What would you call a laboratory where dogs are frozen alive to further
research for ALCOR, the cryonics facility that stores the HEADS of
people who believe they are going to be rescusitated back to life
sometimes in the future?

Steve Harris calls it his.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Missing head

Is It A Crime To Live Forever?

By M. Schudel

Saul Kent and Bill Faloon hope to cheat death with vitamins,
experimental drugs and frozen bodies.  But the government says their
path to the future isn't visionary--it's criminal.

 On the cold page of the court docket, there is nothing remarkable
about the case of the United States vs. Saul Kent and William Faloon.
On Nov. 5, 1991, the two men were indicted by a federal grand jury in
Fort Lauderdale for conspiring to import pharmaceutical drugs not
approved for sale in this country.  Faloon faces 27 counts, Kent 28.

 They will go on trial sometime early in 1992 in the courtroom of
U.S. District Judge Jose Gonzales Jr.  But this is more than just
another court case, and these are no ordinary people.

 Behind the plain surface of the official charges lurks a
complicated, sordid tangle of accusations and mystery.  This is about
more than just illegal pharmaceuticals.  This is a case dark with
conspiracy, international intrigue, a battle against the government,
hard to trace money, frozen bodies, a missing head -- and the hopes of
eternal life.

 Kent and Faloon are controversial figures in a controversial
movement to increase the human life span by any number of unorthodox
means.  They consider themselves visionaries.  They talk wistfully of
a time when science will overcome death, when we can live indefinitely
in the perfect health of youth.  Of course, Saul Kent is a man who had
his mother's head cut off, and Bill Faloon is a man who travels on
commercial airlines wearing a fire proof hood.

 The battle has been building for a full decade, ever since the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration first investigated Kent and Faloon's Life
Extension Foundation in Hollywood, Fla.

 "They's done everything they can think of to get rid of us." says
Saul Kent, the president of Life Extension.  "But they don't have a
shred of evidence that any of this is true."

 Whether there is evidence or not, the accusations are numerous and
specific.  The first count of the indictment charges Kent and Faloon
with conspiracy; they also face 13 counts of importing unapproved
drugs without prescriptions and four counts of importing
pharmaceutical drugs in packages labeled "nutritional supplements."
In addition, Kent stands accused of obstruction of justice for
destroying evidence.

 On Nov. 7, 1991, the two men were arrested, handcuffed,
fingerprinted and jailed for four hours.  They were released on
$825,000 bond each.  If convicted on all counts, the 53 year-old Kent
could fact up to 84 years in prison.  Faloon, Life Extension's 38
year-old vice president could serve 79 years.  They could be fined up
to $7 million each.  But if they win, they believe they will be on
their way toward their ultimate goal of dismantling the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration.

 For years they have been in a cat-and-mouse game, with the FDA
leveling charges and investigations, and Kent and Faloon answering
with a strident advertising and letter-writing campaign.  Few people
in the country have been so outspoken and persistent.  They have
filed, by Kent's estimate, seven lawsuits against the FDA and recently
won a judgment requiring the agency to pay some of their attorneys'
fees.

 They have publicly accused the FDA of everything from incompetence
to murder.  They claim the FDA -- by keeping new drugs off the market
-- has killed more people than the Nazi concentration camps.  They
have vowed to press warcrime charges against the FDA in the World
Court.

 Before Kent and Faloon were indicted in 1991, prosecutors offered
them a deal of minimal prison time if they would plead guilty to only
three of the 28 charges.  They refused.  They say the U.S. government
is threatening not just their livelihoods, but their very lives.

 "If were to capitulate, we would be facing the inevitability of
aging and death, "says Faloon.  "It really is life or death."

 Saul Kent and William Faloon would not have their current troubles
except for one thing:  They want to live forever.  It is the passion
at the heart of everything they do.

 Kent and Faloon are well known in the small competitive world of
life extension.  Faloon a bachelor, lives in Hollywood, Fla., and Kent
lives with his wife in Riverside, Calif.  Neither man is a scientist,
neither has made any discoveries that would increase life expectancy.
Kent is a writer by profession.  Faloon, oddly enough, is trained to
be a mortician.

 In 1964 Kent read a book by Robert C.W. Ettinger called *The
Prospect of Immortality*.  When Ettinger wrote that people could be
frozen after death and revived at a later time, he became known as the
father of cryonics.  His ideas gave Saul Kent his lifelong mission.

