X-Message-Number: 2978 Date: 11 Aug 94 17:03:41 EDT From: John de Rivaz <> Subject: CRYONICS: Notes for Journalists >From John de Rivaz, Member, Cryonics Institute Compuserve 100431,3127. It is hoped that these notes will be of assistance to anyone who is asked for a press interview etc. Make a printout of them and give them to the journalist involved. I recommend that when you have moved the file to your word processor, you bold-face the first sentence in each paragraph and print the whole in a largish typeface, say 16 point. Suggestions for alterations and additions are welcomed, and updated versions will be posted to the Cryonet from time to time. Press Notes re Cryonic Suspension What it is Cryonic suspension is the process where people are frozen the moment death is declared (see below for definitions), with a view to being restored to an active healthy life in the future when science has advanced to a stage when freezing and ageing damage and the cause of death can be rectified. Answers to Common Queries and Misconceptions People cannot be revived by present-day science. It is future science that will repair the freezing damage and what caused death. Cryonics is not about freezing dead people. Legally, as people cannot be revived by present day science, it would be murder to place a live person into cryonic suspension. Therefore it cannot be carried out on a live person. However in reality death is a process rather than a sudden event fixed in time. Legally it is regarded as a sudden event, and therefore we can freeze the client as soon as possible after this event. In times gone by, people were given up for dead in cases where today cures would be commonplace. Therefore it is not unreasonable for people to be revived in the future from states that we today would regard as "dead". There is no problem with power cuts. As cryonic suspension uses liquid nitrogen dewars electricity is not directly involved in the process. The dewars are topped up every fortnight. There is no way anyone could be conscious whilst in cryonic suspension. Cryonics is not a waste of money. In fact it is the reverse, because people save and invest their money so that they leave an estate sufficient to pay for it. When a person is put into suspension, only part of the funds are used. The rest is invested to provide an income in order to pay for the liquid nitrogen top-ups. If money is left to other people who spend it outright, then one could argue that the money is consumed completely. In any case, the cost of a suspension with the Cryonics Institute is comparable with say a cruise around the world, and people are not usually criticised for spending their money on a cruise. Cryonic revival is not comparable to getting a cow from a hamburger. This oft-repeated comparison is unfair and unscientific. Hamburgers are made by grinding cow meat into paste and sometimes freezing it. Cryonics people are carefully prepared and then frozen, a quite different procedure. Animals of visible size (invertebrates) have often been revived after freezing, never after grinding. Cryonics would not defeat God's plan of a resurrection. People are already - routinely - revived after what was once regarded as clinical death. Success in reviving frozen patients would not be a defeat for God, but merely proof that they weren't "really" dead in the first place. Cryonics societies are not duping people into paying a lot of money for a service that cannot be guaranteed. In fact, they go out of their way to explain to clients that survival cannot be guaranteed for a particular individual. This is in contrast with many other established activities, for example national lotteries who take your money with the odds heavily against you ever winning anything at all. Cryonics is not only for the rich. Although the prices of one organisation, Alcor, are rather high, they are affordable by single people with professional jobs, even when young. The Cryonics Institute is considerably cheaper, at $28,000 for full body. This has to be paid on death and can be met with life insurance and/or savings and investment plans. The Cryonics Institute's costs can easily be met by the family man on average earnings, using life insurance or a savings plan, and are comparable with activities such as smoking, eating out regularly, annual holidays, motoring costs etc. People will be willing to revive Cryonics patients. Even today, vast sums of public money are spent on health care for the aged, even when an expensive operation results in only a short addition to life. The human species places great value on life. Cryonics patients will be funded by their cryonics organisations, not public funds. A likely route to revivals is a now-young science known as nanotechnology, and this is intrinsically cheap. Population pressures will not prevent revivals. In fact the growth of population is levelling off because of affluence in the developed world, and AIDS in the undeveloped. But if the population does go on growing, a society with the ability to perform cryonic revivals will also have the capability to colonise space and other worlds. Longevity will increase, with or without cryonics, and the cryonics component of population pressures will be minor. Because of the exponential growth of population, approximately half the people who ever lived are alive today! Although it is obviously better, suspension does not have to be performed within a few minutes of death. Deterioration is a result of atoms in the body moving to the wrong place, and as long as sufficient information remains to put them back in their right places by nanomachines, then the patient can be restored. Clearly if the body is rotted or burned, then information for restoration is lost. However if looked after carefully and according to especially designed protocols suspension can occur hours or even days after death. The future will be better than the present. Although many people seem to think the past was better than the present, this does not stand up under serious scrutiny. Often one learns about the past from the writings of well-off people, and indeed the lives of the rich may have deteriorated a little. However freedom from many previously prevalent diseases, better working conditions, and more leisure time and opportunities distinguish present day living from the past. When one considers television and video, for example, the average person has better access to entertainment than monarchs of the middle ages and earlier! There will be no problem with integrating with future society. To start with there will be more than one person revived, so reanimated people will have people from their own time with them. Training will most likely be provided as part of the reanimation process. Also there is the example of people from primitive civilisations in the third world who have successfully integrated with modern civilisations after emigrating say to the USA. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2978