X-Message-Number: 5734 Date: Wed, 14 Feb 96 20:39:24 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: re Neuropreservation Publication Kevin Q. Brown, #5728, wonders > >Who was the first person to consider neurosuspension to be a >viable variation on whole-body cryonics? > To the best of my knowledge, the answer is: Ev Cooper, writing in the September 1965 issue of his newsletter, *Freeze-Wait-Reanimate*. The breaking news of the day was that Isamu Suda & colleagues in Kobe, Japan had just frozen a cat brain for 203 days then rewarmed it and gotten brain waves (an amazing feat by today's standards too). This inspired Cooper to ask, "What does this mean for the freezing and suspended animation of humans?" His answer, in part: "It means we have experimental results that indicate it is increasingly certain that the human brain can be frozen, stored, and revived. It may well mean that *something* of this injection process [injection of glycerol solution prior to freezing, as was done with the the cat brain] may be the best for humans. "We shudder to think of our brain estranged from its cave, its home, its comfortable brainpan. We find it virtually impossible to imagine. Nevertheless, if our survival really depended upon it, many of us would submit to such an operation. Suda's research doesn't mean such a separation is absolutely necessary. It is, however, one alternative we should explore. It indicates a reasonable possibility for the storage of the human brain. ... "If we let our imagination go way-out, we can consider the storage of the brain alone, to be reanimated later, and placed in a body which has been grown from one of the original body cells. This arrangement should be especially appealing to those who worry so much about space and the cost of refrigeration." So, clearly Cooper had the basic ideas behind neurosuspension in mind (brain-only in this case). This was only 15 months after Ettinger's book *The Prospect of Immortality* was first published by Doubleday, and well before anyone had been frozen, whole-body or otherwise. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5734