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

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