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? Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26141