X-Message-Number: 6922
From: 
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 13:35:42 -0400
Subject: psychopathology

I'll pick up on one point today, because it is so mind-boggling.

Charles Platt (#6917) says that, if CI gets sheep hearts from a
slaughterhouse and revives them from liquid nitrogen, "...the scientific
community would not take this experiment seriously, and it would help to
brand cryonicists as amateurs."

All right, picture this. Responsible outsiders--journalists, scientists,
business people--are in the CI lab, SEEING what happens. They watch a heart
for (say) 12 hours in liquid nitrogen, or even more, to be sure it's well and
truly down there. Then they or their relief teams watch the warmup and
washout etc., and SEE the heart resume beating. Then, according to Platt, the
members of the "scientific community"--those who weren't there (and those who
were there?) would "not take this seriously." And Platt apparently approves
of such an attitude.

Now, I don't believe for a moment that Platt himself wouldn't take it
seriously. I think his remarks are agenda-driven. 

Neither do I believe the "scientific community" wouldn't take it seriously,
with some exceptions. But if anyone would really dismiss the event because of
its amateur sponsorship, that could only be characterized as psychopathology,
not science.

Of course we are told that the Society for Cryobiology will not accept papers
from known cryonicists, regardless of scientific merit. So there are indeed
some psychopaths among them. But I think they will soon be irrelevant.

Robert Ettinger


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