X-Message-Number: 4995
From: Ralph Merkle <>
Subject: Memory, ischemia and freezing: let's put the discussion on the web
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 20:23:10 PDT

Several recent posts have been on the subject of the extent
to which memory is (or is not) preserved by ischemia and
freezing.

A general observation: a mailing list is an awful place to hold
a serious discussion.  Regardless of the merit of a post, it fades
and is forgotten.  The same arguments are hashed and rehashed, and
the participants feel a certain sense of deja vu.

As a consequence, it might be useful if someone were to volunteer
as webmaster of the "Memory, ischemia and freezing home page."

The substantive issues involve (1) a claim (explicit or implicit)
that some particular mechanism of memory or neuronal plasticity
is important to human personality, memory etc. and (2) that some
type of damage either (a) does or (b) does not make it fundamentally
impossible to reverse the injury to that mechanism.  As a consequence,
it would seem appropriate that the "Memory" page be organized by
topics, where each topic discusses a particular type of damage to
a particular mechanism of memory.  As an example, we might have
the topic "Ice damage to memory stored as DNA", which might have
a link to a page that read:

   As is well known, memory is stored in DNA (see, for example, the Journal
   of Irreproducible Results, August 1977, page 3.14159; or "Long Pork:
   you're route to a quick doctorate?" in the Journal of Cannibal Affairs).
   Unfortunately, DNA is destroyed by ice, as shown in "Ultramicrotomes
   using water blades at 7 Kelvins" which says in part "...ice blades
   can easily slice through the nucleus of the cell at this temperature,
   giving us a clear view of the interior."

Anyone who cared to submit a page to the webmaster could e-mail it, and
the resulting page would then be added as an item under the appropriate
topic.  The page could reference other pages at the site (or indeed,
anywhere on the web).  Authors of pages would be allowed to update their
pages by the addition of links or other modest changes, but would not
be allowed to delete a page or substantively change it.  (A simple
ability to append or prepend text and comments might suffice).  If an
author later concluded that a given page was in error, a notation to that
affect could be added at the head of the page.  However, as the refutation
of erroneous views is very useful, maintaining the erroneous view along
with its refutation (despite possible embarrassment to the author) would
be a public good.  Authors could, of course, submit new pages and update
the old page to say "The new improved version of this page can be found
at ....."

The webmaster would also be responsible for enforcing certain stylistic
constraints.  Submitted pages that did not clearly specify both a
mechanism of memory and a damage mechanism would be rejected.  Pages
that included irrelevant or ad hominem attacks would also be rejected.
The author would be free to revise and resubmit the page until the
stylistic constraints had been met.  The webmaster would not be expected
to decide substantive issues of content, as these could be resolved by
subsequent posters who cited and criticized earlier pages.  Given the
tendency of posters to CryoNet to drift into areas that have no
direct bearing on any substantive question, some sort of stylistic
enforcement would seem to be useful.

The following hypothetical post would be rejected:

   This is the same kind of argument (and I  believe mistake) that
   noncomputerscientists like Darwin make.  I will have recourse
   to a slippery analogy.

   Viewing math in general and long division in particular as
   major intellectual challenges, the noncomputerscientist
   thinks Newtonian mechanics is applicable only to rigid bodies
   and that the more fundamental non-Newtonian or vitalistic explanation
   is essential if we are to consider liquids.  Rejecting molecular mechanics
   (used by big B biologists, whose views differ fundamentally from the
   views of small b biologists in that big B biologists are well known
   to have head lice and advocate absurd ideas) because it is based on
   Newtonian concepts, these non-Newtonian guys view of living systems
   is like ectoplasm and ghosts. A corollary of this world-view is
   that if you adopt *their* ideas you're getting into intellectual
   bed with Stalin, Hitler, and other uncool guys -- but if you
   join *our* group, then you get to rub intellectual shoulders with
   neat people like Einstein.

The foregoing would be rejected as it (a) says nothing substantive and
(b) contains ad hominem attacks attempting to discredit an idea by
discrediting the proposer(s) of the idea.

A possible submission mechanism would be to examine posts to CryoNet
for some simple tag, such as:

-------------------MEMORY PAGE------------------------
*Topic: Synapses and ischemic injury
*
*The acoustic resonances caused by the words "He's dead" cause synapses
*suffering from ischemic injury to vanish, and as synapses are the
*key substrate of memory it's clear that suspensions that start after
*someone is declared dead are pointless.

A relatively simple program could scan for the keyword starting the
submission, include everything up to the first line which did not
start with a "*", and then automatically create an appropriate page
(named, perhaps, after the author and date?).

If the foregoing proposal looks suspiciously like a special topic
technical journal which happens to be on the web, you've pretty much
got the idea.  The differences are (a) it's a lot easier to create
some web pages than it is to start a journal, (b) it would be more
widely and easily available, (c) "submissions" would likely be
shorter and more numerous, as the overhead involved in paper
publication is largely eliminated, (d) it would be relatively
easy to put in back links, i.e., you could easily find out what
subsequent posters had to say about a given page, thus helping
to rapidly weed out errors and (e) "refereeing" would be simpler,
as incorrect form and style would be cause for rejection (by
the web master) while substantive issues would be left to
subsequent posters and back links to resolve.

This submission mechanism would also be helpful in that it would
clearly identify that component of a post that the author felt
was substantive, allowing those of us with limited time to skip
the rest of the post.

Speaking of limited time, despite the plethora of statements that seem
to cry out for some response my own time is rather limited and will
continue to be so.  As chair of the Fourth Foresight Conference on
Molecular Nanotechnology, I find that there seem to be many things
that need doing.....  Hopefully some time after the conference
I'll have some free time...  well, I can dream....  And if some kind
soul were to set up a web site on memory, I'd only have to respond once!

And if the webmaster got really ambitious, some of the more hotly
debated topics could be reformulated as questions suitable for
Idea Futures.  If some of the Caribean web-based gambling operations
actually survive the various legal assaults that will no doubt be
made on them, perhaps one of them will establish an Idea Futures
market.  Wagers on this market could then be used to finance
research into the fundamental issues in cryonics.  (See the Idea
Futures page at http://if.arc.ab.ca/IF.shtml)

I will comment on one item: Mike Darwin was arguing that my reference
to Hossmann's work represented some sort of basic misunderstanding of
the issues on my part.  Unfortunately, I cited Hossmann's work primarily
to illustrate that there must be substantial structural integrity after
one hour of ischemia if 50% of cats recovered major spontaneous EEG
activity.  The neuronal state several months after the insult is not
the point, the point is that functional recovery rules out a broad
range of possible types of structural damage at the one hour point.
To argue that information theoretic death takes place after one hour
of ischemia, it is necessary to argue that major functional recovery
(and presumably complete functional recovery of many neurons) is
consistent with utter obliteration of some neuronal structures that
are crucial to long term memory and personality.  While it's possible
to advance such a hypothesis, it's much more difficult to argue that
such obliteration is "likely" or "probable."

I would urge anyone interested in pursuing this point further to
look at "Molecular Repair of the Brain" at
http://merkle.com/merkleDir/techFeas.html, and in particular the
section on "Ischemic injury and presuspension injury" at
http://merkle.com/merkleDir/techFeas.html#ISCHEMIA

I should add that I am also concerned about ischemic injury that
occurs prior to a declaration of death.  In the worst case scenario,
much of the brain is simply gone because legal death was declared well
after an ischemic insult.  This speaks more to the social and legal issues
surrounding a cryonic suspension rather than the purely technical,
but I think an effective method of changing the legal and social
environment is to establish greater credibility in the medical
community.


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