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Cryonics • 4th Qtr, 19972

CGI Cover Art courtesy of Tim Hubley. Great work, Tim!

About the Cover

PUBLICATION NOTESCryonics is the quarterly publication of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation

Editor: Brian ShockVolume 18:4 • Issue #175 • 4th Qtr, 1997 • ISSN 1054-4305

(Most of the first 160 issues—September, 1977 through December, 1993—were published on a monthly basis.)

Contents copyright 1997 by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Inc., except where

otherwise noted. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarilythose of the Alcor Foundation or its Board of Directors or management.

Submissions may be sent via e-mail ([email protected]) in ASCII, Word, WordPerfect, orPageMaker format. Mailed submissions should include a PC disk with the file in anypreviously mentioned format (although printed text alone will be considered). All submittedmedia become property of the Alcor Foundation unless accompanied by a self-addresseds tamped envelope . The Alcor Foundat ion assumes no respons ib i l i ty for unsol ic i tedmanuscripts, photographs, or artwork. Send all correspondence and submissions to:

Cryonics Magazine, 7895 E. Acoma Dr., Suite 110, Scottsdale, AZ 85260.

Where Are All The Angry Mobs?

By Brian Shock

Every year I escort dozensof people around Alcor’s

facility, and at one point or an-other, in one way or another,almost all of them ask me thesame thing: “How much reli-gious opposition do you getaround here?”

I’m never sure whether tocringe or chuckle at this Fre-quently Asked Question. Thewords conjure up superimposed

images of torch-carrying mobsin Frankenstein films and plac-ard-carrying mobs in front ofabortion clinics on the EveningNews. In my experience,though, the Alcor Foundationhas never received that sort ofnegative attention from the pub-lic*, and certainly not from anyspecifically religious groups.

You probably already knowmy standard answer to visitors:

* True, Alcor’s Riverside, California facility was “raided” by coroner’s deputies duringthe Dora Kent case of 1988, but this event was quite secular and almost certainlyinitiated by the misplaced ambitions of one person.

Shock Treatments

3 4th Qtr, 1997 • Cryonics

deals with issues of personalfreedom and “right to life.”Then too, the mob mind couldeasily make a fuzzy connec-tion between cryonics and fe-tuses — embryos of 16 cells orless are routinely maintained infrozen storage and later carriedto term. Further, a Houston,Texas company, Cryogenic So-lutions, actually advertises thatit will freeze aborted embryosfor possible future reanimation.As ludicrous at it sounds,people may think of a cryonicsfacility as a “reverse abortionclinic,” open to the same con-troversy.

Perhaps the imagined con-flict between cryonics and reli-gion devolves to “moral” con-cerns, which are often unnec-essarily linked with religiousgroups. Numerous reportershave asked me how cryonicsorganizations can morally jus-tify selling services that “don’twork.” Never mind that weoffer constant, insistent dis-claimers. Never mind that noone can yet demonstrate thatcryonics will fail. The currentpractice of cryonics fails to of-fer certainty (such as the “com-forting” certainty of death), andso should require the interces-sion of spiritual consumer ad-vocates.

Or perhaps religious groupsdo feel a silent animosity to-ward cryonics, but don’t yetconsider it a sufficiently large

cryonics is no more opposed toreligion than cardiac bypasssurgery violates the Ten Com-mandments. Cryonics offersjust one more medical treat-ment for prolonging human life,not a means of circumventingdeities.

This answer never seems tosatisfy anyone. That’s hardlysurprising, when you considerhow popular fiction portrayscryonics and religion at odds.This happens in both fictionalworks sold by Alcor. InChiller, by Sterling Blake, em-ployees of a familiar cryonicsorganization are murdered offone at a time by a religiouslymotivated psychopath. In TechHeaven, by Linda Nagata, aquasi-religious organizationcall the “Knights of the Op-pressed Earth” violently op-poses the storage and reanima-tion of cryonics patients.(Nagata’s earlier novel, TheBohr Maker, taking place in alater period than Tech Heaven,further demonstrates how Earthand Nature are treated as reli-gious foci in Nagata’s milieu.)Clearly, an uninformed publicis not the only source of thismisconception about cryonicsand religion.

Perhaps my previously men-tioned “abortion clinic sce-nario” has more relevance thananyone would care to admit.(After all, it even occurs to me.)As with abortion, cryonics

target. Who notices a mereeight hundred scattered zealotsin a world of six billion?

Whatever the reason thatcryonics has not seen religiousopposition, we should take se-rious note of the simple factthat it hasn’t. While lack ofopposition doesn’t preclude thepossibility that opposition maysomeday exist, lack of opposi-tion also doesn’t require thatopposition will someday exist.Even so, I know manycryonicists who skulk aroundlike soldiers in a World War IImovie bunker, muttering linessuch as, “It’s quiet — too quiet”. . . as though this indicates acertainty that the enemy muststrike at dawn.

I’m annoyed by the almostuniversal assumption amongcryonicists themselves that re-ligious opposition to cryonicswill eventually occur. Is thissome dim pseudo-observationthat powerful organizations inthe past tended to reject icono-clastic ideas? Is this a crypticinsight of an unconscious massmind? Or is this simply theinstinctive call of the herd,frightening us with stories ofwolf packs that devour thosewho stray?


the popular “hotspot.” GregoryStock, speaking at Extro-3 (August9, 1997 in San Jose CA) on“Reengineering the Human GermLine”, forecast that artificial chro-mosomes will soon permit us to al-ter ourselves and our children.

Asked if he thought humans car-rying differing artificial chromo-somes might find it impossible to re-produce, Dr Stock tried to be diplo-matic. In principle, he said, “Mak-ing babies is going to evolve like ev-erything else.”

What is this leading toward?Will people of the future have chil-dren as they now do, or will theymake “designer kids”? Must theparents sort through all their owngenes, to find the ideal mix? Do ar-tificial chromosomes take centerstage? How might clones come intothe picture?

Future Issues

Suppose it’s forty years fromnow, and a man with three artificialchromosomes engineered in Switzer-land pairs up with a woman with fivesuch chromosomes, of Chinese de-sign? Suppose these artificial chro-mosomes permeate the germ line (re-productive cells)? Will these people

By Fred ChamberlainPresident/CEO

Alcor Life Extension Foundation

New developments touch our culture at all levels. DNA, discov-

ered in 1953 by Watson and Crick,has now reached new plateaus ofpopularity through “Dolly theSheep.” Knee-jerk reactions devel-oped around the globe in oppositionto human cloning research. Morequietly, the Human Genome Projecthas been accelerating the growth ofknowledge for future developmentswe cannot yet fully imagine.

Let’s look at potential interestsin cloning, on the part of bothcryonicists and non-cryonicists.They seem to have different roots,but those will converge with time.Alcor, through a project called AlcorBioBank, might help bring thoseneeds together and serve them both.

Recent History

A few decades ago, “genetic en-gineering” raised such concerns thatexperimentation with recombinantDNA was faced by a moratorium.As Susan Wright puts it at her website [1]:

“In the early 1970s leaders of bio-medical research quickly moved tocontain the emerging ethical and so-cial issues. A partial moratorium on

Notes from the President

research in 1974 was followed by thefamous international conference atAsilomar, California, where scien-tists addressed the hazards of geneticengineering and agreed to imposecontrols on their own research. Theseevents were celebrated as acts of sci-entific responsibility. But they werealso pre-emptive strikes, demonstrat-ing that control of genetic engineer-ing was best left in the hands of ex-perts, and defining the problem asone that only experts could address—that of ‘containing’ possible bio-hazards. With that definition, geneticengineers were soon back at workunder voluntary controls issued bythe National Institutes of Health in1976.”

Today, modern textbooks on bi-ology [2] discuss recombinant DNAresearch as if it were taken forgranted from the outset. Now, wehave newer, up to date controversiesover the possibility of tamperingwith human reproduction and clon-ing. Soon, these could be forgotten;maybe anti aging or cryonics is next.

Present Controversies

Aside from the ban on cloningresearch in humans, genetically al-tering ourselves and our children is

DNA, Cloning, and Alcor BioBank


have normal children?Maybe not! Perhaps they will

be, biologically speaking, “differentspecies”! Could they, to put itbluntly, have “old fashioned chil-dren”? If they could, would theythen feel impelled to add a mix ofcustom tailored artificial chromo-somes, to avoid “old fashioned ge-netic defects”? How reliably will thevariations and combinations of theirown genes match the fine tuning ofartificial chromosomes? Is thereanything we might have overlooked?

Cloning

Of course, we overlooked clon-ing. Here, a life history will suggestareas where fine adjustments couldhelp. Known genetic weaknesses inmetabolism or bone structure couldbetter be compensated. Many subtleareas of biochemistry or develop-mental morphology might be opti-mized, where the genome is knownin terms of its end result (phenotype).But why would we want to clonesomeone?

Cryonicists will be interestedfrom the standpoint of repair. A lotof tissue replacement is likely to beneed, especially for neuros. Evenwhole body cryonicists are likely toget extensive repairs requireing re-generated tissue. In most cases, itcould be easier to “regrow” tissuethan “rebuild” it with nanotech-nology. This regrowing could be anextension of cloning, benefitted byupgrading with artificial chromo-somes.

Non-cryoncists will have otherreasons. How about those who placea lot of value on family history?They talk for hours about their par-ents, favorite uncles, and grandpar-ents, and tell you how they, “wishthey could have known them, but

now it’s impossible.” And largelythey are right.

How “Gone” Are YouWhen You’re Gone?

But they are not completelyright. Aunt Jenny might have takenyou on trips when you were young,or was there when you were sick orin trouble, or helped you to learn andexplore when others shut you out orwere too busy to listen. You can-not have Aunt Jenny back, but if shewere a little girl again, and neededsome one to take care of her, mightthat person be you?

There may come a time when itis easy to add an identical twin of“Aunt Jenny” to your family. Willthat “Little Jenny” find out where shecame from? You can bet on it. Shewill be fascinated to know that thereonce was an earlier Aunt Jenny, whocared for her parent as a little child,and that she is receiving all of thelove and attention that earlier “incar-nation” of herself gave to others. Inlike manner, a boy may finds that hismother, who loved her father andcould not give him up absolutelywhen she lost him, has given that be-loved “Daddy” a kind of rebirth, al-though certainly this is nothing likereanimation.

And will this process stop withAunt Jenny? Or a mother’s lost hus-band? No, gradually, in a futureworld just around the corner, entire“family trees” may come back to life.Not just one segment, one slice ofthem, but the whole thing, except ofcourse for those who went into thefires.

How much of anyone’s DNA isleft, when they die? And what con-dition is it in? Does it take cryogenicpreservation to maintain it in the bestcondition? Would such a sample be

useful in cloning? How can weknow these things in time to take theactions which later might be impor-tant to us? If we cryonicists havethe best suspensions, we just mightrecover with our memories intact. Ifnot, what are the chances that somefamily member of ours might find aclonable DNA sample among whatwe left behind? Pretty Good?

In the past, Alcor offered a “kit”approach for DNA storage, as partof its fund raising program. Perhapswe should refine and extend that intoa highly organized, well researchedpart of our operations. That bringsus to Alcor BioBank, a project stillunder study.

Alcor BioBank

Alcor is presently consideringthe launch of a subsidiary offeringDNA collection kits, with cryogenicstorage included or as an option.This would not be a service limitedto Alcor Members, but would beavailable to the general public. Theconnection with Alcor as a cryonicsorganization could be part of the pro-motional result. At the same time,we must avoid undue liabilities.

