X-Message-Number: 5505
From:  (Brian Wowk)
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
Subject: Re: Radiation preservation
Date: 30 Dec 95 20:16:23 GMT
Message-ID: <>

References: <4ae9il$> 
<4c2r5t$>


In <4c2r5t$>  (NetMan)
writes:

> (George Watson) wrote:

>>I am curious about what aspects of radiation preservation could be
>>used to store a body or a head (brain ) for reanimation.

>>Could you seal someone in say a block of plexiglass and then irradiate
>>them to prevent parasitic decay? Obviously you would not stop chemical
>>decomposition but perhaps the lack of parasitic structural decay would
>>be enough to retain the physical structure of the brain and THAT would
>>be enough to match the neuron circuits and allow reconstruction.

>>Is enough of the personality stored in the physical structure of
>>nueron circuits such that preservation of electrical and chemical
>>potentials is not needed for reconstruction?

	Sorry I was too busy to respond to your original inquiry.  High
dose irradiation would indeed stop microbial decay, but it would not
stop chemistry.  Cells are full of autolytic enzymes that will 
reduce a dead brain (irradiated or not) to mush within a few days
at room temperature.

	A far superior (and cheaper) strategy is chemical fixation.
Chemical fixation stops microbial decay and stops chemistry almost
completely.  Unfortunately it also causes devastation at the molecular
level.  Whether the essential elements of memory and identity survive
this devastation is not currently known.  Achieving rapid, effective
chemical fixation of a sample as large as a whole brain also has
many practical difficulties that I won't go into (unless you ask).

	Suffice to say that no cell has ever (or could ever) 
spontaneously recover from chemical fixation.  On the other hand,
many individual cells recover spontaneously from cryopreservation
protocols similar to ones now used on cryonics patients.  (See the
"Cryobiological Case for Cryonics" in the Library section of the 
CryoCare Web Page.) Clearly cryopreservation is the most  
conservative, least injurious, and most-likely-to-succeed means to 
get our minds to the future when we are dying today.
      
***************************************************************************
Brian Wowk          CryoCare Foundation               1-800-TOP-CARE
President           Your Gateway to the Future        
   http://www.cryocare.org/cryocare/

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