X-Message-Number: 15287
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 23:10:53 -0500
Subject: Charles Platt's Many Ludicrous Remarks
From: 

On Christmas Eve, Mr. Charles Platt decided he would regale us all with
some jolly yuletide cheer by returning to Cryonet after a ten-month
sabbatical. In the course of spreading Holiday merriment, and later, he
made a number of remarks concerning CI that were not terribly accurate. I
would like to respond to a few.

1.  Observing that not much research had been posted, Mr. Platt wrote:
 To be fair, there has been reference to recent  research" financed by
CI, but anyone who reads the relevant web site will find a paucity of
fundamental data to evaluate the claims. While implicitly suggesting that
professional cryobiologists are incompetent, the page shows an insulting
disregard for the proper documentation of lab work--procedures which I
learned in high school. 

I am happy to note that Mr. Platt wished to be fair. I am less happy to
note that six words later his resolution falters as he refers to CI s in
quotes as  research    ie pseudo-research as opposed to the valid sort,
ie, those that support his own views.   People who wish to be insulted by
CI s disregard for properly documented lab work rather than Mr. Platt's
helpful five-word summary of it may indulge their masochism by reading
reports of Dr. Pichugin s properly documented lab work at
http://www.cryonics.org/research2.html  and at
http://www.cryonics.org/research3.html, both of which have been publicly
available since the page s inception in 1997.
 
As for Mr. Platt s claim that CI is implicitly suggesting that
professional cryobiologists are incompetent -- well, that suggestion is
so very implicit that I confess I couldn t find it at all. Maybe he was
trying to tell us implicitly that there is no such explicit suggestion.
That, certainly, is true.

As far as CI views of cryobiologists go, the studies on which CI
protocols have to date been largely based were repeated and evaluated by
Dr. Yuri Pichugin, who not only is a cryobiologist, but who was trained
and employed as such at the largest cryobiology institute in the world at
Kharkov in the Ukraine, and who is currently working under the direction
of Dr. Greg Fahy for the Institute of Neural Cryobiology. Since his work
there has been of no small relevance to the new vitrification procedures,
I must assume that Mr. Platt would characterize the good doctor's latter
efforts as good good non-CI research as opposed to evil evil CI
 research . 

Mr. Platt then added,  Worst of all, I see absolutely no interest on
CryoNet in discussing this work or its methodology, or the sloppy way in
which it was reported, or its claim to debunk the past ten years of
orthodox cryobiology.  

Given that the web page nowhere states,  The past ten years of orthodox
cryobiology is bunk,  it is not terribly surprising that it isn t a hot
topic on C-net. No one (barring Charles) debates statements that aren t
made.  Can he mean Russian Orthodox cryobiology, maybe? To my knowledge,
CI has not claimed to debunk that either.

In what way, however, is CI claiming to debunk ten years of cryobiology,
readers may be wondering? It is hard to debunk an entire field of
science, after all, even if you do it so implicitly that only Charles
Platt can spot it. Mr. Platt does not tell us above, but I think what Mr.
Platt is darkly referring to is the long-bemoaned fact that CI has
favored one-pass rather than stepped or continuous ramping in its
suspension procedures. 

(For the 99% of you out there who are not cryobiologists, orthodox,
Catholic, or reformed, preparing a body for freezing involves removing
the blood -- which freezes and causes ice damage -- with a solution that
reduces such damage. All cooling procedures cause some damage, alas, but
CI s initial tests suggested that doing this replacement in one pass
produced mildly less damaging results than pumping the solution in and
out in gradually increased percentages. This has been controversial
because of the charge that one-pass could produce osmotic shock and
damage cells. 
 
CI, however, ran tests, sent them out-of house for an objective
evaluation, and got the report that one-pass actually produced somewhat
less damage than the alternative.  On publicly presenting these test
results, the response of critics was, in essence,  Well, you must be
bunglers and the evaluations must be a pack of lies!   This   perhaps
Charles  high school lab methodology run amuck -- did not seem to the
people at CI to be a terribly effective refutation.) 

Now   if I can digress for just a moment -- when I joined CI, I found
this disparity to be kind of interesting. See, in the real world of
biological science, as opposed to the rant-o-rama of Cryonet, actual
tests on biological subjects tend to produce somewhat varying results.
Different results by different researchers is the norm, not the
exception.  Person A has a cigarette and develops lung cancer instantly;
Person B smokes three packs a day for seventy years and dies jogging.
There are always individual differences   what tends to prevail is an
eventual consensus over a large number of tests over time. Thus I was not
so much surprised that CI and (say) BPI results differed in the few tests
run.  What did surprise me was the fact that the difference seemed to
excite so much rancor and rigidity   one-pass was flatly demonized and
gradual ramping exalted, and -- well, that was that. End of discussion!
CI s research was not disputed at all -- simply dismissed out of hand. 

