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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15318