X-Message-Number: 3170
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: CRYONICS: re #3155,3156
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 01:20:05 -0700 (PDT)

To Mr. Coetzee:

As I said, Mike Darwin gave a very good account of cryobiology. But cryobiology
isn't the same as cryonics. One of the very basic ideas of cryonics, which 
even some cryonicists haven't really come to accept, is that as a matter of
principle we freeze and store people (or vitrify them!) not because we know
how to revive them both from their freezing and from whatever condition 
caused them to be suspended, but because we do NOT know either of these things.
Or one or the other. And I will compare this quite directly with current
medical practice, which gives up on people whenever the doctors of the time 
do not know what can be done to bring them back.

That is, someone who is
dead by the criteria of the 1940's (and could be revived by the criteria of 
the 1990's) would be declared dead (ie. killed) by doctors of the 1940's and 
revived as a matter of routine by the doctors of the 1990's. (This is a 
statement of the conditions which really occurred. We can revive people now
who would have been written off as "dead" in the 1940s). 

We try to preserve patients as well as we can because after freezing, they 
will last unchanged for thousands of years. And unlike present medicine, we
know very well that future doctors will have far more capability than we do
now, and we do not believe that the mere fact that we happen not to know just
how to fix these people means that they should be killed at once.

To put it bluntly, we value human life far more highly, and we are far more
modest about our present abilities, than most of medicine is now. And you 
will note that the arguments against cryonics by others all seem to boil down
to: "we don't know how to revive such people" (with varying degrees of 
rhetoric and florid verbiage). So people are killed because the doctors 
"treating" them don't know what to do. 

Yes, cryonicists have also devoted a lot of thought to the technologies which
would be needed to revive people frozen by today's methods. And there is a
very good case that those technologies will often work (though their develop-
ment may take 100 years or more). Yet that isn't really the central point
of cryonics --- it's important to us, but cryonicists would advocate 
suspension even without a clue as to how revival might be done. When human
lives are involved, it is wrong to draw conclusions about what should be done
with them simply on the basis that we, at this exact point of time and on this
small planet in the spiral arm of a very large galaxy, HAPPEN not to know
what to do. 

I will say, finally, that cryonicists do have a notion of death, though it is
far broader than the normal one. Basically we would agree that it's appropriate
to give up on someone when they have no brain left to revive. That is, 
we do agree that someone who has been burnt to ashes is gone, and someone whose
brain has been totally destroyed by disease or accident is gone. But total
destruction in the sense I mean is very rare (unless done by current society

after declaration of "death", when a person IS burnt to ashes or allowed to 
rot)Among the other consequences of this notion is that we try, in suspension, 
as
an absolute minimum, to ensure that as little destruction occurs to our
brains as possible.

And finally, I will reiterate what I said before: we aim to freeze/vitrify and
store people with as little damage as we can. It is all the better if we can
find some way in which we know how to revive them. But just as our ideas about
the technology for revival aren't the central ideas of cryonics, neither are
our methods of suspension.

I hope that this discussion makes the matter clearer in your mind.

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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