X-Message-Number: 2343
Date: 13 Jul 93 06:54:40 EDT
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS: Fooling Mother Nature?
Dear Cryonet:
Before I go on further about the technical problems of
cryonics, I should perhaps introduce myself to some of the people
here on the net who have not met me. I'm a 35 year-old
practicing California physician and researcher who is board
certified in both internal medicine and geriatrics/gerontology.
I've authored many scientific papers published in well-respected
journals. I'm interested in the problem of aging, and in the
problem of mortality. I'm presently a suspension member of
Alcor. In the years since I first visited the Alcor facility in
1986, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about cryonic
research and the philosophical implications of cryonics. I've
written extensively for Cryonics magazine, and one of the
chapters in the current Alcor "bluebook" is mine. Over the years
since I first met the leaders of Alcor in the Alcor facility in
Fullerton, I've had some opportunity to observe and participate
first-hand in both cryonics research done at Alcor, and cryonics
research done outside of Alcor. Most recently, as regards the
last, I've participated in a series of hypothermic canine
experiments performed at the independent laboratories shared by
the corporations of Cryovita and Bio-Preservation (which I'll
just call CV/BP Labs for short), research which was organized
partly by Mike Darwin, who I've known since I first became
interested in cryonics. In short, I've seen enough of medicine,
science, cryonics, and cryonics politics over the years to have
rather strong opinions on some of the issues in the current
debate, and I think I'm qualified to have them.
So. First, a reply to Thomas Donaldson and others who make
the point that it is unfair of me to criticize Alcor's current
lack of animal research, inasmuch as Alcor is supposedly for-
bidden to do this kind of thing by a strange "Conditional Use
Permit" edict. Unfortunately, my opinion that Alcor has lost the
ability to do animal research is NOT based only on the fact that
Alcor is not doing animal research currently. Rather, it is also
based on my assessment of the biomedical knowledge of the
personnel at Alcor presently, combined with intimate knowledge of
just how difficult it is to prep, perfuse, and recover experi-
mental animals with the multi-organ insult which results from
ischemia of the type encountered in the average cryonic sus-
pension. The last total body washout dog that *Alcor* did on its
own (without Jerry or Mike) was perfused (in a rather striking
error) at double the required blood pressure, and did not come
close to survival. At the time, as I recall, Alcor people were
up front about admitting that they did not expect to be able to
do this kind of thing without Mike or Jerry. Thus, if some
psychological change has since come over Alcor to the effect that
the people there now feel that they would NOW be doing stellar
animal research work but for the evil city council, I can only
comment that, if so, it reminds me of the story of the two
mothers coming from the music recital: "Well, I'm sure that MY
daughter could have played that piece FAR better, if she'd chosen
to take up an instrument."
As for the law itself that supposedly keeps Alcor from doing
research, it is far from clear if it is legal for a zoning
regulator to exact some personally motivated promise to observe
some moratorium on an otherwise fully legal activity, in exchange
for a formal zoning permit relative to another matter. For a
hypothetical example, if you as a citizen come to me as a regula-
tor for (say) a liquor license, I cannot make you promise that if
I give it to you, you will agree never to have (say) an abortion.
Likewise, if I as a politico happen to be in private life an
animal rights fanatic (instead of a fetal rights fanatic) I
cannot legally let that intrude into my public persona either,
when I'm being asked if it is permitted under zoning code for an
organization to (say) store human remains. Alcor has been told
all this by attorneys, so I hear; the city council could possibly
be challenged if anyone was really interested (and perhaps not a
lot of money spent on this for some time while court dates are
delayed-- time enough for Alcor to move). Another possible
solution is that Alcor research might be moved off-site to nearby
cities where zoning for animal research is easier. Has anyone at
Alcor bothered to look into this matter? Such problems have been
solved at CV/BP Labs, so I know they are not insurmountable.
Where there is a will there is usually a way, if you have the
right people. But that is, of course, the issue.
"What does a cryonics organization need animal research for,
anyway?" some people seem to be asking. The short answer is that
we need it because there is comparatively little feedback on
cryonic suspensions, as I recently commented in another posting.
This sad fact has many political implications. I do not like
Thomas Donaldson's airplane analogy, because nobody left Alcor in
the middle of a suspension. Instead, let me use a medical
analogy, since we all agree that a suspension should be thought
of as a medical procedure: if you are on an island with no
transport or doctor, with a patient who needs his appendix taken
out right now, it is gutsy and admirable of you as a layman to
attempt it using a textbook of surgery. Well and good. But if
there should have been a surgeon available, and he left months
ago because of a disagreement with the island government or
hospital board, THEN after the disastrous surgical operation is
over it will be time for some hard looks at the political
conditions which caused the departure of the specialist, and the
necessity for the do-it-yourself medical care in the first place.
Was it worth it? In real cases like this, there is real and
sometimes painful feedback (your patient may be obviously in bad
shape), and if that happens everybody is ordinarily finally
forced to confront hard questions about how lesser concerns
managed to get in the way of what should have been everyone's
prime objective. This is a reality check. In cryonics, however
(and most unfortunately) the situation is different. During our
current lifetimes the feedback in *cryonics* consists not of a
Dead Patient (something that is not easy to ignore in medicine)
but rather instead mainly of a lot of strange lab results, whose
meaning is interpretable (if at all) only probablistically by
induction from animal models of ischemic damage, and then only by
a pretty small number of technically oriented people. Is the pH
way down and potassium way up? How much is the LDH rising, or
the blood lactate levels and anion gap? Is the A-V O2 extraction
declining with time more than it should?
