X-Message-Number: 859
From: Charles Platt
Subject: Alcor New York News: June, 1992
[ Charles Platt kindly provided an electronic copy of the June 1992
Alcor New York News for distribution to this mailing list.
(The spiffy graphics of his hardcopy version are, of course,
missing below.) Note: The Alcor New York News is not the same
as the Alcor New York Minutes which, to date, exist only in
hardcopy form. - KQB ]
Alcor New York News
-------------------
Number 5: June 1992
NEXT MEETING
Our next meeting will be on Sunday, June 21st, commencing 2 P.M. at the usual
place: 72nd. Street Studios, 131 West 72nd. Street, in Manhattan. There'll be
no special guests this time, but we will have a set of actuarial tables
furnished by an insurance company, so you can find out how long the insurance
industry thinks we have to live (and figure out how to prove them wrong). Come
and join us!
NY TEAM DOUBLES ITS EFFORTS
At our May meeting, we received good news from Stanley Gerber and Robby
Henderson. Both of them are planning to visit Alcor in August for a week of
training to certify them as emergency medical technicians. Also, in September,
they will both enter classes in New York that will eventually qualify them as
paramedics.
In addition, all members of our stabilization team, including the associate
members, are learning protocol and medications. Training sessions will now
take place twice a month (on the second and fourth Sundays) instead of once a
month. And if a suspension occurs within the next couple of months, Curtis
Henderson will go there in person to observe and participate.
Lastly, Gerry Arthus has donated a van which can be used to transport
equipment to the scene of an emergency. The only snag is, we still have to pay
the insurance on the van. Needless to say, if anyone feels inclined to make a
contribution, this would be much appreciated. Generally speaking, Alcor New
York is not supported financially by Alcor in Riverside. We're improving our
local capabilities on our own initiative, for our own benefit--and for yours!
If you are a suspension member within 500 miles of New York City, you could be
saving your own life if you help us to help you in the event of an emergency.
[ Request for Alcor New York donations to be sent to me (the Treasurer of
Alcor New York) elided to not appear too self-serving. Send email to
Brenda Peters () for more information. - KQB ]
NOT-SO-COLD STORAGE?
Several of us have been wondering (again) if liquid nitrogen is really the
best way to preserve cryonics patients. The advantages are obvious: it's
cheap, supplies are plentiful, the dewars have been proven over a period of
years, maintenance is minimal, no thermostatic control is required, and the
patient stays frozen at a constant temperature even during power
interruptions.
But liquid nitrogen has one big disadvantage: it's too cold. At -196 Celsius,
human organs tend to fracture. Nanotechnology may eventually be able to repair
this kind of damage, as well as tiny rips and tears on a cell-by-cell basis.
But wouldn't it be better to freeze patients in such a way that fracturing
doesn't occur in the first place?
It could be done. A slightly higher storage temperature would eliminate the
fracturing problem while diminishing the "life expectancy" of the stored
patient to perhaps 500 years. This seems an acceptable tradeoff. But there are
problems.
First, a refrigerator obviously requires uninterrupted power. A backup
generator can be installed for use during power outages, but this entails
additional expense and still doesn't provide a one-hundred-percent guarantee.
Second, refrigerators that would be large enough for whole-body patients are
designed for horizontal installation, requiring a lot more space than a
vertical dewar. Could the refrigerators be turned on end, and still work
satisfactorily? We don't know. Could they be stacked in a system of racks?
Probably, but it would not be a trivial construction project.
Third, the refrigerators themselves could be more expensive to purchase than
dewars.
We could consider constructing a room-sized walk-in refrigerator of our own
design, with space for dozens of patients. This would provide an economy of
scale (a large refrigerator is potentially more efficient than a small one,
because its volume is greater relative to its wall area). But this again would
be a major project.
All in all, switching over to refrigerators might be like going back to the
early years of cryonics, when no one knew the potential pitfalls and problems
associated with tanks, and there were some catastrophic failures before we
learned how to do the job right. So--are there any other alternatives?
New Options
A few possibilities come to mind. One would be to add a system of electric
heating around a patient inside a dewar of liquid nitrogen. An "electric
blanket" under a thick jacket of thermal insulation would need very little
power to keep the patient at a slightly higher temperature than the -196
Celsius of the surrounding nitrogen. On the other hand, it would have to be
reliable, it would entail a constant power drain, more liquid nitrogen would
be boiled off, the extra bulk of the blanket and its insulation might make it
impossible for two patients to share a dewar, and a thermostat would be
necessary.
Another possibility would be a dewar cooled by a liquid-helium probe. In this
scenario, the patient is surrounded by air inside the dewar. The probe
protrudes through the lid and cooling occurs by convection. Once again, a
thermostat is needed to maintain the correct temperature, and an
uninterruptible power supply is necessary. Also, if two patients shared a
dewar, the second one would have to be pre-cooled before insertion, to avoid
disrupting the temperature of the first.
