X-Message-Number: 2609
Date:  Tue, 15 Feb 94 09:20:00 
From: <>
Subject:  CRYONICS Re: Problem with Cryonics

(Via unlicensed copy of UGATE)
>From Steve Petersen Feb. 13, 1994, Message #2603

>  I heard that cryonic suspension has some problems.  It damages
>skin cells.  Not too recently a woman who payed to have her body
>frozen ran out of funds some years after her body was frozen.
>They took her out and just froze her head.  This gave scientist
>(or cryonicists) s the chance to analyze her body.
  
>  Apparenly her skin had been badly damaged.  A problem if she was
>ever re-animated.  (This info was taken from "Thje Great Mambo
>Chicken")  

in "Great Mambo Chicken & the Transhuman Condition" by Ed Regis, 
pp. 93-94 there is this description:

     "In November of 1983, for the first time ever, a cryonics firm 
conducted autopsies on the defrosted mortal remains of two Trans Time
patients who had been converted to neuro. ...
     "There was both good and bad news. 'The most unexpected finding 
as a result of these autopsies,' says the report, 'is the discovery
of serious fracturing in all of the suspension patients.'[*Cryonics*,
Sep. 1984, p. 25.]
     "There were fractures in the outer skin, in the subcutaneous fat,
in the blood vessels next to the heart, in the arteries and veins. The
right lung of one patient was cracked almost in half, as was the liver,
and there were open wounds on the hands and right wrist. This was not 
encouraging, but it was all too easy to lose one's perspective. The fact 
of the matter was that the injuries suffered by these frozen corpses
were no worse than what's seen in hospital shock-trauma units every day
of the week--broken (if not absent) arms and legs, and so on--but many 
of these people end up recovering. The fact that the frozen corpses 
were not in pristine shape was not by itself any cause for alarm.
     "The good news was that much of the bodies survived perfectly 
intact. The palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and other
structures were all in fine shape. As for the brains, they 
remained in suspension and were not examined."

Comment: actually three patients, one male and two female, were 
converted to neuro and examined almost concurrently. There is a
writeup of this in *Cryonics* Sep. 1984, with additional material
in Oct. and Nov. of that year. Apparently the main damage noted was
gross fracturing of tissue, at the macroscopic scale. Fine structures
were generally preserved intact, as far as could be ascertained.
I don't think any specific damage to "skin cells" was noted, beyond 
gross fracturing. In resuscitation you would, of course, have to replace 
the entire body of a neuro, no doubt harder than correcting any skin
damage. (You'd have to rebuild most of the skin from scratch, in fact.)
As for gross fracturing itself, most of us in cryonics think it would be
a relatively minor problem to correct with the technology we anticipate 
will be available. Ischemic damage caused by insufficient oxygenation
of tissues prior to freezing is likely to be a greater problem.

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