X-Message-Number: 3727 From: Brian Wowk <> Date: Sun, 22 Jan 95 20:43:20 CST Subject: SCI.CRYONICS brains Re Mr. Coetzee's suggestion that cryonics patients could wake up inside other people's bodies: "Transplanting" a brain with restoration of proper neural connections is a task of such daunting complexity that growing clones is trivial by comparison. In words, by the time we have a technology to "transplant" brains we will most certainly have a technology to grow adult anencephalic clones in vitro. You most certainly would not wake up inside a genetically foreign body. In fact, restoration of neuropatients is unlikely to be done by means so crude as transplantation. It is more likely that a new body will be grown around the repaired brain in vitro (in a sort-of artificial womb). Bruce Zimov writes: > I also think that EEG traces should be run on brains in > cryonic suspension to try to detect the existence of > any super-conducting eddy currents, their half-life, and > path at those low temperatures, to either measure > degradation over time, or detect low-temperature brain > activity due to electron-coupling in Cooper pairs. Sorry but EEGs go flat below 70 degrees *Fahrenheit*, and they do not come back at lower temperatures. Brains do not contain high Tc superconductors, so nothing magic will happen at liquid nitrogen temperature. In fact, brains do do not contain any superconductors at all, so nothing would happen at liquid helium temperature either. What if brains did superconduct, and currents were found in frozen brains? This would mean absolutely nothing relative to the consciousness of the patient because such currents would be completely uncoupled from normal biochemistry. In fact they would be uncoupled from any chemistry at all. Frankly this line of thinking is plain nuts. It ranks right up there with telepathic communication with cryonics patients, or a certain cryonics enthusiast from the sixties who wanted to be frozen because he believed that cremation would cause him unspeakable agony. Give me a break! --- Brian Wowk Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3727