X-Message-Number: 16336 Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 11:34:05 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: Yuri, Olaf, and David Yuri Pichugin wrote: > Eugene, you was not able to do even 1/1000 part of > the achievements Mr. Ettinger has done for cryonics! > What right do you have in order so spitefully to > criticize Mr. Ettinger and the Cryonics Institute? Anyone has a right to criticize anyone. If the criticism turns out to be valid, it may be useful, and credentials of the critic become irrelevant. Eugene Leitl did little to promote cryonics as it is currently practiced, presumably because he was appalled by the way in which it is currently practiced. However, he did dedicate a substantial part of his working life to acquiring an understanding of cryobiology and applying that knowledge in research. Vanishingly few cryonics activists have shown such an interest. By my estimation, Eugene's contribution to cryonics-related research has been greater than anything that anyone in CI has done in its entire history. Just for the record. Olaf Henny (I think) wrote re The Netherlands: > I'll assert again...the mindset that welcomes euthanasia > is not an immortalist one but a mortalist one.They believe > that lives should end. I'm not sure that this is correct. I think they believe that unnecessary suffering should end. Their views on cryonics remain untested, so far as I know. ----- Re David Pascal--welcome back, I have indeed missed your bile, although your tendency to be prolix is really quite tiresome. In the past, as you well know (but prefer to forget), I already stated at great length my concerns about CI procedures (such as the slow initial cooldown which is virtually guaranteed to maximize the risk of autolysis); therefore your statement that I have offered "zero proof" for my opinions is without merit and should be ignored. In addition I made it clear that I was expressing opinions, rather than statements of proven fact, since, as you well know, the fundamental problem in cryonics is that nothing can be proven conclusively. This lack of proof is indeed the great flaw in this field, which CI has turned to its advantage. In cryonics, if one organization uses a cut-rate bargain-basement approach while claiming that its results may be as good as those achieved by a more rigorous protocol, no one can _conclusively_ disprove this affront to commonsense. Thus has CI prospered. > In other words, CI is violating laws which do not exist by killing people > who are not alive, and it ought to be sued, although it shouldn't, > because its patients have no chance, though maybe they do. If CI were successfully sued, obviously this would set a precedent that would endanger other organizations where patients probably have a better chance of resuscitation than those at CI. This is precisely why I have refrained from writing an expose of cryonics which, I believe, could kill a large part of the field. I certainly have more than enough material, but there is no way to damage one part of this field without damaging it all, since it all looks much the same from an outsider's perspective. > Ah, the gentle tones of reason. I do kind of thank Mr. Leitl for writing > these things. I think it demonstrates that the person capable of > producing such a stream is not really the best person to make an > objective assessment of his subject. I think Eugene Leitl is a good scientist who is outraged by bad science, and is so offended by what he perceives as fraud, he allowed his emotions to influence his text. Personally I would have preferred to see Eugene attempt an itemized, dispassionate rebuttal, but I certainly understand the distress he expresses, and your comparison of him to a Nazi in the Third Reich is of course utterly despicable. It is made even more offensive by your subsequent suggestion that other people (not yourself) are the source of personal disparaging remarks here. > Case in point. Charles. Charles, like Eugene, goes around saying that > CI patients (don t ACS or Alcor have any patients?) have no chance of > revival whatsoever Don't paraphrase me. I never said that, and you know it. I would never make such a statement of fact, for the reasons already given above. No one knows for sure what anyone's chances are. > because I have before, in lengthy and picayune detail, during the last > rumble; partly because such discussions immediately decay into arcane > technical jargon that 0.001% of readers understand, and that that 0.001% > disagree about; Here I agree with you: It has been almost impossible to persuade CI to write anything about CI's procedures, because you have found that you can attract a steady flow of members while telling them virtually nothing about the details. Moreover, since your data gathering is so rudimentary, in many cases (such as core temperatures during cooling, or edema observed via burr hole) you don't even have the data. You certainly can't report details that don't exist. > change. In Charles' last strafing run on this list, he blithely informed > us that all CI patients were dead meat since CI ramped in one-pass Again, this is a complete and deliberate misquote. I never said that. > than stepped. Surprise! CI ramps stepped rather than one-pass. CI began its version of ramped perfusion early this year, after about a decade in which it had claimed the procedure was unnecessary, despite endless well-documented cryobiological evidence to the contrary. CI was in the habit, probably for more than ten years, of using highly concentrated glycerol without any ramping, which almost certainly caused osmotic shock while failing to penetrate deeper tissues sufficiently during the very short perfusion time that was used. CI was warned repeatedly (by myself and others) that its procedures were a) probably poisoning the cells that were reached by the highly toxic solution while b) probably leaving other cells completely unprotected, so that they would be decimated by freezing damage. Pascal responded to this suggestion with his usual mixture of contempt for critics and breezy confidence. He now presents CI's belated decision to ramp concentration as a selling point, conveniently omitting CI's intractable resistance to this procedure in the past. As for the fate of CI patients who, for a decade or more, were subjected to a bizarre punishment in which some cells were almost certainly poisoned by toxicity while other probably received no protection at all, one can only speculate. It's certainly fortunate for your conscience that you have such uncritical faith in nanotechnology. > you do that by raising money and running tests and checking the results, > as 21CM is doing, as (CI man) Ben Best and (CI research-director-to-be) > Yuri Pichugin are doing at INC, and as CI itself is doing at its Michigan > headquarters and elsewhere. To take indirect credit for Ben Best's funding of research is despicable and hypocritical. (How much money has CI put into the hippocampal slice project? Doesn't anyone remember Ettinger's endless posts campaigning for people to give money to Olga Visser, rather than the Prometheus Project--which fathered the hippocampal slice project?) Ben did not join CI because he was entirely satisfied with its procedures. This much I think is public information. The rest of Ben's opinions should be for Ben to state. > You see, CI has gotten it into its noggin that the way to find out which > procedures work best is to do them and send them out, blind, to > mainstream researchers who don't have a vested interest in saying 'this > is better than that'. As has been pointed out, CI has made a habit of offering only its own rather odd ideas for evaluation. One hopes that this practice may change. But so far, CI has merely asked its lab, "Which works better: CI process (a) or CI process (b)?" I have not seen CI express any interest in comparing its procedures with other people's procedures. It remains an island of idiosyncracy. > posting.) Alcor is very into vitrification these days, and vitrification > requires extemely rapid cooling. I suspect that Alcor feels that it is > simply too tough to apply its new procedures properly on a long-distance > basis. You can suspect anything you want, but the fact is, future Alcor applicants in the UK were told to shop elsewhere because Alcor felt unable to verify their insurance arrangements in an emergency. Alcor has made no guarantee, that I am aware of, to apply vitrification to every future patient. Nor can it do so, since some cases (where the patient is not reached promptly, for instance) may be unsuitable for vitrification. To suggest that Alcor refused future UK members solely because vitrification procedures cannot be applied in the UK is misleading, inaccurate, and uninformed. > I think the problem between CI and Alcor is a lack of clarity on the > nature of market segmentation. The problem is that CI's procedures are an embarrassment to a field that is making some attempts to bury its past. So long as you avoid this issue and disseminate the usual mixture of facile reassurance and personal abuse, your opinions are not congruent with reality. 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