X-Message-Number: 3004
From:  (Nick Szabo)
Subject: CRYONICS: Insurance, odds, and milestones
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 1994 04:12:07 -0700 (PDT)


David S. Stodolsky:
> That is, the insurance
> company would be able to bet that cryonics would work and they would
> have the incentive to assist research in this direction.

The role of an insurance company is to spread risk, not merely to
take on risk.  In this case, the risk is strongly correlated 
across patients: if cryonics doesn't work for somes patients, either
due to organizational or technological failure, it's much less 
likely to work for other patients.  The insurance company would 
have to make some bulk side-bet against cryonics to offset the risk.

There are alternative insurers in England who are sometimes willing
to take on these kinds of bets, but I don't know if they're willing
to go this long a term.

Along these lines, an idea futures market is starting up in 
Canada.  These are essentially bets, using play money for now,
for and against various scientific and technological milestones
being achieved by the specified date.  I'm in the process of creating 
an idea future for nanotechnology, the milestone being a Stewart 
platform or other 6-dof assembly device meeting certain accuracy 
and operational frequency benchmarks.  What do folks consider 
milestones for cryonics technology; ie progress that would increase 
the of cryonics working: in reality in the mind of the medical 
community, and in the mind of the public?  Some possible candidates:

* Freezing whole primate organs (eg, the liver) for a year, then 
successfully thawing (cf. the excellent article in the current
_Discover_ -- we're quite close to being able to do this).

* Vitrifying/thawing a whole primate organ.

* Freezing a whole mammal for a year, then successfully thawing
with no functional loss.

Nick Szabo				

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3004