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chemopreservation


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#31 bgwowk

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Posted 20 March 2008 - 06:13 PM

"In proposing biostasis by cryopreservation, Ettinger at least knew the resulting state was stable, and that all tissue components would still be there in some form. This is not the case with post-mortem perfusion of aldehyde fixatives."

This statement is too general. Preservation of the person does not require preservation of "all tissue components"

Yes, but this does not justify any preservation method, especially methods for which the preservation is expected to be poor with no proof otherwise. As an extreme example, if embalming were offered for identity preservation, would burial in peat bogs be next for people who could not afford embalming?

and the long term stability of the components that matter is unknown.

The long term stability of bulk biological tissue at liquid nitrogen temperature over cryonics timescales is known with certainty.

Philosophically speaking, there is a baseline problem here. The correct baseline to evaluate the ethics of offering chemopreservation should not be cryonics but information-theoretic death.

I am well aware of the information-theoretic criterion, and stipulate to it in this discussion. I have no intrinsic objection to chemopreservation as a general concept, and believe it could be done with sufficiently advanced technology. In the worst case, it could theoretically be done by nanomachines as described in Drexler's book.

The problem here is the proposed sale of post-mortem aldehyde fixative perfusion under mortuary conditions as an identity preservation technology, and doing so by false analogy to microscopy specimen preparation. This is to chemopreservation what home freezer storage is to cryonics. It would be terrible if someone rushed to do this without evidence or biological understanding of the efficacy of the preservation.

But I do think that Jordan Sparks would do best in focusing on affordable pet- and human neuropreservation for the time being.

Agreed.

#32 jonano

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Posted 20 March 2008 - 06:42 PM

One main problem with cryonics and funding cryonics is that most people who are members of cryonics are too much smart with money than the other suicidal group. I would quess so. We know much more than the suicidals that money is important, more than things. And in that sense we dont use our money on cryonics the same way than stupid suicidal people (because we are smarter), you know what I mean? Robert Miller is a nice example. David Pizer is another one and Mr. Laughlin too. They lie on their situation or hide themselves. Instead to invest or spend or waste, they keep the money, I quess it's the general pattern between members in the cryonics area. But who will tell them it's bad? They play the money game and that's good for me.

--Jon

Edited by jonano, 20 March 2008 - 06:43 PM.


#33 bgwowk

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Posted 21 March 2008 - 12:41 AM

Maybe I am the only one who feels like this, but I'm missing a comparison discussing which parts of a stored tissue will be destroyed and which will be preserved through cryonics and through the chemopreservation approach jordansparks proposes. I still wonder how the long term prospects are with the chemo systems that is discussed here are, too. I know, I could go to the library and look it up myself. But on the other hand bgwok and jordansparks could just type two messages ;)

First, and very importantly, any tissue that doesn't perfuse well with fixative will end up destroyed. I've seen this under even laboratory conditions in animals with minimum post-mortem delay. Areas of the brain that don't perfuse well with fixative end up with practically no structure in electron micrographs. Ischemia worsens the problem because the more ischemia there is, the harder perfusion is. Areas that don't perfuse well with fixative will end up destroyed after long exposure to ambient temperature. Unlike fixatives, the virtue of cold is that cold penetrates everything with certainty.

Long-term stability of even tissue that is well-perfused with aldehyde fixative is questionable. A colleague of mine once prepared electron micrographs of a fixed brain that had been stored for three years in a refrigerator. He said the micrographs "looked like (expletive)". This is not unexpected because aldehyde fixatives don't preserve lipids. The burden of proof is on anyone who offers this that it can preserve a meaningful amount of information for long periods of time.

