X-Message-Number: 11444
From: 
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 22:21:32 EST
Subject: more in sorrow than in anger?

Thanks to Steve Bridge for the Open Directory Project information and his role
in it as editor for cryobiology and cryonics. Looks interesting and useful.

I haven't had time to look at much of it yet, but have seen the site of Ingo
Heschel of the Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering, "Cryobiology
Aachen." (His counter showed 3 visitors--maybe because of the reshuffle of
URLs that Steve mentioned.) 

One of his pages is titled "BODYFREEZING." (This is all in English--German
also available.) He lists "some of the reasons" why "I hope that you do not
believe in body freezing (any more)!" 

I won't bother listing his reasons, which are well known, but will list two
reasons why "I hope you do not believe in the scientific integrity of Ingo
Heschel and his ilk (any more)."

1. He lays out reasons that a complex organism supposedly cannot be
cryopreserved and revived, but ignores the fact that some pretty complex
organisms, including insects, actually have been cryopreserved and revived.

2. He totally ignores any possibilities of repair by future technology, which
is a major premise of cryonics. 

More in sorrow than in anger? More in anger, I think. But only a vestigial
anger; thanks to the Web, the dinosaurs of cryobiology will soon be almost
entirely irrelevant--except as occasionally, inadvertently, they happen to
contribute to the success of what they detest and denounce.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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