Until a lot more is known aboutcloning, we cannot say that sampleswe store would be usable for clon-ing. At the same time, in view ofthe possibility that such samplesmight be usable for cloning, wewould need to assure those who storeDNA with us that no use of theirDNA would ever be made withouttheir consent. Some might consentto cloning, under well specified con-ditions. Even considering such a usewould raise these people’s awarenessof life extension and cryonics. Andit would raise ours, too.

If we are suspended in any nor-mal way, we cryonicists leave behind


a great storehouse of cells, manypresumeably containing intact DNA.But this does not mean that as livinghumans, our DNA is “safe.” Evenwe might be lost in a plane crash, inan absolute way, and we mightchoose (in addition to wearing ourbracelets) to leave a secure samplewhere it would be there even if wewere not found. Our pets, similarly,could go with us in genome form,even if their “personalities” could notbe preserved. DNA samples forcryonicists might make a lot of sense.

DNA is everywhere at this time,in the public consiousness. A “savethe tiger” organization has an exten-sive web page [4]. Legislative ac-tion is underway to make surepeople’s rights in their own DNA areprotected [5, 6]. Massive collectionsof links on DNA are appearing in theWorld Wide Web [7]. One can getlost in the world wide web, in theworld of DNA, and Alcor BioBankis ready to help.

In exploring the Alcor BioBankpossibility, a web site has been setup. You may access it at http://www.alcor.org/dna.htm. In the“links” section, dozens of annotatedreferences and outbound DNA sitesare provided. If Alcor goes aheadwith Alcor BioBank, we’d like thisto be the most comprehensive site ofits kind on the web. At this part ofAlcor’s website, we’d weave to-gether all the non-cryonicist ideasconcerning DNA with those whichpertain to cryonics. Just as in thispaper, the two tend to converge, themore you think about them.

Summary

DNA is the master key to ourpast physical evolution and ourpresent physical selves. We

can do much to modify our-selves, without “tampering”with our DNA, but soon suchtampering will become com-monplace. Everyone will bedoing it, and in the processcloning may become a pathwaythrough which many newpeople will come into being.

This will be accompaniedby a new perception of identityin humans. Cryonicists who aresuspended in extremely dam-aged ways or who are lost ab-solutely in accidents like planecrashes may reemerge, not asthemselves, but as identicaltwins of themselves, who recalland feel strong bonds with theirpredecessors.

Alcor BioBank would be alogical extension of Alcor’spresent activities in life exten-sion. Before long, we hope wecan tell you that it is a reality.If you think this is a good idea,write and tell us. If you have asuggestion, it’s welcome. Ifyou want to know when our kitsare ready for distribution, makesure you’re on our mailing list.My email address [email protected], and I’d like tohear from you.

References:

1. “Splicing Away RegulationsDown on the Animal Pharm” by Su-san Wright - http://www.all-natural.com/genetic.html

2. “Biology” (3rd Ed.), Campbell,N. A., Benjamin/Cummings 1993.

3. Modern Biotechnology - http://weber.u.washington.edu/~radin/bio.htm

4. Genome Resource Banking Ac-tion Plan for the Tiger - http://www.5tigers.org/grb95.htm (Ge-nome Resource Banking involves theorganized collection, storage and useof biological materials (usually ga-metes [sperm, eggs], embryos, tissueand blood).... A diverse group ofpeople interested in tiger conserva-tion has been considering how ad-vances in the freezing of sperm, em-bryos, tissues and other‘biomaterials’ may be useful formanaging the world’s dwindling ti-ger populations.”)

5. Genetic Privacy And Non-dis-crimination Act (Hatfield) - http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/HUM-MOLGEN/documents/texts/0012.html (“February 18, 1996 -Abstract - A Bill to Protect GeneticPrivacy introduced (but not yet actedupon) in The US Senate...”)

6. Genetic Privacy And The Law- http://dserve.swmed.edu/V1N2/GenePriv.html (“Today there isincreased awareness and concernabout genetic discrimination andgenetic privacy as the public learnsmore about genetics...”)

7. MedWeb: Genetics and mo-lecular biology - HREF=”http://www.gen.emory.edu/medweb/medweb.gen.html (This is a *mas-sive* collection of links.)


Life Unlimited

By Charles PlattBook Excerpt

Chapter 3: Life Suspended

“The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that somefuture generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science.”

—Policy statement from the Society of Cryobiology.[6]

Ice Damage

Since cells live more slowlywhen we lower their temperatureslightly, will their processes stopcompletely if we lower their tem-perature much more? Suppose wetake some human cells, such as braincells, and make them really cold.Can we keep them for years or evendecades and then revive them bywarming them again?

Perhaps this sounds too simplis-tic, an insult to the profound mys-tery and complexity of life. Indeed,the chemical processes that seetherestlessly inside every cell are socomplex, many of them still aren’tproperly understood. Yet we don’tneed to understand them in order tocontrol them in some very basicways.

The first man who tried to dothis was a Jesuit priest named BasileLuyet. This strange, solitary mangrew up in a French valley that wasso cut off from the outside world,its people spoke a dialect that fewoutsiders could understand. Later he

learned English, studied biology,moved to the United States in the1930s, and eventually established asmall laboratory in Madison, Wis-consin. After saying mass at 6 AMeach day he would spend the rest ofhis time puzzling over the nature oflife as it was revealed to him throughhis microscope.[5]

For years Luyet experimentedfreezing and thawing plants, tissues,organs, and insects. He saw veryclearly that life processes are sloweddramatically by low temperatures—which is no surprise, since no mat-ter how complex the processes are,they all depend on chemical reac-tions, and a well-known equationtells us exactly how reactions areaffected when the temperature falls.This equation has been a standardtool of chemistry since it was origi-nally derived back in 1889 by aNobel-prize-winning Swedish scien-tist named Svante AugustArrhenius.[1]

Consider the case of just onechemical in human cells, an enzymecalled catalase. Like a party animal,

catalase is highly energetic and lovesto interact. If we cool it below nor-mal body temperature, it loses someof its zest and becomes sluggish—exactly as predicted by the Arrheniusequation. Near the freezing point ofwater, catalase is slowed to one-fifthits normal speed. If it gets reallycold, it can barely move at all; at -200 degrees Celsius a catalase reac-tion that usually takes 1 second willtake literally millions of years. Butif we warm it again, it “wakes up”and becomes just as active as be-fore.[3]

Since catalase actually happensto be the most reactive of all cellchemicals, in theory we really canpreserve cells by freezing them, andwe can revive them by rewarmingthem.

In practice, however, there’s asnag.

As the temperature falls, waterstarts seeping out of cells and formslittle particles of ice among them.Gradually the particles grow bigger,stealing more space, muscling in onthe cells, exerting relentless pres-

Charles Platt, editor of CryoCare Report, is a regular correspondent for Wired Magazine and theauthor of countless books of fiction and nonfiction alike, including The Silicon Man .


sure, eventually squeezing the cellsto a fraction of their normal size.[4]If we raise the temperature and meltthe ice, chemical reactions will re-sume—but the cells will be so badlydamaged, they may not function any-more.

Basile Luyet wrestled with thisproblem of ice damage for years, asit killed almost all the specimensthat he froze and rewarmed. Still,there were some exceptions. Whenhe tried freezing embryonic froghearts, he was astonished to see thatthey resumed beating after he thawedthem. This impressed him so much,he made a home movie of it. Healso found that if he soaked vinegareels in ethylene glycol (antifreeze)he could take them all the way downto the temperature of liquid nitro-gen, and after he warmed them, theystarted wriggling again.[5]

No one else was conducting ex-periments like these. Basile Luyetwas that rarity in science, an eccen-tric-mystic who nevertheless did rig-orous work and became a true pio-neer. The only way he could reporton his research was by starting hisown publication, which he titledBiodynamics. Single-handedly hecreated a field of science that hadnever existed before.[5]

His journal had a small circula-tion, his ideas were wrapped inphilosophical speculation, and therewas no practical use for his work—but in England, a remarkable womannamed Audrey Smith sensed somepossibilities. Women were rare inscience in those days, and they faceda quiet but pernicious wall of preju-dice. Still, Smith had a tough, asser-tive personality and some politicalconnections. Even though Britainwas virtually bankrupt after WorldWar II, she somehow managed toget funding for a research group spe-

cializing in low-temperature biology,and they set up their operation ingrim, bare rooms at the NationalInstitute for Medical Research, nearLondon.

Sir Alan Parkes, a biologist, waschosen to head the team. A youngman named Christopher Polge wasadded to it, and they started work.

In 1948 the British scientistsmade their first discovery: they couldreduce freezing damage if theysoaked cells in glycerol, a slipperycolorless liquid not so different fromthe ethylene glycol that Basile Luyethad used. In simple terms glycerolreplaces water in and among thecells, so that less ice forms, and thecells aren’t crushed into such tinyspaces.

Actually the British scientistsdidn’t discover glycerol, they redis-covered it, because a French biolo-gist named Jean Rostand hadstumbled on its protective proper-ties two years earlier at L’AcademieFrancaise.[5] Either way, glycerolwas the first known “cryoprotectant”(cryo being derived from the Greekword Kryos, meaning “cold”).

Smith and her coworkers soakedred blood cells in glycerol, frozethem, rewarmed them—and the cellsrevived. This may sound trivial, butthe life processes in blood cells arenot so different from life processesin other human cells, including braincells. In fact Sir Alan Parkes feltthat this work was so important, itwas opening up an entirely new fieldof science that should have its ownname. He called it cryobiology ,which didn’t please Audrey Smith,who disliked the idea of adding an-other piece of jargon to the Englishlanguage. Still, Parkes insisted, andthe name stuck.[5]

The British scientists decided totry something tougher for their next

effort: freezing bull semen. Theysoaked it in glycerol, froze it, thawedit, and looked at it under a micro-scope, and the thawed semenwriggled just as busily as semen thathad never been frozen.

But was it still alive in the full-est sense? The scientists used thesemen to fertilize cows by artificialinsemination. Months later, the cowsgave birth; and months after that,the calves themselves were fertile.The chain of life, linking one gen-eration with the next, had been in-terrupted—and restored.

Today, frozen bull semen isbought and sold routinely in thecattle industry. Human semen is alsofrozen on a routine basis—for ex-ample, if a man plans to have a va-sectomy but wants retain the optionof fathering children, just in case.

Even tiny human embryos, con-taining fewer than 100 cells, can befrozen, stored, rewarmed, and im-planted in a woman’s womb with a50 percent survival rate.[9] The firstchild to grow from a frozen embryowas Zoe Elizabeth Leyland, born inAustralia in March, 1984 from awoman whose blocked fallopiantubes prevented her from conceiv-ing normally. There have been thou-sands of similar births since then,and glycerol is still the cryo-protectant that makes this pos-sible.[2]

The Fascinating Question

After doing so well with bloodcells and semen, the Britishcryobiologists became more ambi-tious. As Sir Alan Parkes put it, “In-evitably, we were drawn to a stillmore fascinating question: Could awhole animal survive freezing?”

With typical British understate-ment, Parkes made the work sound


like idle speculation, pure researchwith no practical applications. In re-ality, his team was heading intohighly sensitive territory. Theyweren’t just blurring the line be-tween life and death for a matter ofa few minutes; they were seeking toswitch life off and on like a lightbulb, and if they managed to do thisusing whole animals, the procedureshould also work on people.

