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About two weeks after his father's death, Kurt Pilgeram opened an unexpected package. It contained the cremated remains of his father – minus the head.
On April 10, 2015, Pilgeram's father, scientist Laurence Pilgeram, collapsed on the pavement outside his Goleta home in California, and died at the age of 90. Five days later, he is the 135th patient, based in Arizona.
The way his remains were treated by Alcor is the subject of a long-standing legal dispute between the company and the son of Pilgeram, who claims that the cremation of the rest of his father's body was a breach of contract and his head is back to life. "
"Kurt is now involved in the lawsuit," said David J. Tappeiner, a lawyer for the son, at the Daily Beast.
"Kurt suffered extreme emotional distress as a result of Alcor 's actions and was injured, allegedly, in the amount of more than a million dollars," he said. declared a court early in the year.
Alcor – who counts Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox icon among her "patients" – says on her website that she uses cryonics "to save lives by using temperatures so cold that a person beyond the help of future medical technology can restore the health of this person. "(Cryonics is not the same as cryogenics, the branch of physics that studies the effects of very low temperatures.)
Alcor offers whole body preservation or single-headed neuropreservation, which she says aims to "restore the patient's health by pushing a new body around the brain through future tissue regeneration technology."
"In the future, medicine will learn to master the growth and development programs in the human body," according to Alcor. "The cells will be reprogrammed to heal cut spinal marrows, repel lost limbs and even regenerate new organs. This type of tissue regeneration already occurs naturally in children who lose their fingertips and in organs such as the liver.
The use of cryogenics to bring back someone to life is, of course, not possible at the moment and the idea is viewed with skepticism by many members of the scientific community . However, lawyers say the new findings are promising for the movement.
Despite her desire to be preserved – declared on a Alcor bracelet – Laurence Pilgeram's body was transported to a medical examiner's office in Santa Barbara after her death. She stayed there until the following Monday morning "because she did not understand the process of Alcor and assumed that the circumstances surrounding her death would prejudge any donation guidelines," according to the Alcor website.
Alcor claims that she was not informed of the death until Monday, when the body was released into a morgue, where it was immediately covered with dry ice. Two employees of the company carried out a "neurological separation" at the morgue and then returned the remains of Pilgeram to Alcor in Arizona to "continue the recovery", which began on April 15, 2015, says the site.
Pilgeram, who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, was a long-time supporter of the Alcor cryonics program and lectured at cryonics conferences since 1971.
According to David J. Tappeiner, the lawyer who represents Kurt Pilgeram, he took out an insurance policy of $ 100,000 to pay his contract fees with Alcor. The deal with Alcor called on the company to "preserve his entire body," Tappeiner told The Daily Beast on Monday.
But that's not what happened.
Alcor froze Pilgeram's head but cremated the rest of the "unreserved remains without authorization," according to court documents. As a result, Karl Pilgeram and his brother Kurt quarreled with Alcor over their father's insurance rights, Tappeiner said. A federal lawsuit on this issue was settled in 2015 with an agreement to put money in the hands until the parties could agree on how it would be disbursed, according to Tappeiner.
James Arrowood, a lawyer for Alcor, did not explain to The Daily Beast why the company had decided to keep only Pilgeram's head after his death. In a judicial document, Alcor stated that Pilgeram's body was "medically incapable of being preserved" but did not specify what it meant.
The battle over life insurance was not over. About two years ago, the sons asked Alcor to return their father's head to their family and release the $ 100,000 guarantee, according to their lawyer. In response, Alcor filed a lawsuit in November 2017 in California Superior Court in Santa Barbara County for breach of contract, among other charges.
Pilgeram filed a counter-claim in March in which he said that Alcor had sent him the box of cremated remains without warning after promising, during a phone call, to preserve his father's entire body.
Kurt Pilgeram alleges in the legal documents that he "had no idea what had happened with the body of his father until he received a parcel delivered at home by a factor that would contain the cremated remains of his father except his father's head cut off by Alcor and transported in a cooler to Arizona by vehicle to "preserve".
The March filing indicated that in its agreement with Alcor, the former Pilgeram had made it clear that it wanted the company to "suspend the biological remains they could recover, regardless of the seriousness of the damage to my human remains. causes such as fire, decomposition, autopsy, embalming or other causes.
The sons allege that Alcor "never intended to fulfill" the contract and that it is "extremely improbable" that their father could be resurrected because of the number of days needed to preserve his body.
Kurt Pilgeram was "horrified and extremely distressed" to find that his father's entire body had not been preserved, according to court documents.
"Alcor has engaged and continues to engage in unfair trade practices by encouraging older people to enroll in cryonic conservation as part of a largely illusory deal," the complaint says. "Alcor takes the money from its elderly clients and ignores its obligations under their own agreements."
Arrowood said, in a statement to The Daily Beast: "At the moment, Alcor can not specifically comment on this case, but Alcor is generally convinced that the legal system will run its course as it did in the past.
This is not the first time that the Pilgeram and Alcor family are in a legal skirmish.
In 1994, a California Court of Appeal ordered Alcor to surrender the body of Laurence Pilgeram's wife, Cynthia, for burial. She was cryo-frozen after her death in 1990, but her sister Sharon Fields later found a copy of Cynthia's will in which she asked to be buried, according to the Associated Press.
Alcor argued that Laurence Pilgeram gave the remains of his wife on the basis of the Anatomical Gift Act, which is generally applied to medical research or organ harvesting. But the court would have found that the will of the nurse went against the authority of her husband.
The next case hearing will be held in California's Superior Court in Santa Barbara County in January, after which a trial date will probably be set.
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