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.

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