X-Message-Number: 15318
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 00:34:35 -0500
Subject: Reply To Charles Platt
From: 

Mr. Charles Platt wrote:

>>Believe it or not, David, I am primarily interested in establishing
some facts here. While you have done a thorough job ridiculing my
opinions, my opinions are not the issue.<<

On the contrary, Charles.  It is precisely your opinions that are at
issue.  May I give an example?  A day or so ago Doug Skrecky wrote: 
"Lets assume for the sake of argument that Alcor's cryogoop gives double
the chance of resuscitation that CI's gives," and you replied, "I can't
share this assumption. From my perspective, it's a comparison between a
probably zero chance, and a probably very small chance. We cannot derive
a meaningful ratio from that."  Then -- in the very same Cryonet posting!
-- you said, "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.  I think maybe half of the patients at Alcor have some chance..." 

Now in your first statement you say CI patients have a  probably zero 
chance, and Alcor patients have a  probably very small chance  -- i.e.
you assert a rough, if miserable, parity.  Then we scroll down and CI
patients go from  probably  to  unlikely to emerge from storage, under
any circumstances, ever , and Alcor patients mushroom to 50%!  We are
given no reasons why this is so; we are presented with no evidence to
support (much less prove) these statements; we have no explanations for
these arbitrary leaps in probability and percentages.  What has this to
do with  establishing some facts ?  What you have given us are flatly
unproven and unprovable -- opinions!  Opinions that are not even
consistent with each other on the same page. 

I'm not saying this to attack you personally.  It's got nothing to do
with personalities.  I don t say you re deliberately distorting things or
willfully lying or that your motivations are evil.  Indeed I assume your
motives are benign, though I'm no mind reader.  But I don t have to read
minds.  All I have to do is wish you well personally, as I do, and look
closely at the words you ve written.  I grant that you genuinely believe
them.  But -- so what?  Your statements above are simply not supported by
evidence or argument, are not clearly defined, and do not even remain the
same in the course of the same post.  I don't call this ridiculous.  I
don't call it fact.  I call the reader's attention to it and let them
make their own judgement.

>>If you can convince me that any of my factual assumptions or
information about CI procedures is incorrect, I'll be glad to restate my
position publicly. For instance, if the dog experiments conducted by
Darwin, Harris, et al did not accurately replicate the perfusion protocol
used at CI, in what way did they differ? You need to be a bit more
specific, here.<<

Charles.  You tell us that you ve known for, quote,  more than FIFTEEN
YEARS  that CI protocols were inferior to what Darwin and Leaf came up
with in the mid-80's.  And then you tell us that the only *actual test*
of this was performed and reported in CryoCare Report #4 -- ie in the
1995 issue, ten years later.   How can you know something for *ten years*
without even bothering to run one test?   How can anyone purporting to be
a biological scientist consider one single test to be definitive and
conclusive?  And then you ask me for specifics five *more* years *after*
you run it? How did you know what you were testing then if you have to
ask me now?  I should tell readers who have not as yet sent Charles two
bucks for a copy, that the CC #4 article in question is not a review of
CI protocols, but presents a 'summarized extract' from a paper curtly
describing a surmised CI-like (maybe) protocol but mostly dwelling
rhapsodically on a contrasting BioPreservation protocol.  Astonishingly,
BioPreservation president MIke Darwin, who did both, finds his own
protocol a lot better than what he presents as the competition's!  And
how 'summarized' is that extract?  The 'description' of CI protocols is
as follows:  "The brain was glycerolized to 4M at 700 mM/minute before
being frozen to - 77C for one week, thawed, and reperfused with
fixative."  That's it.  This is the meticulous documentation of lab work
that Charles exhaustively mastered at high school?  Does Charles have a
full complete exhaustive documented report on this (purported) CI
procedure anywhere at all?  Or is this 'summary' it?  As an example of
the sort of criticism CI is subjected to, I may very suggest to Mr.
Ettinger that he puts the article the CI web site -- the humor page. 
  
And if you'll forgive me -- why do you even care?  As I said in my post: 
CI procedures are based on CI test results as evaluated by third-party
researchers, and those researchers most recently came out in favor of
gradual ramping as opposed to one-pass.  They favored it about as weakly
as you can, but they favored it, and so that s that.  I realize it must
be a trifle dismaying to lose one s favorite punching bag, but -- you
have.  Face it.  Why in the world compare notes on protocols that were
not being done then and are not being done now?  I mean -- shouldn t you
rather be writing Silicon Man 2 or something?

>>I know, from prior correspondence with you, that you are able
communicate fairly, when your anger doesn't get in the way.<<

Angry?  Me?  I am never angry.  I have too many Perry Como albums on my
turntable to ever be in a state of less than celestial Zen calm.

>>I suggest that since email can be cumbersome and time consuming, a
better method would be for us to talk on the phone. If you are willing to
do this, I'll call you at CI or at any other location of your choice, and
we can spend as much time as you have available, trying to clarify the
points of  disagreement.<<

Charles, if you d like to call me up to talk about your golf stroke or
the latest episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer or to see if I can get you
a date with my sister, fine.  But if you want to talk about CI and CI
protocols, please:  be cumbersome, consume some time, and put your
comments on this list.  Where you are right, you are right, and you are
most certainly right when you say that people in cryonics need to be
honest and open.  Shall we practice we preach?  You have mentioned your
 unnamed  source at CI and your  unnamed   source at INC, and now you say
that you and I should traipse off like two mysterious ninjas of the night
and exchange whispers  privately  out of the general earshot.  Thank you,
but no thank you.  If you have something to say, please say it before all
of us in the open light of day where everybody can hear it, hear the
reply to it, and judge for themselves.  Believe me:  I like nothing
better than to hear criticism of the Cryonics Institute.  If it is fair
criticism, it's a blessing because it points out areas where CI can be
made better.  And if it is unfair, it only makes the critic look worse.