Or there may be no strange lab results at all: if you don't DO
any of the lab tests during a suspension to generate these
numbers (or comparable tests) then the feedback disappears almost
completely, and you're left with nothing but brain shrinkage (a
good marker, we think, but significance still not entirely clear
in the presence of very high glycerol concentrations). Some
other cryonics organizations don't even open the skull at all,
and they get "good" suspensions every time. Guaranteed. No
suspendee has ever complained.
My point is that without the simultaneous use of many
physiologic markers and quality control tests, it is possible to
"practice" surgical, mechanical, logistics, and even political
skills in doing cryonic suspensions, but it's very difficult to
practice medicine. In this context I am somewhat mystified by
Thomas Donaldson's comment that one can learn the art of medicine
by reading a textbook. This is a bit like trying to become an
auto mechanic by simply reading car-fix books; it works occasion-
ally, but in the real world there is generally no substitute for
practice and problem-solving. In a cryonic suspension the
problems to be solved are not just surgical and mechanical, but
also physiologic, and here the practice is provided only by
working with animal models of the kind of damage you do in the
first phases of suspension, because only with animals do you get
the best and most reliable physiologic feedback: if you screw up,
they die. Ischemic damage is a complex phenomenon: by way of
example, we at CV/BP Labs recently found that we were losing dogs
to epithelial injury resulting from the sucrose in the perfusate.
This fact did not obtrude in neon lights; instead what we saw was
a consumption coagulopathy associated with a microangiopathic
hemolytic anemia which manifested itself by sudden extreme RBC
anisocytosis on blood smears. It took us a while to figure
things out from autopsy results and lab results (plus a stint in
the UCLA biomed library reading some really old research litera-
ture on IV sucrose toxicity), but now Alcor no longer uses
sucrose to perfuse with, and at CV/BP Labs we have had two
surviving dogs after we ourselves stopped using the stuff. So it
goes in research. Do these results mean anything to today's
suspendees? We won't know for sure for centuries. In the mean
time, let me see hands raised for everyone who still wants
sucrose over mannitol....
Finally, along this line, let me say something about the role
of honesty in science and medicine. Carlos Mondragon has
recently commented that he trusts Mike Darwin not at all, and
that Mike lies when he says "hello." This may be a great line,
but it is at odds with my own observations and with certain
facts. The bottom line is that we get surviving animals at CV/BP
Labs, and we have two perfectly healthy dogs at the lab now which
survived cold perfusion-times significantly longer than Alcor was
able to achieve even in the old days when the acknowledged master
Jerry Leaf was directing the show. These results do not lie. At
CV/BP Labs Mike and team are rapidly absorbing (in the context of
having to work real physiology problems) everything I can teach
about acute care in multisystem organ damage, but I cannot take
most of the credit for the results. I have had to learn a great
deal, too, since dogs are not people and I'm not a vet. Mike
himself has a great deal of knowledge about ischemic physiology
that I do not, not to mention an eclectic mass of data about all
things cryogenic, put together from decades of experience. He is
not a perfect organizer, but he is efficient enough to get the
job done. Now, my point is that one does not GET results in
science by being dishonest, because Mother Nature scores the
exams, and she takes no excuses. Nor is Mother Nature impressed
by salesmanship. In his recent letter Carlos himself states that
he doesn't have a lot of biomedical knowledge, but the rest of
his comments about Mike seem to end up leaving the impression
that Mike is somehow dishonest in doing science. This *I* can
comment on even if Carlos cannot: Mike isn't. Also, Mike's
knowledge of physiology is real, even though I agree it would be
nice politically if it weren't. So far as the rest of cryonics
goes, my experience with Mike on suspensions happens to go back
exactly far as Carlos' does (as it happens, I wrote out, on
Alcor's behalf, the $1000 check to the ER doc that Mike persuaded
in that case), and I can only report that here again my im-
pression varies from that of Carlos. I freely admit, however,
that others have had much more experience in this area than I,
since I have missed many cryonic suspensions since 1987.
To sum up, I am put in a very difficult position by this whole
debate. So far as personalities go, many of the principals in
the current political war (on both sides) are friends of mine,
whether or not I have found it possible to work with them on a
suspension (by contrast, I haven't yet found a single cryonicist
worthy of hatred; possibly I'm missing something...). But the
current political and scientific situation at Alcor is untenable,
for reasons that I've outlined. In the end, the entire Alcor
membership ought to decide this issue (i.e., who will design
Alcor's future suspension procedures), since it is they (not just
the Directors) who will ultimately be going under the knife, it
is they who will be getting some stuff or other in their veins,
and it is they who will be stored at some temperature or another.
As regards this last, I am of course glad to see Brian Wowk toss
his hat into the ring as an Alcor Director candidate for 1993.
If it will help this situation, I myself am willing to follow his
example and do the same. If not, I'll continue to kibitz
occasionally, but mostly I'll continue to work instead on
building the kind of scientific cryonics organization that I
want. From the ground up, if necessary.
Steve Harris, M.D.
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