X-Message-Number: 32659 From: Gerald Monroe <> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:14:22 -0500 Subject: Comments --001636284ad490d0bc0489b17bb7 In reply to "John de Rivaz" : trained medical personal are going to make mistakes like any other human being. The whole reason we are having this discussion is because human beings are *not *the perfectly self repairing, accurately thinking beings we wish we were. Otherwise, we'd already have life extension technology used by everyone on the planet. Nevertheless, a trained medical professional with appropriate experience is going to be much less likely to make a mistake than someone with 1/10 the training and experience. If you have a qualified surgeon leading the preservations, you are much more likely to get a good freeze. As I understand it, Alcor uses what it has available, and at least some of the time a surgeon has been there to do a case. Your examples of mistakes made by overworked NIH staff are not really relevant to the discussion, because most of the time those errors are the fault of administrators and support staff. Objections to chemical fixation : there's a huge problem with chemical fixation, and it has nothing to do with the technology. In order for cryonics to be further developed and widely accepted, it must be based upon scientific principles. We can't make further improvements if we don't have any practical way to evaluate the improvements, and we can't get the medical community to accept it if we don't have evidence and reasoned arguments. The catch is, we cannot produce the one thing that would silence all doubt - a revival of a human being - without technology that is many decades away. However, this isn't the end of the story. If cryonics as a medical procedure put the human brain into a state that is demonstrably revivable - and then froze it in a way that did not significantly change the molecular structure of the brain - we could show using mathematics that all significant information needed to reverse the process back a few minutes still exists in the frozen brain. Ultimately, the process could be proven mathematically to work. Frozen patients could have samples removed from their brains and scanned, and the data could be used to prove that a particular patient was still alive. All of the above can be worked on with contemporary technology. With sufficient funding and time, I think sufficient proof could be obtained and published to silence most scientific skeptics. None of this is possible with chemical fixation, and you cannot chemically fix living tissue and then revive it today like you can revive living organisms frozen in liquid nitrogen. You don't really have a way to test your work. It may actually be possible to remove samples from a suspended patient and to revive individual cells, producing real proof of viability. --001636284ad490d0bc0489b17bb7 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32659