X-Message-Number: 8924 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #8915 - #8922 Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 20:40:47 -0800 (PST) Hi everyone! A few comments. To Paul Wakfer, I was a little jocular. However I would also say that most fatal diseases do happen to those who are old, and I personally believe that they happen to older people because in many ways their resistance has gone down. What that boils down to is that for many --- even the majority --- of cases, suspended animation will only work well if they can be cured of their illness AND rejuvenated (perhaps not totally, but to some extent certainly). While I believe that is possible, many ordinary people do not. However you're quite right that a majority is not the same as everyone. So there will be people, particularly children, whose lives are saved by suspended animation. The younger someone is, the more he/she stands to benefit from use of such a procedure ALONE, without other more radical developments. (A cure for their disease will be needed, of course). As for the majority of people with heart disease or cancer, suspended animation may once and for all show their relationship to aging. And even if they're not totally decrepit, the problem with aging is that, sure, we can cure this disease, and we can cure that disease, but ultimately something gets them. That's why the famous "War on Cancer" has turned into a concealed defeat. Right now medicine and the popular mind is very slowly coming to realize that if we want to increase our lifespans then we're going to have to work on aging. Even things like the recent NEWSWEEK issue tell us that --- though to someone who has been interested in this issue for the last 25 years, and for all that time felt that working on cancer or heart disease as if they were not usually themselves consequences of other, deeper changes (aging) would consistently turn out to be a waste of money and energy. And yes, I got cancer myself. And managed to survive, at least until now. Even though I do follow work on brain tumors and their cure, I still believe that most money and effort spent on cancer might be far more productively spent on finding ways to slow down aging (or stop and reverse it, if we can). I would be surprised if many other cryonicists don't agree with me. But one consequence of that relation is simply that suspended animation in an older person just won't give him/her much extra life, if any. Just how people and most doctors will respond in 20 years when the Prometheus Project may succeed I can't say. There have been slow changes. (And incidentally, one consequence of aging is that without treatment the muscles deteriorate. So that it is really accurate to say that --- again, without treatment --- by the time you're over 90 you might not be able to walk across the room without help. Just hope that treatments arrive and become widely applied!). I do hope for Prometheus to succeed, at a minimum, with brains. That is an issue which cannot be covered over by any amount of technological blathertalk. And I also hope that aging will be far more prominent as a subject for research and public interest in 20 years time --- if so, many rather than very few would see the merit of suspended animation for old people, not just young. But still, there are implications of beliefs, and people behave according to their beliefs. Those beliefs will strongly affect how the public sees suspended animation when it arrives. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8924