Ben Best - Cryonics Activities

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.

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 organization. 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.

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. In 2007 Best gave a presentation "Evidence that Cryonics may Work" at the third SENS conference, held at the University of Cambridge in England. That talk became the basis for a paper published in Rejuvenation Research in 2008 under the title "Scientific Justification for Cryonics Practice". In 2012, after serving the longest tenure since founder Robert Ettinger, Best stepped down as President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, but remains a Director.

The most popular Cryonics FAQ(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.