X-Message-Number: 9467 Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1998 13:49:24 -0700 From: Peter Merel <> Subject: Re: Confusion Dan Brown writes, >Now I a very much underinformed prospective cyronics client, am >confused. It seems there is a debate on whether or not Alcor or >Cryonics Institute is doing the right job of preservation. How does >someone like myself make a choice? One costs a great deal and the other >less but I don't hear if one is more viable than another. Maybe I just >become a specimen in a frozen jar for future scientists to laugh at. > >Help me out here cause I am confused. How to make a choice? As Darwin's recent messages should make clear, most of what goes on in cryonics is of highly questionable worth. The mantra is "well, yeah, but it still gives you a better chance than burning or burying" - the logic being that so long as there is some structure left in a frozen brain, a future nanotechnology will be able to fix it. It's plain that this mantra is wearing thinnest for the folk who are closest to the actual problem domain, and that's led to the most recent debate. Like many of the previous flaps here, if you can read through the noise, this one signals a sea change in the structure of the cryonics community. If I read it right, the CC group of companies (including 21CM and BPI) are effectively getting out of the cryo-org business in favour of doing the real work required to achieve real vitrification technology. That is, they're working on techniques that would freeze you as a glass rather than making you crystallize, so that the freezing itself wouldn't damage you at all. There's an obvious logic in this: if vitrification becomes feasible, then there will be no more need fo cryo-orgs of the traditional sort (Darwin's "stacking frozen corpses", plus the support and legal defence networks that go along with that) because working vitrification would be immediately accepted as a legit technique and massive business opportunity in mainstream medicine. So many and such large businesses would spring up around this that the existence or lack of the existing orgs would be quite irrelevant. Where does that leave we "early adopters"? I don't know where it leaves you, but here's my picture: The options available are still CC, CI, Alcor and the ACS. The technical merits of CI techniques being most in question, I discount them. You may choose to do otherwise. The CC business structures still seem to make sense to me, but I wonder whether they intend just to get out of the freezing and storage part of things or whether they'll be shutting down the business part too. Whichever, they seem to be directing new business towards Alcor, the largest org, which I get the impression will be licensing whatever technology comes out of the 21CM research. ACS may be licensing this too - I'm not sure how they see their direction at the moment. The best time to make a decision is always tomorrow. One of the best things about the ... um, fiesty ... nature of cryonet is that time tends to elicit details where they're needed. It didn't take the folk here more than a few months, for example, to reach a consensus on the worth of the Visser techniques when they were first mooted. But the best way is to pay your money and take your chances - you can always change orgs when that seems appropriate. Confusion won't kill you, but hesitation certainly will. Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9467