. It is 1968 and I am 13-years-old. I have 
just come home from school on a cold gray winter afternoon and I am 
eagerly reaching into the mailbox through the fog of my breath hoping that 
there will be another issue of Cryonics Reports there. 

When do you date the start of cryonics? Is it 1962 when the first steps 
to disseminate the idea were taken? Is it 1964 when Robert Ettinger's 
book The Prospect of Immortality was commercially published? Or, was it 
in 1967 when the idea seemed realized with the freezing of the first 
man, Dr. James H. Bedford in Glendale , California ? 

Those dates, or any others you choose, speak to both your knowledge and 
your perception of history. Forty-three years have passed since 1964 
45-years since 1962. Almost all of the men and women who created 
cryonics were of the same ages most of you reading this are now mid-20s to 
mid-40s. I, and perhaps a few others, were much younger when we were 
seduced by the idea of a world without death. Cryonics was already a 
central part of our world by 1968. It was a world we shared with people, 
most of whom have grown old and died, or are dying. I use the word died 
with painful deliberateness because if you go back in time, or simply 
go to the pages of the cryonics newsletters and magazines of those days 
and follow the histories of the people whose names appear there, you 
will find that most are dead. Dead not cryopreserved, not cryogenically 
interred, not even in cryonic suspension. To almost everyone who reads 
this they are just names now; the rich details of who they
were are gone, presumably forever. 

When I (very rarely these days) walk amongst the cryonicists of the 
present I am haunted by the familiarity of it all. Your voices, your 
faces, your words, your dreams, your expectations, they are really no 
different than those of the dead who preceded you and who wanted what you 
want, and expected what you expect. I see them in you and you in them 
because it is impossible to do otherwise. And so, I make a prediction: most 
of those cryonicists around you now will also pass away into death, and 
in so doing will forever take a part of you with them. This is a 
fearsome thing to say, but it is true, because whether the Singularity' 
comes tomorrow, or there is control of aging in 30 years, most of those now 
living will die. This is so because chance as much as choice decides 
who lives and who dies. Neither is omnipotent, but each has its 
undeniable and inescapable role. Plan as carefully as you will, but understand 
that the real world is a dynamic and unpredictable engine of
destruction. The best laid plans of men are oft for naught and we 
are still men. Do not forget that we are still mortal.

It is early in January of 1964 and in Huntington Beach , California a 
35-year-old housewife named Marcelon Johnson has just finished filling 
out her cryonics paperwork, paid her first cryonic society dues, and 
dropped her application for a Medic-Alert bracelet in the mail. She has 
six children and a busy, happy, life which has just gotten better because 
she now believes, for the first time, that she might never have to die. 
She is haunted by the death of her mother who was in her mid-50s when 
she succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. She does not want to die that way, 
or any other way, for that matter. 

Within a year Marcelon Johnson, or Marce as she is known to her 
friends, would become increasingly involved in cryonics. By March of 1967, 3 
months after Dr. Bedford began the journey which he continues to this 
day, Marce Johnson was the Secretary-Treasurer of the Cryonics Society 
of California (CSC). She opened her home to cryonics meetings and 
catered them superbly. She answered countless information requests and filled 
countless orders for books and literature. On October 11, 1974 Marce 
reluctantly accepted the Presidency of CSC, not suspecting that she had 
stepped into a nightmare that would go on for almost eight years. Russ 
Stanley, who had welcomed Marce to her first cryonics meeting on 
September 30th in 1966, had been frozen (or so it seemed) for 6 years. Two of 
the other pioneering CSC members whom she had met and befriended were 
also (presumed) in cryonic suspension at CSC's Cryonic Interment 
Facility in Chatsworth, CA. 

In the 45 years she was actively involved in cryonics I have never 
heard anyone say a bad thing about Marce Johnson. That is an 
extraordinary achievement for anyone involved in cryonics, but it is made all the 
more extraordinary by the fact that Marce was the de facto President of 
CSC when it came to light in 1979 that all of the patients in the 
Chatsworth facility had been allowed to thaw and decompose. No, Marce had no 
complicity in that horror beyond that of being loyal and trusting. The 
very qualities that made Marce an exceptional human being, her 
readiness to help, her willingness to trust the words of a friend and 
colleague, and her quiet and nearly unshakeable loyalty had set her up to be in 
the crosshairs of the litigation and enmity that followed. 

