X-Message-Number: 463
From att!compuserve.com!73337.2723 Fri Sep 20 02:46:58 EDT 1991
Date: 20 Sep 91 02:40:34 EDT
From: Brian Wowk <>
Subject: Cryonics and Brain Injury

To: >INTERNET:

     In reply to the recent question about possible brain injury
following revival, I would like to raise the following points.

     Cryonics is a "first-in-last-out" process.  As suspension
technology improves, less sophisticated repairs will be required for
revival.  Eventually the severity of suspension injury and level of
repair capability will overlap.  When this happens we will be able to
pull people in and out of solid-state suspension at will.  (I
personally estimate this capability to be about 40 years away.)

     Of course, once overlap is achieved, cryonics will be routine
practice in medicine.  (If the process is immediately reversible, few
would dispute its utility.)  In the meantime, cell repair technology
will continue to advance, and we will begin reaching further back in
time to recover patients suspended with greater degrees of injury.
Eventually (perhaps by the early 22nd century) we will recover
cryonics patients suspended today.

     The most important point I want to make is that this process will
be incremental.  No one with unique, never-before treated injuries
will ever have cell repair machines turned loose on them without
simulation on animal and computer models first.  Also, because
progress is incremental, there will always be a baseline of knowledge
concerning less severe, but similar injury.

      This is not to say there won't be problems.  I confidently
predict the most unsettling incidents will happen early next century,
during the approach to overlap.  People will play around with this
technology (like Barney Clark and the artificial heart), pushing
limits, suspending and reviving people with technology not up to the
task.  I don't believe Alcor will engage in this kind of behavior, but
unscrupulous, glory-seeking researchers probably will.

      Even 200 years from now, there will be problems.  If the
fundamental fabric of memory and personality is obliterated by injury,
no technology will be able to restore it.  We will always be able to
restore people to health, youth, and physical wholeness, but we will
not always be able to restore memories.  Thus, the worst form of brain
damage in the far future will be amnesia.  The cure: begin
accumulating new memories, and hope some trace of the original person
persists.

      There will also be iatrogenic problems: Cell repair technology
itself will occasionally misfire.  If a patient wakes up in a
condition worse than we expect, we will put them back into biostasis
(using advanced means) until we can figure out what went wrong.

                                            --- Brian Wowk

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