X-Message-Number: 5959 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: To John Sharman and others Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 23:03:09 -0800 (PST) To John Sharman, once more: You should know first that so far as we are able we ARE working on the problem of making a better suspension (or cryopreservation). You should also know how many cryonicists there are, right now: very roughly, about 1000. Even though a community of 1000 devotes a lot of its resources to the needed research, it will not make rapid progress. In terms of our desire to be suspended (or cryopreserved) that fact does not change our desire. It is, however, one reason why we do not intend to wait until we can revive a gerbil from suspension. Not only that, but we must deal with lots of other issues, legal ones included, to make any progress, even in research. There are a few cryobiologists who want to be frozen themselves, but even they get their research money from agencies who aren't interested in human cryopreservation at all ... and in some cases, such as Pegg and the Society for Cryobiology, are actively opposed. If you wish to contribute to the research needed, your contributions are more than welcome. If you simply wish to stand on the sidelines and carp, you will be ignored. As for nanotechnology, some might count me as a cryonicist who does not believe that nanotechnology will come near to doing what is claimed in the time scales claimed. IN THE LITERAL SENSE, nanotechnology consists of any means we have to manipulate events on a molecular scale; such means include those from biotechnology (which, though many devotees of nanotechnology refuse to admit it)is now farthest along in terms of the power and variety of manipulations it makes possible, and nowhere near exhaustion. Nanotechnology also includes materials science: the invention of plastics was the start of this science, but scientists have been able to produce many materials with surprizing and useful structures at the molecular level, far beyond plastics. Some are even thinking about making systems which on a molecular level work like molecule- sized machines (I do not refer to those allied with Drexler, but to others). I will point out that lots of biological molecules work as molecule-sized machines: that is how and why they do what they do. (The class of enzymes, which is very large, consists of just such molecular machines). And there is also considerable work in the computing community to do such things as make memories out of suitably arranged molecules. This latter work has not yet produced devices on the market, but very well may do so in the near future. Unfortunately, some cryonicists (and others who are not cryonicists) do not mean by nanotechnology what I have described in the last paragraph, but some- thing else more specific, a constraint which I think unwise to make. I do not know or claim to know just when our abilities in nanotechnology (in the broad sense I have just described) will allow us to repair people suspended with present technology. I will say, though, that we have only just begun to use these ideas, and there is not reason at all why some version of nanotechnology will not be able to carry out any conceivable manipulation of every cell in any suspended person's brain, doing whatever repairs and replacement might be needed TO EVERY CELL AT ONCE. Currently we see great excitement and concern, not just in the scientific but even in the legal world, about manipulation of genes. Such manipulation, of course, gives one more example of nanotechnology. But if we think just a little more broadly, this excitement is excitement about some very minor and crude advances. We have climbed to the top of some rather small hills, but when we look out from our newly acquired abilities it's very plain that we can go orders of magnitude further than we have. I would agree that we see a vast mountain range before us, but would add that it only seems so close because of the illusion caused by the way it now dominates the sky. To actually scale it will take hundreds of years. But then, in suspension, we can wait for as long as it takes. Such a possibility underlies the thinking of virtually every cryonicist. In fact, it was the thinking of CRYONICISTS that helped produce the general idea of nanotechnology, not the other way around. (You can see this if you look at the early books of Drexler, who invented and popularized the word "nanotechnology"). I hope that this explains the relation of nanotechnology to cryonics, in a better way than all the media hype has done before. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5959