#34 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 21 March 2008 - 01:17 AM

Here are two links to articles that may have relevance to this discussion, the first is about Ben Best's peer reviewed published paper on cryonics:

"A technical cryonics article to be published in the conference proceedings of a customarily peer-reviewed scientific journal, entitled “Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice,” by Ben Best, President of the Cryonics Institute, will appear in the next issue (Volume 11, Issue 2) of Rejuvenation Research." (He first presented it at Sens, if you want a copy I can send it to you)

http://depressedmeta...on-by-ben-best/

This paper is exciting for many reasons, but I'm still swayed that cryonics is the best option and more work needs to be done in researching the effects of chemopreservation. I think information-theoretic death must be kept in mind foremost. I'm not even sure that good chemopreservation, demonstratively as good as cryonics--would be any less expensive than a neuropreservation. I also think that CI could drop its idea that neuropreservation is 'worse PR' as Alcor has been doing fine with it for years, and the culture is more accepting of cryonics in general--and that they would offer a lower cost neuropreservation. Their regular price being 28,000.00 a neuro, would be a lot more affordable at around half that price or better.

Aschwin de Wolf and his wife Chana de Wolf are now working with Mike Perry to obtain electron micrographs of plastinated brain tissue. (Currently being supported by Alcor in this endeavor, and hopefully will be to its fruition). It will be interesting to see what they find.

Chana de Wolf last year wrote about a study that looked at the chemopreservation of whale brains:

http://depressedmeta...f-whale-brains/

I see some potential benefits to chemopreservation, I just think that neuro-cryo preservation is superior at this time--is Oregon Cryonics going to offer that, and with the same vitrification formula as CI or Alcor?

Is Oregon Cryonics actually accepting people then?

#35 1arcturus

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Posted 24 March 2008 - 03:27 PM

Memory is not just "position and size of all the synaptic junctions." It's also molecules in the lipids of membranes at synapses.


Which molecules are you talking about?

#36 bgwowk

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Posted 24 March 2008 - 04:56 PM

Memory is not just "position and size of all the synaptic junctions." It's also molecules in the lipids of membranes at synapses.


Which molecules are you talking about?

Receptors, ion channels, and protein kinases. Others who know more about memory than I do can probably name more.

There is more to synapses than just their size and position, or phenomena such as long-term potentiation could not exist.

#37 1arcturus

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Posted 24 March 2008 - 06:46 PM

Memory is not just "position and size of all the synaptic junctions." It's also molecules in the lipids of membranes at synapses.


Which molecules are you talking about?

Receptors, ion channels, and protein kinases. Others who know more about memory than I do can probably name more.

There is more to synapses than just their size and position, or phenomena such as long-term potentiation could not exist.


Those are all proteins, as I understand it, so presumably fixation could fix them.

There might be many things that would be necessary for long-term memory to function that would not be necessary to characterize information from which one could infer the memory. My impression of the prevailing theories on long-term memory is that it requires structural/morphological changes in synapses.

We know that synapses and lipid structures such as cellular and organelle membranes can survive fixation and embedding because we can inspect these microscopically.

#38 bgwowk

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 01:32 AM

Those are all proteins, as I understand it, so presumably fixation could fix them.

Fix them to what? Unless there is some other protein to tie them to, transmembrane proteins treated with only aldehyde fixative will float away with dissolution of the lipid membrane they reside in. This is why (in my understanding) highly toxic and expensive osmium tetroxide is used for secondary fixation.

We know that synapses and lipid structures such as cellular and organelle membranes can survive fixation and embedding because we can inspect these microscopically.

I don't know why this keeps getting made as an argument. The timespan between aldehyde fixation and the subsequent steps to prepare specimens for microscopy is hours or days, not centuries. Nobody has ever done the experiment of aldehyde perfusion fixation, leaving tissue sit at ambient temperature for 200 years, and then embedding for microscopy.

Edited by bgwowk, 25 March 2008 - 01:35 AM.


#39 jonano

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 03:19 AM

can we know why there is a change on oregoncryo.com, can we have honest answers here? Do you sell your equipment?

Im sure The Cryonics Institute applied their monopole again. Remember the 3 traps of cryonics by Charles Platt. I can explain you!

--Jon

#40 xlifex

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 04:48 AM

Fix them to what? Unless there is some other protein to tie them to, transmembrane proteins treated with only aldehyde fixative will float away with dissolution of the lipid membrane they reside in. This is why (in my understanding) highly toxic and expensive osmium tetroxide is used for secondary fixation.


