X-Message-Number: 6717
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #6704 - #6711
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 17:29:04 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Guys!

And here are my comments on several points raised:

1. Cryonics and Suspended Animation. First of all, some of what I say here (but
   not all) is repeated on the Prometheus-forum. Those who have pledged must
   bear with me a bit because I'm writing for those who haven't pledged, too.

   The very first point is that the aim of Prometheus is to provide reversible
   storage of BRAINS. By our own (cryonics) definition of life and death,
   there will be no doubt that those stored are alive. However if we only
   store brains, we have a rather strange notion of suspended animation:
   sure, we know that the people are still there, but unless we can give them
   bodies we cannot revive them in any practical way.

   If the REAL goal of Prometheus is the suspended animation of whole bodies,
   then Paul should say so. And in saying so he should make clear that one
   may be much harder than the other: if we want vitrification solutions which
   work OK for every body cell, we are asking more than if we only want 
   solutions which work for brains. That is why research will be needed, after
   all --- otherwise we just use the solutions GF has found for kidneys, and
   devote our money to something else.

   Furthermore, even if we had guaranteed suspended animation, using it for
   MEDICAL reasons raises lots of questions, some of them even about whether
   or not those stored that way are alive in any practical sense. We would
   be storing people in anticipation that a treatment will be available to
   fix their particular illnesses: most doctors would think that a wild 
   speculation in nearly every case. The only cases in which they might not
   would be those in which a treatment was imminent, generally agreed to be
   so, but not presently available (perhaps it needs apparatus that the 
   particular hospital currently lacks). That gives a very small number of
   people for whom suspended animation might be useful at all, and knocks
   out every case of "death" the cryonics societies have suspended so far.
   Would Dora Kent have qualified? She had widespread strokes in her brain,
   and could not wake up because one stroke happened in her Reticular Activ-
   ating system, which keeps us awake. And what about those who could be
   perfused, but who weren't reached soon enough by the current criteria
   of "brain death"?  

   But by its official aim Prometheus doesn't even try for suspended 
   animation.

   I don't mean by this that means to suspend brains won't be very valuable.
   In that respect I hope Prometheus succeeds. And yes, doing so will be
   an order-of-magnitude increase in our capabilities in storing someone.
   But we do not go about storing healthy people with nothing wrong with 
   them other than dandruff, we store those which present medicine has given
   up on. In that sense, vitrification (or suspended animation) should be
   seen as an advance in cryonics, not something totally different.

2. What is cryonics, anyway?

   The current definition, which was not put down by a cryonicist, is that 
   "cryonics is the deep-freezing of human bodies at death for preservation
   and possible revival in the future". This definition comes straight from
   my 1991 Webster's College Dictionary, and as anyone reading it on 
   Cryonet will know, it begs lots of questions. A group which merely put
   bodies of its members into large refrigerators would qualify under this
   definition. Neuropreservation, note, would not. For that matter, what is
   this "death" thing, anyway? And OK, so we revive Grandmother who was 
   frozen at age 95 and very frail, where does that put her? 

   I would say that it's quite wrong, first of all, to attach any particular
   technology to cryonics. Its basic idea is that we should store people
   whenever they become sick enough that our current medicine has no cure
   for their sickness. And over time, many different technologies for storage
   will arise. 

   And for those who feel that it should be necessarily and indissolubly 
   tied to FREEZING, not just in the broad sense in which a vitrified brain
   would be considered as frozen also, but in the technical sense that 
   requires that not only must our temperature be lowered enough that 
   our body water and the solutions used must somehow congeal, but that they
   must also crystallize ... for someone who feels that way, I have a 
   question. Just what on earth are we trying to do with all this freezing 
   of "dead" people? And since we will continue to do that, and even vitrify
   them, and maybe be able to vitrify the brains of those who aren't 
   officially declared dead, in the hope that someday we'll know how to 
   rescue them from their aging and their illness, it would be nice if 
   we have a name for it. Do they have a proposal? Or do they think it
   won't be needed any more, for some magic reason which escapes me?

   If they want to call the goal of Prometheus "brain suspended animation"
   or BSA, that's fine with me. I pledged my $1000 so that it could be
   used in my cryonic suspension, and I believe most who have pledged did
   so for the same reason. And I do not expect to be suspended when I'm
   next bitten by a mosquito, but when I need it to have any hope of 
   future survival. (Given that it's only for brains, it would be foolish
   to choose otherwise!).

