Laurence Pilgeram, Alcor member A-1245, was pronounced clinically dead on Friday April 10, 2015 in Santa Barbara, California at the age of 90. Alcor was notified on Monday April 13 and Dr. Pilgeram, a neurocryopreservation member, became Alcor’s 135th patient on April 15, 2015.

Dr. Laurence Pilgeram, a cryopreservation member of Alcor since 1991, was involved in cryonics early on. He gave a talk at the 1971 Cryonics Conference in San Francisco, California, on “Abnormal in-Vitro Oxidation and Lypogenesis Induced by Plasma in Patients with Thrombosis.” Dr. Pilgeram was awarded his PhD in Biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1953. In 1954-55 he served as an Instructor in Physiology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. After two years, he accepted an offer to develop and head an Arteriosclerosis Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine. He later moved to Santa Barbara, California for a time before joining the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX to develop and head the Coagulation Laboratory there.

On April 10, Dr. Pilgeram, collapsed outside of his home of an apparent sudden cardiac arrest. Despite medical and police personnel aware of his Alcor bracelet, he was taken to the medical examiner’s office in Santa Barbara, as they did not understand Alcor’s process and assumed that the circumstances surrounding his death would pre-empt any possible donation directives. Since this all transpired late on a Friday evening, Alcor was not notified of the incident until the following Monday morning.

Fortunately, no autopsy was performed which at least eliminated any invasive damage but the lengthy delay led to a straight freeze as the only remaining option. The medical examiner released the body to the mortuary that Alcor uses in Buena Park, California and he was immediately covered with dry ice, per our request. Aaron Drake and Steve Graber traveled to California to perform a neuro separation in the mortuary’s prep room and then returned to Arizona for continued cool down which began on April 15, 2015.