Yes. And this raises an important point. Let's say that the ultrastructure of the brain can be reasonably well preserved by aldehyde fixation, post-fixation with osmium tetroxide (which will necessitate fixing the brain in a safety hood), after which the brain is stored in a dry, low temperature location. Is this less expensive than doing a straight freeze (or even perfusion) of a neuropatient? I am not so sure about this.

As I said in an earlier message, chemical fixation might appeal to people who are very concerned about the long term stability of cryonics organizations. Walk away from a dewar for a number of months (very conservative) and the patient is dead. This does not happen to a chemopreserved patient (even allowing for long term degradation of fixed brains). Chemopreserved patients can also be easier cared for by laymen if such a scenario would occur. But still....

Having said this, technologies often improve because people want them to work. This is what made the transition from crude cryoprotection to vitrification with modest toxicity possible. A similar project could be outlined for normothermic biostasis.

#41 xlifex

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 04:57 AM

Of course, I should add that the crudest freezing methods seem to be far superior than the crudest chemopreservation methods.

Cryopreservation is in a better starting position than chemopreservation, that's for sure.

#42 bgwowk

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 06:08 AM

Fix them to what? Unless there is some other protein to tie them to, transmembrane proteins treated with only aldehyde fixative will float away with dissolution of the lipid membrane they reside in. This is why (in my understanding) highly toxic and expensive osmium tetroxide is used for secondary fixation.


Yes. And this raises an important point. Let's say that the ultrastructure of the brain can be reasonably well preserved by aldehyde fixation, post-fixation with osmium tetroxide (which will necessitate fixing the brain in a safety hood), after which the brain is stored in a dry, low temperature location. Is this less expensive than doing a straight freeze (or even perfusion) of a neuropatient? I am not so sure about this.

As I said in an earlier message, chemical fixation might appeal to people who are very concerned about the long term stability of cryonics organizations. Walk away from a dewar for a number of months (very conservative) and the patient is dead. This does not happen to a chemopreserved patient (even allowing for long term degradation of fixed brains). Chemopreserved patients can also be easier cared for by laymen if such a scenario would occur. But still....

Having said this, technologies often improve because people want them to work. This is what made the transition from crude cryoprotection to vitrification with modest toxicity possible. A similar project could be outlined for normothermic biostasis.

Agreed. My suspicion is that doing it well enough to have a chance of working over the requisite timescales will be more expensive than people think. The need for prompt post-mortem access is itself expensive because of the cost of standby services. The need for prompt access could be relaxed if the brain is removed and sectioned(!) for immersion fixation, but that requires the services of a pathologist, another expense. Then there is the cost of a place to store the specimen (cemetery plot?). The devil is in the details, and it all adds up.

#43 1arcturus

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 03:09 PM

Those are all proteins, as I understand it, so presumably fixation could fix them.

Fix them to what? Unless there is some other protein to tie them to, transmembrane proteins treated with only aldehyde fixative will float away with dissolution of the lipid membrane they reside in. This is why (in my understanding) highly toxic and expensive osmium tetroxide is used for secondary fixation.

We know that synapses and lipid structures such as cellular and organelle membranes can survive fixation and embedding because we can inspect these microscopically.

I don't know why this keeps getting made as an argument. The timespan between aldehyde fixation and the subsequent steps to prepare specimens for microscopy is hours or days, not centuries. Nobody has ever done the experiment of aldehyde perfusion fixation, leaving tissue sit at ambient temperature for 200 years, and then embedding for microscopy.


The lipid membranes can dissolve, but they don't spontaneously dissolve. Under the right circumstances, lipid membranes can survive for an incredibly long time. Fixation eliminates one primary source of their dissolution, digestion by enzymes. I agree, liquid aldehyde storage, even carefully buffered, doesn't seem to preserve structure because of the continuing molecular motion. But polymer embedded and impregnated specimens seem to keep just fine. Specimens mounted on slides for microscopy last for a long time. But like I said, I am not defending Jordan Sparks' idea of storage in liquid aldehydes. Once fixation is complete, the specimen needs to be embedded for storage.

