In 1973, with no advanced notice, a graduate student at the Medical College of Georgia and an undergraduate student there in his first year received a desperate call for help, one night, from the Cryonics Society of New York. They took off immediately, grabbing what little they could take with them, and over the next few days carried out the first well-documented "freezing" in history. Later the same year, with considerable effort and many revisions, in a small-circulation publication of that day (Manrise Technical Review), they published their report.
In the 36 years that followed, both of these authors accomplished fantastic things in cryonics. The graduate student went on to obtain a PhD in cryobiology and serve as one of the researchers in a major medical laboratory, for many years pursuing cryopreservation of organs for transplantation. Now, he's one of the key people in a research program to apply that knowledge to the problems facing cryonics itself. The undergraduate student worked with Alcor in its very earliest days, contributing greatly to preparations for its first suspension, and later became President of the organization, setting up a "designed from scratch" cryonics facility in Southern California and then later conducting cutting edge research for years in extending the periods of time tissues could be maintained viable following clinical death.
So, young people can accomplish incredible things in cryonics! All it takes is a can do it attitude and the will to take on challenges. Both of the major cryonics organizations now in existence (CI & Alcor) are literally starved for such participation. They offer an incrediby higher level of infrastructure than the two authors of the paper linked above were able to obtain from the Cryonics Society of New York in 1973.
Again, here's that link. Have a look at what they did. Think about what you might be able to do!
Fred Chamberlain (AKA Boundless Life)
ps: When Adobe Reader opens this file, it will "fit to page" at about a 50% level of "zoom", depending on your monitor. But, the document was scanned at 300 dpi and can be seen at 150%-300% zoom without major degradation of the image. The "hand" tool can be used to read this document at 100% -150%, dragging the pages around. This isn't the most convenient way to read the report, perhaps, but it will give you the feeling of how this article was printed, on paper with crude fibers, using a second-hand mimeograph from a thift store and wax masters cut with an IBM selectric typewriter. These were the 'early' days of cryonics, with no inexpensive pocket calculators, and certainly no 'word processors' other than what has been described above. There was no email; the simplest 'pager' was larger and bulkier than today's cell phones, and cell phones still would be big, bulky things even fifteen years later. This was the general level of technology at the time the suspension described above was performed and documented. What we have to work with today is so far beyond that as to make it very difficult to imagine what it was like to be there, scarcely more than three decades ago, unless you were there, at the time. Still, a brief glance at this document, at 150%, might give you a kind of 'time travel' back into that era.
Edited by boundlesslife, 05 March 2009 - 12:27 PM.