The very public disintegration of CSC was not only financially costly 
to Marce and her husband Walt (not to mention their 6 children), it was 
a deep personal humiliation and loss. Three of the people who had 
welcomed her into cryonics were now gone lost to a gruesome and 
disgraceful fate. There was no immortality for them; in fact, there was not even 
the dignity of a decent burial. Many of the people who were cohorts of 
Marce at that time walked away from cryonics and never looked back 
and most of them are dead now, or are beyond help in nursing homes, or 
dependent upon their indifferent children. I have watched as those who 
died passed, and I have spoken with those who remain, helpless and dying. 
Chatsworth was not a pretty business.

Marce Johnson did not walk away. She joined Alcor, and at a very bad 
time for Alcor in 1981, she quietly pulled me aside at a meeting and 
asked me if I would assume the Presidency of Alcor. I didn't know Marce 
very well then and I was completely taken aback. I was even more surprised 
when Marce told me that she was asking this of me because she had seen 
her cryonics organization fail before and she had not known what was 
happening until it was too late. This time she was not going to stay 
silent. So, it came to pass that I did become the President of Alcor later 
that year, and it was largely due to the quiet initiative of Marce 
Johnson. 

Over the next ten years Marce hosted more Alcor meetings than anyone 
else has before or since. She and her husband Walt were a dependable 
source of contributions, and Marce would often make the hour-long drive 
(often closer to 2 hours when the traffic was bad, which it not 
infrequently was) from Huntington Beach to Fullerton to help with various 
volunteer activities at Alcor. Her gentle, intellectual decency served as a 
welcome beacon of normality and warmth at cryonics get-togethers that 
were often marred by partisanship and extremes. Marce's home was one of 
the least conveniently located in Southern California , but the meetings 
she hosted there were among the best attended. 

In 1985 Alcor faced a seemingly insurmountable crisis. For 7 years 
Alcor had been the guest of Cryovita Laboratories in Fullerton , California 
. Cryovita was the creation of cryonics pioneer Jerry Leaf and it was a 
costly drain on Jerry and his family. Jerry not only paid the rent on 
the facility in Fullerton , he covered all the other operating expenses 
out of his pocket, including the liability insurance required by the 
landlord. In the early 1980s the explosion of litigation in California 
and elsewhere resulted in skyrocketing premiums for basic business 
liability coverage. By 1985 coverage at any price was no longer available for 
businesses with a high, or impossible to estimate degree of risk. 
Alcor, and thus Cryovita, became uninsurable and with that came the 
inevitable edict from the landlord to vacate the premises. 

With the help of a long-time friend of Alcor, Reg Thatcher, a potential 
solution was identified. A small park of industrial buildings was going 
to be built in nearby Riverside , California with completion expected 
in about 10 months. We negotiated with the landlord and began trying to 
raise the impossible sum of $150,000 plus closing and other costs. I 
had from April 4th to June 20th, 1986 to do just that a little over two 
months. At $149,000 I stalled out. All the deep pockets had been tapped 
and Alcor only had 75 members in April of 1986, and finding the 
additional $5,000 in cash required to cover the closing costs appeared 
hopeless. As it was, an additional $37,500 had already been pledged to cover 
the 2-year note carried by the developer. When Marce heard of this 
situation she quietly opened her and Walt's check book and wrote out a check 
for $5,000. 

In the years that followed, Marce was always there for cryonics and it 
wasn't easy. She and Walt had to buy life insurance late in life and 
the premiums were punishing, even for neuro. Sometime around 1997 Marce 
asked me to meet her for lunch in Huntington Beach . That was an unusual 
request, but one which I was happy to oblige. It was an unexpectedly 
emotional and difficult meeting. As we sat in a little Italian restaurant 
in an anonymous strip mall Marce repeated the story of her mother's 
death and asked me to promise that I would not abandon her should such a 
fate befall her. She told me a number of deeply personal things and she 
asked me to dispose of some unfinished business should I outlive her. 
It was easy to say yes. Marce was healthy and had every prospect of 
living many years longer in good health. It takes extraordinary courage to 
confront not only your own mortality, but also the prospect of closing 
your life in the darkness of dementia. Nothing in my experience
of Marce as a relentlessly positive and optimistic person had prepared 
me for that meeting.