(To be completely truthful, I should also say that I was privately
informed that the really definitive reason CI s practices was so
appallingly neanderthal because a competing organization   no conflict of
interest there!   ran a test of CI procedures and got very bad results.
This was daunting news indeed   till I dug further and learned that the
test was not one of actual CI procedures but rather of the researcher s
best guess of CI procedures.  The researcher in question publicly
referred to these procedures on one occasion as  B.S.    that s  bull
shit  for you foreign readers   and in the course of applying his
personal vision of B.S. procedures, the researcher in question got B.S.
results. How very surprising, eh?) 

To get back to my story, however: what puzzled me was the fact that
one-pass seemed to have a certain common-sense advisability about it. It
is almost an axiom of cryonics that patients need to be cooled rapidly,
lest ischemia and structural deterioration sets in. Well, one-pass is the
most rapid method there is. Gradual ramping, according to Alcor s web
page on the subject, takes several hours. Even granted the possibility
that gradual ramping might be better in some respects, surely, I thought,
maintaining patients at higher temperatures for longer times must produce
at least some greater structural degradation. It could not be
black/white:  surely there had to be some level of trade-off. On asking
around, however, I was told that gradual was best, period, that any
actual actual tests run by CI ought to be ignored, and that one-pass was
not merely not as good, but, quote,  worthless    that patients treated
by one-pass were absolutely irrecoverable by any conceivable scientific
method or development till the end of time. This seemed to me to be
overstating things.

So I looked further. Why was there this difference? I next found out that
CI and other organizations tended to apply their methods on rather
different sorts of patients. When Alcor, for instance, does (or did)
experiments on animals, they would take a perfectly healthy dog,
anesthetize it, and apply their procedures. CI, by contrast, would
arrange to have a sheep decapitated at a slaughterhouse, pack the head in
ice, take it to their facilities, and begin the process fifteen minutes
to a half hour later. CI s reasoning, I learned, was that the latter
method (alas) more closely approximated the conditions under which an
actual cryonics member was likely to die. Of the former method, one can
only say that no cryonics patient is ever going to be anesthetized in
perfect health, ramped with glycerol, and frozen. The one procedure was
practical; the other abstract. But could that account for the difference?
Certainly it would account for any apparently better dog head results as
opposed to sheep head results.

That speculation did not answer my question though, so on I slogged,
learning another interesting fact: apparently, the difference between
ramping and one-pass is not so great at the high levels of cryoprotectant
used in cryonics cases. In the November 1984 issue of the American
Journal of Physiology (page C384), we learn that granulocyte survival
declines most rapidly between 0-0.5 Molar glycerol, and is steady at 20%
survival above 1.0 Molar. Since 7 or greater molarity of glycerol is used
in cryonics cases, the viability data for such low concentrations may not
be terribly relevant.

(Incidentally, I might point out to readers, that after several weeks
with a dictionary of biology terms and other works, I actually know what
the above sentence means. Most people don t. When they read  molar , they
think teeth. Charles seems to have mild fits over the fact that great
tracts of the CI web page are written in English for lay readers, as
opposed to the purer form of sheets of incomprehensible cryobiologese
accessible only to the vitro-elite, before whose cryptic pronouncements
we the lowly hoi-polloi can only scrape and grovel. CI feels that when
you re talking to everybody, you have to talk clearly and simply. That
does not mean that more complex or critical material is ignored. As
Charles knows   or does he?   CI links directly not merely to Alcor, to
Open Directory s cryo pages, to 21CM, to the Cryonet Archives, to the BPI
tech briefs, indeed to every criticism of CI, fair, absurd, and
hare-brained, that there is. The charge that CI misinforms people is only
true to the extent that we give people access to even to misinformation
about CI, trusting their judgment to see through obvious nonsense.)

Anyway, what all the above meant was that difference between one-pass and
gradual in cryonic perfusion, while real, might perhaps best be
characterized as not exactly radical. I forged on nonetheless, still
determined to find on why even the small discrepancy that is there is
there. But my quest for the truth was cut off at the knees by CI s
quote-unquote  research . You see, CI does not only test its procedures,
but re-tests them, and upgrades them, and so on. It s a never-ending
thing. CI also believes that the best people to evaluate procedures are
not those that have a vested interest in supporting one protocol over the
other. Thus CI tries to find qualified objective third party labs and
universities to evaluate blind (unlabelled) samples. This it did, and in
the latest round of tests it has so far turned out that stepped ramping
has in fact produced a marginal but arguable improvement over one-pass.
Noted the (university-based, non-CI, PhD) research scientist doing the
evaluation:  My impression of [stepped] and [one-pass] is that the middle
regions of the brain look the same. I think I could argue that [stepped]
is subjectively slightly better on the inner-most and outer-most brain
regions.  This is not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it does lean
toward gradual ramping, and CI goes by test results. Hence sufferers in
the Cryonet community can breath a sigh of relief: Charles Platt need no
longer beat this particular horse to death.

