X-Message-Number: 9640
Date: Wed, 06 May 1998 13:25:01 -0700
From: "Christopher M. Rasch" <>
Subject: Scientific Prizes
Hi Jim,
Thanks for your efforts on behalf of cryonics. Judging from comments I
heard at the Alcor Technology Festival, your book appears to be a good
outreach tool. I am happy and grateful that you've devoted so much of
your time, energy, and money to promoting the idea of suspended
animation.
I'm a researcher at 21st Century Medicine. To give you a little
background, I've worked on research directly relevant to organ
cryopreservation (and therefore cryonics) since my sophomore year at
Stanford Univesity. Under Matthew Scott at the Howard Hughes Medical
Research Institute, I attempted to adapt protocols developed to freeze
Drosophila embryos for everyday storage of new, genetically engineered
lines of fruit flies. Under Dr. Rona Giffard, in the Stanford
Department of Anesthesiology, I worked on the mechanisms of ischemic
injury, using mouse neuronal cell culture. After graduating, I spent a
year performing cryoprotectant toxicity studies in the lab of Greg Fahy,
at the Naval Medical Research Institute. And I've spent the past year
at 21CM performing similar toxicity studies, as well as assisting with
21CM's cerebral resuscitation program.
I don't want to discourage your efforts to make a difference. You're
one of the rare individuals willing and able to devote large resources
to cryonics. I hope my comments and questions will help you.
As I understand your proposal, you believe that by offering a chance
for free brain and/or tissue cryopreservation to organ donors, more
people will become a) organ donors and b) favorably disposed towards
cryonics.
How valuable do people perceive a lottery ticket to have their
brain/tissue cryopreserved to be? Keep in mind, at least initially, the
majority of organ donors will have brains severely damaged by many hours
or days of ischemic time. For them, the likely future benefit is the
opportunity to be cloned.
Assuming that perpetual storage of a brain or tissue sample could be
reduced to $8,000, and $1000 respectively, you would be able to fund 62
brains, and 100 tissue samples. Assuming that 10,000 sign up, that
means that these people will have a 1 out 161 chance of having their
brain frozen, and a 1 in 100 chance of having their tissue frozen. How
much value will people assign to a small chance of having a clone made
of themselves someday in the distant future? As you know, people tend
to discount uncertain future benefit quite a bit, even when the odds are
better than this.
Are people much less squeamish about freezing their brains as opposed
to whole heads? Perhaps, but it doesn't strike me as being particularly
much less so. Besides, it seems to me that people sophisticated enough
to be organ donors, are not likely to be turned off by the squeamish
aspects of it. Transplanting a heart is not a pretty image either.
How much publicity will you generate? Of what kind? Given the dubious
value that most mainstream scientists assign to cryonics, I would
suggest that your efforts may be publicized, but with a "kooky" spin on
it that is not likely to draw more people into cryonics.
How are the organ donor registries likely to respond to your efforts?
The organ donor registries are populated by many of the same people
within the Society for Cryobiology. For example, some of the officers
of the Society for Cryobiology have served as officers within the
American Association of Tissue Banks. Given the historical reaction of
cryobiologists to anything to do with cryonics, they are probably not
likely to be favorable.
Once committed, how many will choose to pay $5000-1000 to upgrade to
"freeze my brain even if my organs can't be donated"? I don't know, but
I suspect that they won't be willing to do so, until the perceived value
is increased.
Since it's much easier to criticize a someone else's proposal than to
advance one of your own, please allow me to offer an alternative
proposal which I think will achieve many of the goals you wish to
accomplish
Obviously, I think that the best investment would be in my company,
21CM. However, I would like to see a lot more people, companies, and
researchers outside of 21CM get into the field of organ
cryopreservation. At the Alcor Technology Festival, I suggested that
one way to spur scientific advancement and generate positive publicity
for cryonics
would be to establish a prize or prize(s) for the scientific goals that
we wish to see achieved. Others, including Joe Strout, and den Otter
also arrived at the idea independently.
I was turned on by the idea by reading an interview with Paul
McCready. In August 1977, he won the 50,000 pound Kremer prize,
established by the British industrialist Henry Kremer in 1959. The
prize required the winner to fly a man-powered vehicle in a figure-eight
course around two pylons 1/2 mile apart. Kenneth A. Brown interviewed
him for his book, Inventors at Work (Tempus Books of Microsoft Press,
Redmond, WA, 1988, pg. 17)
BROWN: "What do you consider your most important invention?"
MCCREADY: "The Gossamer Condor was my most
significant--achieving
human-powered flight, which some people didn't think could be done. For
eighteen years people had been pursuing it because of the Kremer Prize
and not even coming close.
The challenge itself was a terrific invention. The gadget
wasn't all that great and you could have made different configurations,
any one of which could have won. The real genius was Henry Kremer, who
put up the prize money and was assured that somebody was going to do
this sometime. That was a very creative action."
We would benefit by offering a prize in several ways:
The prize-sponsoring person/organization can generate a lot of free
positive
publicity for itself and its goals by issuing press releases,
advertisements, and web sites announcing the prize, and again when the
prize has been won. In your case, you could generate a great deal of
publicity for your books. Imagine the NYT press release, "James
Halperin, author of The First Immortal, announced today that he was
offering $500,000 to the first person to demonstrate recovery of a whole
solid organ at following 1 month of storage at cryogenic temperatures...
We could be building positive support within the cryobiological
community. As a rule, graduate students live on quite small salaries;
as
you may have read in a recent Cryonet digest, Joe Strout and his wife
Shelly
live on 15K/yr/person in fellowships. Strout's salary is typical of
most graduate students. Something like $5,000 grant would therefore
represent a substantial bonus the income of someone like Joe, as well as
a nice feather to his resume.
Graduate students become professors, who are the arbiters of what is
scientifically acceptable. As you know, many researchers feel a great
deal of trepidation about working on research relevant to cryonics. A
big part of this is that cryobiologists believe that they don't have
anything to gain by
associating with those "body freezers" except a tarnished reputation.
By offering a prize, we would induce both graduate students and their
advisors to view us in a more positive light.
Although their salaries are small, graduate students have access to
institutional resources, in terms of specialized skills and capital
equipment,
which would be extremely costly to duplicate in our own lab. For
example, Joe Strout has access to a specialized microscope, one
of only a few in the world, among other pieces of expensive
equipment. Offering a prize would induce impoverished graduate
students, even those who don't win, to direct the use of that costly
capital equipment to the goals we wish to see achieved.
The prizes can be made quite small, yet still be effective; witness,
for example, the $500 Society for Cryobiology's Crystal Award for best
undergraduate or graduate research.
If we make the prize contingent upon achieving some particular goal,
we don't have to pay until the criteria are actually met. Conversely,
the prize can be designed to encourage explorative work by offering a
prize for the best proposal to advance the state of the art for organ
cryopreservation.
The disadvantages to this idea are as follows:
1) The cost of setting up, advertising, and administering the prize.
The prize judging committee would likely have to sift through a bunch of
crappy proposals.
2) The cost of the prize itself.
3) Accusations of favoritism, corruption, etc.
4) Diversion of resources from other, possibly more fruitful,
opportunities.
5) Other disadvantages which I haven't considered.
I hope that you will find this feedback useful; I look forward to
seeing the fruits of your efforts in the future.
Chris Rasch
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