X-Message-Number: 23177 From: Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 10:13:18 EST Subject: research Mr. Coetzee writes in part: >Maybe one day someone with a lot of money will pay a >laboratory that do this kind of thing to infuse a 1000 mice with different >concentrations of cryoprotectants and see which ones have the least tissue >damage. Such study may even make it into the serious scientific journals. Please read the Cryonics Institute web site for many details, including evaluations of CI procedures, applied to sheep, rat, and rabbit brains. Dr. Yuri Pichugin has been working full time for a couple of years now as research director for the Cryonics Institute, with occasional help from collaborators elsewhere and from professional consultants. His recent work has had a focus on improved vitrification procedures, with positive results which will be reported in due course. All the organizations have at least partial and indirect evidence of efficacy of their procedures, and they all yield results much better than straight freezing, under appropriate conditions. None has yet been fully evaluated--this would mean, in my opinion, studies including histology, light and electron microscopy, electrophysiology, and at least some kinds of physiological viability tests, including the K/Na ratio but also with many other possibilities. (On the CI web site, for example, you will find mention of studies of metabolites taken from humans and whales dead for two days at room temperature.) CI has the only professional single-focus cryonics research laboratory in the world, as far as I know, and the work Mr. Coetzee mentions is being done. We don't have to wait for people with "a lot of money," although that would be nice. The work will be done faster if we can get more money, even in relatively modest amounts, from people who are not rich but would like to improve their chances of life. Donations to the Immortalist Society research fund are tax deductible. The Immortalist Society can help fund research anywhere it deems appropriate and potentially useful. The address is 24355 Sorrentino Court, Clinton Township MI 48035. Robert Ettinger Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23177