X-Message-Number: 7770
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7747 - #7752
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 14:24:52 -0800 (PST)

Hi again!

I note that some on Cryonet believe that the cryonics organizations should
start cloning some of their patients ASAP. That seems to be to be a very
bad misinterpretation of why cryonics is about.

While I cannot speak for others, I would not want to be cloned until and unless
other work had shown decisively that I could not be revived. I did not get
involved in cryonics so that a clone of mine could see the future. I wanted
to live till then, and see it myself. Certainly I would want to be cloned if

nothing else was provably available, but that fails to be true now and probably 
won't be true for centuries at least. 

Cloning is a very poor second choice to cryonic suspension followed by
(eventual) revival. I say this even in the case of patients which could not
receive any cryoprotectant, or arrived with severely damaged brains. We talk
about how much we DON'T know about what is possible, and then one day when 
someone comes up with a way to clone adult animals some people decided that
must be done NOW. Even the worst suspension happened because we thought we
did not know enough to PROVE the patient was forever beyond revival --- and
now with this comparatively minor advance some seem to have forgotten that.

Cryonics is not a matter of 100 years. It is a matter of how long it takes.
And compared to the abilities we're likely to have in 500 years our present
wonderful discoveries are the play of animals only starting to become aware.
I doubt that any patient would want to be cloned just because we've just
learned how to do that.

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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