Alcor Annual Strategic Meeting
Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2026 11:56 am
Alcor opened their Annual Strategic Meeting as a public zoom meeting, so I watched. 115 participants at first, with 20 drifting off over 3 hours. They are trying to open a facility in Calgary and are toying with the idea of operating in Europe with storage in Sweden. Both of those initiatives are mostly in the idea phase, with nothing tangible. They have hired more staff recently, up from 12 to 29 over the last two years, plus contractors. Includes at least one PhD. Budget is about $3m per year, which I feel must exclude certain salaries covered by donors. James Arrowood mentioned a few times that he's been there for 2 or 3 years, but it feels like so much longer. He gave it to us straight.
Diane Cremeens talked about how people can sign up online now, including submitting documentation. Diane now runs a team of 5. They get about 15 new members per month, and it takes them about 3 months to process the paperwork for each new member, mostly because of life insurance paperwork. They have about 50 members in Europe, mostly in the UK and Germany. Underfunding was brought up. They admitted no solution to underfunding.
People kept asking in the chat for photos of their facility, research development results, etc. The repeated answer to these questions was that they don't have any info to share. To see the facility, they said news organizations have filmed there, or they would love to give you a tour. As for research, it will be communicated later in the form of journal articles. JA specifically said he wants to be transparent, but then later said that he doesn't like to give public technical details about what they are actually doing. He said it had something to do with competitive advantage against newer "for-profits", but he curiously and frustratingly didn't actually explain that position. This has been a consistent theme from him. As a lawyer, he likes to hold his cards close. Simultaneously, he constantly touts the improved communication from Alcor. Final quote: "It's none of your business right now".
Steve and Jacob Graber: Team of 4 engineers, all paid by donors. One of their projects is trying to build whole body Intermediate Temperature Storage (ITS), but they are a long way from having anything actually available. Heater-based ITS that fails cold consumes about 8x liquid nitrogen, which is way too expensive, so they are trying to engineer something else. Separately from ITS, they have secured 9 patents in the last two years. They've started using superdewars instead of the old bigfoot dewars that only hold 4 full bodies. They will be relocating existing patients from bigfoots into superdewars. They have about 10 years of future capacity in their current building.
Science: Team of 3. Some of their projects are focused on biological reversibility, something that I feel is pointless because the required technology would not be available for something like 100+ years. Other projects have to do with studying how ice crystals form. This topic is frustrating to me because nobody should be using a protocol that has any chance at all of forming highly destructive ice crystals. All Alcor patients appear to have suffered some degree of ice formation, which I consider tragic. They have some new equipment which was made possible by donors. They don't seem to actually be publishing anything, although they teased maybe doing so in the future.
Catalyst Campaign is their name for the money raising push for the new facility they are hoping to build. They had a video of the new building. It looked fancy. They didn't specify square feet. Cost would be about $30M+. They hope to have a new page on their website as early as today for this campaign. This is actually very interesting. I think they will get it funded fairly quickly, but that same money would go a lot further and do a lot more good if they established staffed rapid response (DART in their terminology) facilities around the United States. Another reason why I find this topic interesting is that we don't yet have any sort of active funding campaign yet. I think we will work on a website page that explains to wealthy donors exactly what their money would be used for. We would use donated funds to future proof each of our remote facilities. Keeping those facilities open, funded, and operational is so important for each individual's survival. Flying someone out from Arizona or Oregon is absolutely unacceptable. An interesting approach for us would be to allocate each donation to maximally benefit the donor. For example, funds donated in the Bay Area would specifically go toward future proofing the Oakland facility.
Diane Cremeens talked about how people can sign up online now, including submitting documentation. Diane now runs a team of 5. They get about 15 new members per month, and it takes them about 3 months to process the paperwork for each new member, mostly because of life insurance paperwork. They have about 50 members in Europe, mostly in the UK and Germany. Underfunding was brought up. They admitted no solution to underfunding.
People kept asking in the chat for photos of their facility, research development results, etc. The repeated answer to these questions was that they don't have any info to share. To see the facility, they said news organizations have filmed there, or they would love to give you a tour. As for research, it will be communicated later in the form of journal articles. JA specifically said he wants to be transparent, but then later said that he doesn't like to give public technical details about what they are actually doing. He said it had something to do with competitive advantage against newer "for-profits", but he curiously and frustratingly didn't actually explain that position. This has been a consistent theme from him. As a lawyer, he likes to hold his cards close. Simultaneously, he constantly touts the improved communication from Alcor. Final quote: "It's none of your business right now".
Steve and Jacob Graber: Team of 4 engineers, all paid by donors. One of their projects is trying to build whole body Intermediate Temperature Storage (ITS), but they are a long way from having anything actually available. Heater-based ITS that fails cold consumes about 8x liquid nitrogen, which is way too expensive, so they are trying to engineer something else. Separately from ITS, they have secured 9 patents in the last two years. They've started using superdewars instead of the old bigfoot dewars that only hold 4 full bodies. They will be relocating existing patients from bigfoots into superdewars. They have about 10 years of future capacity in their current building.
Science: Team of 3. Some of their projects are focused on biological reversibility, something that I feel is pointless because the required technology would not be available for something like 100+ years. Other projects have to do with studying how ice crystals form. This topic is frustrating to me because nobody should be using a protocol that has any chance at all of forming highly destructive ice crystals. All Alcor patients appear to have suffered some degree of ice formation, which I consider tragic. They have some new equipment which was made possible by donors. They don't seem to actually be publishing anything, although they teased maybe doing so in the future.
Catalyst Campaign is their name for the money raising push for the new facility they are hoping to build. They had a video of the new building. It looked fancy. They didn't specify square feet. Cost would be about $30M+. They hope to have a new page on their website as early as today for this campaign. This is actually very interesting. I think they will get it funded fairly quickly, but that same money would go a lot further and do a lot more good if they established staffed rapid response (DART in their terminology) facilities around the United States. Another reason why I find this topic interesting is that we don't yet have any sort of active funding campaign yet. I think we will work on a website page that explains to wealthy donors exactly what their money would be used for. We would use donated funds to future proof each of our remote facilities. Keeping those facilities open, funded, and operational is so important for each individual's survival. Flying someone out from Arizona or Oregon is absolutely unacceptable. An interesting approach for us would be to allocate each donation to maximally benefit the donor. For example, funds donated in the Bay Area would specifically go toward future proofing the Oakland facility.