X-Message-Number: 4170
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Keith Lynch's comments about China.
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 21:49:27 -0700 (PDT)

I think that what Yvan Bozzonetti was talking about had nothing to do with
communism at all, and your comment was completely off base. If you follow
the financial press, China has loosened up a lot in the last few years,
and lets lots of private enterprizes, including foreign ones, prosper in
many sections of the country. The general opinion is that communism will not
survive in China for very long at all, though it may survive as an empty
doctrine (people might still visit Mao's tomb, for instance). 

True, this is not certain, though there has been a VERY significant loosening.
The Chinese government, seeing what has happened when communism fell apart in
Russia, is trying to have that happen without all the turmoil and strife. 
Whether they can succeed in this isn't yet clear at all. But if they fail it
would mean not that communism had perpetuated itself but that a military
government, with no particular ideology, had taken over instead.

If they succeed, of course, China may very well become the world's greatest
economic power. It is one of the more interesting stories of the latter part
of this century, and many people are watching to see how it works out.

On a completely different matter:

Many months ago there was some discussion on the net about an experiment 
that a cryonicist (if I remember, in New York) was setting up to do. Basically
the idea was to train nematodes or similar primitive animals and then freeze
them. After revival, would they still recall their earlier training? Has
anything come of that by now? Does anyone on the net know what became of it?

There is a similar experiment which might be tried on a much more complex
animal. Salamanders have remarkable powers of brain repair. It would be 
of interest to first train a salamander, then remove some large part of the
salamander's brain, freeze it, then thaw it out and replace it either in
the original salamander or in another one. They seem to be able to regrow 
the major connections, both nerves and blood vessels, and actually recover
from such treatment (if we omit the freezing). So can they recover and 
remember after such treatment? If nothing else, this may give us a handle
on just how much brain disruption freezing might cause. I am wary, personally,
of experiments which simply do the same thing to mammals, mainly because 
we really need to know not just how bad the animal LOOKS after such treatment
but the degree to which healing remains possible. Brain repair of any kind
doesn't naturally happen in mammals, but there are animals in which it does.

So what is the status of the nematode experiments? (If I got it wrong and
the animals weren't nematodes but something else, I still want to know the
answer to the question).

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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