X-Message-Number: 24528 Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 10:24:22 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: for various commentators Here we go, again: To Yvan Bozzonetti: Perhaps I did not explain my point well enough, so I will repeat my explanation. First of all, the molecules making us up are comparatively mobile and changeable as individual molecules. They form into large scale patterns, and these are what makes us up. A molecular scale map of our brains would be like a map of the clouds in the sky over Paris at a particular instant. There may well be order in the clouds over Paris, but a single map is unlikely to show any order at all. Furthermore, to the extent that we might make a map of the structures in a normal undamaged brain, a brain damaged by freezing may be hard to decipher knowing only the form taken by an undamaged brain. In the very first place, our memories will make our brains differ from anyone elses, and our memories are just what we want to recover. Even the connections between neurons (synapses, and the axons and dendrites which connect neurons) occur on larger scale than molecular. They are the things that can be torn apart on freezing; and virtually all present students of memory IDENTIFY those connections with our memories --- not the large ones which connect different anatomical areas in our brains, but the smaller ones between individual neurons. To provide a molecular scale map of a human brain would be like providing a map of the clouds over Paris on Wednesday 18 August 2004. If you want to work out how a damaged brain formerly connected together, maps are the last thing you want. What you really want to get is an understanding of the molecules which make up our brain and their birth, behavior, role, and disappearance. I'm not AGAINST nanotechnology. I just think that using it wrong will get us nowhere at all. Anymore than trying to make a map of the clouds over Paris. It's not that there's no order in the clouds over Paris, but maps just aren't the best way to work out what that order is or tell that it's somehow gone wrong and needs fixing. I'll even say that close scrutiny of work on brains and how they work suggests to me that we might well be able to get enough information to reassemble most of a brain broken by freezing. And when I notice such information I do so in a SCIENCE REPORT in PERIASTRON. We want to work out how pieces of a broken brain once fit together; the evidence we'd use doesn't necessarily bear any obvious relation to memory and how it works. To give a simple example, synapses will take with them their receptors for different neurotransmitters, and we know from knowing how brains work that some neurons mostly use serotonin, others glutamate, and so on. Some areas may have many neural processes crowded together, all broken; such information eliminates the possibility of piece A being connected to a whole class of other pieces using different neurotransmitters. And yes, that preliminary step of working out which pieces associate with which neurotransmitters would very likely use some form of nanotechnology. NO map of the brain but an understanding of brains would be used here. I'll add here, just as I did in my last message, that it would be better if we didn't even have to take all that trouble. And that's what vitrification aims to do: prevent any problems with broken neural processes at all. For Basie (I don't understand why you call yourself that): Fine. You say it is hooe. So far the only reference you've given deals with single cells, which by now as single cells are almost always quite freezable and revivable afterwards. (Sure, we want to improve our methods, but that's not the same). It's a real pity that some things seem to be forgotten very fast: Greg Fahy, though at the time he could not openly go by his real name, wrote a good piece in an Appendix to the PREVIOUS survey of cryonics put out by Alcor, not the one by Lemler but the previous one. As you know, Fahy is currently researching vitrification with the support of the 21st Century Medicine Foundation. And yes, he gave details about just what happened to brains on freezing, even with the cryoprotectants of that day. I have a copy of that document and if you pay my postage and photocopy costs, and send me your address, I'll send it to you. If you only want to bleat hooe to me on this question, too bad. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24528