Does the Cryonics Institute still deserve my attention?

I have to wonder about that, considering that Robert Ettinger created it primarily for the cryonic suspension of his mother, his two wives, several of his friends and, eventually, himself. Yet he never seemed interested in trying to make it into a technologically progressive venture, though perhaps he couldn't have done that any way for reasons beyond his control; I haven't visited the facility, but I have the impression of it as a paleofuture, preserved-in-amber sort of monument to Ettinger's 50-year-old vision. You'd almost expect it to become a branch of the Henry Ford Museum.

CI has even charged the same amount for a suspension for years, in effect a paleofuture price; and if you don't contract for separate arrangements for perfusion with cryoprotectants from the Suspended Animation company, apparently it just does a straight freezing of your body in liquid nitrogen - which practically defeats the purpose of cryonics because the mammalian brain responds in disastrous ways when you do that to it.

So how much of CI's desultory existence derived from Ettinger's influence? Now that he has gone into his own probably self-defeating cryonic suspension, will that give younger cryonicists with a commitment to getting things right the opportunity to step into the vacuum and make CI into something more dynamic and effective? Or will CI just continue to drag along as a marginal, financially threadbare effort until some catastrophe causes the loss of all of its suspendees, Ettinger included?

And in general, what would it take to give cryonics the sort of energy and excitement we associate with the recent emergence of the knowledge economy? I don't expect two guys in a dorm room to come up with an idea for a breakthrough in cryosuspension which turns into a business in a few years comparable to Apple, Google or Facebook, and which also happens to make them billionaires; but can we find a sweet spot between the two extremes which will push cryonics out of its 1960's dowdiness and inadequacy, and allow it to enter the respectable company of iPads, personal genomics, exoplanetology and other areas of the 21st Century's dynamism?