X-Message-Number: 15703
From: "Jeff Grimes" <>
Subject: suicide etc.
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 00:53:25 +0000

I have been away for a few days. Here are a few brief points re the 
various posts by Robert Ettinger.

>An even better way would be for the patient to 
>"commit suicide" with a team 
>standing by, without waiting for natural death. 
>Suicide is not illegal in 
>Michigan, although assisting in a suicide is illegal. 

In England you are likely to be given an autopsy, I think, if you kill 
yourself. Isn't this true in the USA as well? Since an autopsy would 
probably mean dissecting the brain, that doesn't seem a very good idea.

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

Mr. Ettinger acknowledges that his comparison of aircraft development with 
cryonics has some limitations, because cryonics can't be tested completely 
until some frozen people can "wake up." But he suggests CI comes closest 
to following the normal procedure of aircraft development, because it has 
tested its methods.

This seems misleading to me, because he just skips over the fact that CI's 
methods failed the test! The brain samples shown on the CI web site seem 
to show damage that would stop them from functioning. Therefore they are 
more like pictures of a plane that crashed, than a plane that flew. 

> In due course, when the veil of 
> secrecy is lifted, we will test the Alcor procedure or/and similar ones 

As I have pointed out many times, the ice blocker developed by 21st Century 
Medicine is being sold for 99 dollars a bottle. This is not a secret, and 
CI could test it right now if they wanted to. Since it seems that CI has 
not bothered to do this, apparently CI doesn't want to try something that 
comes from another organization.

> If [Grimes] means references on our research pages, in 
> the reports by Dr. Pichugin and others, what would be the point? 
> They are 
> reporting on what they found, not comparing their findings to 
> those of others or to different experiments.

I was pointing out that CI never seems interested in referring to research 
done by other teams. If CI hasn't tested something itself, it seems to 
refuse to believe in anyone else's results. For example, I can't think of 
any other explanation for CI choosing not to gradually increase glycerol 
concentration, until it finally decided this might be a good idea in the 
year 2001. This was standard procedure in other organizations a long time 
ago, wasn't it? But until CI ran its own test, it paid no attention to 
anyone else. Surely in a field as small as cryonics seems to be, it makes 
no sense for people to ignore each other's work.

Jeff Grimes.

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