Parkes never said anything pub-licly about the long-term implica-tions, presumably because he wantedto avoid backlash. But in one of thepapers published by Audrey Smithand her co-workers, they suggestedways to warm an animal after it hadbeen frozen, and near the end theyspeculated about ways to scale upthe equipment—so that it could beused on a human being.

Before this could happen,though, the team faced two majorproblems. First, if you inject glyc-erol into a living animal, it inter-feres with blood chemistry, causesembolisms, and the animal dies. Sec-ond, while glycerol can protect in-dividual cells, it can’t do enough tosafeguard the structure linkingcells—such as the vast web of neu-rons in the brain. Some ice stillforms, which pushes things aroundon the microscopic level. Thisdoesn’t matter when cells are free tomove independently, as in the caseof red blood cells or even very youngfetal cells. But the links betweenneurons are incredibly delicate andeasily broken. Also, tiny capillariescan be punctured or torn, so that ifblood resumes flowing, it will leakfrom millions of minuscule wounds.

Could a different chemical beused as a cryoprotectant? AudreySmith couldn’t find one that a livinganimal would tolerate, so she de-cided finally to tackle the challenge

without using any cryoprotectant atall. This wasn’t quite as primitive asit sounds, because she could controlice formation to some extent by ad-justing the rates of cooling and re-warming. If all the factors were op-timized, conceivably the animalswould survive.

She picked golden hamsters asher test subjects, because they hi-bernate naturally and are wellequipped to withstand the cold. Bymonitoring the heat flow, Smith wasable to prove that the animals’ brainscontained sixty percent ice. And yet,when she warmed them, many ofthe hamsters did survive. Once again,the general principle was affirmed:the symphony of life can resumeafter cell processes have been slowedby low temperature, even if the tem-perature is below freezing.

That was the good news. In fact,it was better than anyone had ex-pected. But there was bad news aswell: The survivors didn’t live verylong. Their capillaries were dam-aged, probably their brains weredamaged too, and their gastric sys-tems were eroded by stomach acid.One by one, they died.

Paradoxically, Audrey Smithwas a classic British animal lover.She owned a dog named Katie,which she took with her every-where—even to scientific confer-ences. She wrote a book which shededicated to Katie, and when Katiedied, Audrey managed to find an-other dog that looked exactly likeher.

How could an animal lover sub-ject so many small, helpless crea-tures to such an unpleasant death?Perhaps she felt it was justified be-cause her goal was to banish deathcompletely—not just for animals,but for people. Animal rights activ-ists may still feel that Audrey Smith

had no business sacrificing scoresof hamsters in pursuit of a grandi-ose, impossible dream. On the otherhand, what she really wanted wasfor the hamsters to live.

She worked for several years,with relentless determination. In theend, though, she had to admit de-feat. She gave a final report withher co-workers in the Proceedingsof the Royal Society in July, 1956.Summing up, she said that in orderto freeze an animal successfully, sheneeded to replace at least ten per-cent of its water with some kind ofantifreeze. But that was impossible,using any cryoprotectant she couldthink of.

In Scientific American, Sir AlanParkes echoed this pessimistic mes-sage. He wrote, “The biologist isnot yet in sight of achieving sus-pended animation of a warm-blooded animal at a temperaturelikely to result in a stable state.”

Was this the end of the road? Itsounded like it. And yet, Parkeswasn’t saying, “It can’t be done.” Inhis cautious British style he was say-ing something rather different: “Itcan’t be done yet.”

Brain Waves

At Kobe University School ofMedicine in Japan, a scientist namedIsamu Suda extended the British re-search in a direction that was radi-cal, unexpected, and bizarre. His rea-soning seemed to go like this: It’sextremely difficult to cryoprotect,freeze, and revive a whole animal.Therefore, why not work on just oneorgan—such as the brain, which canbe kept alive by nourishing its cellswith an external supply ofblood?[10][7]

Suda gave a cat a general anes-thetic, slowly reduced the tempera-


ture, and circulated a blood substi-tute to protect the cells from dam-age. Then he removed the cat’s brainand perfused it with a solution of 15percent glycerol, so that thecryoprotectant reached every cell.Finally he froze the brain at a tem-perature slightly below zero degreesFahrenheit.[7]

Forty days later, he warmed thebrain and flowed diluted bloodthrough it. Here was an isolated brainamid a tangle of lab equipment; abrain that had been in a freezer formore than a month. By anyone’sstandards, this brain seemed incon-trovertibly dead . Yet when Sudatook a standard electroen-cephalogram (EEG), he picked up asignal—and the trace looked verylike a reference signal that he hadrecorded while the whole animal wasstill alive.[7]

True, the brain had been dam-aged by freezing, and the signaldidn’t last long. But still thecryoprotectant had preserved thecells well enough that they still func-tioned when they were warmed andresupplied with fuel.

Suda repeated his gruesome ex-periment many times. He storedsome cat brains for seven months,and they still produced brainwaveswhen they were revived, though thetraces weren’t so clearly defined. In 1966, Suda’s results were pub-lished in Nature, one of the mostprestigious scientific journals in theworld. But he didn’t stop there. Hekept some brains frozen for sevenyears. When he finally thawed them,even they still showed some activ-ity. He wrote another paper and re-ported “well synchronized dis-charges” of cells in the cerebellarculmen, and “rhythmic but continu-ing uniform wavelets.”[8]

Suda’s work was a true break-

through, yet it received very littlepublicity. No one repeated his ex-periment to verify it, no one triedadjusting the variables to get betterresults, and today, few people evenremember that it took place. In fact,if you describe it to scientists out-side of cryobiology, you may havea hard time convincing them that itever happened.

There are good reasons for this.Suda’s work was unconventional, tosay the least. Pumping blood throughdefrosted cat brains and stickingelectrodes into them to search forsigns of life—it was like somethingout of a freak show. You could getinto trouble if a stunt like that waspicked up by tabloid journalists oranimal-rights activists. It could dam-age your reputation. You might evenlose your funding. Cryobiology hadstarted as a wide-open frontier, fullof opportunities for risk-takers whowanted to touch and control the ba-sic processes of life; but by the mid-1960s this radical spirit had beenswept away by a tide of caution.Cryobiologists didn’t just abandonthe path that Suda opened up, theystopped freezing mammals underany circumstances. In fact, virtuallyno work of this kind has been donesince the 1960s.

Several factors caused this re-treat, but one eclipsed all the others.In the words of Robert W. Prehoda,an expert in trend analysis and fore-casting who published a book titledSuspended Animation in 1969: “Se-rious scientists engaged in reducedmetabolism research have been con-fronted by the unexpected emer-gence of a pseudo-scientific cultwhich is presenting a completely dis-torted picture of the prospects forsuspended animation to the generalpublic.”[5]

“Cult” was a loaded word;

“movement” would have been fairer.Either way, there was no doubtwhere it originated. In 1964 a phys-ics teacher named Robert Ettingerpublished a book titled The Pros-pect of Immortality, which changedeverything.

References:[1] Asimov, Isaac: Asimov’s BiographicalEncyclopedia of Science and Technology.Garden City, New York, Doubleday &Company, Inc., 1982.

[2] Genetics and In-Vitro Fertilization In-stitute: Public relations brochure, Fairfax,Alaska, 1997.

[3] Hixon, Hugh: How Cold is ColdEnough? Cryonics, January 1985.

[4] Mazur, Peter: Freezing of living cells:mechanisms and implications, Am. J.Physiol. 247, C125-C142, 1984.

[5] Prehoda, Robert W.: Suspended Ani-mation. Philadelphia, Chilton Book Com-pany, 1969.

[6] Society for Cryobiology Policy State-ment, quoted in Cryonics April 1983.

[7] Suda, Kito, and Adachi: Viability ofLong Term Frozen Cat Brain in Vitro,Nature, October 15 1966, vol 212 pages268-271.

[8] Suda, Kito, and Adachi: Bioelectricdischarges of isolated cat brain after re-vivalfrom years of frozen storage, Brain Re-search 70 (1974) 527-531.

[9] Toronto Centre for Advanced Repro-ductive Technology: Public relations bro-chure.

[10] Wowk, Brian, Darwin, Michael, andothers: Cryonics Reaching for Tomorrow(fourth edition). Scottsdale, Arizona, AlcorFoundation, 1993.

1 1 4th Qtr, 1997 • Cryonics

For years Alcor has made repeatedattempts to inform members that

Standby services and their costs can-not be included in CryoTransport(cryonic suspension) insurance fund-ing. There are two primary reasons:(1) a Standby is an open-ended pro-cess that could go on for many dayswithout any way to know the dura-tion in advance, and (2) if the mem-ber survives a Standby (such as dur-ing surgery), the member’s insur-ance will not cover it.

The purpose of this article is todiscuss what a Standby is, why ev-ery member should consider havingStandby services, what a typicalStandby (if there is one) might cost,and how to provide Standby fund-ing easily and conveniently withoutfinancial sacrifice.

What Is Standbyand Why Is It Advantageous?

To understand the many phasesand complications of a Standby, onemust understand what a Cryo-Transport Team is trying to accom-plish. CryoTransport describes theentire process of attempting to trans-port our members to a future timeand place where medical science canheal and recover them, returningthem to a state where they can con-tinue with their lives. CryoTransport

can be broken down into three ma-jor areas: (1) Standby and RemoteTransport to Alcor, (2) Cryopro-tective Perfusion, and (3) Cooldownand Long Term Care.

Standby and Remote Transport,which include patient acquisition andstabilization, are time-critical. Thegreater the delay, the greater thephysiological damage caused by di-minished or halted blood flow to thetissues (ischemia). The eventualamount of freezing damage is alsoaffected by the duration of ischemia.For example, if ischemic damageresults in a leaky capillary bed, theperfusion of cryoprotective chemi-cals into the tissues will be compro-mised.

Every minute counts. As a re-sult, if Alcor is not notified of amember’s need for assistance untilafter the pronouncement of legaldeath, a devastating delay could re-sult (especially if the member doesnot live in Arizona , which includesthe majority of Alcor members).Even if the next available flight isnot many hours away — as will of-ten be the case when a member goesinto cardio-pulmonary arrest in thewee hours of the morning — justcalling to find out airline schedulestakes time.

There are two major instances

in which Alcor would provide aStandby. The first is when a mem-ber has scheduled surgery or someother risky medical procedure. Theother most likely scenario is when amember nears death as the conse-quence of a terminal illness. Sincelogistics and duration (and therefore,cost) of Standby are very clear cutin the first instance, preparations forit are also much easier. However,while terminal illness may be moredifficult in terms of planning, someform of Standby is vitally importantin such situations.

The Logistics Tripand Advance Preparation

The coordination of a Standbyand Transport requires an intensiveeffort to anticipate potential prob-lems and try to eliminate them. If atall possible, Alcor personnel (usu-ally Alcor’s CryoTransport Man-ager) should make a “logistics trip”to the Standby area to accomplishthis goal and contact key people inadvance. Preparation of these influ-ential players greatly helps to lessentheir possible distrust of the indi-viduals and situations involved, aswell as improving the likelihood thatthey will cooperate in a timely, wellcoordinated manner.

