X-Message-Number: 7705 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: Re: Visser failure Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 23:43:13 -0800 (PST) Hi again! Visser has certainly not behaved as a scientist should, in any respect. I will note, also, that she is presently a PhD STUDENT, ie. in the course of learning how to do science, not an established scientist on her own. And yes, she may well have violated moral norms, although so far I haven't seen an explicit statement that she (for instance) did not have consent from her subjects. I'd like a reference to that. So far the kinds of things I've read about her come from Authorities who are upset that she didn't follow established procedures, not that she was acting immorally. Maybe Mike has a newspaper article or something which describes her conduct toward her subjects, and I just haven't read it. As for whether what she's been doing in cryobiology is SCIENCE, from what I saw at the Alcor Festival I certainly agree with Mike. Basically she was messing around: with rat hearts, with her cryoprotectant, and so on and on. Apparently on Friday it was far worse, with no set procedure at all. HOWEVER I would not demand that something be science, in the sense of being carefully done, with everything specified so as to make replication easy, and so on, for it to be worth attention. IF her experiments had worked, even just one of them, then she would not have been doing any more science than before, but she would have done something to which we should pay attention. But no, SHE DID NOT. Fundamentally I don't care how much her husband sent negative messages about lots of us on Cryonet, nor what other things she's been doing. The crucial point here is that the hearts, when we knew they were kept at LN temperatures for the required time, DID NOT REVIVE WHEN SHE TRIED TO REVIVE THEM. All else is irrelevancy. And what if she did lie to her AIDS subjects? Yes, that would have made me mistrust her more... and so if she were to try a public experiment, I would be all the more rigorous in my requirement that the hearts beat after verifiable immersion for 20 minutes in LN. If Mr. Mengele had found what may be a successful cryoprotectant, it would not become less successful because of his immorality. Sure, I'd want to see that immorality dealt with, but not by refusing to attend to what he had done. (Think seriously: now which country was it that really got rocketry going?). As for whether Visser is worth attention NOW, I would say she is not. If her methods can somehow be fixed, that is her job, not ours. We should forget her and work on other methods such as vitrification, which now still looks much better than its competition. And of course BioPreservation might find better cryoprotectants. Just wipe her from our slate. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson PS: I really mean what I said about consent. If someone on Cryonet can send me an article, or quote from one, which deals specifically with how she treated her patients, I'd certainly like to receive it. Incidentally, an incident happened in Australia about 1984 that reminds me a little of the Visser business... though the participants were just as mistaken, they may not have had Visser's other (possible) faults. One day I opened my paper (THE AUSTRALIAN) and found an article about some scientists up in Queensland who announced that they would soon demonstrate successful freezing of kidneys. None of them had any previous contact with cryobiology, their names simply weren't present anywhere. Hmmm. It looked to me that they were very new to the field, and saw all the problems as simple to solve. Why, in just a few months, we'll wrap that problem up and give it to you with a ribbon round it ... After which there was silence. >From watching the experiments it looked to me that there were lots of ways someone could fool themselves or be mistaken about their results --- not trying to fool others, just fooling themselves. Why, of course the heart is is LN. We needn't use a thermocouple to verify that, we've looked through all the fog and see it down there ... Visser apparently convinced herself that there had been a little bit of beating in the first heart she did. It takes experience to learn the pitfalls in such experiments. No one in South Africa had such experience, telling them what must be carefully measured, what must be done so the results are replicated, etc etc. Sure, a careful scholar would have read up on everything he could find which had been done before. But too often that isn't done. Few in Australia (at that time) had such experience, either. And when I first heard of Visser on the net, the first thing I thought of was that newspaper article from THE AUSTRALIAN, in 1985. Oh dear, another one! was my first thought. Unfortunately, it looks like that's just what's happened... though this time with all kinds of curlicues and gargoyles to decorate the scenery. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7705