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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=463