X-Message-Number: 15626
From: "Jeff Grimes" <>
Subject: Response to David Pascal's "Comparison"
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 20:37:29 +0000


Recently I visited the web site for John de Rivas's Longevity Report, which is a
digest of interesting opinions from various sources. I found text there by 
David Pascal of the Cryonics Institute, comparing CI procedures and Alcor 
procedures. This interested me because it promised (I thought) to answer some 
questions I had about CI procedures. What I found, though, is that David Pascal 
seems to have a very limited understanding of his subject. I say this based on 
information from people who contacted me in the past because of my previous 
posts on CryoNet. But mainly my opinion of David's text is based on common 
sense.


David begins: "Preparing a body for freezing involves removing the blood -- 
which freezes and causes ice damage -- with a solution that reduces such 
damage."


Of course this is not quite right. Blood doesn't cause damage. Water inside 
cells causes damage. If you flow a protective solution through the blood 
vessels, it can penetrate and replace the water in cells. This may seem a minor 
point but really it is very basic, and if David Pascal cannot even get the most 
basic things right, this makes me doubt his competence in more complicated 
areas.


"All cooling procedures cause some damage, alas, but CI's initial tests 
suggested that doing this replacement in one pass produced mildly less damaging 
results than pumping the solution in and out in gradually increased 
percentages."


Again this is not precise and not correct. Freezing, not cooling, causes the 
main damage. As for one-pass vs. recirculation in increasing concentrations, if 
David does not define the other variables, this is a meaningless statement. 
Like, what percentages? For how long? At what temperature? If the two procedures
take an equal amount of time, using the same concentration at the same 
temperature, why should there be any difference at all?


"This has been controversial because of the charge that one-pass could produce 
osmotic shock and damage cells."


No, the "charge" is that HIGHLY CONCENTRATED glycerol causes the damage. The 
idea of increasing the concentration gradually is to reduce this problem. 
Obviously you can do this in one pass, or by altering the concentration as the 
solution recirculates. One-pass itself has nothing to do with causing osmotic 
shock.


"CI, however, ran tests, sent them out-of house for an objective evaluation, and
got the report that one-pass actually produced somewhat less damage than the 
alternative."


Again this is meaningless if you don't define your terms. What concentration? 
How long? What temperature? Some of this info is on the CI web site. But by 
omitting it and simplifying the story, David is indicating that he doesn't 
really understand what he's talking about.


"On publicly presenting these test results, the response of critics was, in 
essence, "Well, you must be bunglers and the evaluations must be a pack of 
lies!" This did not seem to the people at CI to be a terribly effective 
refutation."


Here David does his Robert Ettinger imitation. Instead of actually quoting what 
the "critics" said, David puts their words in his words (to make them sound as 
stupid as possible), and then sneers at his own version of what people said. I 
would prefer to know what people actually said. Why is David not willing to tell
me?


"What did surprise me was the fact that the difference seemed to excite so much 
rancour and rigidity one-pass was flatly demonized and gradual ramping exalted, 
and -- well, that was that. End of discussion! CI s research was not disputed at
all -- simply dismissed out of hand."


Again David ridicules the other point of view, without taking the risk of 
quoting it. In fact I think people must have been surprised by the CI results 
simply because experienced researchers have never matched these findings. When 
only one organization makes a claim that contradicts all of the other work in a 
scientific field, and when the organization doesn't provide a proper report 
showing exactly what it did, of course people will be dubious.


"To be completely truthful, I should also say that I was privately informed that
the really definitive reason CI's practices was so appallingly neanderthal 
because a competing organization (no conflict of interest there!) ran a test of 
CI procedures and got very bad results. This was daunting news indeed till I dug
further and learned that the test was not one of actual CI procedures but 
rather of the researcher's best guess of CI procedures. The researcher in 
question publicly referred to these procedures on one occasion as B.S. (that's 
bull shit for you foreign readers) and in the course of applying his personal 
vision of B.S. procedures, the researcher in question got B.S. results. How very
surprising, eh?"


David continues to quote his version of what other people said, without actually
including any verbatim quotes. This is a poor debating tactic, especially since
he does not even NAME the people he is referring to. No one can reach any 
conclusion from this except that David Pascal is not debating the issue fairly. 
He is doing PR, much like a politician.


"To get back to my story, however: what puzzled me was the fact that one-pass 
seemed to have a certain common-sense advisability about it. It is almost an 
axiom of cryonics that patients need to be cooled rapidly, lest ischemia and 
structural deterioration sets in. Well, one-pass is the most rapid method there 
is. Gradual ramping, according to Alcor's web page on the subject, takes several
hours."


Again he confuses the issue. Ramping can be done fast or slow. One-pass can be 
done fast or slow. Recirculation can be done for a long time or a short time. 
What he really seems to be saying is that the CI one-pass system takes less time
than the Alcor recirculating system. Maybe this is so. But if he is saying that
speed is the number-one advantage, first, this is a terrible simplification 
(ignoring so many other factors), and second, the fact is, CI takes LONGER than 
any other organization to cool a person after the perfusion has been done. If 
David is concerned about speed, why does CI allow so long for deterioration to 
occur? Wouldn't it make sense to do faster cooling (I believe Alcor's method is 
ten times as fast), and allow more time during perfusion, for the glycerol to 
penetrate?


