X-Message-Number: 4004
Date: 13 Mar 95 09:39:44 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS: Re-inventing Wheels

    In message 4003 Bob Smart writes:  >>Let's see if I have this straight,
now: Bauge enters the US illegally; contracts to provide cryonics services
which he was grossly unprepared to provide; botches it, creating a scandal
that--if the media were paying much attention--would discredit the whole
concept of cryonics...and now he expects the rest of the cryonics community
to rush to his rescue?<<
 
     Answer: Yes, Bob, I think that about says it.  Some people have simply
got to reinvent the wheel.  Alas, however, experience is a harsh
schoolteacher, for she always presents the test first and the lesson later. 
Experience also runs an expensive school, as Ben Franklin always noted, yet
a fool will learn in no other.  
 
    When it comes to freezing people, it's been somewhat painful to see
Bauge repeat most of the mistakes of the last 25 years of cryonics-- with
money, with equipment, with families of the deceased, with the press, with
the law, with trying to run a private operation-- all while steadfastly
refusing to listen to the advice of people who've been doing it longer, and
have developed better ways out of the mistakes we've made long ago.  
 
     But, as you point out, all this is more than just empathically
painful, since what Bauge does may yet impact the rest of us directly too,
like it or not, and unfair as that is.  If he were trying to re-invent
skydiving (say) instead of cryonics (as some cryonicists have sometimes
wished) he'd have about as much success, but he would also be much less
dangerous to others.  Socially, the inevitable end result with skydiving
would be put down only to his own foolhardiness, too.  When it comes to
freezing people for the "challenge" of it, however (as Bauge puts it), I'm
afraid things won't be quite so clear.  The press in this area still has
difficulty distinguishing one lunatic from another.
 
 
                                          Steve Harris

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