X-Message-Number: 10139
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 02:18:12 -0400
From: Paul Wakfer <>
Subject: Vitrification and Ultrasound

Report on Discussion from sci.cryonics

In the middle of a discussion on the potential use of heavy water in
vitrification to which Steve Harris was replying a poster
<> asked about the potential of ultrasound for
preventing ice formation and thus aiding vitrification.


>>steve : what about ultrasound? has it been tried in conjunction with 
vitrification?>>

To which Steve replied:


>>   Dunno.  It's a good idea.  A medline search on vitrification and ultrasound
yields no hits.  Pehaps it's time somebody with a cryomicroscope and a 
transducer looked at the effect of sound waves on ice crystal growth (hint, 
hint)>>

To which dm_telvis replied:


>>If I had a lab , I would do it! but i am but an undergrad... there should be 
low energy resonant frequencies that would largely just break up ice crystal 
lattices, as in the way microwaves are tuned to heat water and not proteins, 
carbs, etc... or they would char food...and ultrasound being mechanical energy, 
is gentle enough
to hit fetuses with...anyway, email me steve, I have some refs. to share
with you, if you want them...>>

To which I replied:

Since I answered this question somewhat negatively when it arose before
on sci.cryonics, this time I sought expert opinion from two people with
knowledge and direct working experience in vitrification. The following
was sent by one of them:


>>Agitation at sub-sonic (stirring) and audio frequencies seems to promote 
nucleation and freezing.  In fact this is the principle that osmometers use to 
*cause* samples to freeze instead of supercool. It's possible that ultrasound 
may behave differently, but it seems that that approach should be put somewhere 
back in the queue of things to look at right now. Thanks for mentioning the idea
again.>>

The second expert replied:


>>Claims for this approach have been made before, but they have not been 
substantiated. I did some work on using ultrasound to warm up vitrified organs.
We were able to warm the organs at a reasonable and pretty uniform rate 
without obviously nucleating the test samples.  This remains an open option for 
warming.  Whether it can do anything pertinent to freezing is an open 
question.>>

As the first expert said, using ultrasound is somewhere back in the
queue of possible solution aids to perfecting damage-free vitrification
of large tissue masses.

What most people do not seem to realize is that the "space" of possible
methods and aids to perfect suspended animation has any extremely large
number of "dimensions", ie. there are a truly enormous number of
compounds and methods which one can apply to solve the problem. Even
though a few have been trying to attack this goal for decades, the
problem has never been a lack of ideas which might work to achieve it.
In the past as now, and for the foreseeable future, the problem remains
one of a lack of resources of people, time and money to investigate more
than a minuscule amount of that potential solution space. In such
circumstances, the investigators and the monetary supporters must be the
ones who choose the order of approaches to investigate.

OTOH, the good news is that this enormous number of potential yet
untested solutions suggests to me that the problem has an excellent
chance of being solvable. Now if only I could convince more people that
this research is essential for any realistic chance for their survival
through cryonics, we might actually start bringing enough resources to
bear on the problem to make a dent in that solution space ;-)

Which brings me to the subject of the Hippocampal Slice Vitrification
Project. This is now completely approved; permission has been give by
the university medical center research institute host for their name to
appear on the web site and in fund raising literature (so you may all
now look at http://www.neurocryo.org to see where the project will be
executed); some of the equipment is ordered; and we are close to hiring
the experimentalist who will conduct the experiment under the
supervision of the principal investigators one of which is Greg Fahy. We
are now at the stage where the project will be held up for lack of
funding from the Institute for Neural Cryobiology! 

I again ask all those who were so generous with their pledges to the
Prometheus Project, to donate that pledge, or a good portion of it,
toward this project which is the direct result of what Prometheus was
attempting to accomplish. All donors with US or California taxable
income can deduct the amount of their donation from that income. I have
even offered a purchase option on my personal shares in 21CM to anyone
donating $5,000 or more. (So far not a single extra donation has
resulted from this offer. The only ones to want the offer, were the two
people who already had donated over $5,000 - so I have personally lost
value on the idea.)

Please, please, please show that you really wish to live by sending some
money to enable this first major initiative at damage-free vitrification
of brain tissue.

What more can I say? My next step must surely be to start phoning
people, putting them "on the spot", and verbally twisting their arms.
This is something which I deplore and I am sure that any of you who will
be on the receiving end will dislike it also. Do I really have to resort
to this?

-- Paul --

 Voice/Fax: 416-968-6291 Page: 800-805-2870
The Institute for Neural Cryobiology - http://neurocryo.org
Perfected cryopreservation of Central Nervous System tissue
for neuroscience research and medical repair of brain diseases

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