I should note in passing that this does not mean that CI intends to stop
re-testing variations on this procedure. In the year 2000 abstracts from
the December 2000 issue of the journal Cryobiology, Dr. Greg Fahy
describes a new vitrification solution in which propylene glycol is
replaced with ethylene glycol   a long-neglected cryoprotectant that the
abstract indicates may very well be an improvement over glycerol when
used on human patients. (A point very ably made by Doug Skrecky earlier.)
 Does gradual ramping of ethylene glycol, as opposed to glycerol, produce
better results than ramping it in one pass?  Beats me.  How would I know?
But I expect that CI will be running tests to find out.  Is it better to
run tests based on discoveries from a world-famous cryobiologist
published in the very latest issue of a mainstream cryobiological
journal?  Or is it better to base treatments on the recommendations of
sci-fi novelist Charles Platt based on tests run by non-cryobiologists,
quote,  more than FIFTEEN YEARS  ago? Gosh -- it s hard to say. All I
know is that at this point independent third-party evaluation of CI tests
confirmed what common sense suggested all along   namely, that it wasn t
the case that one procedure was  effective  and the other  worthless 
B.S. What the findings indicate is that both approaches work in the sense
that both reduce freezing damage, and that the actual results are
somewhat different, rather mixed, and fairly slim.

Why have I mentioned this at such length? Well, because to listen to
Charles Platt s portrayal of CI, you get this carefully arranged picture
of the place as a dank Castle of Dracula about which Dr. Frankenstein s
hunchbacked assistant Igor lopes, drawing black curtains to veil the
horrors within. In point of fact, when I wanted to find out about the
one-pass controversy, all I had to do was ask   Robert Ettinger explained
CI s position, Andy Zawacki the Plant Manager gave his views, I was
pointed to the journals, to the reports, the links, the sources, etc.,
etc.   CI was as open as open could be. The only problem I had getting
information was not getting information from CI about what it was doing
and why, but dealing with out-of-date misinformation from its critics,
and having to dig past the global innuendo and personal attacks to
specific charges. Once that was done, then it was possible to get to the
bedrock of disinterested specific studies, where things fell into place. 
Needless to say, the muck is still being slung, but be heartened,
readers: as Fox Mulder says:  The truth is out there.  

2. Speaking of The Immortalist, Mr. Platt said,  At this point, we have
NO reliable source of timely information about cryonics in general. CI's
monthly magazine has never covered any topic in depth, as I recall   

CI s bimonthly magazine The Immortalist (sample articles of which are
available at http://www.cryonics.org/info.html, which I believe includes
a link to Charles Platt s own self-defined shallow review of a 21CM
conference) has been in publication for 25 years. I am sorry that
Charles, having read every last Immortalist article in the past
quarter-century, finds them all, including his own, lacking in depth. I
ascribe this to his discriminatingly high aristocratic standards. By
golly, the man must stick his pinky out when sipping Earl Grey. True, I
think he is correct when he says that there is a need for an ecumenical
publication covering cryonics. The only problem is, it already exists. 

The July-August 2000 issue of The Immortalist, for instance, had an
article covering the Cryonics Society of Canada gathering, two articles
by former CryoCare President Ben Best (one, a critical technical article
on then-CI procedures titled  Cryoprotectant Addition Procedure in
Cryonics Protocol ), Paul Wakfer of INC s appeal for donations for the
Hippocampal Project (which Alcor s Cryonics magazine refused to carry),
reprinted Cryonet posts from Alcor members Scott Badger, Mike Perry,
David Pizer, and Natasha Vita-More, not to mention a full-page ad
soliciting members for ACS, a competing organization. Talk about lack of
depth! No  timely information about cryonics in general  here!

I think maybe the problem is that Charles is so busy condemning CI s
publication that he doesn t have to time to read it. He prefers
(grudgingly) to subscribe to Alcor s Cryonics magazine, which apparently
makes it a point of policy to never mention CI or ACS and to carry no
articles by CI or ACS members. (Is all the space taken up by trenchantly
self-critical assessments of hot topics like vitrification instead? I'm
afraid not.  Skeptical or critical assessments of certain topics -- well,
on such neither Cryonics magazine nor Charles Platt's pen sheds a drop of
ink.)  Policies like this are perhaps why according to a recent
Immortalist readership survey, there are actually more Alcor members
reading The Immortalist than Cryonics Institute members. Where else are
they going to find out what s going on?

I might add in passing   one of the things that I most like about The
Immortalist (apart from the brilliant literary standards implied by the
fact that they publish my stuff) is that it is a clear demonstration that
different cryonics organizations and the people in them can actually  
can you believe it? -- get along amicably. CI and ACS are competitors:
nonetheless both CI and ACS run ads for members in the magazine, and CI
and ACS both print their respective organizational updates and member
articles. They share information, and space, and do so with mutual
respect and in peace.  This is not how it  ought  to be: this is how it
is. It s an example I wish more people would learn from. 

