X-Message-Number: 15662
From: 
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 21:41:28 EST
Subject: an analogy

My main criticism of Fred Chamberlain's "Vitrification Is Here!" article was 
that there has been no test of the current Alcor cryopreservation procedure. 
That is, no animal brain has been subjected to the current Alcor procedure, 
rewarmed either from - 196 C or from - 130 C, and then evaluated for 
structure or function. Not only by no outsider--since essential elements of 
the procedure are secret--but not even by the Alcor people or their 
consultants. By no one, anywhere, ever.

That doesn't mean they necessarily made a bad decision, and it certainly 
doesn't mean they are acting in bad faith, and it may be, as they believe, 
that the current procedure--at least under ideal conditions--is better than 
the previous Alcor procedure. Their optimism is based on theory and on 
different but related experience, and they could be right. But consider the 
following analogy.

A team of aeronautical engineers wants to design and build a new plane, 
civilian or military, better in certain ways than existing models. They draw 
on theory, experience, and imagination and develop plans. From time to time 
they build and test prototypes of portions of the design, e.g. they test 
airframes in wind tunnels or computer simulations of wind tunnels. Eventually 
they build a prototype of the plane, and test it. Then they shake out the 
bugs in a series of tests and corrections. Eventually they either run tests 
that are satisfactory, or else they decide the concept wasn't so great after 
all, and write it off as a loss--sometimes even after building quite a few 
planes. (The Osprey?) 

What they do not do is fly passengers or missions before a successful series 
of field tests of the finished product.

Now the analogy isn't perfect. For one thing, cryonics researchers have only 
a tiny fraction of the talent and capital and experience available to the 
aero engineers, which makes it all the more important to have successful 
tests, all the chancier to rely on guesswork or predictions. For another 
thing, the cryonics problem is much harder than the aero problem, with the 
same conclusion.

Of course, another shortcoming of the analogy is that, in the aero case, the 
previous planes flew. In the cryonics case, we know that the previous "plane" 
didn't "fly" (provide preservation reversible by current technology), and the 
new one won't either, so it isn't a question of flying better, but coming 
closer to flying. Here definitive tests are harder, because results could 
easily be ambiguous, with some indications one way and some another. It's 
easy to distinguish between a plane that flies and one that doesn't, but it's 
not necessarily easy to figure out which of two (or several) non-fliers comes 
closest.

As usual, no certainties, no guarantees; you pays your money and you takes 
your chances. But the CI policy is only to use what has been tested and 
evaluated, as well as what is feasible. In due course, when the veil of 
secrecy is lifted, we will test the Alcor procedure or/and similar ones 
(there is more than one company in the field), in addition to many other 
variants on our agenda, and make whatever changes seem appropriate from time 
to time, including the possibility of offering a range of options instead of 
one standard procedure.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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