In this article I am assuming that

By Linda ChamberlainCryoTransport Manager

Alcor Life Extension Foundation

Report

Alcor CryoTransport Standby Services


the member’s family already sup-ports his or her desire to be frozen.Without that cooperation, a Standbyor transport may not even be at-tempted. Assuming cooperation withfamily members, the next three mostimportant people (or organizations)that Alcor must coordinate with are(1) the coroner, (2) the patient’s phy-sician and hospital, and (3) the con-tract mortician. (See opposite pagefor major contact points with each.)

Contact with the coroner mustcome first. If the coroner is hostileand will not cooperate, other plans

must be made (for example, findinga way to move the member/patientto another county or state). If thecoroner is cooperative, the next con-tact is the personal physician (whocan bring hospital cooperation alongwith him). The third step is then tocontact a local mortician for assis-tance with transfer paperwork, ar-rangement of transport from the hos-pital, and an appropriate facility forthe surgery and wash-out proce-dures.

Whenever possible, Alcor’sCryoTransport Manager or an on-

site CryoTransport Technicianshould meet with these individualsin the presence of the member (orthe member’s family, if themember’s health dictates) for whomthe Standby is being arranged. Ex-perience has shown that the coro-ner, physician, and mortician are allusually at greater ease in these coor-dination meetings if they know thatthe member/patient and the familyagree with the proposed plans. Suchmeetings can be handled by tele-conference, but are usually more suc-cessful if done in person.

Typical Standby Costs

Even if the logistics trip was suc-cessful and all apparent obstacleshave been eliminated, unexpectedproblems lurk in the shadows of ev-ery Standby. For example, althoughStandbys necessitated by surgeryhave a fairly well defined length andcost, medical complications couldarise when least suspected. Ifthe member does not recoverwell, the Standby could lastsignificantly beyond originalprojections.

When Standby is per-formed for a terminal mem-ber, determining Standbylength is even more difficult.The CryoTransport Managerand member must carefullybalance expense versus need.If the CryoTransport Teamenters the field too early, thecosts of Standby may becomeunnecessarily high. If theTeam is not deployed soonenough, the member could gointo cardio-pulmonary arrestbefore the Team arrives.

Both financial and medi-cal considerations need to be

considered. Each case is different,and so expenses cannot be com-pletely determined in advance. Forthis reason, the member for whom aStandby is being performed mustplace a deposit with Alcor ahead oftime. After the Standby is performed,Alcor will provide an accounting,and refund unused funding per the

member’s wishes (cash refund, or,in the event the member is sus-pended, donation of excess fundsfor research, etc.).

Although setting a single, pre-arranged fee would be impractical,it is possible to give a typicalStandby cost-range based on a break-down of various elements.

Standby Cost Breakdown

Logistics Trip (1 person, 2 day minimum):Travel and Lodging expenses varies (Estimate $500)Alcor staff member (1) $400/dayLocal Alcor trained assistant $100/day

Total 2-day logistics trip estimate: $1000

Standby Trip (2 persons, 2 day minimum):Travel and Lodging expenses varies (Estimate $1000)Cargo (medical equip & supplies) varies (Estimate $300)Two Alcor staff members ($400/day ea) varies (Estimate $800)2 Local trained assistants ($100/day ea) varies (Estimate $200)

Total 2-day Standby estimate: $2300

Total Minimum Logistics (2 days)and Minimum Standby Logistics (2 days) estimate: $3300


For Physicians/Hospitals:

1. As with the coroner, does the physician understand our goals?

2. Will she or he cooperate with us and assist in gaining hospital cooperation?

3. Can the patient be pronounced promptly? What arrangements are necessary to make this happen?

4. Do the physician and hospital recognize Alcor’s authority to accept the patient as an anatomical donation?

5. What is his/her fax number so we can fax the “General Information for Hospital Personnel”?

6. How far are the physican and hospital willing to go in cooperating with us? Non-interferrence only? Medications and IV lineonly? CPR?

7. Are large quantities of ice available at the hospital and mortuary?

8. Can Alcor personnel wait nearby (eg. in the floor lounge)?

9. Can Alcor equipment be stored nearby (eg. in an empty room)?

For Coroners:

1. Communication of our goal: we are attempting to minimize the biological deterioration associated with the dying process.This requires quick action because cellular damage begins at (or, in some cases, even before) cardiopulmonary arrest. Tominimize biological deterioration we need to start our procedures with absolute minimum delay. This means that we need tohave our patient pronounced and then released from the hospital as quickly as possible after cardiopulmonary arrest.

2. Will she or he cooperate with that?

3. What circumstances would require autopsy? In those cases, can the autopsy be limited to the trunk (i.e. can the brain bespared)?

4. What does the coroner need to effect an immediate release of our patient from the hospital?

4-a. Does the coroner need a phone conference with the physician? If so, make sure that the physician and the coroner speakto each other in advance. Both of them should understand exactly what each other needs, and should know how to contacteach other immediately (phone numbers, pagers, etc.). By arranging communication between the coroner and physician inadvance, less confusion and fewer obstacles are likely to appear at the last moment.

4-b. Does the coroner need any paperwork completed? Can we get a blank form and fill it out in advance? How can we getthis paperwork signed by the physician or hospital and delivered to the coroner in the most efficient way (fax, courier, etc.)?

For Morticians:

1. Does the mortician understand Alcor’s goals?

2. What is his or her response time in an emergency? To determine this, add the paging and response time to the round tripdriving time. If this is greater than 10 minutes, is the mortician willing to stand by at the hospital? How much will that cost?Does the member/patient understand the importance of cutting this time? Does the member authorize the added expense?

3. Is the mortuary Transport vehicle a van or a stationwagon? Will the portable ice bath and heart-lung resuscitationequipment fit into the mortician’s pick-up vehicle? Is there room to perform cardiopulmonary support in it? If not,arrangements need to made to rent or borrow a vehicle that will accommodate this need.

4. Will Alcor receive priority over the mortician’s other customers?

5. Will an embalmer assist with the surgery prior to a blood wash-out? Additional charges?

6. Can the equipment be set up in advance? Additional charges?

7. Can additional equipment be stored at the mortuary? Additional charges?

8. What does the mortician need to interface with the coroner and hospital?

9. How quickly can the death certificate, transfer permits, cremation authorization, etc. be obtained?

10. What else will be required for him or her to get our patient shipped promptly? How much can be done in advance?

Standby Contact Questions


Before Alcor personnel can planfor the logistics trip, we must have adeposit of $5000. After Standby isterminated, the member or themember’s next of kin will receivean accounting. In case of overages,the member can choose from sev-eral options as to how Alcor mightdisburse this money (cash refund,donation to research, etc.). If theStandby becomes lengthy, the mem-ber must make arrangements tocover this as well.

Covering the Unexpected

An unexpected need for Standbyusually poses the greatest problems.What if you suddenly fall ill withappendicitis, are rushed to the emer-gency room, and have no way tomake Standby pre-arrangements?Even though Alcor could not carryout a logistics trip in advance (pos-sibly compromising any Standby),some members would still prefer tocall us and ask for the deploymentof a CryoTransport Team.

This last-minute scenario wouldrequire a slightly different type of

accounting. Without the advance lo-gistics portion, actual Standby wouldbecome far more difficult, forcingthe CryoTransport Team to accountfor every possible complication.Such a Standby would probably re-quire the participation of more Alcorstaff members, and possibly localassistants as well (if available). Ev-ery situational difference will changethe billing to one degree or another.

A Simple WayTo Provide Standby Funding

Some Alcor members have cho-sen a very simple and inexpensiveway to provide funding for unex-pected situations. A member needonly provide a credit card that Alcoris authorized to draw against in suchan emergency. Since you want tohave your full credit limit availableat all times, this credit card shouldhave no other purpose but Standbyfunding.

As you can see, Standby provi-sions handled in this fashion do notneed to represent a cost unless youactually use the service. Further, be-

cause Alcor can confirm that suffi-cient funds are available on ex-tremely short notice, the dedicatedcredit card account allows us to ac-commodate emergency requests forStandby services without being ham-pered by funding questions. And,unlike setting aside specific fundsthat you might prefer to invest else-where, you will not lose any interestor potential appreciation of assets.

Conclusion

Arranging for your Standby isthe single most important thing youcan do to improve your chances of agood CryoTransport, but you mustmake these arrangements well in ad-vance. Don’t be caught by an unex-pected emergency — provide foryour Standby now, so that Alcor’sCryoTransport Team can be therewhen you need us.

If you have any questions onthis subject, please give me a call oremail me at [email protected].

Show Your Support -- Wear Our Symbol!The Official Alcor Patch!

This embroidered patch (left) is 3” indiameter, with a white background, darkblue phoenix symbol, black lettering, and adark blue border. Price: $4.00

The Official Alcor Pin!This cloisonné pin (right) is 1.25” x 1”,

with a white background, dark blue phoe-nix symbol, black lettering, and a gold bor-der. Price $7.00

To order, call 1-800-367-2228 and give us your Visa/MC number, or send check or MO to Alcor Foundation, 7895 E. Acoma Dr., Ste. 110, Scottsdale, AZ 85260


By Russell CheneyInterview

Editor’s Note:The following is an exclusive interview with the scientist who is widely regarded as first

choice to head the Prometheus Project’s research team [26]. Anonymity is maintained out ofrespect for this scientist’s current position. While the editorial policy of Cryonics usuallyprecludes the publication of anonymous interviews, in this particular case we believe that thestrength of the subject matter outweighs this consideration.

Cryonics presents this article solely as a point of information. Cryonics Magazine and theAlcor Life Extension Foundation neither endorse nor criticize the Prometheus Project.

Unbinding PrometheusA Conversation with the Most Likely Candidate for

Scientific Leader of the Prometheus Project

Russell Cheney (RC): Why is thePrometheus Project exciting to you?

Answer (A): Well, the answer tothat is clear. The Prometheus Projectoffers the prospect of very radicalchanges in the way we regard medi-cine and the way medical care iscarried out. The Prometheus Projectessentially offers the possibility, ef-fectively, of curing any disease thatdoes not involve direct damage tothe brain, in the sense that if thebrain could be cryopreserved forlong periods of time, sooner or laterall diseases will be curable, and pa-tients would then be allowed to reachthe cures that will be developed inthe future.

The Prometheus Project is a two-step project. The first step is a proofof principle involving cryo-

preservation of the brain. The sec-ond step is the perfected cryopre-servation of the whole body. Inother words, the attainment of truesuspended animation.

And certainly it’s not very con-troversial to think that if suspendedanimation can truly be achieved, thenof course, all medical advances thatwill be developed in the future wouldbe available to anyone that needsthem today.

And I think that is such a sweep-ing shift in our concept of what ispossible that, of course, it would bevery attractive to make that becomea reality. It would certainly be arevolutionary departure in humanhistory, if we could achieve that goal.

RC: Before we ask you about spe-cific research plans, is there any

background information that wouldbe helpful for our understanding ofthe future potential of thePrometheus Project?

A: Sure. Let’s consider several as-pects of background behind thePrometheus Project. One of thebackdrops to this whole Project isprior research achievements in thearea of organ cryopreservation. Ofcourse, if we’re going to be induc-ing suspended animation in the hu-man, we need to be able to preservethe individual organs that comprisethe human. And although there hasbeen interesting work done in thearea of whole-body freezing byAudrey Smith [20], and by peoplelike Ken Storey, who studies frozenfrogs [21, 13], those experiments ina way fall short of strong proof that

Russell Cheney (pictured above; no, that’s not the interviewee) is an Alcor suspension member, acertified Alcor CryoTransport Technician and regular correspondent for Cryonics .


we can attain suspended animationbecause the storage temperatures forboth of those whole-body experi-ments were much too high for long-term storage.

