X-Message-Number: 13789
Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 10:48:21 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: comments for Ivan and Charles

Hi everyone!

For Ivan Snyder: The major problem with any form of simple brain 
transplantation is that major events causing aging may well occur
in our brains. If so, merely transplanting brains or parts of brains
will only accelerate the aging of the young body a good deal (so
that the transplant will soon become useless). If by "brains" you
mean not only the neural part but glands such as the pituitary,
such transplants have already been done in animals and have much
the same results as I just described. Our lower brain plays a 
significant role in managing all our hormone production, and if
it goes bad then everything will. Why not just transplant the
frontal cortex (I hear you suggest --- or other higher cortical
regions)? Because we want to retain not only our memories but
also our feelings toward them. It's the combination which gies
us our personality, not just our memories. (And it may ultimately
prove impossible to separate them; there are lots of connections
between our brain cortex and the lower brain regions, so emotions
and feelings play a constant role).

For Charles Platt: Yes, the results from current freezings look
very bad. However we need to look at them far more carefully than
has yet been done, to see what signs of the former connections
between neurons (and former neurons) may still persist. Moreover,
the detection involved requires us to know much more than we now
know about how memories work, not just in broad terms but in 
close detail. Moreover, even methods which preserve much more information
such as those described in the Seminar 2 years ago by those working
with Kent and Faloon (the 21st Century Medicine seminars), even though
they did not yet produce provable revivals, still preserved a lot more
information than before ... and so deserved to be instituted.

But then who wants to be frozen by current methods if we can improve
those methods? Yes, that too is a big job, but isn't helped by
giving up.

If we want to live then we have no alternative. Didn't I say Reality was
hard?

		Best and long long life to all,

			Thomas Donaldson

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=13789