X-Message-Number: 32375
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2010 07:37:33 -0700
Subject: NewYorker letter regarding "Ice Man"
From: MARK PLUS <>

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2010/02/15/100215mama_mail2

February 15, 2010

Jill Lepore's article on Robert Ettinger, who founded the Cryonics
Institute, in Michigan, deftly placed the cryonics "movement” squarely
with the lunatic fringe, where it belongs ("The Iceman,” January
25th). There are many legitimate applications of low-temperature
biology (think frozen semen), and any decent cryobiologist (someone
who studies the effects of low temperature on living systems, and
something I used to be) would have plenty to say about the nuttiness
of freezing dead people. And yet the reanimation of a cell or an
organism is wondrously strange. I've been out of the field for a long
time, but I still pay a cattle-breeding center over a hundred dollars
a year to maintain a few oyster embryos in liquid nitrogen. They look
like hairy microscopic volleyballs. I froze them twenty-five years
ago, and they have no conceivable value or use, but if you plunge them
in seawater they'll wake up, those little hairs will start to beat,
and off they'll swim. So, yes, freezing corpses and taking money to do
it is pathetic and immoral-but I still can't bring myself to flush my
tiny sleeping oysters.


Brian Harvey

Victoria, B.C.

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