Elsewhere in CryoNet posts Robert Ettinger has said that the CI system of 
perfusion does not take long enough to allow glycerol to penetrate completely. 
This means some parts of the brain are well protected, some may be damaged by 
the excessive concentration, and some may be left unprotected. This seems to be 
the result of fast perfusion with a highly concentrated solution. I have asked 
repeatedly on CryoNet, why CI does this. Ettinger has not answered, perhaps 
because he regrets that he ever revealed that the solution doesn't penetrate 
fully, and he is afraid of making any more statements that will cause 
embarrassment later.


"Even granted the possibility that gradual ramping might be better in some 
respects, surely, I thought, maintaining patients at higher temperatures for 
longer times must produce at least some greater structural degradation."


Presumably, yes, this is true. So, why does CI take ten times as long to cool 
patients after perfusing them?


"So I looked further. Why was there this difference? I next found out that CI 
and other organizations tended to apply their methods on rather different sorts 
of patients. When Alcor, for instance, does (or did) experiments on animals, 
they would take a perfectly healthy dog, anaesthetise it, and apply their 
procedures."


Since David does not name the experiment he is referring to, we cannot know what
he is talking about. When I contacted Alcor, they told me they have not done 
any experiments using perfusates on dogs for many years. When I ordered a back 
issue of CryoCare Report containing a comparison of procedures used by the 
company named BioPreservation, and the procedures believed to be used at CI, the
article said quite clearly that the procedure was NOT started immediately, 
because the researchers wanted to simulate the delay that a typical cryonics 
case might experience.


"CI, by contrast, would arrange to have a sheep decapitated at a slaughterhouse,
pack the head in ice, take it to their facilities, and begin the process 
fifteen minutes to a half hour later. CI's reasoning, I learned, was that the 
latter method (alas) more closely approximated the conditions under which an 
actual cryonics member was likely to die."


Well, yes and no. Some cryonics cases may be left lying for a long time. In 
other cases where the organization sends a standby team, the procedure may start
within a few minutes after death. The fact is, CI is making a virtue out of 
using heads from a slaughterhouse, but there is no virtue in this at all, since 
it means the specimen is not properly controlled. 


"Of the former method, one can only say that no cryonics patient is ever going 
to be anaesthetised in perfect health, ramped with glycerol, and frozen. The one
procedure was practical; the other abstract. But could that account for the 
difference? Certainly it would account for any apparently better dog head 
results as opposed to sheep head results."


David is comparing CI's experiment with other experiments that he has not named 
or described. This is meaningless.


"That speculation did not answer my question though, so on I slogged, learning 
another interesting fact: apparently, the difference between ramping and 
one-pass is not so great at the high levels of cryoprotectant used in cryonics 
cases. In the November 1984 issue of theAmerican Journal of Physiology (page 
C384), we learn that granulocyte survival declines most rapidly between 0-0.5 
Molar glycerol, and is steady at 20% survival above 1.0 Molar. Since 7 or 
greater molarity of glycerol is used in cryonics cases, the viability data for 
such low concentrations may not be terribly relevant."


The style of this para is so different from everything else David wrote, I can't
help wondering if he actually wrote it himself. Anyway, first I note that the 
experiment he quotes was done more than 16 years ago. Second, I don't think he 
knows what "granulocyte" means, and I certainly don't. What is more important is
whether structure and viability are maintained. From photos on the CI web site,
I believe structure is not protected by CI procedures. Ice still seems to form,
and causes "holes" in the tissue. Lastly, David states that 7 molarity is 
normal for cryonics cases, but this ignores the different procedures of 
different organizations (CI uses a higher concentration of glycerol than anyone 
else). Also it does not take into account the ramping-up of concentration, used 
by other organizations. Also it ignores that Robert Ettinger has admitted that 
only a small proportion of the glycerol manages to penetrate tissues using CI 
protocol. Also some cryonics cases will be differ!
ent from others. Consequently, there is no such thing as "normal."


"Anyway, what all the above meant was that difference between one-pass and 
gradual in cryonic perfusion, while real, might perhaps best be characterized as
not exactly radical." 


This is not a logical conclusion from anything David has said, because of all 
the factors I have mentioned above. He has compared CI to other, unnamed 
organizations, has not supplied any references, and has not defined how the 
procedures are actually done, either at CI or elsewhere. Therefore the 
comparison is meaningless.


Finally David quotes an unnamed scientist at an unnamed laboratory: "My 
impression of [stepped] and [one-pass] is that the middle regions of the brain 
look the same. I think I could argue that [stepped] is subjectively slightly 
better on the inner-most and outer-most brain regions." 


David concludes: "This is not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it does lean 
toward gradual ramping, and CI goes by test results."


No, it does not lean toward gradual ramping, because you would have to do 
multiple experiments, changing one variable each time, to make such a sweeping 
statement. First you vary the concentration slowly, then faster; then you try a 
lower starting concentration, a higher terminal concentration, a higher starting
concentration, a lower terminal concentration, a different temperature, and on 
and on. Then you make comparisons with single-pass procedures that are 
comparable, and finally you find which way works best.


The really irritating thing about this is that I believe this kind of experiment
has already been done, in properly run laboratories, by real scientists, who 
have published their results. But apparently CI refuses to use anyone else's 
results. It would rather do an amateur job, and then brag about it, while making
sly sneering references to its competitors.


Maybe this impresses some people (David himself seems impressed). But it does 
not impress me very much.

Jeff Grimes.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15626