X-Message-Number: 5789 From: (Brian Wowk) Newsgroups: sci.cryonics,sci.life-extension,uk.legal Subject: Re: Death (was Donaldson MR and Miss Hindley) Date: 21 Feb 96 05:10:03 GMT Message-ID: <> References: <> <> In <> Marshall Rice <> writes: >> I wonder if Marshall Rice would like to tell us what he thinks would be a >> critera for there to be no longer any possibility of recovering the >> information required (to revive a person). >The criterion is the ONSET of tissue death which, in the case of the human >brain, usually occurs about three minutes after disruption of the blood >supply. >Let me draw an analogy. Imagine a shelf of books. Imagine that you began >tearing out the pages and throwing them on the floor, then tearing the pages >into individual sentences, then the sentences into words and finally the words >into letters... In formal debating, this particular tactic is what is known as the BIG LIE: a lie so outrageous, yet told so forcefully that one's opponent is left speechless and in shock. Having already dazzled us with his deep knowledge of central nervous system cryobiology (i.e. frozen brain = mush), Mr. Rice now treats us to further authoritative discourse on another subject about which he obviously knows nothing: cerebral resuscitation. We are apparently to believe that after three minutes of (warm?) ischemia, the brain undergoes a magical transition called "death" which is accompanied by the immediate and total disintegration of its constituent cells into jumbled atoms and molecules. This extraordinary assertion will no doubt come as a great surprise to cerebral resuscitation researchers who for years have been laboring under the assumption that mere ion pump failure and leukocyte plugging was responsible for the "no reflow" phenonmenon after 3 to 5 minutes of cardiac arrest. I suggest that Marshall Rice submit his own revolutionary theories to a journal immediately, accompanied by an explanation of how anti-coagulants, calcium channel blockers, and free radical scavengers have in recent experiments allowed recovery from warm ischemic insults 10 minutes beyond his ominous "ONSET of tissue death." Cerebral ischemic injury is in fact a far more subtle and complex process than instantaneous disintegration after three minutes. Live neural cells can in fact be cultured HOURS after clinical death (see the Cryobiological Case for Cryonics at our Web site). I also suggest reading The Pathophysiology of Cerebral Ischemia by Mike Darwin in Services --> BioPreservation section of our page. Cell death, brain death, and personal death are long and very complex PROCESSES, not discrete events that occur at any specific instant in time. Finally, just a reminder that this is all academic to most cryonics cases, because breathing and circulation are restored in LESS than three minutes after cardiac arrest. *************************************************************************** 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=5789