X-Message-Number: 7158
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7152 - #7155
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 11:18:12 -0800 (PST)

Hi, I'm back!

1. I totally agree with Steve Harris about the importance of quality control.
   We all need to work much much harder to see that cryonics methods improve.
   And if the only thing we choose to do is to rely on some unspecified future
   technology (nanotechnology or something else) to revive us then I agree
   that cryonics would turn into a religion.

   However I would also add some further comments. Unfortunately, regardless
   of how good our procedures might become in the best cases, there are always
   going to be people who cannot be suspended by the best procedures. Implicit
   in cryonics is the proposition that medicine should at all times and all 

   cases work to maximise the chance that patients will live and remain healthy.
   In bad circumstances, this will mean that they can only be 
   straight-frozen,
   with no cryoprotection at all. We should certainly work to reduce the number
   of people who fall into these bad circumstances, but here again all that 
   work is unlikely to bring that number to ZERO. 

   Yes, straight freezing causes lots of damage, some of which Steve Harris 
   lists. If we really aim at immortality then we must be prepared to suspend
   people for whom we have only the vaguest and most speculative ideas about 
   how they might someday be revived. The test of whether or not a cryonics
   society acts as a religion or as a form of medicine should not depend on
   how they respond to the worst cases, but how they respond to the better
   cases, and how they work (as Steve Harris says) to improve their methods,
   constantly. 

   To abandon such patients also abandons THE key idea in cryonics: that we 
   should try to preserve people as best we can, EVEN WHEN WE DON'T KNOW HOW
   TO REVIVE THEM. To do otherwise shows a fantastic hubris: that now,
   in 1996, (or any other time!) we know ALL that is needed to decide whether
   or not someone can EVER be revived.

2. About using funeral directors as agents: I would not say that automatically
   this means a poor suspension. I would prefer to see whether such training
   actually works, and just how well they can perform in suspensions. Steve
   may turn out to be right, but as yet, with only one cryonics society using
   them, and that society as yet not known for the most optimal procedures,
   we have not yet given them a good test.

   One point Ettinger makes about funeral directors should have weight even 
   if we find they cannot do as well as a trained cryonics team: not all cases
   are easy for such teams to reach in time. A funeral director, in a case
   in which the cryonics team needs hours to even get to the location where
   the patient had been found "dead", might well do better than no treatment
   at all.

   I personally would also like to see work by the other cryonics societies, 
   even just as an experiment, in training funeral directors. I cannot believe
   that ALL such people will be so poorly motivated and inadequate that they
   cannot learn to apply the best methods for suspension available at the 
   time of their training. We may all be neglecting an important resource.

			Long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson


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