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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3085