X-Message-Number: 5750
From: Marshall Rice <>
Newsgroups: uk.legal,sci.cryonics,sci.life-extension
Subject: Re: Death (was Donaldson MR and Miss Hindley)
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 96 01:05:53 GMT
Message-ID: <>

References: <> <4g5bnb$>

In article <4g5bnb$>
            "bob whitaker" writes:

> Marshall Rice"s statement was the first intelligent 
> anti-cryonics comment I have seen here, i.e., one that I would 
> not hear from a high-school dropout in a bar.  Mr. Rice seems 
> to be one of the few anti-cryuonics people who believe he 
> should know something useful about what he criticizes!

Thanks.

As a matter of fact, I'm far from being anti-cryonics.

I don't find the prospect of rotting in a box particularly attractive, and 
believe that cryonics has considerable potential, I simply think that it is 
and always will be impossible to reverse cellular death. The degree of entropy
is simply too great. It may be possible to create a new cell from the 
remains of the old, but in no sense would they, or could they, be identical 
on the molecular level, and that is the degree of organisation which you would
need to duplicate to restore a brain.

Now that said, I can see no reason why, in principle, *living* tissues, or
even whole organisms, cannot be suspended. The difficulty of freezing tissues 
before any individual cells autolyse, and in such a way that the restructuring
of water-linked molecules is not disruptive, may *conceivably* be overcome.

What I object to is the taking of money to freeze dead meat, on the
pretence that it may somehow, some day, some way, become 'you' again.

-- 
Marshall Rice


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