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.

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