X-Message-Number: 9630 Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 08:21:46 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #9622 - #9629 Hi again! A small correction to my Canberra story. Substitute sequoias for redwoods. The weight of the story remains as before. Though Saul spoke glibly of the "failure" of cryonics, he never states clearly just how cryonics has failed. The aim of cryonics is immortality, an aim which by its nature will take a long time to reach anything even close to fruition. Sure, getting lots of people to join would help; getting cryobiologists on our side would help; convincing more people of the merits of cryonics would help; means to show that we can freeze and then revive brains will help. But none of these are in themselves our aim. Just what is meant by cryonics "working"? The major use of cryonic suspension is to provide a means by which those suspended can make use of undeveloped medical technology --- which because it is not yet developed will happen at some unknown future time. Because of the state of our present technology for suspensions, it's easy to lose sight of this: the fact that those we suspend must be "dead" and the related fact that our methods cause lots of damage bulks large in our perception. But even if we could freeze and revive people perfectly (including those who are very sick, hardly the best choices for such a stressful technique) that issue of future medicine would still remain. So will cryonics "work" if we can simply freeze someone and revive them, or must we show a patient who was cured of some illness which doctors at the time of his or her suspension had no clue as to how to cure? I myself, when I first heard of Ettinger's idea, was struck by its logic. If incurable disease is a reason for suspension, then the damage caused by suspension itself counts also as one more incurable disease, and therefore the time to begin suspension is NOW. And we can no more predict the time at which any given disease becomes completely curable than the time at which patients frozen by present methods could be revived. For that matter, we may find that some diseases are not curable, just as some suspension damage may be too great. Advanced Alzheimer's Disease gives an example: sure, we can no doubt repair a patient's brain so that it works like that of a healthy person, but bringing that patient back remains impossible. I say this not out of satisfaction with current methods at all, but because the idea behind cryonics seems to have been lost by those such as Saul. We freeze ourselves not because we are assured in any way that our currently incurable condition will become curable, but because it is labelled INCURABLE by virtually everyone in current medicine, none of whose commentators have the least idea just what might be done to help it. Yes, medical history gives us lots of examples in which the entire medical establishment comes down against some idea --- which later proves to be correct. We are seeing that right now with the research of 21st Century Medicine on revival after more than 5 minutes: I remember clearly how in the early 1970's the very idea that people might be revivable after more than 5 minutes was anathema to most physicians. This does NOT mean that everything commonly believed about a medical condition will be shown wrong, but it should at least make us think that there is a good deal we do not know about future abilities and technology in medicine. The merit of current methods consists solely of the fact that they provide A POSSIBILITY of using future medicine to cure a currently incurable condition, so "incurable" that no one has the least idea what to do with it. The alternative is simple annihilation. Who would rationally chose a certainty of annihilation against the possibility of life? And yes, such an idea is bound to cause opposition. By promoting suspensions (note that I'm saying that whether or not suspension itself is now reversible does not matter here) to those with "incurable diseases" or "incurable conditions" we are saying to all the experts: you are WRONG, and your expertise will someday seem the expertise of savages. Why wouldn't we meet with opposition? (contd) Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9630