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. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=6981