X-Message-Number: 3306 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Re: biostasis viability Date: Wed, 19 Oct 1994 21:26:41 -0700 (PDT) Some comments are in order: 1. Almost by definition, no one is suspended unless they are already seriously damaged. Cryonics is not a lark into the future. It is an attempt to survive. To ask that survival be assured before you decide to make your personal arrangements for suspension is like someone who refuses to get into the lifeboat of a sinking ship because the living arrangements on the lifeboat won't be so nice as those on the ship ... except that the ship is sinking. 2. The subjects which have now taken on the common name "nanotechnology" existed for some time prior to Drexler's book. Even in Drexler's book, he points out that cryonicists were seriously thinking about what would be needed for revival. 3. Ralph Merkle's article was originally published in MEDICAL HYPOTHESES, by no means a mainstream journal. Furthermore, as I discussed in a (quite tardily published) article in CRYONICS 15:3(1994) 37-39, there are very serious reasons to believe that the problem of repair will be harder than Ralph makes it seem. The main gap in our knowledge consists of our understanding of how human memory works. We are (collectively) moving towards that understanding, but without it we simply cannot PROMISE that revival will someday become possible. Does this provide an argument against cryonics? NO. To see why, refer to Point 1 above. 4. Just as with any other technique, fixation has practical problems which show up when you try to actually DO it rather than theorize about it. One such problem is that of reaching the inner parts of the brain with fixative: the fixative works on the blood vessels too, and makes it harder to get fixative into the brain beyond its outer layers. If we wish to theorize, with the complete understanding of memory which we do not now have, we might well verify that fixatives have preserved someone --- if the problems of using them are also solved. The reasons for using cryobiology instead have been well discussed in previous messages; but serious work on fixation haven't even begun. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3306