X-Message-Number: 13407
From: "George Smith" <>
References: <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #13402 Thoughtful ideas
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2000 16:59:24 -0800

Reply to Message #13402 fom: bankston <>

> Subject: Re: CryoNet #13399 - #13401
>
> I continue to receive and read many of the CryoNet updates and would like
to add
> a few things. I work in an acquired brain injury program in San Diego that
works
> every day with over 100 individuals surviving stroke, anoxia, tramatic
brain
> injuries, the surgeons byproducts of tumor removals, etc. I can attest to
one
> undeniable fact, boys and girls; when areas of the brain are damaged,
corelated
> functioning for that particular formation results in flat ass loss. As in
> forever.

Ah, but "forever' is such a long, long time!  I see you never met my mother
who recovered from just such injuries due to a stroke, her personality
restored after being virtually absent for years.  Other aging problems
attacked her later in life, but she nevertheless recovered before her
biological clock ran down.

Please consider that you are seeing an isolated segment of the population -
those who remain injured.  Those who are abandoned as "incurable" and then
recover are oft ignored in my clinical experience.  As it should be, those
who require help receive the attention.  You are seeing only those who
remain injured.  There are others.  The one white crow proves all crows are
not black.

Neuronal pathways blocked by scar tissue or sufficiently absent cell
> groupings do not transmit impulse no way no how.

Unless, somehow obviously unknown to today's science, the brain finds
alternative routes or grows them.  People do recover.  How?  We don't know
yet.  I'm betting my life that we will.

Unless there is a plan afoot to
> regrow the exact, to the freaking cell, structures damaged by age, trauma,
> disease or freezing, nobody will regain the intact personality everyone
seems
> bent on imortalizing.

That's the ideal plan.  Again, we may not need the ideal.  Time will tell.
I truly doubt perfection will b required.  I have completely forgotten far
more than I remember of my life.  And I don't mind a bit!

Even minor trauma strips away so much of what we are, I can
> not even imagine the results of freezing/thawing the human brain.

Yes.  We will all be awed by what is yet to come.  That is my assumption
based on the rising hockey stick curve of technological change in medicine
alone over the last 50 years.

Fifty years ago they buried my maternal Grandfather due to his heart attack.
Today he would have probably recovered and lived another twenty years.
Fifty years ago children in the US were contracting polio.  Now this is not
necessary.  Fifty years ago we still had smallpox.  Now it is gone.

What will happen over the next 50 years?  Mind bending changes are what I
expect.  (So evidently does IBM with their $500,000,000 Blue Gene Project).

But, being
> among the marchers to the grave, I gotta like your spirit. As soon as a
cloning
> or a cultivating/implanting of cells becomes a viable method of recreating
> original structures, I'll be first in line. Keep up the good work.

Please don't go to the grave!  The entire concept of cryonics is based on
arresting further damage and waiting until it can be reversed in the future.
If you wait, you won't reanimate!

Thanks for the thoughtful ideas.

George Smith
www.cryonics.org

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