X-Message-Number: 213 From att!CompuServe.COM!72320.1642 Tue Aug 14 03:46:15 1990 Return-Path: <att!CompuServe.COM!72320.1642> Received: from att.UUCP by whscad1.att.uucp (4.1/SMI-3.2) id AA15168; Tue, 14 Aug 90 03:46:14 EDT Received: by att.att.com; Tue Aug 14 03:40:56 1990 Received: by saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu (5.61-kk/5.900605) id AA10334; Tue, 14 Aug 90 03:40:52 -0400 Date: 14 Aug 90 02:34:59 EDT From: STEVE BRIDGE <> To: KEVIN <> Subject: Alcor updates and neuro Message-Id: <"900814063459 72320.1642 EHI39-1"@CompuServe.COM> TO: KEVIN A couple of important upcoming dates: August 23: The hearing on Alcor's suit against the California Depart- ment of Health, concerning their continued refusal to acknowledge cryonics as being legal and their refusal to give us the necessary forms to have legal custody of the suspended individual. These people have stated in writing on two separate occasions that cryonics is legal and they are merely trying to figure out how to properly handle the forms. However, in the past three "real-life" situations, they have informed local authorities (who were inquiring about how to handle our patients) that cryonics was illegal and that they should have nothing to do with us. Our attorneys are fairly confident that this should go our way. The individuals in the Bureau of Vital Statistics who are causing the problem have no authority or legal right to declare cryonics illegal. Even the California Attorney General's office has acknowledged that. But a full and public declaration of our legality will go a long way toward getting cooperation from local authorities all over the state. September 24: This is the current date set for the hearing on Dr. Thomas Donaldson's request for the right to enter cryonic suspension before his legal death --at his option, if his brain tumor should begin growing again. The outcome is much less certain, and any decision will no doubt be immed- iately appealed to higher courts. Obviously, these two court cases have primary relevance to the success of cryonics in California, and by extension, throughout the country. We'll try to pass along the decisions as we hear them. News Articles: Several newspapers around the country (including USA Today) are expected to run articles on cryonics this week or next. This includes papers in New Jersey, Detroit, and California. Please let this "Cryo-Net" know if you see something significant, and please send a copy of the article to Alcor. NEUROPRESERVATION No one should feel self-conscious about having reservations concerning neuropreservation in cryonics. Practically every one of us had a negative emotional reaction when we first heard of it. Like you, we all saw films about severed heads being kept alive, or being chopped off during the French Revolution. It is sometimes hard to get past those images and look at the REALITY, which is much different. Neuropreservation is merely a convenient way to save the personality and memories of the individual. We do not plan to bring people back to consciousness as severed heads; and we do not think it is all likely that we will trying to attach severed heads to donor bodies. It won't be at all necessary. We will grow new copies of the individual's own body, just as we all grew our own bodies in the first place. Most likely they will be grown right from the cells in the base of the stored head. (Although people like Ralph Merkle have other possible scenarios in mind). The exact procedure is hard to predict for sure, since technological advance rarely proceeds in a an orderly manner. When I discuss this with groups, I point out that children under the age of 9 can already regrow the severed tip of a finger. It is no great prediction to suppose that advanced technologies will (fairly soon) give us the ability to regrow an entire missing finger. Well, if you can regrow a missing finger, in principle you can regrow a missing arm. And once you learn how to regrow missing limbs, then regrowing a missing BODY should not seem much of a stretch. There are some important (theoretical) biological advantages to neuropreservation that may not be obvious at first. Freezing tissue without damage is a complex process, and the body has many kinds of tissue. Each type takes a slightly different protocol to freeze and store it most effectively. So in freezing a whole body, either some compromises must be made to make sure that the big toes are frozen just as well as the head, or all other parts of the body must be compromised in order to properly freeze the brain. If you agree that the brain is primarily where the individual resides, then you don't want to compromise that organ. Also, an important tenet of cryonics theory is to get the brain down to liquid nitrogen temperature as rapidly as possible. With a whole body, this takes at least three days. But with a neuropatient, it only takes a few hours. Long term storage is better, also, since the cost is much, much lower for neuros (under $100 per year, compared with perhaps $1,000 per year for a whole body), and the ease of transfer to new con- tainers as needed is significantly increased. The tradeoff is, of course, that there is a real chance (although I personally believe it is small) that the information in the brain will not be adequate to reconstruct the "new you." It is also conceivable that it will possible to repair every cell in a whole body sooner (or cheaper) than it will be possible to grow an entirely new body. My own feeling is that turning on a natural process of growth will be available to us sooner than the sophisticated machines necessary to do cell-by-cell repair. And let's be realistic -- most people die when they are elderly, with aged, severly damaged bodies. It might be easier to grow a new body than to fix the old one. The counter-argument to THIS is that we will need machines at that level of sophistication anyway to do the BRAIN repair necessary, so we will have to wait that long for everyone. I'm willing to admit that I have hedged my bets. I am currently signed up for neuropreservation with Alcor, because I believe that the advantages are significant in terms of better perfusion and cooldown, and I don't think that the eventual outcome depends on anything more than the brain. However, I arranged from the beginning for an insurance policy of $100,000, so I can change my mind if I get new evidence (as long as the increase in Alcor's minimums don't increase faster than the value of the policy). I only pay $60 per month for that policy, an insignificant difference from the premiums for a $50,000 policy. Officially, Alcor doesn't care which choice you make, as long as you provide the proper amount of minimum funding. Unofficially, most of us also feel the same way. There are potential advantages to both procedures, so you choose whatever you think is correct. One other possible approach that some members have asked about (although I don't know if anyone has actually arranged for this) is for the primary focus to be on neuropreservation to take advantage of those benefits, but to ALSO preserve the body as a back-up, perhaps in a separate container. I assume Alcor would charge the whole-body rate for this; but there could be an additional cost for the added trouble, I suppose. I hope this answers some of the basic questions on neuropreservation; but I still encourage interested persons to contact Alcor and request the reprints suggested by Michael O'Neal in Msg #209. Steve Bridge Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=213