X-Message-Number: 4059
From: 
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 13:05:21 -0500
Subject: reanimation

Robin Helweg-Larsen (#4049) asks further questions about how to make, and who
will make, decisions pertaining to reanimation, rehabilitation, and changes
in the individual; also costs.

As previously indicated, Cryonics Institute (and doubtless other
organizations) will try to accomodate the patient's previously expressed
wishes. In any case, the directors will try to act in the patient's best
interests as they perceive them.

My own guess is that the most prudent course, for the patient and for the
organization, is to try initially to restore the patient to the state most
nearly approximating the last condition he remembers or ought to remember,
but of course with good health. After that the revived patient can study the
situation and seek the advice of the directors and anyone else he chooses,
and go from there.

It is unlikely that there will be any urgency about such decisions. Nor is it
likely that most of them will be irreversible. 

As for experimental surgery, why should there be any? If somehow such is
deemed advisable, again it should certainly be reversible, if we are talking
about reanimation in an era of advanced nanotechnology. At worst, the patient
can be suspended again, to wait for still more advanced technology.

As for the funding, if we assume no end to progress, then both society as a
whole and the cryonics organizations in particular, as well as any separate
trust funds of individual patients, should grow in wealth eventually to any
requisite amount

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute

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