 "I didn't like the idea of getting old and dying," Kent explains,
"There is no future in death."

 A native of the Bronx and onetime semi-professional baseball player,
Kent helped found the Cryonics Society of New York.  In 1968 he
participated in one of the first cryonic "suspensions" in which a body
was put eternally on ice.  He worked on technical magazines and wrote
a couple of books, including one called *Future Sex,* which speculated
on better loving through science.  He became an advocate of life
extension in all its forms -- cryonics, vitamins, nutrients, and
experimental drugs.  He believes that within 100 years technology will
conquer aging and death.

 In 1980 Kent and his mother, Dora, moved to Florida, where Kent met
William Faloon and began to publish a newsletter called *The Life
Extension Report*.  Kent worked out of an ugly fortress of a building
on Hollywood Boulevard owned by his silent partner, a shady character
named Stephen Ruddel.

 Often described as a Howard Hughes-like figure, Ruddel put up
$100,000 to start the Life Extension Foundation, but he took no part
in running it.  A big player in South Florida real estate, Ruddel
rarely left the building, watching the world though binoculars and
telescopes.

 In 1986, it became apparent why.  A Hollywood Police SWAT team
landed on the roof in a nighttime helicopter raid, rappelled down the
side of the building, and discovered a filthy apartment littered with
hundreds of ether bottles, gold coins, platinum bars valued at
$80,000, feathers, wigs, and suggestive snapshots of young women.  The
building had an elaborate system of cameras and alarms, and razor wire
was uncoiled inside the air ducts.

 The 47-year-old Ruddel was captured as he tried to escape on foot
wearing only black bikini underwear and deck shoes.  He was later
convicted of cocaine possession and sentenced to 3 1/2 years of
probation.

 Authorities returned to the building on Feb. 26, 1987, raiding Kent
and Faloon's Life Extension Products.  In a 12-hour search, FDA agents
seized hundreds of products and documents.  The company's mail-order
business was shut down, about 10 employees lost their jobs, and Kent
and Faloon found themselves under federal investigation.

 "They wanted us to go out of business and go away," Kent says.
"They don't like anything we do."

 As two grand-jury inquiries dragged on, Faloon moved the Life
Extension office to Griffin Road in Davie, while Kent took his ailing
mother to Southern California to be close to a cryonics laboratory
called Alcor.

 Of all the forms of life extension, cryonics is the weirdest.
Cryonicists are a mostly male band of futurists who tend to read a lot
of science fiction, and have an almost religious faith in the power of
technology.

 They debate over the best methods of freezing -- whole body or
"neuro."  The trend today is toward neuro-preservation, or storing a
severed head in a pot of liquid nitrogen bubbling away at 320 degrees
below zero.  Devotees of cryonics think they can literally come back
from the dead.  The put their trust in a theoretical science called
nanotechnology, believing it can knit them new bodies, jump-start
their brains, and bring eternal youth and life everlasting.

 "A lot of these cryonics people live in a fantasy world," says a
former associate of Kent and Faloon.  "They can do nothing but talk
and speculate and abstract until they become like a group of medieval
bishops debating how many angels dance on the head of a pin."

 The former president of Alcor, Mike Darwin, used to freeze turtles
as a boy and change his last name from Federowicz in honor of Charles
Darwin.  To devote all his energies to cryonics, another member of the
group is said to have castrated himself, using a local anesthetic and
a scalpel.

 Bill Faloon is so serious about cryonics that during takeoffs and
landings of airline flights, he wears an asbestos-lined helmet.  If
the plane crashes and burns, he believes his head could be saved and
frozen.

 "It's a nice, secure feeling," says Faloon.  "I can't understand why
everyone else doesn't do it" -- but he admits he gets plenty of
puzzled stares from fellow passengers.

 In December of 1987, 83-year-old Dora Kent was fading fast.  She had
arthritis and degenerative brain disease and couldn't care for
herself.  Saul Kent checked his mother out of her nursing home and
brought her to Alcor, where she died at 12:27 a.m. on Dec. 11, 1987.
Later that morning an Alcor surgical team -- though none of its
members was an actual surgeon -- cut off her head.

 The California health department refused to issue a death
certificate because a physician was not present at the time of death,
and because, as anyone could see, Dora Kent had no head.  The
coroner's office spent weeks examining the decapitated corpse.

