X-Message-Number: 3085
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: CRYONICS:re.questions.asked.by.Mike.and.Bob
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 1994 11:01:04 -0700 (PDT)


Hi again!

To Mike Darwin: 
The report to which I was referring was published in the September 94 issue
of THE IMMORTALIST, by the two Ukrainian researchers Pichugin and Zhegunov,
and titled "The effect of freeze-thawing (without reperfusion) on the
structure of the head brain tissues of a sheep ...".

To Bob Ettinger:
The source of temptation comes from the fact that your research plans, even in
very rough form, will be completely unknown to those who donate. Certainly
your PAST research will (I hope) be known, but that's not the same. And as
time passes, anyone in such a situation, particularly if they don't often and
very explicitly and in great detail publish their research RESULTS, can easily
start to go off track... not so much off track as to purpose, but off track 
as to just how to get to that purpose.

Every plan of research will have some underlying theory underneath it. And
given one set of information (biased, but with a bias not known to the person
doing the research) we can produce very many ideas about just what is 
happening and why. If this is done in isolation, the researcher will never
even notice the biases.

When I said temptation I meant it, but not in the simple sense that you or
any other researcher (or any other CRYONICS researcher) would simply abscond
with the money to the Bahamas. We all need some kind of feedback about what
we are doing: ideally, informal feedback, but if it must be structured in 
some way then so be it. It is a temptation of ideas (the spirit) rather than
a temptation of the flesh. And if it continues long enough, it's easy to
believe that no one else understands enough to comment on your research,
they are all too ignorant ... 

That is what I mean by temptation. As for NEUROCRYOBIOLOGY, it was and is
really intended to provide a place where scientific papers by cryonicists on
questions of cryonics may be published. But if you (or the researchers that
work for you) wish to publish them in THE IMMORTALIST, I have no objection
(I will say that what has been published so far doesn't yet qualify as a 
scientific paper, but then they are intended as interim reports, after all,
and for that I have no criticism). As for just handing qualified people the
money and letting them go off and do their stuff, I'd say that the key
point depends on what's meant by "qualified" in that context. The feedback
needed may already exist and be quite informal: fine. But it does need to
exist.
			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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