In the field of organ cryopre-servation, though, there have beensome whole organs that have beensuccessfully cryopreserved at tem-peratures that would allow long-termpreservation. One of them is thecanine intestine which has beenshown by a number of groups tosurvive freezing in liquid nitrogen,and to support normal function aftertransplantation [11]. The caninespleen has also been frozen to fairlylow temperatures, thawed, and atleast in one case seemed to escapesome of the long-term degenerativediseases that tended to plague thatmodel [1]. But the bottom line isthat, in at least one case, it’s beenshown that the canine spleen cansurvive deep freezing and thawingand still function after transplanta-tion.

RC: Any successes in organ sys-tems in addition to the intestine andspleen?

A: John Farrant’s cryopreservationof guinea pig uteri back in 1965 isworth mentioning [9]. He used avery innovative ap-proach which avoidedfreezing entirely. Andthis is one of the pre-cursor approaches thatled to the current ef-forts to cryopreserveorgans by vitrification.He could have actu-ally vitrified the uteri at the time,but he did not understand that. Hedidn’t understand the physics wellenough to realize that if he’d onlycooled the uteri another 50 degrees

or so he would have converted theminto a glassy state and probably couldhave preserved them for years.

That just was not known at thetime. But he did the hard part: hewas able to introduce about 55%dimethyl sulfoxide into the uteri andwash out the DMSO after warmingthem back from about dry-ice tem-perature, and have the uteri contractnormally in response to histaminestimulation.

That’s a substantial achievementin cryobiology.

I might also mention that, usingan extension of that technique,Gabriel Rapatz, a few years laterwas able to cool adult frog heartsdown to dry ice temperature, warmthem up, and get good, vigorousbeating of the frog hearts after warm-ing [17].

There have also been a numberof sporadic reports of partial or com-plete successes in the area of kidneyfreezing [10]. The problem withthese experiments is that they seemto fly in the face of what we nowknow mechanically to be going onin the case of kidney freezing.

And, unfortunately, as youknow, recent claims for successfulrat heart cryopreservation have notbeen substantiated to date [2].

At the same time, using com-

pletely different methods, Fahy hasbeen working on organ vitrificationfor several years, and that seems tobe nearing a critical point [7].

So you could say that part of the

background for considering thePrometheus Project is that there hasbeen a lot of success, or results thatare pointing directly toward the pos-sibility of success, in other organsystems [16, 25].

RC: But as to the brain itself . . .?

A: One of the things to keep in mindis that the brain is an organ like anyother organ, and if it’s possible forcertain organs to be cryopreserved,then it may well be possible for thebrain as an organ to be cryopreservedtoo, which is the first step of thePrometheus Project.

With respect to the brain per se,there’s been a tremendous amountof prior work done on cryopre-serving brain tissue. And generallyspeaking, what has been observed isthat brain tissue survives biochemi-cally in spite of very severe freez-ing. And despite freezing being donein ways which are not exactly asprotective as they could have been.

So we think that biochemicallythe brain is fairly hardy, but forwhole brains, very limited work hasbeen done. It’s known that you canperfuse rabbit brains with glycerolwith good permeation of the glyc-erol. It’s also known that rat brainsresist permeation with most

cryoprotective agents.So one issue is whetherwe’ll be able to getcryoprotectants to pen-etrate the brain ad-equately.

There’s alsobeen work, of course, onthe cat brain by Isamu

Suda and his colleagues at KobeUniversity in Japan [22]. Theyshowed that it was possible to ob-tain a normal electroencephalogramafter freezing the isolated cat brain

“The brain is an organ like any other organ, and ifit’s possible for certain organs to be

cryopreserved, then it may well be possible for thebrain as an organ to be cryopreserved too.”


to minus 20 degrees Celsius andholding it there for five days, andthen thawing it and reperfusing itwith warm cat blood. What theydid was actually to electrically com-pare the same brain before and afterfreezing to see if the wave patternwas similar. And what they foundwas a very good degree ofcomplementarity between the pre-frozen and the post-thawed brain.Which is quite a stunning accom-plishment.

They did not use enough glyc-erol to protect at very low tempera-tures, however, and what they foundwas, if they froze to minus 60, theycould get some recovery of theelectroencephalogram, but it wasmuch diminished. If they froze tominus 90 they got no EEG, suggest-ing that long-range neural connec-tions were broken. But they did getnice recovery of individual braincells, as demonstrated by applyingmicroelectrodes to cells within thebrain and recording the electricaldischarges.

RC: Does other significant researchbackground in this field exist?

A: It’s known that living tissues cansurvive an incredible amount of dis-tortion by ice. This has been one ofthe paradoxes in the field and oneof the reasons it’s taken so long forpeople to decide that we have to goto such extents as vitrification inorder to cryopreserve organs. Hu-man limbs severely frozen by acci-dent in the winter in Alaska cansometimes be largely saved by slit-ting them open to allow edema fluidto escape and pressure to be relievedfrom the tissues so the blood canreflow back to the blood vessels.

Prior to those observations, itwas thought that the limbs were just

irreversibly damaged; when youthawed them out, blood went intothem for a little while, but then thelimbs turned blue and that was theend of it. But the problem is thatthe blood vessels are leaky. If youallow the leaked fluid to weep outof the limb so you don’t build uptissue pressure, you can actually pre-serve the limb.

And there are similar experi-ments on frostbite where peoplehave taken animal limbs and im-mersed them in very low tempera-ture baths and frozen them to unrea-sonably low temperatures, such asminus 20 degrees or below, andthawed them out and retained mostof the structure of the limb.

And this is without anycryoprotective agents being present.And yet what we find when it comesto the three most popular organs -the heart, liver and kidney - is thatthey tend to have very sensitive vas-cular beds. Presumably the samewould be true of the brain. If youfreeze out too much ice in thosesystems, you can’t recover the wholeorgan because of the blood vesseldamage.

Nevertheless, some of these ex-periments allow us to devise goalsthat we can pursue. In other words,it’s known in certain cases howmuch ice can form without destroy-ing the capillary bed, and from phasediagram information it’s possible tocalculate how much cryoprotectantyou would need to prevent forma-tion of that amount of ice. Thenyou can design experiments thatwould allow you to introduce at leastthat amount of cryoprotectant to pro-tect the vascular bed.

For example, in the case of thebrain, the golden hamster has beenfrozen to the extent of about 63% ofits brain water being converted into

ice. And yet when you thaw thehamster out, the hamster seems tobehave normally afterwards [20].You can actually freeze out evenmore ice than this in the brain, andhave the hamsters breathe afterwards,which is still impressive, even thoughthey don’t recover. And it seemsthat the damage to the brain wasprobably not the limiting factor inthose experiments.

So arguing on that basis, it wouldseem that you don’t need to preventtoo much ice from forming in thebrain in order to protect it. On theother hand, there were a lot of ex-periments done back in the ’80s in-dicating that in fact the brain is me-chanically damaged by ice, and wereally do have to contain the amountof ice and reduce it to a minimallevel if we’re going to get long rangestructure preserved in the brain.

RC: Based on what you’re sayingI’m envisioning a cryonic suspen-sion protocol here which might in-volve addressing different organsseparately. Is that conceivable?

A: Sure, that’s a real possibility. Un-fortunately, cryobiology, particularlyorgan cryobiology, is a shoestringoperation, and always has been, andso we don’t have a great deal ofinformation about the differing re-quirements of different organs forcryoprotectants. But it’s been longapparent that one potential approachwould be to have several differentcannulas going to several differentorgan systems within a given bodyso as to optimally protect each indi-vidual system.

That’s entirely feasible. It wouldbe awkward. It would be a lot moreconvenient if one agent, or one mix-ture of agents, could be found thatwould protect everything. But if


that cannot be done, then there’scertainly the prospect that you raisedof individually protecting the indi-vidual organs all within the body.It’s not unreasonable at all.

RC: In terms of what you thinkmight be appropriate background forus, the reader of this interview, werethere any other items that you feltcould be mentioned at this point?

A: I suppose I could amplify a biton some unpublished findings thatcryonicists came up with in the1980s and early 1990s [3]. One ofthe findings was that if you actuallylook at brains in the frozen state tosee what the ice patterns look likewith ordinary freezing techniques,looking at things at the light level,the damage looks quite severe andquite fearsome.

If you re-examine the samebrains using the electron microscope,there is still some damage that isobserved in the frozen state, but farless than you would assume just bylooking at the picture on the lightmicroscope level. So it’s a little bitof a paradox that there does seem tobe injury, and you can see the injuryin fact when you thaw the brain out.You see rips and tears in the tissuethat correspond to the large ice cavi-ties that are formed and are visiblein the light microscope.

If we’re shooting for a perfectedmethod, we have to preserve thestructure.

So I’d say that one of the pri-mary findings that came out of thework that was done in the ’80s andearly ’90s is that currentcryopreservation methods for braincause a tremendous amount of struc-tural damage to the brain. They dopermit some structural preservation,of course, but the level of injury

that we see is sufficiently severe thatI don’t think we can really be con-tent with the status quo. We have todo better than what we’ve seen sofar.

RC: Have there been additional sig-nificant findings more recently?

A: There has been some very recentwork that Mike Darwin did, on ca-nine brains, in which he loaded thebrain with about 7-molar glycerol,froze to minus 90 for a couple ofyears, thawed out the animal,reperfused the brain with fixative,and processed the brain in a numberof different electron microscope fa-cilities [4]. In at least one of thosefacilities, the structure that cameback was quite breathtaking in many

areas. The synaptic structure wasnormal, the synaptic vesicles bothpre- and post-synaptically were nor-mal. You could see the normalpostsynaptic densities. You couldsee clean interstitial space in thebrain. And you could see this sortof structure over large areas of thebrain.

Unfortunately you also saw,within the same brain, sizable areasthat seemed to be ripped or macer-ated, perhaps by ice. And you alsosaw partial dissolution of whatseemed to be small populations ofglial cells. In other words, youwould see cell nuclei with no cellbodies surrounding them.

RC: For cryonics, how critical isthat finding?

A: Fortunately those are probablynot neurons and are probably notcritical; they’re probably not infor-mational in nature. The informa-tional structures seemed to bepresent. But, nevertheless, this is adefect in the results. I think thepositive outcome is that at least muchof the neuropil, which is the fineweave of the brain, or what youmight say is the “cross-talk area”between brain cells, seemed to re-main intact. And that’s probablywhere we live, as individuals, in allthose electrical connections, whereall the traffic takes place.

On the other hand, there werethose seemingly macerated areas ofneuropil. Furthermore, samples fromthe same or similar dog brains sentto most other electron microscopefacilities have shown terrible results.I mean unbelievably bad results. Sowe have a problem of reproducibiltyhere. But even under the best con-ditions there’s still sufficient dam-age that although we can hope thatsome of the synapses have survived,we also have to be very concernedthat some of them may have beendestroyed.

So there’s substantial evidencethat gives you pause, to put it mildly.And I think that as long as the presentsituation continues to exist, nobodycan be very thrilled about being fro-zen today. So we must have a morereliable and more complete preser-vation technology at our disposal.