>>I don't have time to answer your extremely lengthy CryoNet post, and
frankly its tone doesn't encourage me. But I will find time to post my
conclusions after any conversation that we may have.<<

I didn t have a lot of time to go through three solid weeks of your own
posts either (three a day on two recent occasions! cripes!  don't your
fingers cramp?), and frankly their tone didn t encourage me much too. 
Nonetheless I managed to slog my way through and address what I thought
were serious issues.  If you don't want to respond, fine.  But if you do
have something to say, again, I would rather you bring it out into the
open and say it to everyone in the cryonics community.  

>>My one remaining question is why CI doesn't name the Canadian lab that
supposedly verified your belief that ramping perfusate concentrations
over a period of time produces either a marginal improvement, or no
improvement at all. Since this conclusion contradicts all relevant prior
cryobiology research (so far as I know), it does strain credulity. If you
were able to name the lab, that might help.<<

My position -- or rather, the test results I have seen -- lead me to the
conclusion that both gradually ramping glycerol and doing it in one pass
results in less freezing damage than straight freezing, and which
procedure produces exactly how much less is a function of a variety of
factors including glycerol concentration, the state of the subject, the
time involved, and several (dozen) other factors.  Forgive me, but is it
your contrasting position that replacing blood with glycerol all at once,
as opposed to looping it through three or four times, produces under any
and all circumstances a total cellular obliteration so super-fine that
even millenia of nanotechnology can never hope to decipher it, much less
repair it?  I do not believe there is a single nanotechnologist nor
bio-nanotechnologist in the world who would agree, and I do not believe
there is a single cryobiologist in the world cracked enough to equate a
brain infused with glycerol in one pass with a handful of scattered
ashes, as you seem to suggest when you say anyone treated in such a way
has 'zero' chance, ever.  That position is absurd.

As for the Canadian lab in question -- well -- after waxing so eloquent
on the virtues of openness, I would very much *like* to name it, and
(hopefully) conclude this numbing thread with my head held high,
posturing heroically.  However, I have not asked them personally whether
it s OK to make their name public, and that may possibly be a matter of
concern to them.  To quote Charles again:  "...if you are in the
biosciences, and you want to get your work published in ANY serious
journal, your chances are minimal if you are known to advocate cryonics."
 I'd like to score yet another point on Charles, of course -- it's like
Ruffle's Potato Chips, once you have one, you gotta have one more -- but
I don't want to stiff anyone to do it, or get anyone into professional
trouble -- nor, to be frank, do I want to risk them getting pestered. 
The lab's complete reports are made available to all CI members, and
membership is growing every day, and we don't tell members what they can
or can't say, so if Charles really can't find out who they are in two
phone calls, he's less of a journalist than I think he is.  But they've
dealt with us honorably, so I feel obligated to try to pointlessly return
the gesture till someone spills the beans.  At which point CI will be
well vindicated in its choice, as it generally tends to be on fair
examination.  I can tell you (I guess) that CI has been working with not
one but two different Canadian labs, so as to get more varied and
balanced feedback. The head of one is on the faculty of Laval University,
the other on the faculty of the University of British Columbia.  Both
labs are quite legitimate, indeed estimable, and I say that because I
myself played a small part in locating them, and I genuinely wanted CI to
have the best laboratory reviews and analysis possible.  That analysis
supports -- albeit razor-thinly -- your own ramping preference, Charles. 
So if you find it questionable, exactly where does that leave you? 

However -- I don't want to end on a pugnacious note.  On the contrary.  I
don't really think Charles thinks Laval University faculty are
professionally suspect for favoring gradual ramping like he does, and I
don't really think he believes CI is making some questionable error for
being guided by such recommendations.  We're just seeing old habits
having a difficult time adjusting to new realities.  He ought to be
welcoming such developments, and if he sits down quietly with himself for
a while and thinks about it, I expect he will.  After all, the cryonics
movement has gone through a long period of rancor and where has that
approach gotten us?  Where did it get BioPreservation, or CryoCare?  I
think that the cryonics community has had enough of it, and is instead
entering an era of synthesis, and (I hope) mutual support.  At CI I see
it in the cordial cooperation we have with other organizations like ACS,
in the great number of Alcor readers of CI's publication The Immortalist,
in the new members and ideas brought into CI from CryoCare members like
Ben Best.  It genuinely is possible to cooperate, to experience creative
and not negative tensions, to work together, to grow and change and
improve and evolve organizationally.  Anyone who does not see tremendous
advances in CI along these lines the last few years is simply not
looking.  What I see there is very much an emerging model of prosperous
growth, intensified research, and greater personal and
inter-organizational cooperation and friendship.  Emerging?  It's already
there in many ways.  Time and technological advance and simple inevitable
change is gradually taking us forward to something better, as Robert
Ettinger predicted it would.  Darwin (Charles, not Mike) said that the
creatures that survived were not 'the fittest' but rather those most able
to adjust themselves and adapt in the face of change.  If we aspire to be
survivors, why not adopt that approach, and try to think in new ways,
rather than keep re-hashing old battles over points that no longer even
apply?   

David Pascal

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