In this connection, I might add that one of the (many) reasons I take
great pride in being a CI member is that this is the way CI tries to
behave generally. For example, when Charles Platt's own organization
CryoCare was going under, CI (despite years of acrid remarks from CC
principals like Charles) went out of its way to hear its then-President
Ben Best s appeal for assistance, and actually voted to re-write its own
rules to ensure shelter for CryoCare patients and to allow dual
memberships for CryoCare members in an attempt to help CC survive. CC
died regardless, ecumenically banning even one-page CI flyers from being
handed out at its last meeting; but still, CI's actions seemed to me to
be the way cryonics members and organizations ought to act. I don't think
such behavior need be limited to CI either. Although CI and Alcor are
generally portrayed as two great stags with horns locked in eternal
combat, my own experience with rank and file Alcor members is that they
are decent as a group of folks as can be. Whatever formal policies might
be in place higher up, on a personal level, Alcorians are great, and I
personally hope and believe that eventually CI and Alcor should and will
end up with as friendly relations at the top as there very often is among
the rank and file. As with CI and ACS, it just makes more sense to work
together and support each other than to bicker and go it alone. 

Anyway. (To get back to my bickering.) Even-handedly expanding his
assault to trash all cryonics media, Mr. Platt concluded:  While we live
in a so-called information age, this field contains less information than
at any time in its forty-year history.  Really? While Charles
occasionally favors us with a good comment, now and then he comes up a
genuine beauty. What? There is actually less information about cryonics
in 2000 than there was in 1960   four years *before* Robert Ettinger
published The Prospect Of Immortality? There was really more information
about cryonics available *before cryonics even existed*? Charles! You
need to take some deep breaths and lie down, man!

3. In post number 2 (or was 7 or 9 or 13?  Mercifully, one forgets), the
tireless Mr. Platt observed:   cryonics is more moribund today than it
has been at any point in the past--with the possible exception of the
period following the Nelson scandal at Chatsworth. This is quite bizarre,
bearing in mind the unprecedented progress that has been made in relevant
research. 

As with many of Charles  comments, it s only bizarre if you restrict
yourself to seeing only those negative aspects or interpretations that
you want to see. CI, for instance, is not what I would call moribund. In
the last five years, its total assets have nearly doubled to well over
two million dollars, putting it ahead of Alcor, I believe. Its membership
has doubled in rather less time than that, and its web site is up to
44,000+ hits. I believe that CI s gotten nearly as many members in 2000
alone as CryoCare managed to get in its entire history. In the last year
alone, CI also developed traveling team services, cell storage services,
*cut* dues for large families, started up an electronics newsletter at 
http://www.egroups.com/long_life, translated its web pages into Spanish,
done new research   ooops, I mean new  research  (no wait! Charles
approves of gradual ramping, so we must be doing genuine research now,
not the quotation-mark variety. Hurray!). Moribund? There are a lot of
things you can call this, and if it s negative and inaccurate, no doubt
Charles will strive hard to come up with a couple. But  moribund  is not
one of them.

Mr. Platt:  When controversial procedures are not accompanied by
journalistic coverage, we have a fertile ground for deception. I am
absolutely not suggesting that such a thing has happened recently; I am
merely pointing out that when organizations are able to operate with
total lack of third-party oversight, and they are not diligent about
reporting critically on themselves, this is a potentially dangerous
situation. Cryonics malpractice has happened in the past, and it will
happen again. The right way to deal with it is to analyze, publicly, what
went wrong, and take steps, publicly, to avoid similar debacles in the
future. 

Sounds like CI's got no third-party oversight, don't it?  (That Charles
Platt lets it get away with anything.)  I'm afraid not.  In terms of
third-party journalistic and other oversight, CI does in fact use
third-party rather than in-house oversight in evaluating its procedures,
not to mention allowing both the general public and people from competing
organizations (like ACS) to simply come over and have a look. Last month
a Detroit journalist came by and looked the place over; this month the
BBC is doing a program on CI headquarters; a while ago, Kitty
Antonik-Wakfer, the wife of Paul Wakfer of INC, was the (very charming)
guest of honor at the annual meeting, where I myself nominated former
CryoCare President Ben Best for a Directorship.  Total lack of
third-party oversight? Maybe elsewhere.

4. In reply to Mr. Billy Seidel, Mr. Platt wrote an entire post entitled
(appropriately)  Negativity . In answer to all the comments on his posts
as exhibitions of indulge in negativism and  verbal abuse , Charles
responded by pointing out the great utility of negative feedback, and by
stating that he himself was not negative at all. (Am I kidding? No:  I
have not noticed any verbal abuse, Billy -- except from one person who
chose to attack me,  noted Charles with a straight face, adding
elsewhere,   in my original post I was extremely careful not to be
critical.") 

I have to say that I agreed with him on both points. There is nothing
better in the world than criticism. Criticism points out your weaknesses,
shows you the places where you can improve, points out the dangers ahead
and the mistakes to avoid repeating. In fact the great philosopher of
science Sir Karl Popper was of the opinion that the very definition of a
scientific proposition was that it should be capable of being criticized
and refuted. Criticism is wonderful! That s the problem with Charles 
criticism -- it s not critical enough. 