RC: Could you share with us yourthoughts on what approach mightmost effectively be taken in a seri-ous, well-funded research programleading to effective brain

“We must have a morereliable and more completepreservation technology at

our disposal.”


cryopreservation?

A: I would envision a two-prongedapproach being initiated early on, inany kind of serious research pro-gram in this area. There are really acouple of issues that need to be ad-dressed, and should be faced up-front.One of the issues is whether you canget cryoprotective agents into thebrain or not, without causing mas-sive damage from dehydration. Inother words, the brain has all theusual permeability problems of otherorgans, but in addition to that, it hasa permeability barrier known as the“blood-brain barrier”. And thesebarriers make it difficult for mol-ecules to pass from the blood ves-sels into the brain tissue.

This blood-brain barrier has beendeveloped by evolution to protectthe environment of the brain cells,because you have a very sensitivesystem which can’t be allowed to bedisturbed. Unfortunately, what thismeans for the cryobiology of thebrain is that we have to be verylucky and find agents that can pen-etrate through this blood-brain bar-rier without causing damage. Or wehave to be able to open the blood-brain barrier, at least temporarily, toallow these agents to get through.

RC: You mentioned a second issue?

A: At the same time that we concernourselves with structural preserva-tion and penetration, we have to beconcerned about the second issue:the cellular toxicity of any agent thatmight be used. Classically, cryonicshasn’t had to worry too much aboutcellular viability, and ultrastructuralpreservation was the goal. And Ithink ultrastructure still has to bepreserved if you want to perfect the

process, but you must do more thanthat. You must also preserve thebiochemistry of the brain.

I told you that the biochemistrycan survive severe freezing andthawing. Unfortunately, the struc-ture of the brain can not. And asyou add cryoprotective agents to pro-tect the structure, then you can onlyincrease the threat of damage to thebiochemical aspects of the brain. Sothat balance has got to be met, andin order to do that you need feed-back on cellular viability, as you gothrough the initial series of experi-ments.

I think one excellent model thatcould be exploited, in this regard, isthe hippocampal brain-slice model.The hippocampus is the part of thebrain that reads in and reads outmemories, and a tremendous amountis known about the neurophysiol-ogy of the hippocampus. And it’spossible that if agents are found thatpenetrate the brain adequately, theyought to be screened against the hip-pocampus for the ability of the hip-pocampus to recover normal func-tions after exposure to thecryoprotectants.

In addition, if agents are foundto be particularly attractive, basedon cellular viability with the hip-pocampal brain-slice model, then itmay also justify extraordinary tech-niques to make sure that those agentscan be delivered into the brain, in-cluding opening up the blood-brainbarrier, or lavaging the brain throughthe ventricular system, or whateverother techniques people can comeup with.

RC: Opening up the blood-brain bar-rier?

A: There has been work, byRapoport many years ago, indicat-

ing that it is possible to open up theblood-brain barrier in the monkey,temporarily, to allow drug moleculesto enter the brain [18]. And mon-keys subjected to this procedure re-covered with no neurological defi-cit. The barrier opening just in-volved an osmotic pulse of about1500 milliosmolal or so, flushedthrough the cerebral vascular bed.And apparently that osmoticallyopened up temporary gaps in thecapillary wall which allowed smallmolecules to cross the barrier andget into the brain.

This technique has not reallybeen explored in brain cryopre-servation research to date. It’s re-mained a possibility for many years,and it can still be exploited.

So to summarize the answer toyour question, I think the initial ap-proach ought to be a two-prongedapproach in which cryoprotectiveagents are screened for their abilityto get into the brain and to do sowithout causing damage to cellularviability. And that process can beoptimized and improved upon inmany ways until satisfactory resultsare obtained.

Presumably one wants to get inas much cryoprotectant as one pos-sibly can, and possibly even at theexpense of a certain amount of bio-chemical injury, provided it’s likelythat injury can be reversed givenseveral days of healing after rewarm-ing.

RC: From a research perspective,how would the two-pronged ap-proach be viewed?

A: You could say the first prong isthe whole brain, and the secondprong is brain slices. Because thewhole brain has to be perfused. Thebrain slice does not have to be per-


GLOSSARY

Anastomoses: Connections between blood vessels.

Freeze Substitution: A method for preserving the structure of a frozen system in which the system is fixed whilefrozen and ice is then dissolved prior to warming the system.

Cryoprotective Agent: A chemical compound or a mixture of such compounds designed to both minimizefreezing damage and have minimal side effects on the tissues to be preserved; a cryoprotectant.

Dimethyl sulfoxide : DMSO; A traditional cryoprotectant that permeates well through cell membranes.

Glial Cells: Nonexcitable cells of neural tissue that support, protect and insulate the neurons.

Glycerol: Currently the most widely-used cryoprotectant for cryonics, C3H8O3.

In situ: In its usual place, usually within the living organism.

In vitro: Literally “in glass,” meaning in laboratory apparatus, as opposed to within a living organism.

Model: An experimental system that has features resembling those of ultimate interest to the investigator, but thatis simple enough to be amenable to study.

Morphology: Biological structure.

Perfusate: A liquid (or gas) that is perfused.

Perfuse: To pass liquid (or gas) through blood vessels.

Prometheus Project:First ten years:

1) Discover how to fully recover both brain and mind from a state in which it could remain for decadeswithout deterioration.2) Demonstrate that mental facilities have been fully recovered in a manner that will convince scientists,the media and the public.

Subsequent years:1) Attend to imperfections.2) Extend the research to the remainder of the body to permit the achievement of reversible whole-bodysuspended animation. (This accomplishment would replace cryonics with a perfected method properlytermed suspended animation.)

Preparation: A specific type of model system.

Thermal Treatment: The time - temperature process used on an object.

Vitrification: A process wherein a solution, at sufficiently low temperature, becomes so viscous that it solidifieswithout the formation of ice. A vitrification solution is an aqueous cryoprotectant solution that does not freezewhen cooled at moderate rates to very low temperatures.


fused. The brain slice can be im-mersed in the cryoprotectant, andthe agent can be added and removedby diffusion. So the blood-brainbarrier basically does not exist inthe brain slice model. But in thewhole brain, the blood-brain barriermay be the primary determinant ofwhether a given agent is practical touse.

So if you just dohippocampal sliceexperiments, youmay discover won-derful cryoprotect-ants that are uselessbecause they can’tget into the brain. Orif you do brain per-fusion experiments,you may find thingsthat get in nicely butare useless because they are lethalto the brain cells. So you need tolook at both sides of the coin.

RC: The hippocampus is an espe-cially desirable model because . . .?

A: It’s especially desirable becauseit controls memory, there’s a greatdeal known about it, and also it’s agreat example of a neural circuit thatincludes both cell bodies and an in-tensive amount of neuropil (in otherwords, axons and dendrites that arein communication with each other).One can apply stimuli in variousareas of the hippocampus and pickup resulting signals elsewhere in thehippocampus to make sure the con-nectivity is retained.

And I think the connectivity isone of the absolutely key areas forsuccessful brain cryopreservation.It’s like making sure your transcon-tinental telephone system operatesproperly: that if you pick up thephone in California and dial me in

New York, you don’t reach NewZealand or Florida instead.

RC: And after the successfulcompletion of the two prongs, doyou envision a sequence of researchto follow?

A: Yes. Because even after you’vedone what I described, you have only

experimented with cryoprotectiveagents; you have still not experi-mented with freezing and thawingor with vitrification and rewarming.So that now must be looked at as aseparate issue. To what tempera-ture can the brain be cooled withoutinjury, what is the optimal coolingrate, what is the optimal warmingrate, and are there things you haveto go through other than the stan-dard ones, in order to get a goodresult? There are many variationsthat must be examined. The goal ofthat kind of research would be tofind out what the brain needs.

You can evaluate the results in acouple of different ways. We reallyhaven’t discussed end points otherthan cellular viability and morphol-ogy, so far. But now we come to anissue which will have to be lookedat if anyone is going to be persuadedthe Prometheus Project has suc-ceeded: the assay for whole brainviability.

There are all kinds of indirect

assays that can be done, such as brainmetabolic parameters, oxygen con-sumption, glucose consumption, allkinds of things like that. Evaluationof electrical activity can be very so-phisticated and exquisite if done byan expert, and a tremendous amountcan be learned that way. But whatwe would really like to know is ifthe brain can wake up after that sort

of experience.

RC: Recoverfull conscious-ness.

A: Yes. Andthis involvesthe need toreperfuse thecryopreservedbrain with

blood. Isamu Suda did this with hisisolated brain model, and he wasable to obtain electrical activity [22].

But as I said, electrical activitymay not be persuasive to everybody.So what else can we do? Also, ifyou have an isolated brain model,you don’t have the ability to havethe brain express itself in any wayother than electrical activity. Pre-sumably this could include the elec-trical activity associated with con-sciousness, but it would not includeconsciousness itself.

One proposal has been to revivesome of the brain transplantationmethodologies that have been pro-posed in the past. There are a coupleof versions of them. One was pub-lished by Robert White, in whichyou take the brain that’s basicallywithin the isolated skull with thevascular segments intact, and trans-plant that into the neck, or otherarea, of a second animal [23].

That allows you to record EEGover several days, if not longer. And

“... connectivity is one of the absolutely key areasfor successful brain cryopreservation. It’s like makingsure your transcontinental telephone system operatesproperly: that if you pick up the phone in California

and dial me in New York, you don’t reach NewZealand or Florida instead.”


that means that the true cellular vi-ability of the brain would be estab-lished, by failure of the brain to dis-integrate over time. And you couldalso measure the blood flow goinginto and out of the brain to verifythat it’s relatively normal.

That would be good evidencethat the brain remained alive, but itwouldn’t necessarily be good evi-dence that the brain was functional.And so it would be desirable, eventhough that particular model is fairlysimple and doable, to go after a moreambitious model, such as RobertWhite [24], Demikhov [5] and Sano[19] have looked at here and in Rus-sia and Japan, in which the wholehead is transplanted.

White has done this both on dogsand on monkeys, and the Russiansand the Japanese have done this onthe dog upper body, in which youuse the arch of the aorta in the do-nor as a point of connection in therecipient. This involves basicallytransplanting the two upper limbsalong with the head and the upperbody. But what it gives you is apreparation which can express con-sciousness and purposeful behaviorto the nth degree, and which is stablefor several days, and even for sev-eral weeks, after transplantation.

This is more of a surgical tour-de-force, but with sufficient fund-ing the Prometheus Project ought tobe able to attract surgeons who cando this kind of transplant procedure.If so, we would then have a prepa-ration which could be at least per-fused with cryoprotectants, and pos-sibly even frozen and thawed to vari-ous levels, and then transplanted andevaluated for consciousness and be-havior.

That is the sine qua non of anend point for brain cryopreservation,conscious behavior.

RC: Are there any anticipated ma-jor issues with this approach?

A: There is a problem which attendsthis, and that is the necessity ofcryopreserving more than just thebrain. If you’re preserving the senseorgans along with the brain andyou’re more able to preserve thebrain than the sense organs, thenyou’re going to find that you cannotdo this preparation.

If your eyes are damaged, if yourears are damaged, if your facialmuscles are all in rigor mortis, be-cause they didn’t survive freezingand thawing, then you’re not goingto be able to have a very successfuloutcome with such a whole-headtransplant model. But that is justanother challenge to be met alongthe way; the Prometheus Projectmust ultimately include being ableto preserve those superficial struc-tures. After all, those are on theway to whole-body suspended ani-mation, which is the ultimate goal.But they would introduce potentialproblems in the short run.