As I understand it, osmium tetroxide can help fixation but it is mainly used for staining purposes. There are thousands of variations on fixation procedure, so anyone proposing to do chemopreservation would have to study them all and probably also experiment to see which works best for our life extension purposes.

#44 1arcturus

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 03:26 PM

Agreed. My suspicion is that doing it well enough to have a chance of working over the requisite timescales will be more expensive than people think. The need for prompt post-mortem access is itself expensive because of the cost of standby services. The need for prompt access could be relaxed if the brain is removed and sectioned(!) for immersion fixation, but that requires the services of a pathologist, another expense. Then there is the cost of a place to store the specimen (cemetery plot?). The devil is in the details, and it all adds up.


I would like to learn more about the issues of immediate post-mortem access for perfusion. Plastination experts somehow manage to do whole-body preservation of cadavers that are dead for some time. Von Hagens has said that he can even clear and hollow the vasculature during preservation; how I don't know.

From what I understand, hospital pathologists will remove a patient's brain and fix it by requested autopsy at no cost whatsoever, or a minimal cost if the hospital is having budget issues. That would be immersion fixation, and that is how some brain bank donations are made. It might be possible to get them to combine perfusion fixation of the brain with diffusion fixation within a relatively short time after death. Storage of a dry (embedded) specimen is a problem, as it is with a cryopatient, but it strains the imagination to think that an inert object that basically just needs to be kept somewhere safe would require more expensive storage than a patient who needs to be kept in a special, expensive, monitored, and maintained container needing regular topoff and inspection, etc.

I agree a more careful case needs to be made than has so far been made.

#45 bgwowk

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 04:49 PM

Once fixation is complete, the specimen needs to be embedded for storage.

Can this be done by perfusion?

#46 1arcturus

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Posted 25 March 2008 - 08:45 PM

Once fixation is complete, the specimen needs to be embedded for storage.

Can this be done by perfusion?


I don't know.

#47 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 26 March 2008 - 02:27 AM

I asked a perfusion expert to look at this thread, hopefully she'll have time :-D.

#48 xlifex

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Posted 26 March 2008 - 06:33 AM

I asked a perfusion expert to look at this thread, hopefully she'll have time :-D.


I doubt that your "perfusion expert" has any experience in perfusing a fixative or embedding medium post-mortem ;-)

#49 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 26 March 2008 - 04:12 PM

From what I know of her years of school, and professional work in the field--and even in cryonics, I believe she does.

#50 bgwowk

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Posted 26 March 2008 - 06:06 PM

From what I know of her years of school, and professional work in the field--and even in cryonics, I believe she does.

MM is welcome to the thread, but what has been suggested (not by me) is related more to the chemistry of EM specimen preparation than anything in cryonics. Water substitution and embedding of all cell constituents in hard polymer for transmission electron microscopy is always done by diffusion into small tissue pieces, never perfusion. The solutions involved are viscous, and would have to be perfused for a very long time. The polymerization initiator concentration would probably have to be lower than normal to allow more time for diffusion. It's all very speculative.

I suppose in some respects the problem is analogous to the problem of introducing viscous cryoprotectant solutions by perfusion rather than diffusion. Some cryobiologists only familiar with cryopreservation of small tissue pieces are incredulous that cryoprotection can be done by perfusion. The question is ultimately settled by experiment.

Edited by bgwowk, 26 March 2008 - 06:15 PM.


#51 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 27 March 2008 - 04:57 AM

From what I know of her years of school, and professional work in the field--and even in cryonics, I believe she does.

MM is welcome to the thread, but what has been suggested (not by me) is related more to the chemistry of EM specimen preparation than anything in cryonics. Water substitution and embedding of all cell constituents in hard polymer for transmission electron microscopy is always done by diffusion into small tissue pieces, never perfusion. The solutions involved are viscous, and would have to be perfused for a very long time. The polymerization initiator concentration would probably have to be lower than normal to allow more time for diffusion. It's all very speculative.

