X-Message-Number: 21176 Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 07:41:01 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #21167 - #21174 For Mr. Kluytmans, again: I have read Drexler, but not Freitas. Your comments on respirocytes are fine, but in no way answer my problems with them. My central problem deals with their present ABSENCE. If you, or Freitas, or Drexler actually makes a respirocyte (WITH systems to make many more) then we can see how well they do in tests against our blood --- not just our red blood cells, but all of it. Let's suppose that you actually have such nanodevices. Fine. The very first problem that comes to MY mind is that of whether or not such powerful devices will prove normally useful at all. Even if you have them and they have passed all normal tests with flying colors, they sound as if they would have abilities that in normal living give someone nothing at all. Perhaps firefighters or space explorers, yes, but not in normal life. The main reason our circulatory system has gone as far as it has is that to go further wouldn't help anything at all. Again, we haven't become space explorers, so someday we may need such abilities. I make this point on the assumption that you don't run into problems making them work in the first place. That sounds to me like a very strong assumption. Evolution has over millenia and millions of years worked to optimize our designs. It is precisely because we can now overcome, with our technology, all the things that killed people before they reached the age of 50 that elimination of aging begins to look useful. What other advances might do I don't know, but I would strongly suggest that we'd do better to improve our thinking ability (which we must first UNDERSTAND, not now the case) than to improve our red blood cells or any other part of our circulatory system. As for providing means to remain without breathing for a much longer time, the companies working on blood substitutes will no doubt provide such means years before Freitas's respirocytes ever come about. Doing so would not be a big step from making WORKING substitutes for red blood cells, and to judge from all the features you want to add to them, actually SMALLER devices. (Normal metabolism does not contain computers. It uses enzymes with shapes which allow them to react to changes with a change in what they do. The individual devices are much smaller, but it is their combination which does the job). Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21176