X-Message-Number: 13789 Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 10:48:21 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: comments for Ivan and Charles Hi everyone! For Ivan Snyder: The major problem with any form of simple brain transplantation is that major events causing aging may well occur in our brains. If so, merely transplanting brains or parts of brains will only accelerate the aging of the young body a good deal (so that the transplant will soon become useless). If by "brains" you mean not only the neural part but glands such as the pituitary, such transplants have already been done in animals and have much the same results as I just described. Our lower brain plays a significant role in managing all our hormone production, and if it goes bad then everything will. Why not just transplant the frontal cortex (I hear you suggest --- or other higher cortical regions)? Because we want to retain not only our memories but also our feelings toward them. It's the combination which gies us our personality, not just our memories. (And it may ultimately prove impossible to separate them; there are lots of connections between our brain cortex and the lower brain regions, so emotions and feelings play a constant role). For Charles Platt: Yes, the results from current freezings look very bad. However we need to look at them far more carefully than has yet been done, to see what signs of the former connections between neurons (and former neurons) may still persist. Moreover, the detection involved requires us to know much more than we now know about how memories work, not just in broad terms but in close detail. Moreover, even methods which preserve much more information such as those described in the Seminar 2 years ago by those working with Kent and Faloon (the 21st Century Medicine seminars), even though they did not yet produce provable revivals, still preserved a lot more information than before ... and so deserved to be instituted. But then who wants to be frozen by current methods if we can improve those methods? Yes, that too is a big job, but isn't helped by giving up. If we want to live then we have no alternative. Didn't I say Reality was hard? Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=13789