I suppose in some respects the problem is analogous to the problem of introducing viscous cryoprotectant solutions by perfusion rather than diffusion. Some cryobiologists only familiar with cryopreservation of small tissue pieces are incredulous that cryoprotection can be done by perfusion. The question is ultimately settled by experiment.



Great post. Who would take on such an experiment? Also, will Oregon Cryonics be doing any research?

#52 xlifex

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Posted 27 March 2008 - 08:42 PM

Great post. Who would take on such an experiment? Also, will Oregon Cryonics be doing any research?


Most likely, this will need to be done by Mike Perry and others using the chemopreservation grant Alcor received.

Jordan Sparks has ceased operations of Oregon Cryonics due to personal reasons. This does not affect the Cryonics Oregon Meetup group by Chana et al, which still exists and will have another meeting on on Saturday, May 10, 2008, at 2:00 p.m.

Expect other Oregon cryonics activities in the near future....

#53 Heliotrope

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Posted 13 April 2008 - 04:14 AM

whether chemical fixation or vitrification or other means to preserve the brain and mind is the BEST WAY, i'm not sure. there's got to be a better way

I put my money on Alcor for now, but why don't all of the cryonics organizations compete and wager, see whoever revives/rescues/recovers a patient first? The the truth will speak for itself.

Edited by HYP86, 13 April 2008 - 04:34 AM.


#54 boundlesslife

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Posted 17 April 2008 - 09:28 PM

Well, I'm gonna do it. I plan to offer chemical fixation, pay-as-you-go cryopreservation, and lower cost than ever before. All with a solid business model.

Please see
http://www.oregoncryo.com/services.htm

Not there yet, but things are coming together, and it shouldn't be much longer.

Jordan Sparks


I'm glad to see Jordan pursuing this approach, part of the reason for which is that I've been convinced for a long time (since the mid-1980's) that bioreanimation may pose great difficulties, and that in the end 'emulations' (uploading) may be the most viable course. A story of mine from that time (the 1980's) has been on line for some time, and some of you may have seen it.

Link to "Nothing's Impossible"

But that's not the main reason for replying on this thread. The thing that impelled me to take a look at this forum again (it's been at least a year) is the outlook for increase in the expensiveness of energy in the near future (next few decades). Sure, I'd expected the dollar to crash, and that competition for resources would intensify, worldwide. I'd anticipated that soon we will see an awful 'crunch' in food supplies, and so on, but I'd paid almost no attention to the issue of "Peak Oil", until I saw an alarming article in the Viewpoint section of the Arizona Register recently.

It forecast a very gloomy picture of what may be about to happen, in fact despite the fact the article sounded very sensible, the title of it seemed almost 'over the edge' ("The end of civilization and the extinction of humanity"). I mean c'mon, doesn't that sound like 'Chicken Little'? (That's how it struck me at the time).

Then, a few days later, I saw reports that the reserves of oil in Mexico had been vastly overestimated, and the President of Mexico was sounding an cry for action, to bring back the big oil companies for higher technology (Mexico nationalized all the oil industry in 1938). A few days later, it was reported that Russian production of oil had 'peaked' and would not be coming back up the ladder. Inclined to dig into it a little more deeply, I had a look at what Wikipedia had to say about it (This is what Wikipedia has, on that subject.) As you scan down the Wikipedia page, click on the diagrams to blow them up. It gives the picture of a 'log ride' that's just beginning to gather speed.

Searching Google for simply "Peak Oil" and then adding in words like "Russia" turned up a gaggle of other things that were alarming. I'll simply leave you with a few other links:

McPherson's main article: "The end of civilization and the extinction of humanity".

An Arizona Republic article that discussed McPherson's shorter postings on the subject: Article in the Arizona Republic about McPherson's "The end of the world as we know it".

