X-Message-Number: 5348
Date: 06 Dec 95 05:22:16 EST
From: "Clifton  G. Clue Jr" <>
Subject: Common Sense

Steve Bridge wrote a funny and insightful respoonse about us Old Farts 
(OFs) and our response to the so-called Young Bucks (YBs) in cryonics.  The 
generalities of what Steve says are valid and worth careful consideration 
by both new and old cryonicists alike.  It is easy to become reactionary, 
infexible and set in one's ways.  But I think Steve picked poor examples in 
this case for specifics.

I have read his work and/or or personally known Thomas Donaldson for a long 
time, nearly 20 years now.  The remarks he makes about virtual reality, 
sinigularities and quick fix answers to complex problems are not OFs 
reactionary rhetoric.  They represent what he has been saying, quietly and 
otherwise, for many years.  It is easy to simply put people into 
catergories and their arguments along with them, mouth some platitudes, and 
ignore the realities.  With all due respect to Steve, he has become an 
expert at this, and it has nothing to do with being a young YB or an OF.  
It is more a matter of temprament, word-view, and need to believe.

It is also certainly not confined to cryonics or politics.  Anyone who 
wants to see old men take vocal, strong, daring, innovative, 
technologically cutting edge, and quite mistaken positions should give 
"Teller's War: The Top sexret Story Behind the Star-Wars Deception" by 
William Broad  (ISBN# 0-671-86738-5) a good reading.  There is much wrong 
with this book, including the bias of its author, but what is almost 
certainly not wrong is the picture it paints of Teller (The so-called 
father iof the hydrogen bomb) as a man who despite his septugenerian status 
was seduced by the sparkle of dream science (and his own frustrated dreams 
of youth) and who lost sight of hard realities.  Old men, even old 
scientistis, from Metchinkoff to Brown-Sequard to Pauling (with vitamin C 
as a cancer "cure" in Pauling's case) are but a few examples.  Temprament 
and need are more critical than age.

The point Thomas and I and others have tried to make about the Virtual 
Reality people is not that virtual reality is bad, or that it will not 
bring wonderful applications and advantages.  It will.  Further, it is not 
that biology is better, or that implementation in nonbiological forms is 
not possible.  I think these technologies are very likely to be developed 
if man endures, and I have no argument with their possibility.  Nor do I 
have any argument with an appreciation of the possibilitie of, the wonders 
of, and the pursuit of these technologies.  That is all fine and good.  And 
those of us who have pursued cryonics are no different in that respect.

But one critical difference I see in these capital VR and capital N people 
is a belief that what they are doing is THE answer.  They are not really 
interested in virtual reality as away to deal with everyday reality, but as 
a way to escape it.  They see the technology as a way around 
responsibility.  And please gentlemen, (and it is gentle MEN, not women) 
don't take up bandwith debating these points.  I've had too many personal 
encounters with males like you; a lifetime's worth.  It has gotten worse 
with each generation.

Please note, I am not daming an entire generation(s).  There are many 
smart, realistic and rigorous thinkers out there of all ages.  But that 
does not chage the fact that statistically speaking those now in their late 
teens and early 20's seem to be particularly afflicted with a kind of 
escapist brain rot which is quite distinctive.  I would also note, with 
some uncharacteristic optimism, that the younger children I see these days 
(grades 1-5) seem more involved with the world and less escapist, but my 
sample size there is small.

I take my time to respond to this issue because I and others around me have 
had some sobering experiences recently.  21st accepts "interns" from 
medical schools; usually medical students in their 4th year of medical 
school who come out to work in the dog lab for a month or two as part of 
their academic requirements.  I am lining up more students for this 
program, and we have found it interesting.  Terrifying and interesting. 

We recently had a student from a major American medical school, one notch 
below Ivy League status.  This was an affable person, very pleasant.  And 
one of the least competent people I have ever met.  Our LVN knows an order 
of magnitude more medicine than this student did.  Sandra Russell, one of 
our ICU techs and 21st Baord Member runs a successful business preparing 
students for the MCAT and LSAT; she was stunned that this individial would 
have an M.D. in back of his/her name in 6 months.  Frankly, most 2nd  year 
nursing students could reason better and had a better grasp of medicine 
when I used to work with them during their clinical rotation through the 
dialysis and transplantation unit a decade ago.

As I turned to Steve Harris, M.D. at one point and wryly said, "Heh, wait a 
minute, as I understand it, this cryonics idea is supposed to work like 
this: we freeze dying people today so that tommorrow's super-doctors can 
thaw them out, cure them and bring them back to life.  If this is what 
tomorrow's Docs are going to be like, we're in trouble!  In fact, we may be 
our own last best hope!"

People who are looking for quick fixes and simple solutions aren't 
necessarily OFs or YBs.  It is not that simple. Would that it were.