You see, real criticism, devastating criticism, is specific, consistent,
even-handed, and (best of all) works by offering a better alternative. 
Charles  wimpy yawps have have none of these manly qualities. Probe under
the flashy verbal surface and instead of substance there is boneless fog.
 For example: the entire cryonics movement, he claims, is  moribund .
Well   OK. What do we do to get un-moribund, Charles? Jump up and down a
lot? Opt for burial, like yourself?  As a remedy for torpor, burial is
rather limp, don t you think? Cryonics magazines are insufficiently
critical, he says. Will  cryonics magazines, hearing this trumpet call,
run an unending series of articles entitled  Why We Stink ? I think not.
Cryonet posts are full of irrelevancy, says Mr. Platt. Are they? What of
it? Why not just skip what bores you? That's generally what I do when I
see Mr. Platt's byline.  But what s the  alternative he offers?
Censorship? A new list? We learn (over and over and over) what he
detests, but what does he propose?  

Take vitrification.  What are 21CM s formulae, of which Alcor has, I
believe, only one? We don t know. How is it applied? I understand that
Alcor has varied from 21CM instructions by cooling more rapidly and by
used higher concentrations.  How much more rapidly, how much higher? We
don t know. We know that INC s applications left only 53% of a brain
slice viable, and viable strictly in terms of  potassium/sodium ratios;
and that higher concentrations produce more toxicity and thus less brain
viability. How much more toxicity, how much less viability? We don t
know.  (We don t even know if *they* know.)  Have any tests been run to
find out? We don t know. Who applies it? In the first case, unnamed
 contract consultants  (trained? untrained?) from an unnamed company. How
quickly? Less than thirty hours in one case; more than thirty in the
other. How much more, how much less? We don t know.

If CI were to come up with something like this, Charles Platt would be
all over it with a dripping ax. But since Charles thinks vitrification is
the cat s meow -- well, he s all over CI with a dripping ax anyhow,
waxing eloquent on Robert Ettinger s  mean-spiritedness  for daring to
question the arrival of the vitro-Messiah. This sort of even-handed
search for the truth may be verbally sharp, but I ask you   can this
really be called  criticism ?

These sorts of remarks from Mr. Platt are not really critical; which is
to say, they re not really dispassionate solution-oriented assessments
geared to actually changing things for the better. They re merely
tantrums. Outbursts of Charles  admitted anger which, as he tells us, is
a mere fifth of the rancor burgeoning in his tormented breast.  I am
using powerful internal filtering techniques to filter my personal anger
and disgust,  he tells us.  I think his filters need cleaning.  No, Mr.
Platt has no real affection for criticism.  Only for his own.  Monologue
is his forte, not dialogue.  He calls out for universal criticism of
cryonics practices, but when Mr. Robert Ettinger dares to mention some
reservations about vitrification, Charles all but smacks him with a
truncheon. Mr. Ettinger, we hear, is jealous, competitive, credulous,
two-faced, deliberating lying, distorting, misleading, etc., etc.  Can
this really be called serious analysis?  I mean, really -- can Robert
Ettinger actually be this shambling ogre escaped from the pages of
Fangoria that Platt describes? And even if so, how does that invalidate
his actual criticisms? I mean   if (as Mr. Ettinger says) the only
vitrification tests run on two rabbit kidneys took them down to  80 C,
which is one bare degree lower than dry ice temperature, well   that s
true, isn t it? Truths matter   don t they? 

With Mr. Platt, I can t help but get the impression that only very thin
band of selective truths matter, and only those that support already
arrived-at views. The discomforting ones get very short shrift.  We want
universal criticism!  he thunders. But when zero criticism about
vitrification appears in Alcor s Cryonics magazine or web site, that s
ignored. When Robert Ettinger offers anything less than a rave review of
it, he s all but nuked. Reader, consider:  when you read Charles Platt on
cryonics, do you really feel yourself in the presence of a dispassionate
person who is humbly and amiably seeking the truth for its own sake, and
for the enlightenment of his beloved brethren? I rather suspect readers
they feel that they ve fallen into the presence of a most able and
eloquent mind, but one that s gotten sadly trapped in the fevered,
indiscriminate, knee-jerk habit of negation, and selective negation at
that. Charles isn t cracked, of course; he occasionally allows that all
current patients may be recoverable, that nanotech may do all that its
practitioners allow, etc. But his text hardly ripples with such
perfunctory admissions. Rather, it most comes alive in that moist crunch
when his grammatical brass knuckles land.  What catches the eye of his
prose is the chink in the armor, the Achilles  Heel, the weakness, any
weakness, that diminishes and downgrades cryonics and all the people in
it except for himself and his own tiny splinter faction. Is it the
novelist s habit of dramatization, the fiction-writer s mental twitch for
a bloody clash of good versus evil? And his prose *is* dramatic.  All
that Gothic splendor:  'Doom, doom!  Eldritch Villainy!  Lurking
Horrors!'  But sadly, it is fiction: an artfully described despairing
perspective on things, rather than an artless statement of facts.

Mr. Platt notes:  As I have said many times before, it was this ruthless
honesty which persuaded me to get involved with cryonics. Since it also
coincided with the biggest surge of growth in the history of any
organization, clearly negative feedback isn't bad for business, either.
On the contrary--negative feedback is extremely reassuring, since it
encourages prospective members to trust the organization. 