To finish with a brief perspective about all of this, it seems as if McPherson has a scenario that should play out pretty closely to how he sees it, except that he may have overlooked how quickly a panic-stricken humanity might rush to construct a great many nuclear power plants at the last moment. Fusion energy is too far downstream and all the other approaches are so oil dependent that McPherson is probably right about the impracticality of using them to 'fix' the problem. Energy could become very, very expensive, and (so) LN2 storage could become more and more difficult to afford.

If any kind of "singularity" is about to happen, I think McPherson's scenario could be it. An even more astounding and devastating "singularity" would be to have the Solar System be abruptly swallowed by a black hole, by that's way down the probability scale.

OK, Jordan... full speed ahead! If there's a 'meltdown' of LN2 storage, what do you think might be done in the way of 'chemopreservation conversion' for those in a cryogenic state? It's not too soon to begin giving some thought to that, right? McPherson's outlook for a "Post-Industrial Stone Age" sounds as bizarre to me now, as when I first heard him use the term, but energy could become extremely expensive even if the world "hammered its swords into plowshares" (coverted its weapons to reactors) in trying to make the best of it.

Any chance that McPherson might be dead wrong? I don't think so!

That's enough (more than enough, for most of you, I'm sure) right now!

Edited by boundlesslife, 17 April 2008 - 10:10 PM.


#55 boundlesslife

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Posted 17 April 2008 - 10:07 PM

I'm glad to see Jordan pursuing this approach, part of the reason for which is that I've been convinced for a long time (since the mid-1980's) that bioreanimation may pose great difficulties, and that in the end 'emulations' (uploading) may be the most viable course. A story of mine from that time (the 1980's) has been on line for some time, and some of you may have seen it.

Link to "Nothing's Impossible"


One thing to add, a fragment from a rather longer thing I'm slowly working on. One of the characters in the story is discussing uploading and whether or not one could 'go back and compare with how one felt earlier, as a biohuman', to be sure one wanted to 'make the jump'. I'll rephrase it, so the synopsis works as a posting here, rather than try to drag in the context of the novel in which it is (will be) used:

[][][][][]

In a novel once started, a man had been frozen, but only after being pressured by his relatives to sign a statement that ‘he was willing to contribute to science, but was never to be reanimated’.

A century or so later, in perfecting suspended animation, the nanotechnology people wanted to use his brain as a ‘prototype’ for repair, which would not be a danger to his ‘personality’, since he had gone on record as being unwilling to ever be reanimated.

All went well, and the repair was virtually perfected, but some of the people involved were troubled by the idea that the man’s brain would simply be ‘left in the freezer’, or even disposed of as ‘used sample material’.

One of them suggested that since they’d made an entire map of the brain to repair it, they might be able to make a crude ‘emulation’ of the brain and ‘have a conversation with it’, to see if he really was serious about never being reanimated.

This turned out to be easier than they had hoped, since he was being given no input/output except speech and hearing. A week or two later, then, they were seated in a conference room with a little ‘CD player’ size thing, which we could think of as a primitive IM ('identity module'), and when they turned it on, he ‘woke up’ inside it and asked, ‘Why doesn’t it hurt any more?’

The experimenters said, ‘Don’t worry about that, the question is, did you really mean it when you signed those papers that said never to reanimate you?’

The ‘emulation’ replied:

“I’m not sure I’d be of any use to the world of the future. Why doesn’t it hurt anymore? Am I dying, and you’re giving me some pain killer? Is that what’s happening?”


The experimenters asked him to ignore the details of ‘what’s going on’ for a moment and focus on just one question: Would he be willing to be reanimated, if a great many other people might benefit by his helping to pioneer the process?

After a moment, the emulation said:

“Sure, I’d be glad, if it could do some good, in fact, if my memories were as clear as this, Wow, they’re great. Of course I’d be happy to come back. What have you done to me anyway? I feel like you’ve got me on drugs. The memories are so clear, so sharp, I seem to be able to think so fast. This is fantastic! If it’s going to be anything like this, then….”



That’s where they ‘shut him off’. And, there was a lot of consternation. ‘You killed him,’ shouted one of the nurses. ‘No we didn’t’, the head experimenter explained. ‘We could switch him on again and he’d pick up right where he left off.’

