X-Message-Number: 5728
From: (Kevin Q Brown)
Date: 13 Feb 96 11:52:00 -0500
Subject: 1971 Neuropreservation Publication
Who was the first person to consider neurosuspension to be a
viable variation on whole-body cryonics? Previously, I thought
that it was a toss-up between Fred and Linda Chamberlain and
Mike Darwin. However the following message, forwarded with permission
of the author, includes the text of a 1971 Australian magazine
article that may qualify as the first. Perhaps people with a
more thorough knowledge of the history of cryonics can provide
more details.
Kevin Q. Brown
--
> From Tue Feb 13 04:05:42 1996
> Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 23:11:05 +1000
> From: (Damien Broderick)
> Subject: Cooler heads
> To:
Hi Kevin
Thanks for the updated comments.
>If you still have a copy of your 1971 article, I expect that several
>people would like to see a photocopy of it. Perhaps you would like
>to send a message to CryoNet about that
I'll re-type it for you here & now, and leave it up to you to decide if it's
worth disseminating further.
The document in question has a less than scientific provenance; at the time
I was edited Australia's (regrettably tame) equivalent of PLAYBOY, a
magazine called MAN. Part of my tedious duties was to write the supposed
`letters column' from readers, so I tried to smuggle in improving tracts
whenever I could. I published one of these concoctions in the June, 1971
edition (p. 4), in the section `Man to Man', and signed it `Kurt Rumfoord,
Ilium, New York', a playful homage (as you might recognise) to Kurt
Vonnegut's early fictional sf and locale:
------------------------
MANY ARE COLD
Cryogenic interment, otherwise known as `frozen burial', isn't well known
outside the USA as yet and I appreciated your objective appraisal (_Has
Science Conquered Death?_ MAN, May). Too many people are still treating
cryonics as some kind of sci fi joke, thereby proving yet again that
embarrassment in the face of novelty is frequently a stronger force than the
survival instict. Weissman's article was a step in the right direction.
What's really need, of course, is a government-sponsored cyronics facility
funded on a Health Service basis, backed up by massively financed research
into revivification and rejuvenation.
This is _not_ a pipe-dream. Modern gerontology believes that the biological
clock which causes us to age and ultimately die can be located and
manipulated. If we can just get cells to continue renewing themselves
accurately - which they now do for nearly 20 years before going wrong -
we'll not only have the cure for cancer but for death as well.
Which brings me to my main point. If anyone is seriously considering
setting up cryonics facilities in Australia, he could do it much less
expensively by freezing merely the head and perhaps spinal column of the
dead person. Grisly as that sounds, it makes biological sense: by the time
cell renewal is sufficiently well understood to revive the dead, science
should be able to regrow a complete new body from just a few cells. And
since the `soul' or `personality' is chiefly the network of memories stored
in the central nervous system, there's no reason to freeze the rest of the body.
The savings involved in storage space and maintenance charges could be large
enough to make cryonic interment feasible even for the average man. And why
should he miss out on his chance of immortality? As Dr Ettinger has said,
`Many are cold but few are frozen'.
--------------------------------------
Despite the offensive (unconscious) sexism in the language, I think this
argument still holds up a quarter of a century later - except that current
understanding of somatic neurotransmitters might modify the easy
identification of self and CNS. Still, I'd be prepared to take the risk if
it was head only or nothing.
Please feel free to circulate this (or archive it) if you think it's warranted.
Best regards, Damien.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Damien Broderick / 23 Hutchinson Street / East Brunswick, Melbourne
Victoria 3057 / AUSTRALIA Ph: (61-3) 9388.0228
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5728