X-Message-Number: 5837
From: Peter Merel <>
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics,sci.life-extension
Subject: Re: Virtue of suffering
Date: 25 Feb 1996 14:50:06 +1100
Message-ID: <4gom9e$>
References: <> <>

John Sharman <> writes:

>No. Until you lot have succeeded in resurrecting one, the use of the
>term "patient" is a misleading falsehood. Only when you have done that
>will you have *any* evidence to refute the proposition that they are
>dead. I might even give you some credence if you could do it with a
>gerbil. But you can't.

Actually, there have been several encouraging studies done over the last
few years; BPI's Mike Darwin has successfully suspended and revived
dogs, albeit not over a period of more than a day, and not down to much
below zero - the dogs didn't actually freeze. Then there's a team of
cryobiologists in South Africa, as described in the December 8 1995 New
Scientist, who have successfully frozen rat hearts down to liquid
nitrogen temperatures, and revived them and got them beating again. And
of course there's Suda's work with cat brains - all very encouraging.
The gerbil-specific stuff is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

Of course none of this work is relevant to existing corpsicles - they've
all been damaged by freezing procedures to the point where nanotechnology
or something similar will be required to heal them. But it does suggest that
it may be possible to come up with freezing techniques that would not do
such damage - ones that would result in vitrification rather than 
crystallization of the patients.

>I certainly wouldn't want someone stealing a chunk of my estate on the
>pretext that some purpose would be served by refrigerating me.

Stealing my arse. You are legally entitled to set up a life insurance policy
naming whoever you like as a beneficiary; such policies are contracts 
predicated on legal (but not biomedical) death, and if you don't want one
no one is twisting your arm. The question is, why would you want to twist
the arms of those who do want one?

>Arse about face again. They are corpses until you prove the contrary. I
>know religious loonies who believe in bodily resurrection on the Day of
>the Last Judgment. Even their crippled intelligences are capable of
>seeing that a cadaver is a cadaver. Why can't you see it?

Ah, so a woman isn't fertile until she actually gives birth? I can think 
of a few women who might disagree with logic like that.

-- 

mailto:                 |            Accept Everything.         |

http://www.zip.com.au/~pete/           |            Reject Nothing.            |


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