X-Message-Number: 7182
From:  ( RON   SELKOVITCH)
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 23:14:06, -0500
Subject: Time Magazine

This weeks Time magazine had a cover article entitled 'Forever Young' which
discusses the possibility of living vastly extended lives and what has been
discovered along these lines. Also included is a small sidebar entitled
'What May be Next' which includes as follows:-

<Futurists like to speculate about the means by which we may defeat the
aging process (and a few cryonics shops have already started taking orders)
Some antiaging technologies have a basis in science and also have a long
way to go.
CRYONICS
Promise. By freezing the entire body - or to save storage costs, just the
head and brain - cryonicists hope to preserve a patient who has died until
a time when physicians will be able to thaw and repair the frozen tissues,
cure the disease that caused the death, and then bring the person back to life.

Reality Check. Preliminary animal studies show that some tissue (rat
hearts, for example) can be cryo-preserved and then revived in spite of the
extensive damage that freezing does to cells.Whether these techniques will
work for entire organisms, especially ones that have ceased living is not
clear. Even so, some 60 people in the U.S. have paid to have their bodies-
or at least their heads- preserved indefinitely.

NANOTECHNOLOGY
Promise. With continued progress in microminiaturization scientists who
believe in nanotechnology-technology that operates on the molecular, or
nanometer, scale- predict that we will someday be able to build microscopic
devices that will be injected into the body to fight disease at the
cellular level- excising tumors, say, or cleaning out clogged arteries.

Reality Check. Microsurgery, which replaces the surgeons hands with probes
and scalpels, has yet to become routine, and its smallest tools are still
hundreds of times as large as a nanotech machine. Even if the tools can
someday be radically shrunk and mounted onto robots the size of a molecule,
patients might balk at the idea of invisible, artificially intelligent
machines roaming around inside their body.>

It may not be much, but at least its not negative.

Ron S


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