X-Message-Number: 17792 Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 01:12:32 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: limits of research Michael Donahue asks about my motives, and writes: "I'm confused- it sounds like CI is working to really find out some of the basic answers to a lot of the problems of cryonics. It seems to me that you are implying, or suggesting, that CI and their ongoing research program will be less than valuable- or no more valuable than anything other organizations are doing. I apologize if I'm wrong." I'm pleased that CI will be pursuing research with Pichugin, but I felt the announcement claimed a little more than was reasonable. _All_ research relating to human cryopreservation remains speculative and extrapolative, because the results of human brain cryopreservation remain unknown. Mike Darwin suggested addressing this problem by removing a very tiny sample of brain tissue from a patient, to verify its condition. This was back in the days when he was the service provider for CryoCare. We discussed his proposal at great length. Logically, he made a good case: The brain has great redundancy, the sample would have been tiny, and loss of the sample would have been trivial compared with the probable damage caused by the cryopreservation procedure itself. Still, we felt that the idea of taking a small sample from a patient was disturbing--even though it would have yielded very valuable information. It would have been the first and only time, so far as I know, that anyone would have had a chance to find out what the brain of a patient looks like after a well-controlled glycerol perfusion and cooldown to liquid-nitrogen temperature. Of course animal experiments are valuable, and I hope Pichugin's work will be productive. But so long as we have no way of verifying the condition of our human patients, cryonics procedures themselves are not "research" in the usual sense. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17792