Stirring words: but one has to point out that people who trusted in the
happy negativity streaming from CryoCare were left with no suspension
provider, no storage provider, and no organization.  Clearly negative
feedback  wasn't  bad for business  there   fatal maybe, but not bad. 
His remark concerning  The biggest surge of growth in the history of any
organization is factually incorrect: that title goes to the recent jump
in memberships at CI. And the  ruthless honesty  which got Charles into
cryonics? It apparently got him right out again, along with Mike Darwin
and several others. One reaps what one sows, but does Charles Platt
notice this meager harvest? I really don t think so. No, his 'powerful
internal filters' simply filter it out. His already decided position is
that negativity is good, so he looks for evidence that it is, and when he
finds some, the search is over. That the immediate rush is followed by a
grinding crash, imperiling himself and others   that just doesn t seem to
register. It's a pattern visible again and again.  Is it ruthless honesty
that dazzles Charles? Or only  ruthlessness? The stern cool feel of being
Charles Platt, lone genius amid a world of buffoons? I can only
sympathize   I ve been a lone genius in a world of buffoons all my life,
and phew, man -- it s tough 

5. In any case: the most recent victim to fall under the bludgeon is Mr.
Robert Ettinger, who foolishly attempted to update newcomers a bit
regarding vitrification. Mr Platt lost no time:  I complained here
recently about lack of information, but this may not be the most
pernicious problem. Misinformation is worse. From Robert Ettinger: [blah
blah blah] ,  To dismiss the relevance of the experiment on this basis,
and then suggest that any conclusions based on it are "guesswork," is
grossly and, I suggest, intentionally misleading. It is an implied slur
against the scientists who did it and the organization which is now using
the principles on cryopatients. It suggests the worst kind of
professional jealousy,  etc. We ve been treated to three days of this
now, I believe. Some highlights:

Platt:  This para (sic) implies that CI has used precisely the same
compounds and procedures as described by the quoted patent. I believe
this implication is false.  

Score one for Mr. Platt. it is false. CI can t use the same compounds and
procedures as Alcor and 21CM. No one but Alcor and 21CM knows what they
are, and they ain t talking. Charles doesn t know what they are either.
But we do know that they re something mighty fine, by gum.  Charles Platt
says so!

Platt:  Also, while he implies that Harris and Russell are still employed
by 21CM,
he must surely know that they are not.  

He must? Do people at 21CM regularly forward notices of their employment
status to Robert Ettinger now? Is CI a temp agency now?

Platt:  A naive reader might conclude from Ettinger's post that he has
conducted a fair assessment of the work in question, and is waiting
wisely to see whether it is up to the high standards of The Cryonics
Institute, while others rush ahead without proper evidence of efficacy. I
find this apparently deliberate distortion of the truth extremely
offensive. 

I, a corrupt wretch, conclude from Ettinger's post that he has indeed
conducted a fair (indeed the *only* sustained critical) assessment of the
work in question, and is in fact waiting wisely for more information to
see whether it is up to the high standards of The Cryonics Institute,
while others are indeed rush ahead without proper evidence of efficacy. I
find this apparently deliberate attempt to portray any sort of reasoned
disagreement or questioning as deliberate distortion on Mr. Ettinger s
part extremely -- well, kind of amusing, really. (I confess it s kind of
a treat to have Charles back ranting. His points are transparently
absurd, but he gets so bug-eyed and apoplectic about it that you have to
chuckle. I hope Mike Darwin or someone out there somewhere is rubbing his
temples. The guy's blood pressure must be astronomical.)

Platt:  A couple of years ago, Darwin and others offered to GIVE CI some
basic monitoring equipment, the only proviso being that CI personnel
should be trained in its use. This gift was refused. 

The 'only proviso'?  Of all the misstatements lodged by Mr. Platt, this
surely is the very feeblest. Suppose that Robert Ettinger had called up
Charles Platt back when Charles was piloting CryoCare towards prosperity
and said,  Chuck?  Bob here.  Listen, Chuck old man:  CI has done a
number of tests and we ve found out that test number such and such has
produced results that are really boffo! Why don t you and those outdated
BPI dudes dump your own protocols and practices and equipment and other
old whatnot and have our team stroll over to your place and tell your
people how it s *really* done?   I think it is fair to say that Mr. Platt
would (a) regard Mr. Ettinger as having popped his cork, and (b) say no. 
Possibly at colorful length.

A foolish reply!  For if Mr. Ettinger were half the Machiavellian Charles
has played him up to be, what better move could he have made?  One makes
an offer with a catch that one is reasonably sure won t be accepted, and
then one gets to both keep the equipment and bash the victim of one s
generosity ad infinitum.  (Did I say 'a catch'?  What Mr. Platt fails to
point out is that the Cryonics Institute said to the intermediary making
this offer that CI was happy to take any donations, including donated
equipment, and any written suggestions for its use, and any training
consultation by phone or email; no, CI had no problem with off-site
training.  What it did have a problem with was letting one particular
individual of that training team, publicly reported to be considered
 unstable  by the Alcor staff, enter patient facilities to do as he
please.  Having made that one simple, surely not unreasonable condition,
the  gift  was not then  refused    the offer was withdrawn. 

