Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: ems%nanotech@princeton.edu Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Honest Questions For An Honest Cryonicist Message-ID: Date: 20 Dec 89 22:33:21 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 59 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu I suspect a cryonicist (I am not one) would answer your "insurance" questions with a statement of faith in cryogenics. This is a faith I lack, because, as far as I can tell, human brains have not been frozen, then thawed, with cell structure intact. It seems safe to say that with full blown nanotechnology any molecular structure will be able to be duplicated. But if the crucial structure of the brain is not preserved in the first place, there will be nothing worthwhile to duplicate. It could be that my understanding of this field is incomplete, I haven't followed it at all that closely. I would be very much interested is seeing the before and after results of the following cryonics experiment, if anything like it has already been done. Take a gorilla or chimpanzee, train it for some particular task. Then take some small brain tissue sample and prepare micrographs. Now freeze and thaw the test animal. If the subject survives, great! Test for memory of the pre-learned task. If the subject cannot by revived, determine why. In any case, take post-freeze brain tissue samples and make micrographs. Publish all data in exhaustive detail. Has anything like the experiment that I've just outlined been performed and published? If so, a reference would be appreciated. I lean toward immortalism, I would like to live forever. I am very interested in any technique that offers a better than even chance of getting "over the hump" to the nanotechnological future, which promises to be a *very* interesting place. One chance in a million, however doesn't interest me (I don't play the lottery, either.) Right now, it seems, a better bet would be a brain transplant (Assuming that your brain was reasonably intact). Probably a vastly more expensive undertaking, but perhaps you get what you pay for. I recall that, in the brain, tissue rejection is not much of a problem. Has this experiment ever been done? (Outside of grade B horror pictures, that is :-) Ed Strong ems@Princeton.EDU [This is probably a good place to reiterate that cryonics is based on the concept that enough information will be saved by freezing brain tissues to recreate the brain with a mature nanotechnology-- *not* that the brain could be restored to order simply by thawing it out. This is sort of the same difference as that between the murderer hanging around at the scene of the crime to await the cops, or having left enough clues that Sherlock Holmes can figure out who he was. Given that it is common practice to freeze human embryos and thaw them *in a viable state*, right now, it is hard to believe that the freezing process destroys so much information that an atom-by-atom analysis could not figure out what had been there. The highest-level whole-animal experiment I know of involved a dog, which I understand is still alive. Can someone fill in more details? --JoSH]