So, you see the pickle they’d gotten into. Now, they knew that the earlier papers the man had signed were irrelevant. And, they then decided to go ahead and reanimate him.

One question remained: should they add, during the final part of the ‘brain repair’, memories of the ‘emulation conversation’? After long debate, and considering the legal ramifications of ignoring the document he’d signed, they decided that it would be safer to ‘leave the memories of the conversation in’. And that’s what they did.

Now, we ‘fast forward’ to reanimation day. He wakes up, in a ‘young body’, and is really happy to ‘be back’, but there’s a problem. His brain must have been damaged, he says. His memories are terribly sluggish, his thinking is cloudy, as compared with his most recent memories.

“How can it be?” he asks. “A moment ago I could see memories flashing before me like magic. I could think like I was flying a jet plane, and now… it’s like I’m stuck on a muddy road, barely able to move. What’s wrong?”


And this poses a problem for them. Are they going to tell him about the little bit of ‘extra memory’ they put in, or not? Of course, they do tell him, and his first reaction is:

“Oh, no! This is awful! You mean I’ll never have a fantastic mental experience like that again?”


The experimenters talk about this, not for a day or two, but for weeks, They figure out how they might be able to come up with an ‘IM’ and interface it into his body. They even work out ways for him to ‘switch back and forth’, updating both the ‘biobrain’ and the ‘hyperbrain’ so the contents were exactly the same. Then they could compare.

In the end, they decided to go ahead with the jump to IM for him, and it took months to bring it off. Later, a lot of the experimenters said, ‘If this really works out, we want to do it ourselves.’ Ultimately, they did.

[][][][][]

That's not much more than a 'glimmer' of the story, however, I've told it in about that way to many people at cryonics gatherings and they seemed to 'get it', so I thought I'd throw it in here, 'for the record' if nothing else. The longer work in which it is 'embedded' is, among other things, an exhaustive exploration of the 'uploading' idea, far beyond that earlier (1980's) attempt linked up above, or any other the other LifeQuest stories. It could be that it's too 'fragmentary' to be of interest here, but each individual will 'take it' differently anyway.

Again, I want to say how encouraged I am to see Jordan Sparks moving in the direction he's indicated, up above.

Boundlesslife

#56 bgwowk

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Posted 17 April 2008 - 10:34 PM

Liquid nitrogen is a small fraction of the cost of running a cryonics organization. In Arizona, the cost of energy is also capped by the cost of roof-mounted solar. The real issue is whether rising global energy prices could lead to a long economic depression, which would impact all operating costs, and the investments that pay for them.

Over centuries of time, there are many things that could cause a depression. In my opinion, the gradual transition from oil to other energy sources is not one of them. Looking around, it would seem that the main preoccupation of energy policy makers is that we still have too much carbon available to burn, not too little!

#57 advancedatheist

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Posted 18 April 2008 - 04:16 AM

Over centuries of time, there are many things that could cause a depression. In my opinion, the gradual transition from oil to other energy sources is not one of them.


Define "gradual," Brian. Oil sold for about $10 a barrel as recently as 1999. Today it has reached $115 a barrel. While some of the increase reflects dollar devaluation, I don't know of anyone who argues that the U.S. has experienced ~ 1000% inflation in the past nine years.

And, as I've predicted, the airline industry has started to collapse. Eventually cryonicists living overseas in denial like John de Rivaz will have to confront reality.

#58 advancedatheist

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Posted 18 April 2008 - 05:10 AM

Looking around, it would seem that the main preoccupation of energy policy makers is that we still have too much carbon available to burn, not too little!


I don't know how global warming science got politicized in the way it has. If the scientists had framed their research as a new tool to give man even more dominion over nature (and what self-respecting advanced civilization wouldn't want to control Earth's climate?), conservatives and libertarians would embrace global warming science while liberals and leftists would denounce it as some kind of scam or fraud.

#59 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 07 May 2008 - 03:09 AM

A new idea in chemopreservation: http://www.depressed...nanotechnology/




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