However   on behalf of CI, and in the interests of keeping Charles from
laboring yet another absurd contention to death -- I hereby notify Mr.
Platt that, with this one qualification, CI is still waiting and would
still be more than happy to take him up on this generous offer.  You have
CI s address, right, Charles?  Call Fed Ex and wrap it up.

Platt:   you are well aware that companies can be blocked from using the
results of research, because (as I understand it) this is precisely what
you attempted to do yourself, when CI and Alcor paid a total of $50,000
to Olga Visser for an EXCLUSIVE license to her rat-heart resuscitating
wonder-drug . 

Oh dear. There he goes, using caps and shouting again. And here I was not
aware that Olga Visser was only selling her formula to organizations
pledging to hand it out to other folks for free. My mistake. Do we hear
similar exhortations from Charles for Alcor and BioTransport and 21CM to
hand over its formulae to CI and ACS and, hey, anyone who asks? No.

Platt:  I have yet to see Robert Ettinger attend a presentation by 21CM
or Critical Care Research. On one occasion, he actually left the
conference hall rather than listen to a progress report. And this is the
man who now claims to be providing an authoritative, balanced overview? 

I think the man who founded the cryonics movement, and who has been
exposed to every development, assertion, claim, triumph, failure, and
downright lie since its inception is precisely the man to offer an
authoritative, balanced overview. My God, who *else* will?  Charles? 
Robert Ettinger and Paul Wakfer are the only two people in cryonics with
sufficient guts to express some reasonable reservations as opposed to
promotional cheerleading.  And what happens?  Robert Ettinger is
personally trashed and Paul Wakfer's remarks are ignored.  Can any
readers seriously consider Charles Platt's howls of execration as an
'authoritative and balanced overview'?

As far as visiting 21CM and CCR conferences, why Robert Ettinger should
trot down to CCR to hear people drone on at podiums when he can get and
go over detailed reports in greater depth and understanding at home or
online escapes me.  Can people learn absolutely nothing by reading? 
Strange position for a journalist.  But what is there to learn when one
reads passages like the above, where Charles informs us both that Robert
Ettinger did not show up, *and* that he nonetheless left the hall! This
is Wired journalism at its finest. 

One is sorry to have to get serious when such comedy abounds, but really
  what Mr. Platt has been saying, over and over, is that Mr. Ettinger is
deliberately, maliciously lying and falsifying facts. This comment is
simply not called for.  Great as Mr. Platt s gifts are, mind-reading is
not one of them. He does not know what Mr. Ettinger s motivations or
intentions are. To pretend that he does, and to announce to the world
that they are cheap and malevolent, is precisely the sort of thing that
itself cheapens and degrades discourse on Cryonet.  Charges like this
wouldn't be called for even if they were true!  Roughly 2600 years ago,
Aristotle nailed down what he called the  argumentam ad hominem . This is
a way of arguing that avoids the issue by making an issue out of one s
opponent s motivations. If Mr. Ettinger says,  It is raining,  for
instance, I expect Mr. Platt would instantaneously bark in reply:  You re
just saying that because the Cryonics Institute is secretly manufacturing
umbrellas and you just want our money!  Whether Mr. Ettinger is in the
umbrella business or not is irrelevant. Either it s raining or it isn t,
and the way to find out is not to bawl out Mr. Ettinger for his intrinsic
personal vileness, but to stick your head out the window and see whether
or not it gets wet.

Only the facts count, the ideas, not the personalities. We should never
attack other people personally, because when we do, (a) it distracts us
from the issue in question -- which is usually why it s used, (b) it
makes the attacker, not the victim, look bad, and (c) personal attacks
tend to get responded to in kind, and end up dragging other people into
it as well, thus producing ill feelings all around and polluting the
whole scene till there s nothing left but a childish free-for-all.  I
mean -- haven t we *all* got better things to do than this?

7. To conclude (yes, Reader, I'm taking my own advice;  you can go back
to that Star Trek rerun now, and thank you for putting up with me this
long), no one has really responded to Charles  central contention, that
cryonics is stagnant, moribund, and in general ready (like Charles
himself) to leap into the grave. Baloney. Charles is like some great
Prosecuting Attorney. Balefully he stalks into the courtroom, glaring at
the foredoomed plaintiff with divine contempt. He faces the jury and with
soaring eloquence enumerates every last conceivable fact, rumor,
implication, and fancy that can send the poor boob in the dock to the
rope. There are no qualifying circumstances, no benign interpretations,
no benefit of the doubt -- to the hangman, go! A corrosive picture of
general malfeasance is built up, and indeed not all the parts of the
assault are flatly incorrect, and yet -- and yet the completed picture is
utterly false. The cryonics movement is stagnant -- on its last legs --
doomed -- the providers are liars, dolts, shekel-grasping ogres -- the
members dupes -- the patients probably thawed already -- only one man of
sense stands alone amidst a sea of drooling clods with a message of sense
and sanity   the sterling example of Charles Platt with his valiant cry:
 Better cremation than one-pass!  It s a ludicrous picture, but not as
ludicrous as the reality.