 At the time, the Riverside County coroners were the Keystone Kops of
pathology, known for botching autopsies and losing bodies.  When a
husband-and-wife team of coroners sold their house, they left behind
25 boxes of body parts -- it turned out they were doing freelance
autopsies on their backyard picnic table.

 The Riverside coroner first ruled that Dora Kent had died of
pneumonia, then changed his mind and called it murder.  He decided
that some of the preservative drugs injected by the cryonics team
could not have penetrated Mrs. Kent's tissue unless she was alive.  A
SWAT team raided Alcor, handcuffing five people and hauling them off
to jail.  Documents, equipment, and two German shepherd dogs were
seized, and Riverside officials demanded that someone bring them the
head of Dora Kent.

 In the end, a judge ruled that Alcor didn't have to thaw out the
head to satisfy the curiosity of the coroner's office.  By bizarre
coincidence, the pathologist who conducted the investigation died, and
the case became, so to speak, a dead issue.  No one will say where
Dora Kent's head came to rest, though one rumor places it in a South
Florida warehouse.

 Even before the scandal of the missing head, the people at Alcor had
alienated many in the already alien world of cryonics.  The founder of
the movement, Robert Ettinger (who has frozen his own mother in
Michigan), went on record opposing the "arrogance and hostility" of
the group supported by Saul Kent.

 Most serious scientists consider cryonics a worthless offshoot of
science fiction.  A prominent researcher in the legitimate
cold-temperature science of cryobiology, Arthur W. Rowe, scoffs at the
whole idea.

 "Believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen,"
he has said, "is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a
cow."

 As California investigators sought answers about Dora Kent, federal
agents sifted through her son's business dealings and found what they
claim is an international network of deceit.  Saul Kent and Bill
Faloon say all they did was tell people how to get around the FDA's
restrictive rules.

 "The FDA indicted us for recommending people to offshore companies,"
says Faloon.  "We would refer these people to where they could find
the drugs."

 But the indictment says nothing about newsletters or
recommendations.  Instead, Kent and Faloon are accused of shipping
unapproved drugs to the United States through phony foreign
corporations.

 The indictment cites the Longevity Institute, established in Panama
in 1984, and its later incarnation in Austria, the Hauptmann
Institute.  Prosecutors say the institute was nothing more than a
post-office box in Vienna and that its director, one "Dr. Karl-Gustav
Hauptmann," doesn't exist.

 They charge that Hauptmann was a product of the imagination of Kent
and Faloon, that he was nothing more than an male model in a lab coat.
Indeed, the spelling and hyphenation of his name change from one
brochure to another, and no one has seen the mystery doctor in person.

 "We strongly protest the charge that Bill and Saul created these
companies as a front," say their attorney, Michael Pasano.  "If the
government thinks we're Hauptmann, where's the beef?  Where's the
money?  We'd like to find Dr. Hauptmann, just like anybody else."

 Hauptmann wasn't the only mystery man doing business with Saul Kent
and Bill Faloon.  According to the indictment, a "John Steinmark" took
out two private mailboxes in Hollywood to conduct Hauptmann business.

 An FBI report has linked Faloon's fingerprints and handwriting with
checks and other materials signed by Steinmark.  Records show that a
Hauptmann Institute mailing list sent by Steinmark was wrapped in a
*Wall Street Journal* addressed to William Faloon.

 "John Steinmark was a partner in a company we used to have called
the Vitamin Factory," Faloon explains.  "The Hauptmann Institute was
real in that it was a real company in Europe, supplying drugs.  We
simply recommended them as a source to buyers -- one of many companies
we recommended ."

 For his part, Saul Kent is charge with obstruction of justice for
destroying Hauptmann Institute brochures printed by a company in
Hollywood.

 "The whole case is ludicrous," argues Kent.  "We didn't do anything,
and they don't have any evidence that we did."

 The government charges that the institute sold powerful unapproved
drugs through the mail without a doctor's prescription.  The Hauptmann
Institute advertised its drugs as "effective or highly effective"
against cancer, AIDS, herpes, hepatitis, influenza, senility,
arthritis, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, lung disease and
cataracts.  Others were said to improve thinking and memory, prevent
premature old age, enhance sexual performance, and extend the life
span by as much as 75 percent.

 If the elusive Dr. Hauptmann and his miracle drugs could do half of
what was claimed, it is a wonder the rest of the world hasn't heard of
him.  But regardless of who ran the Hauptmann Institute, the drugs on
its sales list were among the most powerful known to pharmacology.

