X-Message-Number: 17172
From: 
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 12:17:59 EDT
Subject: Bozzonetti and repair

Yvan Bozzonetti writes in part:

>When most nano supporter think about nano repair, I feel they think in fact 
> about micro surgery done by micrometer sized robots. That technology may 
 >indeed be produced as a spin off from micro electronics device making. It 
> would be useful in cryonics to repair cracks in frozen bodies for example.
 
 >That would be fine, but it fall short of the requested capabilities to get 
 >out of the frost. The main problems are at molecular level, we must reshape 
 >badly folded proteins or membrane molecules. This is a quantum problem, and 
 >to solve it, the nano system must be able to compute all the intermediate 
 >steps between the actual structure and the retrofitted one. 
 
 >The problem: even the biggest supercomputer today can't solve that problem 
of 
 >a single molecule.
 
 >What about the billions of molecules to repair? What about putting the 
 >computer on a molecular scale system?

 I am frequently dazzled by Mr. Bozzonetti's apparent brilliance. (I say 
"apparent" only because I usually don't know enough to decide whether his 
ideas are sound.) However, in this case I think he is missing crucial points.

First, most agree that there is massive redundancy in the brain, which 
affects the argument in obvious ways.

Second, only a small fraction of the molecules in the brain are determinative 
of uniquely personal information.

Third, many think the most important bits of information are encoded in the 
connections between neurons, which will not necessarily be affected by 
misfolding of proteins.

Fourth, Ralph Merkle and others have quantitatively addressed (at least in a 
preliminary way) what they consider to be the most important aspects of 
nano-repair.

Fifth--and most importantly--we have a long list of EXPERIMENTAL verification 
of retention of viability after freezing (or/and vitrification). Yuri 
Pichugin and colleages, doing contract work for the Cryonics Institute and 
the Immortalist Society,  demonstrated coordinated electrical activity in 
networks of neurons in pieces of rabbit brains after rewarming from liquid 
nitrogen temperature, using glycerol as cryoprotective agent. (See our web 
site.) In the '60s Audrey Smith and colleages showed normal behavior of 
re-warmed hamsters after about half the water in the brains had changed to 
ice. Many other experiments--see our site--have demonstrated retention of 
various aspects of structure or/and function after freezing and rewarming of 
nervous tissue. In California recently, Pichugin and his employers (including 
the Institute for Neural Cryobiology) demonstrated up to and including 100% 
viability (by the K/Na criterion) of rat hippocampal slices rewarmed after 
presumed vitrification. 

We don't have to repair all the molecules. We don't even necessarily have to 
understand the problem in full detail. We can sometimes cure a disease 
without understanding it, and we can probably repair a brain without fully 
understanding it. 

I am not a short-term optimist about fully and immediately reversible 
cryostasis, but I believe that CI research under Dr. Pichugin, and the work 
of others, will continue to yield important improvements. I also continue to 
think that even most of our "bad" cases are not hopeless, and that Mr. 
Bozzonetti has greatly overstated the difficulties.

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

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