X-Message-Number: 3042
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 17:49:40 MST
From: "Richard Schroeppel" <>
Subject: CRYONICS: Money for research

Charles Platt remarks
>   Paul Wakfer has suggested that for $5 million in research, we 
    could have reversible brain cryopreservation. In reply, it 
    has been objected that neither he nor anyone else happens to 
    have $5 million to spare. 

My personal guess is more like $5 trillion.  If each hard-core
cryonicist will contribute only $10 billion, we can reach my figure.

How much has been spent on preserving, say, kidneys?
Or finding an acceptable blood substitute?
These are goals of our oh-so-beneficent government, and have received
considerable attention with only very limited success.

It's conceivable that we could do the research for maintenance
of a (live, unfrozen) severed head for under $100 million.
This might achieve 50% of the goals of the cryonics movement
(keeping the majority of us alive until we can regenerate bodies and
arrest further brain aging).  It leaves out a sizable minority with
conditions that directly involve the brain.  It doesn't have the
comforting quality of solid last-resort freezing.

I actually agree with Charles Platt that we should be doing more
research, but I think a research plan is the first step.

On a different level, we need to identify the causes that are
keeping most people from becoming cryonicists:  If enough people
have frozen relatives, the research will follow.

I think there's been enough TV exposure that most people are
acquainted with the concept of freezing-at-death, even if they
can't connect it with the word "cryonics".  I'd conjecture that
there's a wide spectrum of lightly held opinions ranging from
"ripoff" to "might work" to "already been done, I saw it in the
Enquirer".  And yet we've got only a few hundred people signed up,
and the media can still make a big story out of "frozen bodies
discovered in a storage shed in Colorado".

My highly opinionated opinion is that the hangup is cost -
if the cost can come down, the number of cryonicists will jump,
and we're halfway home.  Public resistance will fade as the
concept becomes ordinary, and soon after, we'll see demands for
government funded freezers for the indigent.

Rich Schroeppel  

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