X-Message-Number: 25726
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:18:49 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #25720 - #25725

For Jonathan Despres:

I hope you're like virtually all cryonicists and want your personality
and memories to continue, not just the production of a clone of you
100 years in the future.

And unfortunately cloning brains (even if someone did it) would not
bring the memory and personality of the cloned brain with it. As for
creating a new body, such techniques will very likely help us to
do so. At the same time, if you keep up with bioscience, it's looked
likely for some time that methods to create bodies will be relatively
easy.

But it's exactly because cloning fails to work on brains that many
cryonicists have chosen to have their heads, rather than their whole
bodies, suspended. Not only is it cheaper, but it may even be safer
(heads are far more easy to move than whole bodies). And if you
provide the same funding to store your head that you might have
provided to store your whole body, you'll lower your financial
risks too.

I know that at least one cryonics researcher, Greg Fahy, is working
on suspending brain tissue right now. I believe that CSI is doing
similar research. Working out how to effectively freeze our brains
is one of the activities which present cryonicists would do well
to support. Certainly even if a faulty solution or faulty circumstances
occur, the possibility remains that future methods may revive you ---
but that is a possibility only. If we learn how to suspend brains,
then we'll KNOW that the major issue in cryonics has been solved.
And recreating our body would almost be a problem given to children
in future elementary schools as their introduction to cryonics.

           Best wishes and long long life for all,

                Thomas Donaldson

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