X-Message-Number: 7264
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 11:43:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Serious Visser Question

There is a serious question implicit in Ms. Visser's recent spirited
defense of Robert Ettinger, whom she seems to place somewhere between a
guru and a deity. 

I have often wondered what shape cryonics would be in if Robert Ettinger 
hadn't read the science-fiction story that started him thinking about the 
concept, back in the 1940s. Would someone else have come up with the same 
idea? And if not, what would have happened to the science of cryobiology?

A brief historical backtrack for newcomers: Robert Ettinger is not just
the founder of a cryonics organization, he is the undisputed founder of
cryonics. His book THE PROMISE OF IMMORTALITY served as a mental catalyst
for latent activists, and he put them in contact with each other, thus
leading to the formation of the first cryonics special-interest groups,
some of which subsequently decided to take matters into their own hands.
As a result we saw the first exciting efforts to freeze human beings. 

Before that, however, in the early 1950s, the field of cryobiology (in
fact, the word itself) was established by a British team of researchers
who (re)discovered glycerol as a cryoprotectant and successfully froze
blood and bull semen. By "successfully" I mean they were able to UNfreeze
it subsequently, and its original properties were still intact. This
British team included the legendary hamster-freezer Audrey Smith, and was
headed by Sir Alan Parkes. Here's an excerpt from an unpublished cryonics
history that I started writing but never completed: 

>      Now the cryobiologists decided to get even more 
> ambitious. As Sir Alan Parkes put it, "Inevitably, we were 
> drawn to a still more fascinating question: Could a whole 
> animal survive freezing?" 
>      Why was this question so "fascinating"? Sir Alan didn't 
> get specific. He was a cautious man, and his team was moving 
> into areas that could cause religious backlash. If anyone 
> pressed him on the practical applications or the 
> philosophical implications, he simply said he was engaged in 
> "pure research." 
>      But this was just the cover story. Privately, it seems 
> that Sir Alan and his team were looking further ahead--along 
> the same path that cryonics would take a couple of decades 
> later. In one of the papers published by Audrey Smith and her 
> co-workers, they suggested ways to warm an animal after it 
> had been frozen. Then they discussed ways of scaling up the 
> equipment . . . so that it could be used on a human being. 
>      There it was, spelled out, if you knew where to look. 
> The British cryobiologists hoped that sooner or later, they 
> would be able to freeze people and revive them. 
 
All my cryonics reference materials are boxed and stored right now, so I
can't provide the reference to this paper that mentioned human-scale
rewarming. I do have a copy of the paper however (it was given to me by "a
well known cryobiologist") and I read it with my own eyes. If necessary I
can go and dig it out. 

The question is, why didn't the cryobiologists continue with this line of
research? The answer is, as far as I can tell, they got scared off by the
subsequent publicity for cryonics, which received predictably unfair,
sensationalistic treatment in the media. The Society of Cryobiology still
has a bylaw demanding expulsion of any member who promotes cryonics;
that's how seriously the cryobiologists hate cryonics, and for an obvious
reason: they fear losing respectability and funding. 

If you read cryobiology conference reports over the years, you see very 
clearly that most work with possible application to human beings was 
stopped soon after cryonics came into existence. Suda's cat-head 
experiments were the first and last of their kind.

Would the cryobiologists have achieved more than the cryonicists, if 
cryonics hadn't come along? Or would they have become nervous about the 
implications of their own work anyway, causing them to back away 
from it? I tend to think the latter would be true, because you simply 
can't get away from the bad-horror-movie implications of freezing and 
resuscitating people. If Ettinger hadn't put it in the public eye, some 
accredited scientist would have done so, wittingly or unwittingly, and 
the results probably would have been about the same.

I remain personally appreciative of Robert Ettinger for starting a
movement that may benefit me personally in a very fundamental way. But I
think it is absolutely impossible to know what would have happened to
cryonics and cryobiology without him. Therefore I don't think the story is
*quite* as simple as Ms. Visser suggests, though I agree with her that
loyalty is an eminently valuable trait, provided of course it is exercised
thoughtfully. 


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7264