X-Message-Number: 26141
Date: Fri, 06 May 2005 15:50:57 -0700
From: "Eric Geislinger" <>
Subject: H2S

I don't know if I'm missing something or what - but the
silence greeting the report of successful suspended
animation (Science, April 22) has been deafening. The
few cryonicists who have commented on it seem to be
saying things ranging from, "Well, it's no match for
cryonics" (duh) to, "Shucks, we did that 20 years ago
by cooling dogs." Meanwhile, other life-extensionists
seem to be thinking that it might be handy to have if
they have a heart attack or something.

This breakthrough is *very* different in kind. It allows
you to slow your metabolism by 90%, with no known ill
effects, using a method that requires little more than
a plastic tarp and a nickel's worth of chemicals. (DON'T
try this at home unless you really know what you're 
doing - 40 ppm will slow you down, 600 ppm can kill
you quickly.)

Now, each and every one of us is deeply involved in a
race. The race is between whatever it is out there
that has our number on it, and whatever technology is
being developed to prevent it. (Think of that next
time you read about the FDA taking 15 years to approve
something...) If you could spend your retirement
"skipping" say, every-other-day, thereby extending
your calendar years by almost a factor of two, wouldn't
you think that's important? Instead of 30, you might
have 55 calendar years for whatever's going to get
you to be relegated to history. (Not even counting
the bootstrap extension you get due to the techno-fix
which is the whole reason for doing this.) If nothing
else, when you croak, the cryonics technology will
be 25 years better than it would have been.

Right now, it's not known whether or not the stress
involved with suspending yourself every-other-day
does more harm than the good of slowing everything
down. Or even if slowing your metabolism by 90% slows
most of the important aging mechanisms by a similar
amount. It's not even known whether or not this will
even work with humans. But, darn it all, it looks
very promising. The cellular mechanism being used
here is a very primitive one that very likely *will*
work with humans - and there were *no* discernible
ill effects with mice being shut down for 6 hours.
It's also the sort of cheap easy experiment to run
that questions should have answers fairly quickly -
even if we have to go looking ourselves.

This may be very good news. Why not a little excitement,
or at least some interest?

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