X-Message-Number: 15259
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 22:44:35 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Re: trade-offs in choosing protocols

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001  wrote:

> I think that for the first paragraph, a citation might be helpful, not
> necessarily to a peer-reviewed article (because cryobiology in the
> year 2000 may have as many biases floating around as psychology in the
> year 1850) but to some website or other place where we can take a look
> at the original work.  This would certainly make it more convenient
> for readers.  (And any way numbers can be meaningfully assigned to
> `better' would of course help, as well.)

A very reasonable request! Unfortunately, much of the work was reported in
back issues of Cryonics magazine (Alcor's publication), which are not
available online (so far as I can tell--please correct me if I'm wrong)
even though someone did copy-type or use OCR to transfer all the text of
most back issues to disk, back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. (Plea to
Alcor: It would be a great public service if the text of these back issues
were added to your web page.)

However, I do have some materials at my disposal, which I will be happy to
send to people by USMail.

1. CryoCare Report #4. This contains a report of a comparative study, in
which some dog brains were perfused using the best-available
glycerol-based protocol at that time, while others were perfused using a
"simplified" protocol. Although the text doesn't say so (because we were
trying to be nonconfrontational and polite, believe it or not), the
"simplified"  protocol was based on reports from CI of their work using
sheep brains. In other words, the purpose of the research by Darwin,
Harris, and others was to find out whether CI protocol produced results
comparable to the more sophisticated protocol. Very high-quality
reproductions of electron micrographs are included, with principal
features (good and bad) annotated. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to
interpret these pictures. For instance an ice hole, where all brain tissue
has been displaced, shredded, and/or mangled, is pretty damned obvious.
This should have a sobering effect even on the most hardcore nanotech
believers--if they would actually bother to look, instead of daydreaming
about "What I'll be able to do after the Singularity."

2. CryoCare Update #6. This contains the best available report of the
September, 1998 conference at which personnel from 21CM described their
vitrification work, including preservation of two rabbit brains that were
rewarmed from -80 Celsius (approx) with unprecedentedly good results.
Again, high-quality reproductions of electron micrographs are included,
providing some validation for claims of a genuine breakthrough.

3. For those who are mindful of Robert Ettinger's recent warning against
unwarranted optimism, I also offer CryoCare Report #10, which contains an
exhaustive account of Olga Visser's unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate
rat hearts that had been frozen in liquid nitrogen. This attempt took
place at the 1997 Alcor technology festival. Please note that Alcor
renounced its association with Visser later that year.

I will send any or all of these source materials, at $2 each including
postage, to anyone who wants them. Send your order to:

Charles Platt, 9 Patchin Place, New York, NY 10011.

Since I travel a lot, it may take 7 to 21 days for me to send you your
order.

> Now, i don't want to be unduly argumentative here, but one implication of
> the first paragraph seems to be that morticians are unqualified to
> operate machinery interfacing with a human body.  This is hard to
> believe---morticians not only have to go through a degree program
> (correct me if i'm wrong), but they also handle deanimated bodies all
> the time.

Please feel free to be as argumentative as you like! It's true that the
morticians I have met have been more open-minded than many of the doctors
I have met, where cryonics is concerned; and as you say, they receive
training. However, their priorities are totally different from ours. When
they use an embalming pump, for instance, they are not concerned with
monitoring the pressure to avoid bursting brain capillaries. To them, the
patient is dead--period. To us, this is not necessarily true. For this
reason, no mortician should operate on a cryonics patient unsupervised,
and field work should be done using a mobile kit such as the one built by
Hugh Hixon at Alcor, or the elaborate setup created by Mike Darwin when he
was active in cryonics.

Morticians clearly are not perfusionists; and with the best will in the
world, they can screw up in very basic ways. A mortician I dealt with in
New York, who was extremely willing to oblige, could not imagine that we
_really_ needed so much ice to pack around a patient who was being
prepared for air shipment to California. There was no way I could convey
to him the importance of this. From his point of view, he just wanted to
please an unusual customer who had a thing about ice. From my point of
view, it was a vital matter of calculating the mass of ice that would be
necessary to maintain near-freezing temperatures for a 7-hour (minimum)
journey in summer temperatures, using a casket that contained virtually no
insulation (we did not have a proper cryonics transport box, because there
was no time to get it there).

> Finally, i think http://www.cryonics.org/research.html should also be
> cited to vis-a-vis the ramp-up question.  (I haven't reviewed this
> yet, but i think it's clearly relevant in the decision making process
> at CI that is referred to in the second quoted paragraph.)

I have read the CI web page but have refrained from discussing it because
I've been through this all before on CryoNet. I entered the vitrification
debate only because I saw posts from Robert Ettinger that seemed, to me,
to be misleading and incorrect. I have replied to those posts, and I have
replied to his replies to my replies. The last thing I want right now is
to start a new thread.

My personal opinion (which has been stated many times before) is that any
patient who is cryopreserved using standard CI procedures is unlikely to
emerge from storage, under any circumstances, ever. I think maybe half of
the patients at Alcor have some chance, depending on the circumstances of
their deaths, and depending on future development of nanotechnology, which
remains a totally speculative topic. Currently, I believe that if a
patient is treated promptly after death, is transferred rapidly to the
perfusion lab, and receives the most recent 21CM vitrification treatment,
this person may have a relatively good chance of future resuscitation.

However, there is NO instance in which ALL THREE of these requirements
(prompt treatment after death, speedy transfer, and vitrification
protocol) have been satisfied, even in the two most recent cases.

The delivery of service remains a significant challenge, regardless of
advances in vitrification capabilities. This is the main reason why I have
not joined any of the currently active cryonics organizations myself.

--CP

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