Which of these alternatives--if any--should Alcor pursue? We're interested in
your comments and opinions. Write to us, or come to our next meeting and make
your views known.
A CONVERSATION WITH KRYOS
Kryos is a man who probably knows more about freezing body organs than any
other researcher in the world. (He'd like to use his real name, but is
reluctant to do so for fear of losing grant money. Cryonics is still a dirty
word in the cryobiological community.)
Kryos agrees that cryonic suspension, as it exists today, is better than no
suspension at all. But he is extremely unhappy about the amount of damage
being caused by the freezing process, even with modern cryoprotectants and a
slow, controlled rate of cooling.
He has some faith in nanotechnology, but he also feels that repairing freezing
damage will be a specialized job, or series of jobs, since different specific
techniques will be needed for different areas of the brain. Roving
nanomachines will have to be specially programmed to handle each task, and
writing these programs will be challenging, to say the least. (It's worth
noting that so far, software has not kept pace with developments in hardware.
We don't even have a completely reliable graphics-oriented operating system
for a microcomputer. A program to tell nanomachines how to repair the billions
of cells in the human brain would be almost unimaginably complicated by
comparison, requiring expertise in both microbiology and robotics.)
Minimal Damage
So--who is going to write this difficult, specialized software? We can imagine
a future where the techniques theoretically exist, but programmers are fully
occupied with tasks that have a higher priority. Why spend countless man-years
figuring out how to repair and resuscitate a small number of corpsicles from
the twentieth century, when the same time could be spent developing cures for
disease?
Since we can't rely on programmers of the future, we should be doing our best
to minimize freezing damage right now. Ideally, we should develop suspension
to the point where only minimal, survivable damage occurs.
How can this be done? Some of us have been talking about formaldehyde or
similar fixing agents as an alternative to freezing. It might be a lot simpler
for nanobots to undo the simple chemical bonds created by a fixing agent than
to have them repair chaotic freezing damage. But Kryos reports that agents
such as formaldehyde are not as permanent as they should be. In his
experience, proteins start to unravel over time.
How about using a fixing agent as well as freezing the patient? Gerry Arthus
had expressed optimism about this possibility, since the fixing agent creates
a lattice of robust molecular bonds that might resist freezing damage. But
Kryos reports that when he tried this with a rabbit brain, the damage was
actually worse than usual. Apparently, the rigid structure was less resilient,
and was pierced by ice crystals instead of partially yielding to them.
His answer is the same now as it was ten years ago: vitrification. This is the
process of freezing tissue in such a way that ice crystals never form. Using a
combination of cryoprotectants, a controlled rate of cooling, and containment
in a high-pressure chamber (500 atmospheres or more), samples of tissue have
been successfully frozen and thawed with virtually no damage visible.
But scaling up from a small sample to a whole organ is another matter
entirely. Also, the concentration of cryoprotectant that is required can be
high enough to be toxic to human tissue. And, each human organ has its own
ideal mix of pressure, cryoprotectant, and cooling rate, creating formidable
problems if someone wants a whole-body suspension.
Even if vitrification scored some real successes, there would be a huge jump
required to take it out of the laboratory, into the field. Imagine a pressure
vessel big enough to accommodate a human head, let alone a whole human body.
Imagine sophisticated equipment that would precisely control and monitor every
variable in the process. Clearly, the equipment would cost much more than
Alcor can currently afford.
A First Step
So, what can we do? When Kryos was asked to name the most important single
improvement we could make in our current suspension techniques, after a
moment's thought, he said it would be computer-controlled perfusion. A regular
PC clone with a fairly simple set of interfaces could control the rate of
cooling and the mix of cryoprotectants in response to feedback from
temperature probes in the patient. Kryos already has a similar lash-up in his
lab. He figured it would cost Alcor about $40,000. Its advantage would be that
precise control over a suspension, and an automatic, minute-by-minute record
of its progress. It would be a big step away from the improvised, back-alley
mode of cryonics, toward a laboratory procedure.
Maybe $40,000 sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money! But it's far
less than Alcor has been spending on legal fees--and a mere fraction of the
cost of a fancy new building. So, where should our priorities really lie?
CLASSIC VIDEOS IN OUR MAY MEETING
Those of us who attended the May meeting of Alcor New York were treated to not
one but two videos from the dawn of cryonic history. We saw Curtis Henderson
and one-time funeral director Fred Horn demonstrating stabilization procedures
as they existed in 1967. And we saw Curtis with his wife Diane, moving an
actual patient out of dry ice, into liquid nitrogen, in a suspension that he
conducted in 1972. These irreplacable videos (made originally as home movies)
gave us a unique glimpse of cryonics history. We like to think that one day,
they might be as valuable as film of Goddard's experiments with rocketry, or
the Wright Brothers' first flights. Thanks to Curtis, for bringing them along
P.S. Thanks to Stanley Gerber for helping with this newsletter.
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