X-Message-Number: 5505 From: (Brian Wowk) Newsgroups: sci.cryonics Subject: Re: Radiation preservation Date: 30 Dec 95 20:16:23 GMT Message-ID: <> References: <4ae9il$> <4c2r5t$> In <4c2r5t$> (NetMan) writes: > (George Watson) wrote: >>I am curious about what aspects of radiation preservation could be >>used to store a body or a head (brain ) for reanimation. >>Could you seal someone in say a block of plexiglass and then irradiate >>them to prevent parasitic decay? Obviously you would not stop chemical >>decomposition but perhaps the lack of parasitic structural decay would >>be enough to retain the physical structure of the brain and THAT would >>be enough to match the neuron circuits and allow reconstruction. >>Is enough of the personality stored in the physical structure of >>nueron circuits such that preservation of electrical and chemical >>potentials is not needed for reconstruction? Sorry I was too busy to respond to your original inquiry. High dose irradiation would indeed stop microbial decay, but it would not stop chemistry. Cells are full of autolytic enzymes that will reduce a dead brain (irradiated or not) to mush within a few days at room temperature. A far superior (and cheaper) strategy is chemical fixation. Chemical fixation stops microbial decay and stops chemistry almost completely. Unfortunately it also causes devastation at the molecular level. Whether the essential elements of memory and identity survive this devastation is not currently known. Achieving rapid, effective chemical fixation of a sample as large as a whole brain also has many practical difficulties that I won't go into (unless you ask). Suffice to say that no cell has ever (or could ever) spontaneously recover from chemical fixation. On the other hand, many individual cells recover spontaneously from cryopreservation protocols similar to ones now used on cryonics patients. (See the "Cryobiological Case for Cryonics" in the Library section of the CryoCare Web Page.) Clearly cryopreservation is the most conservative, least injurious, and most-likely-to-succeed means to get our minds to the future when we are dying today. *************************************************************************** Brian Wowk CryoCare Foundation 1-800-TOP-CARE President Your Gateway to the Future http://www.cryocare.org/cryocare/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5505