X-Message-Number: 6773
From: Brian Wowk <>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 17:55:29 -0500
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Waiting in pure hope

Thomas Donaldson writes on CryoNet:

>Doctors will someday become converted to our viewpoint on "death" and "aging",
>and our viewpoint on cryonics too. But until that time, to anyone who does
>not accept the idea of waiting in pure hope (note that there can NEVER be
>any guarantees that treatments will be found in any fixed time), suspension
>will seem just as much a leap into the dark as it does now.

	There are lots of people (millions of people) sympathetic to
keeping near-brain-dead patients on respirators at outrageous cost
for the sake of "pure hope."  Indeed, MOST of medicine today 
is still oriented around hope, not certainty.  

	In my opinion, the biggest reason that popular "hope"  
does not translate into cryonics support is that we are utterly unable
to demonstate (that's *demonstrate*, not argue) that cryonics patients  
are anything worth hoping for.  There is a line between life and death in
the public mind, and cryonics patients are still on the wrong side of
that line.  Nobody will wait in pure hope for patients who they believe
to be dead.

	Reversible brain cryopreservation will irrefutably move
cryonics patients to the other side of that line.  The focus of
cryonics debate will shift from whether cryonics CAN preserve life,
to whether cryonics SHOULD preserve life in this way.  The effects of
this will be so broad I can't begin to enumerate them.  It will
be an entirely new ball game-- one I richly look forward to.
Rather than arguing esoteric science and engineering with morons,
we'll just look down from the sky, like the Wright brothers, and laugh.

***************************************************************************
Brian Wowk          CryoCare Foundation               1-800-TOP-CARE
President           Human Cryopreservation Services   
   http://www.cryocare.org/cryocare/

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