   Maybe they don't want this or don't understand it. OK, sorry. They  
   really want brain suspended animation rather than cryonics. Well,
   it takes all types. When and where do they intend to make use of it? 

3. And now the XXX really hits the fan...

   I became involved in cryonics before the invention of the word "nano-
   technology". And the ideas of nanotechnology have certainly had some 
   value in cryonics, mainly be providing (however faulty particular cases
   of this argument might be) an argument that even in the worst case it
   should someday be possible to revive you. And most such arguments did
   concentrate on the worst cases.

   Not only did this deal with the ultimate issue of revivability, but it
   meant that very little study or thought was needed to see what might
   be done in this worst case. We just whip out the right nanomachines
   and all is done! (I've myself pointed out, of course, that even if we
   want to read the data off a computer disk, we or someone must first
   understand how the disk works and just how data is stored --- or to
   talk about brains, just how brains work and how our memory is stored,
   so that such understanding remains important. For computers, of course,
   someone who knew such things has written a program which does it all 
   for us, and its easy to forget that the author of that program needed
   to know a lot more than we about the guts of his machine).

   HOWEVER this attitude, now widespread in cryonics, has led in many 
   adherents to a very significant loss of knowledge and understanding.
   It is that loss of understanding that now may even provide one major 
   cause for hesitation about Prometheus itself. Nanotechnology is fine
   about worst cases, but what if we aren't dealing with the worst case?

   And the way to tell the difference is to look into the guts of the 
   machine: that is, our guts and the way we work, particularly our brains.
   Vitrification, for instance, is one way to prevent crystallization, and
   many cryobiologists have shown that crystallization is the greatest
   obstacle to storing coherent systems of cells (brains too). Not only
   that, but this crystallization generally occurs outside the cells 
   themselves, and for brains would obscure neural connections to other
   neurons (which happens to be the predominant theory of how memory works).

   The matter goes even deeper than this. Our brains are not at all like 
   any machine we have yet built (maybe someday ...). They have abilities
   to do self-repair. Not only that, but they have some abilities which
   are normally masked. It is research into such abilities that led to 
   the recent paper in SCIENCE describing regeneration of spinal cords;
   and neurologists are working on such things with medicine as their
   aim. 
 
   Not only that, but our central reason for freezing "dead" people comes
   from a belief that the normal brain damage happening after 5 minutes
   can be treated and will someday be repairable. Again, there's a case that
   we won't need all the power of nanotechnology (in the dreams of its wildest
   advocates) to learn how to recover such "dead" people. Sure, we can catch
   (now) significant numbers of patients before such things happen, but what
   if we cannot? We freeze and store them anyway, as well as we can.

   None of the technology and science I've just summarized here involves
   nanotechnology (unless you count biochemistry as nanotechnology, where
   I think it deserves to be counted). We aren't dealing with "worst cases".
   And if we find near term ways to fix many of the problems caused by
   present suspension (vitrification is a near-term way) then what does that
   do for us? It is IMPORTANT! If we rely only on worst cases, we may find
   ourselves kept in storage for 200 years or more --- 200 years helpless,
   with only the cryonics societies to care for us. And even if some of us
   come through (well, of course YOU'LL get through, but not me) what about
   those who don't? Lots can happen in 200 years: banks fail, money lost,
   revolutionaries smashing all the capsules they can find. Anything we can
   do NOW which improves our ability to store ourselves will shorten that
   helpless time. That is a big benefit. And we can only receive it if we
   work now with what we've got NOW, of which vitrification is one very 
   significant possibility. 

			Best and long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson
 
   Salamanders, and other "lower animals" have spectacular abilities of 
   self-repair. Their brains have been removed, cut into small pieces, and
   replaced in scrambled order, and the salamander goes into a coma for 
   several weeks, then comes out with memory of whatever it had learned
   before hand. Could we do that? Well, the major change in attitude that
   led to that recent paper in SCIENCE is the belief that our neurons 
   retain such abilities, but their efforts at repair are blocked by other
   events. We don't really know whether even vitrification will be needed:
   perhaps with just the right solutions, and brains frozen (really frozen)
   we can cause the revived brain to repair itself.   


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