X-Message-Number: 12044
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 21:25:41 -0400
From: Paul Wakfer <>
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
Subject: Re: Just The Facts

References: <7lcd1b$lbs$> 
<>

Ettinger wrote:


> 1. I have always been optimistic, and although the growth of cryonics has been
> very slow, it DID take root and HAS grown, in a very hostile milieu of
> tradition.

This is distortion.
There was little hostility during the first years after your book was
published, certainly none from mainstream cryobiologists who embraced
cryonics as a potential source of popularization of their 'backwater'
research area and a source of funding leading to its rapid growth and
success.
It was only when cryonicists such as yourself (with continued reliance
on our 'friends of the future" making everything possible) continued to
repudiate their scientific detachment, realism, and conservatism that
the disenchantment began in earnest and grew into a major rift.

> Currently, CI growth is fastest of all the organizations--the result
> of many factors, to be sure, but I think our relative optimism has helped.

In the field of 'supplement pushers', the fastest growing companies
appear to be those which present the least complete, truthful, or
solidly scientific information (many of them also organized as MLM).
Those companies, too, are extremely optimistic (each new product will
make you healtheir, have better sex. and live longer than any other).
I am sure this is one of the factors in CI's case as well.


> ACS is generally positive, and I think growing.

The last that I heard, ACS has even less idea of what its *real*
membership might be than did CI.

> As Dave said, Saul Kent for example is relatively

> negative on the chances of cryonics with current procedures (even CryoCare's),
> but in his area of business success--selling vitamins and health
> supplements--his approach has been the traditional one of blowing your horn
> loudly and hopefully, a "joyous shout unto Heaven."

Another distortion.
As a member of the Life Extension Foundation almost from its inception,
I have been very pleased to see a clear trend toward scientific
objectivity in all LEF publications. The major different between what
LEF is doing and cryonics, is that there *is* good scientific evidence
for many of the benefits of supplements (even if not yet fully accepted
by the science/medicine establishment), whereas for cryonics proceedures
there is none whatsoever!

> We all understand, of course, that part of the motivation for Kent's and

> Darwin's and Platt's negativism is their desire to motivate people to put more
> money into research, as opposed to buying actual cryonics services. That is

> legitimate, if openly argued; it is not legitimate, if evidence for the 
promise
> of cryonics is suppressed for their agenda.

But Bob, nothing is supressed because there IS NO EVIDENCE in any
currently accepted bio-scientific meaning of that word.

In the past, I too was a devout believer in the cryonics gospel of faith
in nanotechnology, our friends of the future, the milk of human
kindness, the inevitable progress of technology, the stability of
civilization, the distributed nature of mind in the brain, and the
possibility (even if very small) of restoring sufficient information
from a chaotic mess, but that faith wore thin when I saw very few people
actually willing to *do* anything to give that 'promise' a better chance
to come to pass.

As religions often say, very practically, "God helps those who help
themselves!"
If there were a God, cryonicists would clearly not rate being helped. 

-- Paul --

  Voice/Fax: 416-968-6291  ICQ: 25490505
The Institute for Neural Cryobiology - http://neurocryo.org
Perfected cryopreservation of Central Nervous System tissue
for neuroscience research and medical repair of brain diseases

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12044