 L-Dopa and Parlodel, for example, affect neurotransmitters in the
brain and can be lethal without medical supervision.  Isoprinosine --
sold as the remarkable new antiviral drug that can help prevent colds,
the flu, cancer, and AIDS has been rejected by the FDA several times
because it doesn't do what the manufacturers claim.  Ethoxyquin 100
was promoted for its ability to "extend lifespan and breeding time,"
but it turns out ethoxyquin is a chemical used to preserve apples and
pears.  Inderal is a high-powered drug that slows the heart rate, and
unless monitored, can easily cause death.

 "It's a tragedy waiting to happen," says Paul Doering, professor of
pharmacy at the University of Florida.  "Certainly their claims are
empty, and to me as a scientist and pharmacist, they are dangerous."

 He can only laugh at the benefits credited to a drug called
hydergine, increased intelligence and protection against cancer and
heart disease.

 "That's probably the most outrageous claim I've heard all year," he
says.

 "There is no evidence whatsoever," Saul Kent asserts in defence of
Hauptmann or himself, "that anyone who purchased the products was
harmed in any way."

 "Talk is cheap, let's face it," concluded Doering.  "Consumer fraud
can take many forms.  Unfortunately, this one is potentially deadly."

 Even with powerful evidence lined up against them, Kent and Faloon
appear confident.  If nothing else, the controversy has brought them
considerable attention.

 "It's been great for business," says Faloon.  "When the FDA started
attacking us, we had 4,500 members.  Now we have 10,000."

 These people are more than just subscribers to a newsletter.  They
are believers in the cause.  Hundreds have written to Congress to
condemn the FDA, and dozens more have written to U.S. Judge Jose
Gonzalez.

 More than a year after the indictment, the case remains caught in
legal delays.  Kent and Faloon's attorneys have filed seven motions to
dismiss the charges.  It will be at least February of 1993 before the
jury trial begins in Fort Lauderdale.  Kent and Faloon are prepared to
be in court for several months.

 They have already spent more than $800,000 in legal fees, draining a
corporate fund once promised for research.  It's uncertain how much
money Kent and Faloon have, since Life Extension hasn't filed a tax
return for more than six years.

 Faloon says that the tax-exempt foundation has asked for a series of
extensions because its records have been tied up or lost in the
five-year struggle with the FDA.  (In 1985 -- the last year it filed a
return -- Life Extension reported an income of about $300,000, though
a former staff member says it actually took in more than $4 million.)

 No one knows how much money the FDA and the Justice Department have
spent on their 10-year investigation.  Kent and Faloon's Freedom of
Information requests have been rebuffed.

 "The government is spending millions of dollars of taxpayers'
money," charges Kent.

 The U.S. Attorney's office ignored or refused to answer seven
requests from *Sunshine* to discuss the case.  The FDA had no comment.

 Saul Kent and Bill Faloon think of themselves as lone Davids
fighting a government Goliath.  They believed if they shout long
enough and loud enough, they can bring the FDA tumbling down.

 "We are going to win," Saul Kent pronounces with conviction.

 In the end, this tale of two strange men and the Byzantine world
they have entered leaves a field of unanswered questions.

 Are Kent and Faloon charlatans taking advantage of human insecurity
about health and age, defrauding thousands of people in defiance of
all accepted standards of health?  Or do they really possess some
secret that will set them free from the bonds of mere mortality?

 Are they dreamers, or are they schemeing masterminds of a criminal
enterprise that, for a full decade, has slipped past the grasp of the
law?

 Saul Kent and Bill Faloon are friendly men, willing to discuss their
troubles and hopes, willing to promote their cause.  They may be too
willing.

 In the back pages of *Longevity* magazine, a favorite of the
life-extension crowd, a small ad has run for Baxamed Medical Center, a
clinic in Switzerland.  It offers experimental treatments to slow the
aging process and sells many of the same mail order drugs that got the
Hauptmann Institute in trouble.

 The last four digits of the Swiss clinic's 800 phone number are 5433
-- LIFE.  When you call, an operator picks up a telephone in an office
on Griffin Road in Davie and answers, "Life Extension."

Do you suppose this visceral revulsion might have evolved/been
hardwired into primates as some kind of protective mechanism as in, if
you're in a place where there are body parts lying around it's probably
a really good idea to get the hell out of there?