X-Message-Number: 3105 Date: 10 Sep 94 15:58:21 EDT From: yvan Bozzonetti <> Subject: CRYONICS: Make your own research. If I understand well what I have read on cryonet in the past week, everybody agree on the research necessity, on the financial implication of all, but when there come the time to put the $ on the table, nobody accept to turn ideas into actions. I conclude than, conciously or not, cryonics is not serious business, just a good subject to cheating. ( I put asside Robert Ettinger and, may be, Mike Darwin...) I see money as the smallest common denominator between all the member of a society, now the society is the world. For people with a common interest, there must exist by mere definition a larger body of common values. Why then don't materialize these "restricted area moneys" by a troc system? Plain money would be only usefull in dealing with the "outside society". If anybody starts to spent its own money on a personal basis, there would be not control problems and I think the investment could be greather than with the donation scheme. As products and subsystems would start to be completed, the troc economy could take off. As an illustration, I'll describe one of my onw project: Making a first step in nanomachines technology. I can't use the top bottom aproach, starting with micrometer scale lithography exploited in electronics industries. So I must look at the botom up way, starting with "simple" molecules. Life is the only current technology at hand in this domain. The chaperones are a kind of specialised protein complex able to "mold" denaturated or newly formed proteins into the right active shape. Before a cell turns solid at low temperature, (or near so) osmotic effects dry it up and let proteins without a water cover. The result is a protein denaturation process and cell death at thawing. An artificial input of chaperones could be a step towards the solution... at least if the chaperone's proteins are not denaturated themselve by the freezing process. To address this problem, there must be a stabilizing agent, for example an anchoring on a stable surface such a mineral crystal. I cultivate for three years now some Agathis trees, these southern Pacific conifers are particularly rich in chaperones and are a good spare parts source in this domain ( they produce too a liquid, the copal, whose polimerized form is more known under the name of amber - recall Jurassic Park for the molecular protective properties of amber - ). Now, proteins get fixed and are stabilized by alumino-silicate crystals such the ones found in clay. Flat clay crystals get stacked as tokens on a Black Jack table. To get the largest surface for a given clay mass, clays with folded crystals must be selected. Because they can't be packed efficiently, these crystals produce low density clays. Water deposition gives a tool to select clay crystals on their density properties. Sonicated with ultrasound in a dextran solution, the chaperone-clay complex would get sugar covered and looks as a good food for cells. With this passport for the inner cell domain, it would be possible to restore protein functions in frozen, burned, chemically damaged cells or cells engaged in vigorous reproduction, for example in a wounded area. Well, that research asks for some thinking to be planned, on the other hand it seems, at least to me, holds some good promises in cryonics and outside. The money there is not an issue. I would go faster if some reader was interested and could send me some clay samples taken in different sites. I can give back some young Agathis australis trees in exchange. Anybody can create its own research program along similar ways, it needs only some mind work and the knowledge than anybody can be a researcher in a domain where everything remains to be done. To my best knowledge, there is no patent on the clay-chaperone association, any unfair reader can try to get a good return from this message. My own position is than market must help progress, not block it by stopping information diffusion. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3105