For over a year now I've seen proposals floated here that involved "rapid" 
cooling using perfusion of the circulatory system with gas or low freezing 
point liquids for homogenous "flash" cooling to avoid freezing or 
devitrification upon rewarming.  There is nothing wrong with these ideas 
per se.  In fact, they were thought of, investigated, and in some cases 
analyzed mathmatically over a decade ago.  The problem is that people like 
Doug Skreky can't really think in any meaningful scientific sense.  The 
first step to investigating ideas is to see what others have done.  
Mathmatical models on the rates at which heat can be removed from organs by 
gas perfusion were published years ago.  Extensive experiments have been 
done with kidneys using gas perfusion.  Simple recourse to a Merck manual 
and to a scientific calculator will give you the numbers you need to figure 
heat removal capacity, rehology vs. temperature and so on, of various 
possible "perfusable" heat exchange fluids, and a copy of Guyton's Textbook 
of Medical Physiology will give you relevant numbers for flow rates 
achieveable, capillary diameter, pressure drops and so on.  In fact, a wide 
variety of working fluids was tried in perfusing kidneys 20 YEARS AGO 
including silicone oils, flurocarbons and other compounds.

The use of gas or non-freezeable fluids still shows some promise in my 
opinion not so much for rapid heat exchange, as for minimizing mechanical 
injury by freezing much of the vasculature from ice, and by moderating 
mechanical stress while vitrifying large masses of tissues. However, these 
*possibilities* must be proved out in the laboratory, not speculated idly 
about on paper or in cyberspace.  A pseudoscientific "proposal" is not 
science.

Blue-skying is a fine place to start, as I've said here before.  But it is 
not where you stop.  Responsible theorizing means that you go as far as you 
can to "test" your idea before you dump it into a public forum as a serious 
proposal.  Sure, you can always say "Gee, I don't know, can anyone tell me 
"what if..."  That too is OK, but it will not earn you much respect.  And, 
if the answers the problems/questions/approach you lay out are obvious, the 
answers long ago found by others, then you merely look like what you are: a 
fool.

New people who ask simple, obvious questions should politely referred to 
the FAQ section of CryoNet.  Fools should be treated as such.

Doug Skrecky has been around long enough to qualify for fool status many 
times over.  A conventional cryobiologist has done a mathmatical analysis 
of gas perfusion's efficacy as a heat exchange medium and published it in 
Cryobiology.  Extensive work has been done on freeze-substitution, and yet 
I see uniformed, indeed even stupid questions in these areas from people 
who should know better.  

The problem here is that these people do not know how to either think or 
how to work.  Their lives will be a wasteland as a consequence.

This is not a new phenomenon.  Many years ago the King of Syracuse asked  
the same question (phrased differently) that our medical student asked me 
about books and medicine.  We were  standing in my library and I handed him 
a copy of Semmelweiss' dissertation The Etiology of Childbed Fever.  It is 
715 pages long (excluding the Open Letters). My copy is a hand-tooled, 
gold-embossed leather-bound reproduction of the original.  I treasure it 
greatly, and I have read it.  As the student flipped through the pages I 
stopped him at the numerous tables of statistics in the book; showing him 
that this was one of the first times that statistical analysis was used to 
prove a critical point in medicine.  He did not know who Semmelweiss was, 
or what childbed fever was.  He said, "Wow, books, they just take so long 
to read, I mean really read, you know, it's too bad there isn't some way to 
put like put them on MTV in 15 minutes, you know the important parts."

No, I am not making this up.  He will be an M.D. by Christmas.  The King of 
Syracuse wanted to learn geometery from Archimedes and had a similar 
complaint; to which Archimedes responded appropriately: "There is no Royal 
road to geometery, Sire."

I am not anti- Young Buck.  I am not even abhorred by the notion of making 
brand new universes in yoiur basement that "escape" this one and have 
different physical laws.  I am not closed to almost any possibility.  The 
world is just too weird for that.  And history teaches otherwise; the 
Michelson's of the world are invariably suceeded by the Einstens, the 
Heisenbergs and the Planks.  I have no quarrel with any wild things youg 
men want, and in fact woulg go so far as to say that I have either wanted 
the same things or thought of them myself; and I am not alone in this.

My quarrel is with sloppiness, lack of intellectual rigor and people 
mistking cryonics, nanotechnology and virtual reality for religion and for 
an excuse for laziness.  Worse still, my quarrel is with their mistaking 
that their vision of their future with these technologies, no matter how 
detailed or driven, will really map the reality of their unfolding very 
well.  This is naieve and stupid.  In the very young it is naieve and 
ignorant (a tedious but necessary state of affairs soon cured by time and 
experience) in the man or woman pusjing 30 it is just plain stupid.  In 
someone like Moravec and the (big N)anotechnology people it is pitiable and 
fightening.

Ad hominem?  Yes.  And I am well aware that in this day and age calling a 
fool a fool is politically incorrect. Perhaps labelling them "reality 
challenged" would raise fewer hackles.

So, maybe I am an Old Fart. But if idle theorizing and religious vision is 
what passes for youthful enthusiasm and science now, then it really doesn't 
matter what I am or what "they" are, because in the long run (which will 
arrive all too soon) neither of us will be anything at all.

I would love to know what the real-life experiences of these visionaries 
have been like. I think I have a very good idea.  And I feel sorry for 
them.

Mike Darwin COF (Certified Old Fart)


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