X-Message-Number: 8635
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 00:39:46 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: New York Times

An article on life extension and cryonics appeared in Sunday's New York 
Times magazine section. Typical of the Times, the journalist purports to 
be objective while bringing a very rigid set of preconceptions (rooted 
basically in 1950s science) to his subject.

A remark that I once heard from radical lawyer William Kunstler seems
relevant here. Kunstler spent a lot of his professional life defending
extremist groups. He noted that they often got into trouble because
members of a group would spend so much time in each others' company, they
ended up believing that their ideas were perfectly normal. 

People who are signed up for cryonics share the abnormal belief that
"dead"  does not mean what most people think it means, and some "dead
people" may be resuscitated at some time in the future under certain
circumstances. Despite huge amounts of publicity over the years, I think
this belief is still widely regarded as absurd, and we would be foolish to
forget this. In the words of the Sunday Times journalist: "When people are
frozen, they're dead. Its many miracles notwithstanding, science has yet
to figure out how to bring anyone back to life." 

After some unfortunate experiences of my own with journalists, I have
learned to trust none of them, unless in some way I feel I am managing the
information that they receive. I know from my own experience as a
nonfiction writer that most journalists are concerned only about getting a
story, not getting at the truth; that editors impose substantial pressure
to come up with something sensational to sell newspapers (or magazines, or
whatever); and the wacko angle of cryonics is almost irresistible. I've
also seen (again, from my own experience) that when a journalist asks a
question, most decent, trusting people feel a kind of obligation to 
answer it instead of merely saying "no comment." 

I guess this is all obvious, but I was dismayed by the trust that some of
the interviewees seemed to display toward the Times journalist--perhaps
because they believed that a newspaper as "respectable" as the Times would
be trustworthy. Wrong! 

--Charles Platt

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