Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!psuvax1!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: 5 Jan 90 04:30:18 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 41 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu >>>... no one has looked into irradiation ... >>> >>>Ed >> ... hard gammas would leave you somewhat absent-minded. >> --JoSH] Are there any food irradiation experts out there? I'm afraid we're both shooting in the dark. (Though I am trying to dig up more facts on the subject.) And isn't memory, especially long-term memory, stored in structural changes in the synapses themselves, besides chemically? I would expect those long-term memories would prove more difficult to "bleach out". Nuclear physics is rife with macabre stories of men who, having accidentally received lethal dosages of radiation, then walked around lucid and clear-headed until they died. (Perhaps in those cases amnesia would have been a blessing.) If there is some truth to what you assume here, we can still minimize the damage by irradiating the body briefly once, to kill the microbes, then hermetically sealing it. There's no need to bathe in hard gamma for 200 years, one brief dip will do. ED [As Howard Landman notes, you still have to worry about ordinary chemical decomposition at room temperatures. As far as synapses are concerned, you may be right. According to Crick (in PDP v2 p365) it isn't really known how the weight of the synapse is represented, but his guess is simply the area of the zone of apposition across the synaptic cleft (see p338). In the best of all cases it might even be proportional to the volume of the presynaptic process, a feature whose size is on the order of a micron (ie, big; the cleft is 20-30 nm across). If so, you might get away with irradiating the body and simply dessicating it for the long wait. I wouldn't risk it personally though :^) --JoSH]