X-Message-Number: 8790
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #8785 - #8789
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 12:37:17 -0800 (PST)

Hi!

A few brief comments, just for now.

To Brian: 

I'm actually saying something much much stronger than just that the diseases
we know won't be curable in the next 10 years. Here's what I think will 
happen:

First of all, the diseases we are now familiar with will eventually become
curable.

However, NEW diseases will keep entering the queue. (I point here to the 
history of medicine when I say this. Sure, people can always claim that we
have done everything and no more problems will arise --- I think they are
extremely shortsighted in that opinion but the only way to explain that to
them is to wait a while (not that they won't refuse to see what's happened
by saying they knew it all along --- like most experts confounded by some
new discovery will say)). To bring this a little more down to earth, there
is no way I could have predicted AIDS 20 years ago. Yet now AIDS uses up more
research money than cancer. I'm saying that we should not expect this pattern
to stop.

As this goes on, our lifespans WILL increase. But there will remain diseases
which at any fixed time no one knows how to cure. Not only that, but like 
AIDS in its early days, no one has the vaguest idea just what to do to 
find a cure. And so some unlucky people will find themselves with an 
incurable disease. So should they be put into suspended animation? After all, 
no one sees any means by which they could be cured.

It's also valid here to ask just what a DISEASE is in the first place. Harder
problem: certainly cancers aren't usually caused by viruses. They occur 
because our body loses some resistance, or has its resistance overthrown.
There was a time, when almost everyone died of pneumonia or some other 
disease, when cancer was thought to be very minor. Is aging a disease? Slowly
people (including doctors) are beginning to see it as one. What about 
massive brain damage?

One further point: within cryonics (you'll have to log onto Cryonet for a 
while to see it) we DO have ideas about how we might repair even badly
damaged patients. No, we don't presently have any means to do such a 
repair. But in that sense we're a little bit ahead of the doctors when they
first confronted AIDs. Hardly a lot, but a little. And of course as usually
happens, we may find a cure or a vaccination for AIDs within the next 10
years.

For Peter Merel:
Good idea. There has been a movement with academia against lying to subjects in
such experiments, so maybe we ought to hurry up and do it. I personally would
like to get some more substantive answer to the issue of why people don't join,
rather than just people's impressions and beliefs. It would give us 
well-founded reasons for any recruitment strategy we devised. We lack that 
now, despite how vehemently some defend their personal impressions for the
reasons. 

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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