X-Message-Number: 1974
Date: 16 Mar 93 18:41:13 EST
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: CRYONCS Fracturing
From: Mike Darwin
To: All
> Subject: Fracturing
Date: 15 March, 1993
I have been very busy lately and thus unable to participate in the
discussion of this (or for that matter any other) topic on the net. I am
dog-sitting even as I write this (that's good news cause it means the dog
lived!).
The nice thing about being able to enter a debate after a period of
enforced silence is that a lot of the work gets done for you by others.
Thomas Donaldson and Brian Wowk have both done a fine job of explaining
things and defending the idea of fracture-free storage. I would like to
amplify some points that they have covered and make a few of my own.
Regarding Brian's foam calculations. God knows, mathematical cripple
that I am, that I cannot comment rigorously here. Nevertheless, I can say
a few things that might have merit. First of all, Steve Harris, M.D.,
(and damn good physicist, mathematician, historian, etc.) did calculations
on cold room storage using more reasonable numbers a few years ago and
published them in CRYONICS. Steve has not had the time or ability to
participate in the net recently since he has also been busy with the dog
here, plus his computer is down. However, I have asked him to post his
calculations (which I had completely forgotten he had done).
There must be something Brian is missing if he gets optimum foam
thicknesses in the 2-meter range! Ettinger, Harris, NASA and others have
done these numbers too and don't come up with anything like 2-meters.
This is possibly due to flaws in the cost assumptions that Brian makes.
For one thing, Trymer cryogenic foam is NOT cheap. To do the dry ice box
we have here at BPI, we paid $6.00 a cubic foot. Second, as Steve
Bridge points out, liquid nitrogen ain't a dime a liter anywhere that I
know of, at least NOT since the 1960's when the US made steel and LN2 was
a by-product of oxygen production for steel. When you figure in transfer
losses and other factors you wil probably pay 50 to 60 cents per liter.
What has not been pointed out is that if you went to a refrigerated
room you could probably go to bulk delivery, and if your volume of use
were high enough you might get the price down to 16 to 25 cents a liter.
Also, if the LN2 storage dewar were stored in the room you could greatly
reduce your transfer losses. Hugh Hixon could probably give you a more
current quote on bulk LN2 prices since bulk liquid salesmen come nosing
around Alcor frequently. (No, it is not economical for Alcor to go the
bulk route at this time.)
A Lesson From History: How Ralph Merkle Would Make A Record
It is sometime circa 1875 and a group of people are gathered to
discuss the problem of recording audio information. Edison is present,
and so is Ralph Merkle. Merkle explains to Edison that the problem is a
very complex one and that, in essence, the problem is one of recording a
vast amount of INFORMATION. Merkle explains that only a mature
Microtechnology will be able to this because you will need very
sophisticated equipment to convert the sound waves to some kind of signal
which can then be analyzed and turned into long strings of ones and
zeros...
Edison shakes his head, sadly and in wonder and says: My word, I
never really though about it that way before... Consequently it is not
until the development of computer automation 100 years later that we have
sound recording...
A Lesson From History: How Ralph Merkle Would Make A Photograph
It is sometime circa 1830 and a group of people are gathered to
discuss the problem of recording visual information. Daugerre is present,
and so is Ralph Merkle...
Lucky thing for Elvis and Mathew Brady that Merkle was born so late
huh? Unfortunately, WE may not be so lucky. Fracturing is a major form
of damage to cooled biological systems. And, what is more, it appears to
be worse in frozen tissue than in vitrified tissue. By this I mean that
it seems to occur at a higher temperature and there seem to be more
fractures. Fracturing disrupts the vascular system and its causes injury
that will, just as Ralph RIGHTLY says, require a mature nanotechnology.
Countless severed structures/connections will need to be reconnected and
it may be necessary to disassemble the entire brain, digitize it, and then
rebuild it (a scenario Ralph has in fact argued for). This, as Thomas
points out, is *nontrivial.*
Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately) biology doesn't work like
Drexler/Merkle scenarios. Biology is more like photography or analog
audio recording. A photographer doesn't have to know and control the
position of each grain of silver compound to make a picture. Likewise,
living systems operate using largely diffusion driven processes which
depend for a lot of their "smarts" on the inherent properties of the
materials themselves. Even our DNA is NOT a blueprint, rather it is a
recipe, just like when a cook makes a cake s/he doesn't have to have
complete or nearly complete control over the position of individual sugar
molecules, CO2 bubbles, and so on...
There is a very important point in all of this and it is that there
may be cheaper and much faster routes to repairing suspension patients
than the kind of tour de force THEORETICAL approaches suggested by Drexler
and Merkle. Even very old people who have suffered age-related
deterioration of their brains may be very simply repaired of this kind of
damage by using biological/biochemical means (genetic engineering
technology) rather than the digital sledgehammer approach. Even now, with
our primitive understanding of biology we can take fetal tissue and
implant it in animals and have it reverse devastating neurological
deficits. Similarly, we can induce regeneration in the brain, skin, bone
and elsewhere in the laboratory just by manipulating the local
biochemistry with biologically active molecules (growth factors, etc.).
What I am trying to say is that just as Daugerre did not have to wait
for digital computers, lasers and so on to achieve photography, so too it
is very likely that we will not have to use the kind of strategies Merkle
so glibly talks about because there are likely to better, simpler and
cheaper ones *at least for patients who are not injured so badly that they
become not injured biological systems but rather what Thomas Donaldson
calls subjects for "Neural Archaeology" (the science of figuring out WHO
was once there from WHAT is left)*.
Time in storage is RISK time. It is not just gravy time sitting
there waiting for the Seventh Angel of the Nanocolypse to come flitting in
and make "the perishable imperishable and the mortal immortal."
Furthermore, I personally don't want a big time shift. I am scared
shitless of a big time shift and I'm not afraid to admit it. This is very
personal and very real for me. I keep thinking about my colleague Jerry
Leaf sitting in liquid nitrogen and about how frustrated and yes,
bewildered he will be if he makes it out the other end. *I am in love
with my life now, and while I am willing to suffer a catastrophic (yes
catastrophic) disruption of that life, I am not eager for it.*
Fracturing is probably preventable injury. If we can deal with it
effectively, I believe we should. To fail to, and to follow Merkle's
advice, is to be content with what we have now because we are "sure" that
cryonics will work. Well I am not sure, never have been and won't be
till I see more convincing evidence than has been trotted out so far. We
don't know how memory works or even what a person is in some important
ways (ask the AI people about THAT one). Being rendered into bite sized
chunks doesn't make me any more comfortable about the prospect of success.
Not having an intact circulatory system complicates repair. We will have
enough of a task at hand to repair the damage we absolutely cannot avoid.
Why add a completely new class of injury which so disrupts the
characteristic mode by which biological systems function, when it can be
avoided?
Finally, Donaldson's criticisms about Merkle's assumptions that no
information is lost are good ones. For one thing, I was the guy who
discovered this problem and I discovered it in human patients. My first
clue was when I unwrapped the bodies of a husband and wife and saw sinuous
fractures (like cracks in a plaster wall) on her abdomen. Upon thawing
these turned into gaping gashes inches long and inches deep. More to the
point, the sides had separated enough that I could SEE them in the frozen
state at -90*C.
Also, Russian researchers have reported flashes of blue light being
emitted from fracturing solutions at cryogenic temperatures. I understand
that the temperature of these flashes is high. I do not know what the
practical implications are but it is clear that fracturing is more
complicated than most people think. I would prefer to avoid it. Perhaps
others would not. To each his own.
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