X-Message-Number: 15986
From: 
Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 14:26:25 EDT
Subject: Pichugin to lead CI research

Beginning in July 2001, Dr. Yuri Pichigun will be serving full-time as the
Cryonics Institute's Director of Research. Dr. Pichugin, along with his
wife and son, will also be joining CI as full CI members.

Born in the former Soviet Union, Dr. Pichugin served since the 1970's as a
researcher at the largest cryobiology center in the world, the Institute for
Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine, in the Ukraine. He has been a 
supporter and advocate of life extension and cryonics most of his adult life, 
and is the author of philosophical works as well as scientific papers, with 
36 professional publications in established peer-reviewed journals as of 1996.

Between 1994 and 1998, Dr. Pichugin and colleagues did contract work for CI
involving repetition and evaluation of our work with sheep heads,
cracking limits with cat brains, and electrophysiological evaluation of
frozen and thawed rabbit brain pieces. The rabbit brain work resulted --
for the first time ever, to our knowledge -- in obtaining coordinated
electrical activity in networks of neurons after rewarming from liquid
nitrogen temperature, using glycerine as the cryoprotective agent. A report
is available on our web site at www.cryonics.org.

Recently Dr. Pichugin has been employed in cryobiological research for a
corporate consortium, occupied mainly (according to public information
sources) in work involving successfully improving the viability of rat
hippocampal slices after various cryopreservation treatments including
vitrification. He is currently involved in operational work as the
experimentalist with the Institute for Neural Cryobiology, where his research
efforts on the Hippocampal Slice Cryopreservation Project are expected to
continue until his departure.

Dr. Pichugin's academic qualifications, years of experience, published
papers, and previous and current research contributions in the area of
cryonics-relevant cryobiological research are in many respects unique
worldwide. We are delighted to welcome him to the CI team, and we believe
that Dr. Pichugin's work in the months and years to come will lead to
important progress in patient care for CI members, and will produce research
results of benefit to everyone in the world of cryonics.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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