On the other hand, it’s entirelypossible that those simple structureswill be a lot easier to cryopreservethan the brain itself, since they aresimpler and, in many ways, hardier.And so it’s possible the problem ofbeing selectively unable to preservethem will actually not arise. But Ithink the biggest concern is that, inthe eye, and probably in the semi-circular canals in the ear, you havefluid inclusions which are notperfusable, and this means that thewater in the middle of the eyeballwill tend to freeze because you won’tbe able to introduce cryoprotectantsinto it. The eyeball will tend toshrink also, because of withdrawalof fluid by the osmotic pressure of

the cryoprotectants. So you can eas-ily imagine ocular damage and eardamage caused by this unstirred-pooleffect.

Possibly that’s something thatcan be addressed using fairly simpleapproaches, if it comes right downto it. It’s hard to say exactly whatthose approaches would be at thispoint, but they could be addressedwhen the time came.

So to answer your question, af-ter we qualify various agents byscreening them for cellular viabilityand for the ability to access cellswithin the intact brain, then we canstep up the level of rigor to lookingat whole-brain viability and, if pos-sible, whole-brain function, depend-ing upon what the experimental limi-tations turn out to be.

RC: You didn’t say so explicitlythat I recall, but going back a stephere to Robert White’s work withthe dogs and the monkeys, there wasan implication that his work wassuccessful?

A: It was successful.

RC: That’s just astonishing!

A: Yes, it is astonishing. You couldtransplant these monkey heads [24],or dog upper bodies [5, 19], and theheads would track you with theireyes, and they would bite you if youput your finger into their mouths.They were perfectly intact neuro-logically, there is no question aboutit. And so we know that is possible.

What we don’t know is howmuch damage we can do by addingand subtracting cryoprotectants andstill have such a preparation recover,and how long it would take for sucha preparation to recover.

For example, about a third of


the transplanted human kidneysdon’t function initially. You haveto put the patient on dialysis formaybe a week or two before thekidney sufficiently recovers to sup-port the patient without dialysis.

That’s OK because we have di-alysis machines, so there’s no realproblem with the time delay. But ifyou’re dealing with a head-trans-plant model, and the lifetime of thatmodel is only a week because youget into trouble with infections, orwho knows what else the limitationsmight turn out to be, and it takestwo weeks for the brain to recoverfrom the insult that you induced,then you’re in a bit of trouble.

Incidentally, there is another waystation that can be used. If part ofthe problem for the brain or for thesuperficial structures has to do withvascular breakdown, it’s possible toperfuse the head preparation on anartificial circuit in vitro, so that youcould prevent some of those vascu-lar problems from being limiting,and therefore get results that other-wise could not be obtained. Andyou could quantitate things likeblood flow a little more easily, per-haps. But that’s just one variationalong the pathway that we discussed.

RC: So it sounds like what you’resaying is that you would envision anapproach that would, by design,manage to harvest relevant prior re-search?

A: Well, let me put it this way, whichis a little bit more precise. I’vegiven you a lot of information abouthow the research would proceed, butI haven’t said anything about whatthe actual agents or agent would be.And so I’m leaving that completelyopen. And if the Visser agent turnsout to be the best agent, then that’s

terrific, we’ll use that. If Fahy’sagents turn out to be the best, that’sterrific, we’ll use that. If some com-pletely other, novel agent comesalong that’s discovered in the courseof the Prometheus Project, or thatsomebody else comes up with insome other laboratory in the world,or that some other group comes upwith outside of the PrometheusProject but within one of the cryonicsorganizations, then fine, let’s usethat.

I think the goal here is to suc-ceed, and I wouldn’t want to preju-dice the Project in any way. I thinkthat it’s important to keep an openmind at all levels on how this isgoing to happen, and be guided bythe experimental results.

The brain is largely unchartedterritory. There have been a num-ber of brain tissue slab experimentsthat have been conducted in whichthe slabs were immersed in variouscryoprotectants, including ethyleneglycol, DMSO, various concentra-tions of glycerol, propylene glycol,methanol, mixtures of methanol andglycerol, and other mixtures as well,including Fahy’s cryoprotectants,then either freeze substituted andlooked at for structure in the pres-ence of ice, or just fixed after expo-sure to the cryoprotectant and lookedat for structural preservation afterexposure. And I would have to saythat after all of that research, glyc-erol still seems to be unbeaten byany other agent. There are agentsthat are competitive with glycerol,but not anything that’s distinctly su-perior to glycerol at this point.

However, I think that those re-sults largely should be repeated in amodel that’s more appropriate thana brain slab. There are problems inthe brain-slab model with gettingthe cryoprotectant in and out by dif-

fusion because of the thickness ofthe slab.

RC: In your opinion, what do youthink would be required to convincethe general public and press and sci-ence community of the completesuccess of the first part of thePrometheus Project?

A: It’s possible the head-transplantmodel would not be sufficient toconvince everyone that braincryopreservation had been success-fully done. This would be particu-larly true if it turned out that thebrain required two weeks to recoverand the lifetime of the preparationwas only about two weeks. By thetime the brain had a chance to dosomething to prove that it was intactfunctionally, you couldn’t maintainit any longer.

There could be an answer thatwould be quite impressive to every-one. Although it would be difficulttechnically, it is apparently feasible,at least to a degree. And that wouldbe to selectively freeze the brain insitu, in the intact organism. Thiswould probably be most achievableusing a monkey model, rather thana dog model, because there are somany anastomoses between the ce-rebral circulation and the superfi-cial circulation of a dog, making itextraordinarily difficult to isolate thebrain circulation.

To non-selectively freeze thebrain in situ could be difficult or notso difficult depending on how toler-ant the superficial tissue is to freez-ing. We already discussed the prob-lems of freezing eyes, ears, andmuscle in the face. If those struc-tures turn out to be fairly resistant tofreezing injury, then that would be apotentially useful approach. Youplace the attached head in a freezing


bath, freeze and thaw it, and then letthe whole animal recover and be-have.

If the superficial tissues do nottolerate cryopreservation, it may bepossible to demonstrate successfulbrain cryopreservation by selectivelyfreezing the brain without freezingthose superficial structures. It re-mains to be seen exactly how fardown in temperature we can get thebrain without freezing the superfi-cial structures. Calculations havebeen done indicating that we canget the brain down to reasonablylow temperatures. From the pointof view of cryobiology, if we canget the brain down to minus 60 tominus 80 degrees C, for example,it’s good evidence that the braincould be cryopreserved indefinitelyby cooling to lower temperatures,since not a great deal of extra injurywould normally occur during cool-ing below those temperatures.

And yet if we could cool thebrain by, for example, gas or fluo-rocarbon perfusion, down to thosetemperatures while keeping the su-perficial structures -- the eyes, theears, and so forth -- above the freez-ing point, or at least above their le-thal freezing temperatures, then onecould reverse the process by usingwarm gas or warm fluorocarbon, tothaw the brain within the skull, washout the cryoprotectant, release thevascular clamps to allow the bloodto reperfuse through the brain, andallow the animal to recover.

The animal may require inten-

sive care for a couple of weeks, butwith adequate funding that could beprovided. After which the animalmight not only be able to demon-strate that it survived this experi-ence, but also show it recognizedpeople, it could behave normally, itcould follow you around the roomappropriately, or swing from a tree,or heel, or whatever might be ap-propriate for the animal that’s cho-sen.

If it turned out to be a monkey,of course, it would be all the moreimpressive because the monkey ob-viously is as close as you can get toa human. But a dog would be in-credibly impressive as well, due tothe high intelligence of a dog.

So this would be a way that youcould obtain survival of the entireanimal after having its brain selec-tively frozen. To the extent that thiscan be done, I think it would con-vince anybody that the brain can besuccessfully cryopreserved. Wedon’t have to achieve this level ofaccomplishment in order to convinceprobably the vast majority of people,but if we could do this, I think wecould convince just about everybody.

RC: Are you comfortable that theten-year time-frame and the$1,000,000 a year funding objec-tives for the first part of thePrometheus Project would be suffi-cient to meet the scientific goals?

A: Yes, I think that the answer isaffirmative in both cases.

I think the time frame is appro-priate because there is a great dealof prior knowledge out there that isrelevant to this problem, both interms of brain tissue freezing, whole-brain perfusion, brain-slab freezing,and cryopreservation of hearts andkidneys and intestines and spleenset cetera. So a lot is known in thefield, and during the ten years of thefirst phase of the Prometheus Project,that information is not going to stopaccruing.

So all information from outsidesources all over the planet will feedinto the Prometheus Project, duringthe Project itself, in addition to thefindings that would otherwise arise.I think that many things going on incryobiology laboratories are poten-tially helpful to this Project. And soI think that the time scale is a rea-sonable one.

I don’t think we should be toosanguine about the ease with whichthis goal can be accomplished; thereare certainly plenty of problems. SoI think looking at a time horizonless than ten years is probably notintelligent. But I think that ten yearsprovides a reasonable hope that thegoal can be attained.

As far as the funding level isconcerned, I’ve done rough calcula-tions of what it would cost to do aproject like this adequately, and Ido think that $1,000,000 a year turnsout to be about the right number.

RC: Would you have any concerns,in terms of the financing, that the

“I don’t think that we should be too sanguine about the ease with which this goal can beaccomplished; there are certainly plenty of problems. So I think looking at a time hori-zon less than ten years is probably not intelligent. But I think that ten years provides a

reasonable hope that the goal can be attained, and of course it may well be attainedmuch sooner than that.”


funding might not be required at aneven rate. In other words, maybe inthe beginning there would be someadditional funding requirements, forinstance, to obtain a lab and suitableequipment?

A: The Project will have a lot of up-front structural costs the first year,but the most costly models will beimplemented only later, so it willtend to balance out. I see the Projectphasing in new required equipmentand technology as it evolves, whichessentially costs roughly what thelast wave of new equipment and newtechnology cost. So I think thatgenerally speaking a million a yearis reasonable as to what ought to beprovided.

And it’s true that from year toyear there may be ebbs and flows inthe exact requirement involved, butif you average about $1,000,000 ayear you’ll probably get where youwant to go. And if there’s moremoney than expenses in a given year,the surplus needs to be retained insavings, to avoid a shortfall in alater year.

It’s hard to see that it would bepossible to spend too much moneyon the Project. It’s not likely$1,000,000 will be an excessiveamount in a given year. There isjust too much to do.

RC: In the longer term, is it pos-sible that one mechanism for accel-erated funding might be researchprogress itself?

A: You have a point. The moreresults are produced, the more cred-ible the concept will become. Thecloser it gets to the goal, the moreexcitement the Project will gener-ate, and so it’s quite possible thefunding could actually accelerate as

the research itself is accelerating to-ward the goal.

RC: Did you wish to say anythingabout the makeup of the team thatyou envision would be appropriatefor Prometheus success?

A: I could say a little about that.The Prometheus Project could ben-efit from having talent in a numberof different areas. Certainly havinga neurophysiologist involved in theProject would help a great deal.Having a cryobiologist or two wouldhelp a great deal. There needs to beadequate technical support; I don’tthink you can overestimate the im-portance of people just doing rou-tine tasks. There will be a lot ofdata to be processed and people willhave to be brought in to do that kindof analysis.

