X-Message-Number: 32665 From: "John de Rivaz" <> References: <> Subject: Re: Response to John de Rivaz (Message 32651) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:00:40 +0100 Unfortunately, the failure to feed, and the teeth and spectacles errors are not rare, although there are political moves to correct them. The NHS are making the biggest effort to remedy the poor stroke care service in the UK, and are opening special centres to provide thrombolysis treatment with 24hr access. This is, of course, extremely cost effective, resulting in many patients being able to return to their normal lives instead of being permanent invalids for the rest of their natural lives. In fact I read about this after making my previous post to CryoNet. I didn't think the poor quality of care in some conventional medicine facilities **justifies** poor quality elsewhere, but it does suggest that professionalism is neither a panacea nor a guarantee of perfect safety. Most professionals would argue, limiting their point of argument to the procedures and regulations they have learned, that cryonics won't work anyway. Reanimation relies on technologies few people can even imagine. It is quite possible that if it occurs it will rely on technologies that no one has imagined (or could imagine) at the present point in time, even nanotechnology. When cryonics was first written about, the concept of nanotechnology did exist (but was called something else) but very few people considered it carefully until it was popularised by Drexler. However reanimation was considered by other means, such as those proposed by Segall and Khan in Forever Young. Indeed the idea of preserving the dead was considered long before cryonics, most notably by Benjamin Franklin. In the 1891 the idea of electroplating a dead person to prevent ingress of bacteria was proposed. (It wouldn't have worked because decomposition would occur from bacteria already present.) Dr Varlot, a surgeon at a major hospital in Paris tried to develop the method according to Strange Brains and Genius (Pickover, Plenum 1998) My point is that once someone is frozen, however badly, some as yet unnamed technology **may** be able to revive them into youthful good health. It is obviously better to cryopreserve them as well as possible, but if the choice is between no cryopreservation at all and a less than optimum cryopreservation, then surely the latter is still preferable. Incidentally, I read that there is a judgement against Johnson http://www.alcor.org/Library/pdfs/May2010Judgement.pdf and according to Alcor News he is also in trouble for ignoring it. -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz: http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy, Nomad .. and more Message #32660 Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:25:15 +0000 (UTC) From: Melody Maxim <> Subject: Response to John de Rivaz (Message 32651) <del> With all due respect to Mr. de Rivaz, I think it's unproductive to attempt to justify the extremely poor quality of care, in cryonics, by remarking on mistakes made in conventional medicine. The errors he mentions are fairly rare, when compared to the tremendous number of procedures being performed, in conventional medicine. <del> Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32665