Ben Best

For the actor and screenwriter, see Ben Best (actor).
Ben Best giving a lecture at the Cryonics Institute to some high school students.

Ben Best was President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, the world's second largest cryonics organisation, for nine years (between 2003 and 2012). Best is a well-known activist in cryonics and life extension advocacy.[1][2][3][4][5][6] (YouTube Video of German conference) He holds undergraduate degrees in pharmacy from the University of British Columbia, and physics and computing science (BSc), and finance (BBA) from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Best is also certified as a Professional Registered Parliamentarian by the National Association of Parliamentarians.[7] He currently works for the Life Extension Foundation.[8]

Cryonics activities

For most of the 1990s, Best was President of the Cryonics Society of Canada (CSC) and was Editor of Canadian Cryonics News (total circulation of about 60 copies) until the last issue was published in Spring of 2000. He is still a Director of CSC. Best also served as treasurer of the Toronto chapter of Mensa.[9]

Along with many other cryonicists, in the mid-1990s Best left Alcor Life Extension Foundation to join CryoCare Foundation which had been formed by a small group of dissatisfied Alcor activists in late 1993. In March 1995, he became Secretary of CryoCare and in 1999 became Cryocare's President for a short time in an effort to prevent the termination of the organisation. When CryoCare terminated in the year 2000, mainly as a result of the discontinuation of service in 1999 by its cryopreservation provider (Biopreservation), he helped negotiate the transfer of CryoCare's two cryonics patients from its long-term patient care provider, CryoSpan, to Alcor.

In 2001 at the request of the current President and CEO, Paul Wakfer, Best became President and CEO of The Institute For Neural Cryobiology (INC). Ben thus helped to ensure the completion of the Hippocampal Slice Cryopreservation Project (HSCP), which had begun in 1998, as a direct result of the The Prometheus Project begun by Wakfer in 1996. HSCP, which was being funded jointly by INC and Harbor-UCLA Research and Education Institute. was a project focused on vitrification of rat brain hippocampal slices which involved cooling to −130 degrees Celsius, rewarming and testing for viability. Discoveries from this research have been incorporated into the vitrification formulations of Twenty-First Century Medicine. Dr. Yuri Pichugin was brought to the US from the Ukraine by Wakfer and Dr. Robert J. Morin, Research Professor of Pathology at REI and Chairman of the Department of Pathology at Harbor-UCLA, to conduct the research for this project at Harbor-UCLA under the direction of Morin as Principal Investigator and Dr. Gregory M. Fahy, Chief Scientific Officer of Twenty-First Century Medicine, as Consulting Investigator. The results of the HSPC were published in the April 2006 issue of the journal Cryobiology.[10]

In September 2003, Best became President/CEO of the Cryonics Institute (CI), replacing Robert Ettinger who had been President since co-founding CI in 1976.[9] In 2007 Best gave a presentation "Evidence that Cryonics may Work" at the third SENS conference, held at the University of Cambridge in England.[11] That talk became the basis for a paper published in Rejuvenation Research in 2008 under the title "Scientific Justification for Cryonics Practice".[12] In 2012, after serving the longest tenure since founder Robert Ettinger, Best stepped down as President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute,[13] but remains a Director.[14]

The most popular Cryonics FAQ[15](Frequently Asked Questions) currently on the web was authored by Best, and endorsed by Tim Freeman as a replacement for his own cryonics FAQ which was well known during the 1990s. Best is also known for creating and maintaining personal web pages with extensive scientific and technical information about cryonics.[16]

Life extension activities

Best is active in the field of biogerontology. He regularly attends biogerontological conferences, many of which he reports in Life Extension magazine.[8] He has debated with Aubrey de Grey in the Community Bulletin Board of SAGE KE.[17] His monograph Mechanisms of Aging was reprinted in the Anti-Aging Clinical Protocols 2004–2005 of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.[18] Best's review "Nuclear DNA damage as a direct cause of aging" challenges the OncoSENS claim that nuclear DNA damage only matters for ageing because of cancer.[19]

Writings

Best has published articles on his website on more than 150 diverse topics ranging from science and medicine to history and philosophical musings. Articles include:

See also

References

  1. ↑ Greenhouse, Kim (20 January 2010). "Cryonics and the State of the Industry". Radio interview with Ben Best. The Rainmaking Company. Retrieved 28 November 2012.
  2. ↑ de Wolf, Aschwin (6 August 2008). "Interview with Cryonics Institute president Ben Best". Depressed Metabolism. Evidence-based Cryonics. Retrieved 28 November 2012.
  3. ↑ "A tour of the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township". DETROIT NEWS (YouTube). 4 January 2010. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  4. ↑ Bär, Nora (1 June 2012). "En el futuro podremos vivir mil años (In the future we will live a thousand years)". LA NACION (lanacion.com). Retrieved 28 November 2012.
  5. ↑ Maldonado, Nicolas (1 June 2012). "Congelamiento de cuerpos: el sueño de la vida después de la muerte (Freezing of bodies: the dream of life after death)". EL DIA. Retrieved 28 November 2012.
  6. ↑ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Angewandte Biostase e.V (2 March 2013). "Applied Cryobiology – Scientific Symposium on Cryonics". Symposium 2010. German Society for Applied Biostasis (DGAB). Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  7. ↑ "Members List". Plantation Unit of Parliamentarians. ORGSITES.COM. 1 September 2012. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
  8. 1 2 Faloon, William (January 2013). "Conference Report: Ellison Medical Foundation Colloquium on Aging". Preamble. Life Extension Foundation. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
  9. 1 2 "A Brain Is A Terrible Thing To Waste". Mensa International. Retrieved 24 August 2009.
  10. ↑ Pichugin,Fahy,Morin (April 2006). "Cryopreservation of rat hippocampal slices by vitrification". Cryobiology 52 (2): 228–240. doi:10.1016/j.cryobiol.2005.11.006. PMID 16403489.
  11. ↑ "Evidence that Cryonics May Work (Video)". Archived from the original on 7 December 2008. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  12. ↑ Benjamin P. Best (2008). "Scientific Justification for Cryonics Practice" (PDF). Rejuvenation Research 11 (2): 493–503. doi:10.1089/rej.2008.0661. PMID 18321197.
  13. ↑ "Ben Best stepping down as CI President". Longecity. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  14. ↑ "Directors of the Cryonics Institute". Cryonics Institute. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  15. ↑ "Cryonics − Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)". Archived from the original on 14 April 2006. Retrieved 14 April 2006.
  16. ↑ "Cryonics Topics". (cryonics section of Ben Best's website, many very technical essays). Archived from the original on 3 April 2006. Retrieved 14 April 2006.
  17. ↑ "SAGE KE Bulletin Board". SAGE KE. American Association for the Advancement of Science. 10 October to 2 November 2005. Retrieved 14 October 2013. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  18. ↑ Anti-Aging Clinical Protocols 2004–2005. American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine(A4M). 2004.
  19. ↑ Best,BP (2009). "Nuclear DNA damage as a direct cause of aging" (PDF). Rejuvenation Research 12 (3): 199–208. doi:10.1089/rej.2009.0847. PMID 19594328.

External links

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