X-Message-Number: 1082 From: Kevin Q. Brown Subject: Re: Just My Brain? Date: 30 Jul 1992 Newsgroups: sci.cryonics Subject: Re: Just My Brain? References: <> > For you folks that are already members of a Cryonic Institute, > have you arranged to have only your brain (i.e head) frozen, > or your entire body? Alcor charges roughly 3 times as much > for whole body suspension and makes a case for regeneration > of one's body from the preserved DNA. Just curious to see if > there is a consensus. Paul, Neuro vs. whole-body is a matter of personal preference. I have appended below some text I wrote about the topic in 1988. Since then the situation may have changed somewhat. For example, the new "big foot" dewars can store not only several whole-body patients but also, in between them, several neuros, too. This may change the "mobility" argument in favor of neurosuspension. An issue I neglected to mention in 1988 is that the choice is also technology-dependent. Even if the technology favors neurosuspension today (which some people dispute), as suspension techniques improve and cause less injury, the favored technology may shift toward whole body. At that point it may become faster and more economical to fix the original body than to build a new one from scratch. - Kevin Q. Brown ----- An undisputed advantage of the neuro option (over whole body) is cost, both for suspension and for maintenance (liquid nitrogen required to remain frozen). Another advantage is the quality of perfusion with cryoprotectants attained during suspension. Each organ has its own optimal perfusion protocol and when the suspension can concentrate on the head only, the quality of perfusion of the brain does not have to be compromised to attain better perfusion of other parts of the body. Another important advantage of the neuro option is mobility. Whole body suspendees are stored in large, bulky containers that are hard to transport whereas the neuro suspendees are stored in a concrete vault on wheels that can be quickly hauled away in case of fire or other emergency. (Also, if necessary, they can be removed from the large vault and transported in smaller units that fit into a van.) An obvious disadvantage of the neuro option is bad PR; it sounds gruesome. Also, one would think that revival (as a whole, functioning, healthy human being) when only your head was preserved would be more difficult than if your entire body was preserved. However, the whole body situation may not be that much better. Mike Darwin of Alcor noticed several years ago, when examing two suspended people being transferred from another organization to Alcor, that every organ of their bodies suffers cracking from thermal stress during freezing. In particular, the spinal cords suffered several fractures. Thus, the whole bodies were not quite as "whole" as most people assumed. Another reason that a whole body may not offer much more than the head alone is that the technology required to revive people from (whole or neuro) cryonic suspension should also be able to clone bodies, which is much simpler than fixing damaged cells. One possible objection to this approach of recloning a body to attach to the head was voiced by Paul Segal of ACS (in the April 1988 issue of The Immortalist). He suggested that adult cells in the head may be missing some of the DNA needed to reclone the remainder of the body. Even if this objection is valid, it is easy to circumvent by storing samples of all the major organs with the preserved head (which is standard practice at Alcor). See the booklet "Neuropreservation: Advantages and Disadvantages" published by Alcor for a more thorough discussion. ----- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1082