Robert C.W. Ettinger
My friend Bob Ettinger deanimated on Saturday, 23 July, after a prolonged period in hospice care. A tub of crushed ice was by his bedside, and the certificate of death and perfusion of his blood vessels with a chilling solution were expedited. Since then he has been in the “cooling box,” to lower his whole-body temperature to liquid-gas cold.
I first encountered Bob half a century ago, when I was editor of the Galaxy group of magazines and he submitted his paper The Prospect of Immortality
Moreover, it seem probable that medical science, which had made such great gains in the century just past, would continue to develop, perhaps to the point of defrosting and repairing the damages caused both by the original cause of death and the act of freezing itself. Put them altogether and his idea seemed to offer not a guarantee, but at least a reasonable gambling bet that the idea might possibly work.
So I published Bob’s essay in one of my magazines, then began publicizing it. I was a regular on Long John Nebel’s radio talk show, and he was glad to schedule several shows about Ettinger’s idea. I was doing occasional writing for Playboy, and when I queried them about an article, they loved the idea, which in turn led to a prolonged interview on the then-dominant Johnny Carson show.
Bob was appreciative of that. So were the action groups that began springing up to put Ettinger’s ideas into practice, and as a reward for my activities, one of them offered me a free freeze, which I declined with thanks.
By then Bob no longer needed me to carry the torch for his idea, and further publicity pieces, including a lead article in Esquire entitled “New Hope for the Dead,” Bob wrote himself. We remained friends, and when Bob came to New York or I visited the Detroit area we usually managed to share a meal, once with his uncle, Pee Wee Russell, one of the most famous clarinetists of the Jazz Age.
I should say that one of the major reasons why we remained good friends was his personality. Bob had a great sense of humor. When I told him what Long John called the people in the deep freeze — “corpsicles” — he got a good laugh out of it and began using the term himself. And once, when I’d asked how many people had signed up, he grinned and paraphrased the Bible: “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”
He was always regretful that I wouldn’t sign up, not for the sake of another scalp to hang but because he believed I was giving up on a tangibly real hope. A few months ago, I got a long, friendly letter from him, doing his best to change my mind. I wrote back at once to say that I hadn’t decided the plan wouldn’t work. I agreed that it had at least a non-zero chance of doing as he hoped. But, I said, although I would give almost anything to stay alive and in good physical condition indefinitely, I wasn’t attracted to the idea of being reborn into a society where I had no role and all the things I cared about had disappeared.
He wrote me one more letter, good-naturedly urging me to change my mind. That was the end.
I still think it’s a reasonable gambling bet. If it turns out it works, I hope Bob will be among the first to demonstrate its success, and I wish him well in that future.
Related post:
Inventing Cryonics
— that the most valuable function of a church was to provide a Sunday school for you to send your children to, on the principle that exposing them to religion in childhood, like inoculating them against polio, would prevent serious religiosity later on. 
or the short story “
And he did confess to me once, over a meal at the restaurant next to the old Hotel Chelsea, that he was kind of wondering if it was possible that 
who stayed there when in New York and wrote some of his works there. Well. Arthur did much the same thing and, I believe, rather expected much the same treatment. What I don’t know is whether he got it.
