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