X-Message-Number: 24533 Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:02:03 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: yes, I DID give a reference To "Basie" once more: In case you haven't noticed I did provide a reference on the damage of freezing, particularly of brains. I will be more explicit this time: Appendix II, "A 'Realistic' Scenario for Nanotechnological Repair of the Frozen Human Brain", by Greg Fahy, in the Alcor publication CRYONICS: REACHING FOR TOMORROW, 1991, Alcor Life Extension Foundation. This is the discussion of cryonics which preceded the later one authored by JB Lemler, which did not discuss the damage of freezing (perhaps because by that time Alcor was moving over to vitrification). In his appendix, Greg Fahy gives a detailed discussion of the different kinds of damage freezing causes to brains. As for nanotechnology, it looks to me that it may very well give us lots of very local maps of the damage to a brain, including the chemicals present (particularly if before then we've found them to be marker chemicals ie. chemicals which give info about what was attached to what else. We would then take this information and put it in a computer, all of it, and the computer would work out the most likely connections between all the pieces. I very much doubt that this could be done by any individual nano- sized repair machine (the problem is too big). If you insist, at the cost of lots of extra machinery, we could turn all the repair machines inside a brain into such a computer, but it looks to me much more efficient to pull out that info and analyze it separately. Of course, nanotechnology right now has lots of interest to computer makers, who realize that unless they use some new fundamental method (other than tiny electrical circuits) their ability to miniaturize and thus increase the power of their computers will run into a wall. (I'll even say that from the papers I've seen in SCIENCE or NATURE, that's presently the main reason for interest in nanotechnology itself). In any case, I did give a reference. And if Alcor still has copies of that book, they can send it to you (or just a photocopy of Appendix II). Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24533