X-Message-Number: 26586
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 09:47:53 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: mainly comments for Stodolsky

Hi everyone!

AT LAST! All the discussion of an imaginary lawsuit set up by 
David Pizer will be ending, and we'll have Cryonet dealing with 
other issues.

Also a short comment for David Stodolsky: you believe that means
to increase lifespan will be faster to develop than suspended animation.
Certainly such means get more press and seem more popular. However
instituting a new kind of medical procedure take far more time 
to be done in human subjects than it does in experimental animals.
Whatever drugs increase lifespan, they'll have to get past the
FDA (which presently doesn't even recognize that aging is a 
disease), and find doctors then willing to give it to their 
patients at a reasonable price. 

Not only that, but proving that a drug or treatment actually 
prolongs the healthy lifespan of PEOPLE will take considerable time.
Even to prove that it does so in apes will take a lot of time;
chimps live about half as long as we do. Sure, we can get all
kinds of indirect evidence that our test drug increases lifespan,
but such evidence will also require confirmation --- and because
it's more indirect than simply showing that the test drug prolongs
human lifespan, there's bound to be lots of argument as to whether
or not that indirect evidence shows what is claimed.

The essential point here revolves about the word PROOF. Most doctors
don't wish to apply treatments with uncertain effects to normal
patients, or to patients who aren't so far gone already that 
their death would otherwise be imminent. None of the antiaging
drugs now known instantly rejuvenate anyone who takes them. 

And if we compare this situation to the present work on brain
vitrification, brain vitrification looks like it will come a long
time before treatments of human patients for aging are agreed
on by the medical establishment. Experiments on vitrification do
not take 2 years to perform (the minimum amount for a lifespan
experiment on mice). Many different solutions and procedures
can be tested in 2 years. You probably know of the experiment
in progress on calorie restriction of monkeys: it's lasted years
so far. 

Both cryonics and antiaging have lots of social and political
opposition. If we consider not trivial increases in lifespan
such as 30%, then antiaging gets just as much opposition as
cryonics. But cryonics is in a much stronger position: the
experiments needed to prove that we have a provable way of 
preserving people can be done far more quickly. 

That is why, despite all the noise, I think that cryonics will
be shown to work before antiaging (in the nontrivial sense)
ever gets far off the ground.

          Best wishes and long long life to all,

             Thomas Donaldson

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