X-Message-Number: 2518 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: CRYONICS:more.on.science Date: Fri, 7 Jan 1994 09:12:45 -0800 (PST) Hi again! Among the various messages I read last night on Cryonet was one deploring (a mild description) Mike Darwin's statement that the publishers of cryonics newsletters should censor some contributors: to be specific, Mr. Skrecky. As another strong proponent of science and scientific research in cryonics, I feel I should put in my own opinion. Furthermore, I too commented on Mr. Skrecky's piece about sucrose, though by no means as much as did Mike. Fundamentally, ideas such as those of Mr. Skrecky to use sucrose as a cryo- protectant suffer from an essential problem. It's called the Real World. You can SAY all you want, but saying it does not make it come close to being correct. The real test isn't whether or not you can publish an idea, but whether 1. you actually try to IMPLEMENT IT and 2. when you do, IT WORKS. Not all your tears or rhetoric will change that fact. No bill of rights can change it either. It happens to be true that cryobiologists have already tried sucrose. They found that it DID NOT WORK. No more really needs to be said. Mr. Skrecky can find the references for himself; once he reads them, then he has two choices: 1. retract his proposal 2. devise (somehow) a modification of it which escapes the problems revealed by the first experimental trials. Anyone who wonders why he may find it hard to publish his OLD proposashould understand that scientific periodicals do NOT publish OLD ideas. They try to publish NEW ideas. And what makes an idea new is not that you have already heard of it, but that the Editors of that publication can point to places where it was already tried, years before, and did not work. There is, however, an issue of education. It is in fact a good way to learn about cryobiology to have such ideas and investigate them. Furthermore, scientists in general, I think, have an obligation not just to do research but to help members of the public understand what research has been done and what has not, and why, and just what they think about various scientific issues. If they do not do this, scientists may become alienated from their real sources of financial support. At the same time, anyone involved in cryonics should understand that the number of people involved in doing real scientific work to advance cryonics is VERY SMALL. It can be counted on the fingers of one badly injured hand. So their frustration in having to, once more, explain what is wrong with with a proposal by someone who simply hasn't done their homework should be understood. And perhaps the cryonics community should be a bit more forgiving of that than would happen in the community at large. Actual censorship, however, becomes much harder. As Editor of PERIASTRON, I am happy to print anything, but those who submit material should also understand that I may criticise it strongly even when I print it. But what Mike was saying was not that NEW ideas should be forbidden. He was saying that Skrecky's idea is an OLD idea, and even more, has been shown not to work (that's what the issue of whether or not sucrose got inside cells is about). Genuinely new ideas are hard to have. They don't come easy even to the best of us. Skrecky really deserves criticism for not having done his homework and discovered these things for himself. Next time, I do hope that he looks more carefully into what's been done, and so doesn't come out with something the cryobiological community has abandoned long ago. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2518