X-Message-Number: 3248 Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 23:37:12 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: CRYONICS:Right to Die Marc Atkin complains that cryonicists should be able to choose their time and mode of death, in order to maximize their chances of a good cryopreservation. Naturally I agree with him, and I imagine that everyone who has signed with a cryonics organization feels the same way. I can't answer all your questions, Marc, but here are some pointers to the many conflicting issues involved. 1. "Right to die" legislation is being enacted (or not enacted) on a state-by-state basis. Your situation will vary depending on your location. Since this remains a controversial issue, it's impossible to see, right now, how and when it will affect cryonics. 2. We see cryopreservation as a way of (we hope) perpetuating life, but most orthodox scientists and doctors believe that it has a zero chance of achieving its objectives. We believe that all the evidence is on our side, but we also see that it is going to take a massive shift of assumptions and values before our outlook on death will be widely accepted. For the time being, then, the officials we deal with will continue to see cryonics as a way of killing people, while we see it as a way of potentially saving lives, and there is usually no way to bridge this misunderstanding. 3. Suicide, assisted or otherwise, is almost always cause for an autopsy, which in turn means a) the patient will usually be held, unmedicated, for 24 hours or longer, at a temperature significantly above freezing, and b) the autopsy will usually include dissection of the brain. The medical examiner has pretty much absolute authority to decide whether to perform an autopsy. After all, "dead" people have no human rights. The only way to choose to terminate your life without providing grounds for autopsy is by refusing food and fluids, and several cryonicists (suffering terminal illnesses) have taken this path. It is a very painful and distressing process and does not lead to an optimum cryopreservation. 4. Since cryonics is not a recognized medical procedure, it is not legal to "premedicate" a patient (i.e. administer appropriate drugs to optimize a cryopreservation) before the patient is declared legally dead. 5. It is not advisable for a medically qualified employee or associate of a cryonics organization to pronounce legal death, because this can be seen as a "conflict of interest"--i.e. a judge might believe that the employee was motivated to "kill off" the cryonics patient so that the cryonics organization can get the insurance money. Consequently, legal death must be pronounced by staff who probably have no interest in cryonics, and may be hostile toward the concept. As a result, they may feel little sense of urgency about it. 6. The accepted medical definition of death has changed over time, but is still quite different from a cryonicist's definition of death. Legal death is pronounced when there is no evidence of pulse, respiration, or brain activity (I am oversimplifying, here). To a cryonicist, a patient is not necessarily permanently dead if the brain structure and cell states have been preserved, or have not yet deteriorated. Cold-water drowning victims are frequently resuscitated after being "dead" by normal definitions for two or three hours. Still, the gap continues to exist between what seems obvious to us, and what seems appropriate in the world of orthodox medicine. My personal feeling is that cryonics, right now, has only a small chance of success, for two main reasons: a) there has been insufficient money for research on reversible brain cryopreservation, and b) we are not able to choose how and when we die. If both of these issues could be resolved in our favor, I believe cryonics would become a good bet as opposed to a longshot. Of course, a longshot is still better than no chance at all. ############################################################ Charles Platt, 1133 Broadway (room 1214), New York, NY 10010 Voice: 212 929 3983 Fax: 212 929 4467 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3248