In 2001 I was alerted by Joan O'Farrel of Critical Care Research that 
Marce seemed both forgetful and inappropriate on the phone (Marce was, 
as usual, doing volunteer work, this time for Critical Care Research 
(CCR) and 21st Century Medicine). A call to Walt confirmed Joan's 
suspicions and shortly thereafter Dr. Steve Harris and I visited Marce. Steve 
did a thorough exam, including an assessment for Alzheimer's. Marce did 
well on this assessment, but Steve suggested she go to the Memory 
Clinic at UCLA for a more comprehensive evaluation. Shortly thereafter, I 
left CCR and began what was unarguably the second most difficult period 
in my life to date. I tried to call Walt and Marce over the following 2 
years and always ended up getting Marce's voice on their answering 
machine. In the chaos that was my life at that time I had neither the 
inclination nor the ability, truth to tell, to worry about anyone but myself 
and my partner. Finally, in 2003 Walt picked up the phone and we
talked. I learned that Marce had been placed in a nursing home some 
months prior, and that she had moderately advanced Alzheimer's. 

That news was devastating enough, but what followed shook me to the 
core of my being. Walt told me that Marce no longer had cryonics 
arrangements and that she was to be cremated. I visited Marce twice in the 
subsequent months and found her still oriented enough to recognize me and 
carry on a very basic conversation. From these two visits I learned that 
Marce still believed she was going to be cryopreserved and that she 
felt that she had done something wrong, perhaps by getting sick, which had 
caused her cryonics friends to stop coming to see her. I learned that 
Saul Kent had been down to see her and Walt and to try to get Walt to 
reinstate Marce's arrangements, but to no avail. Walt had never been a 
cryonicist and his concern was, understandably, with ensuring that Marce 
got top quality nursing home care. Walt and Marce were confronted with 
spend down in the face of monthly nursing home bills of over $5,000. 
Medicare does not begin to cover these expenses until the
patient has $2,000 or less in total assets not even enough for 
burial. Marce's and Walt's cryonics insurance policies had been cashed-out 
and used for her nursing home care.

In the four years that have come and gone since then I have continued 
to try to find some way to rescue Marce from this situation. Marce did 
everything right, everything that cryonics organizations asked her to 
do, including giving them ownership of her policy. Unfortunately, Marce 
fell ill just as CryoCare was closing down and she never had the 
opportunity to transfer her arrangements to the Cryonics Institute, or Alcor. 

Recently, Dave Pizer of the Venturists stepped forward to organize a 
fund raising effort for Marce. Dave believed, as I did, that the primary 
obstacle to getting Marce cryopreservation arrangements was money, not 
any unwillingness on Walt's part. A few days ago Walt confirmed this by 
consenting to have Marce cryopreserved at CI when the time comes. CI 
graciously agreed to accept Marce as a member and her future now rests on 
the ability of the Venturists to raise the $35,000 required to cover 
CI's costs and to transport Marce to CI from Southern California . 

Of the twenty or so people who attended that original LES meeting at 
the home of Russ Stanley in 1966, only Marce Johnson and Robert Nelson 
remain alive. The others have all perished, some at Chatsworth, some 
later. Nothing can be done for them, but Marce endures, and she still has 
some chance of rescue. Marce's situation is now extremely tenuous. She 
has been moved to a highly skilled nursing facility a short distance 
from her home in Huntington Beach . Death could come at any time.

Marce asked me to help her, to stand by her, and to never abandon her. 
The burden of that ready and unreservedly made commitment has proved 
far heavier than I ever imagined possible. I ask you, on behalf of all 
that Marce has done to make cryonics possible for you, to please, please 
help her.

Mike Darwin
March 8, 2007