The blog dw2-0 reports on Mike Darwin’s recent ExtroBritannia talk in London:

“Mike Darwin made the same connection at an utterly engrossing UKTA meeting this weekend…. He spoke for over two hours, and continued in a formal Q&A session for another 30 minutes….

….The most poignant part was the description of the people issues during the history of cryonics:

• People who had (shall we say) unclear ethical propriety (“con-men, frauds, and incompetents”)
• People who failed to carry out the procedures they had designed – yet still told the world that they had followed the book (with the result that patients’ bodies suffered grievous damage during the cryopreservation process, or during subsequent storage)
• People who were technically savvy and emotionally very committed yet who lacked sufficient professional and managerial acumen to run a larger organisation
• People who lacked skills in raising and handling funding
• People who lacked sufficient skills in market communications – they appeared as cranks rather than credible advocates.”

More here:

Human obstacles to audacious technical advances

Another account of the event here.