X-Message-Number: 6981
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 19:52:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doug Skrecky <>
Subject: Visser technique generates favorable media reaction

 The recent trial of the Visser technique must have generated a lot of
 publicity since word of it found its way into the Toronto Sun while I was
 visiting that fair city. Although the article barely mentioned cryonics
 till its end, it is nonetheless the first and only positive article
 regarding cryonics that I have ever seen published in a Canadian
 newspaper. Due to its importance and with due apologies to the notion of
 copywrite I would like to quote the entire the short article here as
 follows: 

 From The Toronto Sun, Monday September 23,1996

 Frozen organs offer medical hope

 COLD-HEARTED RAT

   Scottsdale, Ariz. (AP) - One moment the laboratory bustled. People
 poured fluid into tubes, monitored its temperature and tended to clamps
 controlling its flow. 
   The next, all work stopped. Everyone in the lab leaned in close as the
 focus of their labor was removed from a beaker. 
   Sitting in the center of one scientist's palm was a rat heart, the size
 and hue of a red grape. And it was beating. 
   Cheers erupted at what appeared to be the successful revival of an
 organ that had been frozen to its core in liquid nitrogen, at -196 C. 
 Several people gasped and one women cried. 
   The tiny realm of cryobiology, which studies the effects of low
 temperatures on organisms, has been set abuzz by the successful
 defrosting of a tiny, pulsating organ. 
   So what's the big deal? 
   If such a heart can be transplanted back into the rat and work, the
 procedure would be a first step to storing human organs indefinitely,
 giving doctors limitless time to test tissue for disease and match needy
 recipients perfectly to particular organs. Or limbs. Or glands. 
   Freezing at the temperature of liquid nitrogen has been the goal of
 cryobiologists world-wide for decades. It's the coldest attainable
 temperature, scientists believe, and would presumably immobilize anything
 that could invade an organ. 
   The new method made its U.S. debut earlier this month at Alcor Life
 Extension Foundation, a cryonics facility here. Cryonicists believe such
 research will eventually lead to a way to preserve, and revive, whole
 bodies. 


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