X-Message-Number: 18285
From: 
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 16:36:48 EST
Subject: NewYrNews&Thoughts from Ron Havelock

Today's issue of the Washington Post brings 2 pieces of important medical 
news of interest to life extenders. Leading on the left top front page, "A 
Cancer Fighter is Linked to Aging."  Protein p53, "a central cog in the 
cancer-fighting machinery of many animals" also shuts down body's ability to 
renew organs, bones, muscles, etc. Study group headed by Lawrence Donehower 
at Baylor College of Med, Houston, found that mice they had tried to breed 
with weakened p53 were hyperactive producers instead.  What they later 
discovered, by accident, is that while they resisted tumors, they aged much 
more rapidly than controls.  Study published in respected journal Nature 
suggests a key factor in aging may have been discovered along with the 
dilemma: do you want cancer or do you want to get old fast? Ultimately, I 
assume as do they, that we can get around this Hobson's choice one way or 
another, but in any case the knowledge advance may be huge. So says Arnold 
Levine of Rockefller U and Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins, leading ca 
researchers.
The other item which may be nearly of equal importance is NEJournal of Med 
study by US and Italian researchers studying autopsied heart tissue of 
transplant recipients.  Turns out that as much as one fifth of donated heart 
was rebuilt by recipient.  Heart muscle and blood vessels "grew rapidly" in 
the new  hearts after transplant, apparently from stem cells which may have 
circulated in the blood.  I am no authority on medical matters but as a lay 
person I am very impressed by 2 such reports on one day, Jan 3 , 2002 from 
such respected sources.

These 2 items are but a small symptom of the flood of new medical knowledge 
that has been coming in over the last 10-20 years.  Sooner of later the 
implications of all this for life extension should become obvious to a much 
larger public and at that point I believe [or perhaps just hope] there will 
be a rather sudden upsurge of interest in cryonics, particularly among those 
who can see the dawning medical future but realize also that their own age 
prevents them from extending their lives into that future by normal means.  
This suggests to me a target audience and a marketing strategy to appeal to 
optimistic futurists.  There are a lot of futurists out there but they belong 
to three very different camps.  The first and perhaps the largest is the 
pessimists, those who fear the consequences of technology along with 
population growth and the hedonistic tendencies of modern culture generally.  
These people, many of them classified as 'liberals', and, ironically, many as 
religious conservatives, will strongly oppose cryonics to the bitter end.  
They have strong belief systems defended by what they consider 'facts' that 
effectively block out our messages.  The second group of futurists I would 
describe as the fantasists, people who love to absorb themselves in science 
fiction without serious consideration of the science content or the 
probabilities of a real future based on what we now know.  They will flock to 
Vanilla Sky and then The Lord of the Rings and maybe Harry Potter without the 
least concern for what might be possible or even conceivable.  They just want 
to be entertained.  I doubt if this is a very good audience for serious 
cryonics interest but I don't know.  Then there is the third group of 
futurists, people who believe that progress is connected to science and 
technology, people who are impressed as well as thoughtful about what it all 
means but set it within an essentially optimistic framework both for 
themselves and for humanity as a whole.  These people are out there and they 
should be our friends. How do we reach them?

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