Friends: the state of cryonics has never been better. Developments and
improvements in vitrification are continuing, and developments in
nanotechnology are all but exploding. Membership in CI has all but
doubled, and membership in Alcor has been rising too. Thanks to the web
we have world-wide exposure. We have more funds, more people, more
services, more credibility, than we ve ever had. Is everything perfect? 
Everything will never be perfect. Yes, we only have a thousand members
worldwide   but among those thousand members are some of the best known
and respected scientists in the world; we have doctors, researchers,
financiers, best-selling authors, we have multimillion-dollar
organizations caring for patients, and growing in assets and members. 

Where did it all come from? The man of whom we sit around saying
*nothing* as he takes pot shot after shabby pot shot   Robert Ettinger.
Robert Ettinger was not there *at* the beginning of the cryonics
movement. He *was* the beginning of the cryonics movement. Without him
there might very well be no CI, no Alcor, no 21CM, no vitrification, no
cryonics.  But thanks to him, and thanks to his strength in holding up
his idea in
the face of decades of such denigration and ignorance, we ve finally
reached the point where the scientific world is beginning to acknowledge
that what we re trying to achieve for ourselves   for mankind   is
actually possible, actually within our grasp.  Moribund ? Rubbish. We are
here, we are here to stay, and the wind is at our back. Our cause is
just, and our success inevitable. That is the state of the cryonics
movement.

David Pascal
http://www.cryonics.org

(P.S. On finishing this letter, I opened up my email, and sure enough,
there was Charles Platt, for the tenth time in twelve days, making the
same charge for the fourth or fifth time in the same period, but at long
last coming out of the closet with a few details, to wit:

>> CryoCare Report #4. This contains a report of a comparative study, in
which some dog brains were perfused using the best-available
glycerol-based protocol at that time, while others were perfused using a
"simplified" protocol. Although the text doesn't say so (because we were
trying to be nonconfrontational and polite, believe it or not), the
"simplified" protocol was based on reports from CI of their work using
sheep brains. In other words, the purpose of the research by Darwin,
Harris, and others was to find out whether CI protocol produced results
comparable to the more sophisticated protocol. Very high-quality
reproductions of electron micrographs are included, with principal
features (good and bad) annotated. You don't have to be a brain surgeon
to interpret these pictures. For instance an ice hole, where all brain
tissue has been displaced, shredded, and/or mangled, is pretty damned
obvious.<<

Ah, yes   Darwin.  He s that fellow who said publicly that the chances of
anyone using the most advanced techniques available (his own, naturally)
had zero chance of revival.  How nice of him to include CI protocols
along with his own and all the rest.  Yes, we don t need to look at the
reports of a cryobiologist or university researchers on CI s actual
protocols   much better to concoct your own malformed version and then
evaluate it yourself too.   I suppose that if CI slapped together a
caricature of whatever vitrification protocols competing organizations
might or might not have out there, then gave this fantasy version a test
and got poor results, Charles would clap us on the back and proclaim to
the world that vitrification too is 'damned obvious' junk.  Or perhaps
not?

I thank Mr. Platt for giving us his second-hand interpretation of this
quite unbiased researcher s best-guess simulation of imaginary CI
protocols that were never applied by CI and are not being applied now.  I
am particularly grateful to Charles for being rude and confrontational
enough to make it public   the  nonconfrontational and polite  decision
to hide it did not keep it from being passed along to me (in gory and
inaccurate detail) via email during my first days as a CI member.  I
can t help but wonder how many other people who were also exposed to this
laughable tripe  privately  simply believed it, were dissuaded from
signing up, and are now irrevocably dead?  Well, maybe those still
surviving will look at it, and CI, in a somewhat different light now, as
I did.

No   you don t have to be a brain surgeon to see what s going on.  You
only need a brain.

>>My personal opinion (which has been stated many times before) is that
any patient who is cryopreserved using standard CI procedures is unlikely
to emerge from storage, under any circumstances, ever.<<

Again, I would like to thank Charles Platt, who is neither a doctor,
cryobiologist, nanotechnologist, nor psychic, for repeating for the
hundredth time his unpredjudiced layman s views on the eternal
limitations of medical science.  People who, by contrast, would like to
review differing but qualified opinions related to this topic may read
Dr. Yuri Pichugin s reports at http://www.cryonics.org/research2.html and
http://www.cryonics.org/research3.html, Dr.Greg Fahy s testimony at
http://www.cryonics.org/fahy.html , Dr. Ralph Merkle s study at
http://www.merkle.com/merkleDir/techFeas.html, Dr. Eric Drexler s remarks
on biostasis at http://www.foresight.org/EOC, and (not least) Robert
Freitas  Nanomedicine site at http://www.nanomedicine.com.  And, of
course, the most informative cryonics web site on the net: 
http://www.cryonics.org.

Happy reading, gang!

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