A lot of surgical expertise willbe required, so you’re going to haveto bring in people who can do head-transplant experiments. You’re go-ing to have to be able to bring inpeople who can do brain slice workearlier than that.

But certainly surgical expertiseis going to be needed. Preferably aneurosurgeon, somebody like Rob-ert White, would be ideal for thiskind of project, somebody who bothunderstands the neurobiology in-volved and can do the surgery. Ithink the Project will be unlikely toobtain somebody like Robert White,excepting Robert White himself be-ing wooed into Prometheus, unlessthe funding is greatly increased over$1,000,000 a year, as we were justdiscussing.

I also think there should besomebody around who can do engi-neering work, who can make newkinds of equipment as required, andrepair old equipment as it gets bro-

ken. Because Prometheus is goingto involve a constant series of in-ventions and innovations, and theProject has to have the flexibilityneeded to be able to go in any direc-tion that’s required.

There may be a need for some-body to be involved on a full-timebasis just to do the electron micros-copy. It would be wonderful to havesomebody who could process mi-crographs, both light and electronmicrographs, on an almost full-timebasis. One of the problems of aproject like this, particularly one thatinvolves morphology as an impor-tant end point, is the sheer volumeof data that has to be assimilated bythe workers and the project; thatcould be a limiting factor in the rateof progress, unless you have spe-cialists who are willing to take onthat task to the exclusion of a lot ofother work.

The other kind of expertise thatwould be valuable would involvecomputer equipment automationtechniques and talent, so at leastsome of the aspects of the data track-ing could be automated to make thevolume of data tracking manageableby the team.

A number of these tasks can bepursued on a part-time basis, or canbe contracted out to external orga-nizations. You don’t necessarilyhave to have given individuals foreach and every one of these func-tions. But these are all functionsthat would be valuable to the Project,and the number of individualsbrought in and assigned to these dif-ferent functions will be directly de-pendent on how much money isavailable.

The more tasks that can be donein-house the better. But if a lot of ithas to be done outside, then that’sprobably feasible as well.


RC: Some cryobiologists have ex-pressed a certain reticence towardcryonics research. What effect doyou think that might have on staff-ing a research team?

A: Yes, the question you’re reallyasking is, “How likely is it thatcryobiologists could be enlisted toparticipate in the PrometheusProject?”

I think that is a very difficult nutto crack. I do think that there are afew cryobiologists who might beable to participate in a project likethat, but the vast majority of themwould not be able to participate.

I think that there arecryobiologists who do have relevanttalents that could be brought intothe Project, and I think that one ofthe important tasks early in thePrometheus Project would be to at-tempt to recruit these cryobiologists.For some who can’t be recruited di-rectly, confidential consulting agree-ments and business arrangementsmight at least allow them to act asadvisors.

There are cryobiologists in Rus-sia who are available. Whether theseindividuals are able to really do whathas to be done on this Project is anopen question. Certainly there is noshortage of cryobiologists from Rus-sia, but I think we need to have aWestern cryobiologist running theshow if we can manage it.

RC: You mean as a project man-ager?

A: As a project manager.

RC: Do you believe that, because ofthe Project’s extensive funding andtime-frame, that it might very wellput many cryobiologists in a posi-

tion where they would feel morecomfortable about having a conti-nuity of a career, if they choose toparticipate?

A: I think so. I think there may be acouple of cryobiologists who wouldbe on the fence about a project likethis, would realize that departingfrom academia and going into thisfield of research might make themunemployable in the future, but whomight think, “If we actually haveten years to pull this off, an ad-equate amount of funding to getgood results, and if we have the abil-ity to publish results that are ob-tained along the way, in good jour-nals like the neurobiological jour-nals, then there may be the opportu-nity of sustaining one’s career, insome way, after the Project is com-pleted.”

And again, I think that if there ishope of recruiting cryobiologists, theten-year time-horizon would be amajor factor in successfully recruit-ing these people. Because it is po-tentially a one-way street; it’s a tre-mendous risk for any cryobiologistto go into, just because of the con-troversial nature of the whole con-cept.

On the other hand, one redeem-ing feature about this research is thatit is not cryonics. It’s a scientificresearch project devoted, in the firstten years, to cryopreserving a singleorgan. As such, it’s no differentfrom other research projects to pre-serve organs.

But I believe Robert Ettingeronce said that cryobiologists are likefiremen who only want to put outsmall fires, and that analogy per-tains here. This is the banking of asingle organ, and so on that basisshould be perfectly respectable. Andnobody is asking anybody to have

their brain frozen in the interim. Yetbecause of the profound nature ofthis particular organ, cryobiologistsand others are going to be uncom-fortable about it.

RC: Is it possible that some talentedcryobiologists might be positivelymotivated by the extraordinary po-tential of Prometheus?

A: Yes. In fact, I know of at leastone credentialed cryobiologist whowould definitely be interested. Butwe also need to recognize that sci-ence is a universal, non-exclusiveenterprise by its nature. Brightyoung Ph.D.s who are notcryobiologists by training could berecruited and trained ascryobiologists. In other words, ifwe can’t hire cryobiologists, we maybe able to make some new ones. Ifthey can publish their work, thenthey’re cryobiologists.

RC: What role do you envision forvolunteers on the research team?

A: Volunteers could be of enormousbenefit. In a project of this kind,there is virtually no limit to theamount of man (and woman) powerthat can be usefully applied. Vol-unteers would provide more cost ef-fectiveness.

RC: What do you see as the impactof recent biomedical research on thePrometheus Project potential?

A: There are two new developmentsthat are clearly relevant.

The first development, alas, isan unfortunate one, and that is thetrouble Olga Visser had in repro-ducing her results. This new infor-mation about how difficult the Vissermethod is to reproduce, even using


an extremely simple and forgivingtest model, should remind us all thatwe are dealing with difficult ques-tions that may require more thanone new idea to answer. In myopinion, it is not scientifically plau-sible that the Visser method is goingto give cryonicists everything theywant. I believe many people willnow agree with this conclusion. Thisunderscores the need for the wholecommunity to get in the same boatand start rowing together. That wa-terfall ahead keeps getting closerevery day, and jumping out of theboat and swimming to shore doesn’tlook particularly feasible.

The second development, fortu-nately, is positive. The first suc-cessful cloning of an adult mammalby Ian Wilmut, a cryobiologist, sud-denly brings body-replacement op-portunities into view. One can imag-ine transplanting a formerly success-ful cryopreserved head and spinalcolumn into an anencephalic clone.Peripheral nerves regenerate, so thedorsal and ventral roots might becoaxed into establishing reasonableconnections with the cloned replace-ment body. Hookups of the vagusand other nerves may also be man-ageable. A transplant team with suf-ficient daring and determinationmight well be able to accomplishsuch a “body transplant” operationusing surgical acumen and equip-ment that largely already exists andhas been demonstrated.

Societal and ethical concernswould need to be resolved beforethis approach could be utilized. Butthis approach would then allow asuccessful central nervous systemcryopreservation technique to be therough equivalent of whole-body sus-pended-animation. In other words,the payoff of part one of thePromethius Project could be much

greater than anticipated.

RC: From where we stand today,what is needed to unleashPrometheus, as far as you’re con-cerned?

A: Well, I think it could happen in anumber of ways. There could besome dramatic breakthrough, maybeOlga Visser preserves a pig heart, orsomething like that, and suddenlyeverybody feels that this whole realmreally is possible and needs to besupported.

Or maybe Paul Wakfer comesup with another way of structuringthe organization such that suddenlyeverybody feels the payoff is somuch greater than they perceived itbefore that they just have to partici-pate.

There could be a variety of waysit could happen. But I think it abso-lutely imperative that it happen. Ithink there is much to be done, andour limited time is passing rapidly.What we have now is inadequate.And the concerned groups and indi-viduals can not accomplish as muchalone as they can together.

The lack of a perfected techniqueresults in such a high price to paythat we need to find every possibleway of overcoming that limitation.

RC: Let’s presume that, for somereason or another, the $1,000,000funding objective was not met. Inyour opinion, could there still be aPrometheus?

A: There could be. It would bemore risky, and it would produceresults more slowly, and it might bemore difficult to recruit the talentinto it that would be desirable forthe Project. But as far as I’m con-cerned, some sort of research pro-

gram, focused, systematic, well-managed, and well-funded to theextent that it can be done, is neces-sary. And some project is betterthan no project.

I think Paul Wakfer would tellyou that anything less than about$900,000 is not likely to be useful,and to a certain extent he’s right,but to a certain extent any moneythat’s spent on brain cryopre-servation has the potential of dis-covering new information that couldhelp everybody.

RC: If, through some mechanismthat we don’t envision at the mo-ment, funding were ten times greater,or a hundred times greater, wouldthat affect the rate of the researchresults?

A: Yes, I don’t think there’s anyquestion about it, because a lot ofthe research will be very systematicin nature, and the speed with whichyou can progress through the vari-ables depends on the resources youhave at your disposal: the manpower,the number of machines you have todo simultaneous perfusions, and fac-tors of that nature.

So, yes, it could be sped up byhaving more resources.

More resources would also at-tract more credibility on the part ofoutside scientists, who could bedrawn in as collaborators and soforth, which would allow conven-tional laboratories to take on someof the work load. That of coursewould accelerate the results andbring in new dimensions that other-wise might not be integrated.


[1] HB Barner; EA Sheck: Autotransplantation of theFrozen-Thawed Spleen, Archives of Pathology, 1966,82:267-71.

[2] Stephen Bridge; Robert CW Ettinger: A Cryobio-logical Milestone and a New Cryonics Research Alli-ance, The ALCOR Phoenix, Sept 1996, 3(5):4-6.

[3] Stephan Bridge: The 1985 Lake Tahoe Life Exten-sion Festival: A Review, Cryonics, Aug 1985, #61,6(8):24-32 (p 30).

[4] Mike Darwin: Cryo-Care Report, #4:1-8.

[5] VP Demikhov: “Experimental Transplantation ofVital Organs”, Consultants Bureau, NY, 1962, 158-170 (Translated from the Russian by Basil Haigh).

[7] Gregory M Fahy organ vitrification research, bydate:

Fahy: Organ Cryopreservation, “Advances in Anti-Aging Medicine, Volume 1”, Ronald M Klatz, ed,Mary Ann Liebert, Inc, Larchmont, NY, 1996, 249-55.

Fahy: Vitrification: A New Approach to OrganCryopreservation, Progress in Clinical and BiologicalResearch, 1986, 224:305-35.

Fahy; DR MacFarlane; CA Angell; HT Meryman: Vit-rification as an Approach to Cryopreservation, Cryo-biology, 1984 Aug, 21(4):407-26.

[8] Gregory M Fahy cryoprotectant research, by date:

Fahy; TH Lilley; H Linsdell; MS Douglas; HTMeryman: Cryoprotectant Toxicity and CryoprotectantToxicity Reduction: In Search of Molecular Mecha-nisms, Cryobiology, 1990 Jun, 27(3):247-68.

Fahy: The Relevance of Cryoprotectant “Toxicity” toCryobiology, Cryobiology, 1986 Feb, 23(1):1-13.

P Clark; Fahy; AM Karow Jr: Factors InfluencingRenal Cryopreservation. I. Effects of Three VehicleSolutions and the Permeation Kinetics of ThreeCryoprotectants Assessed with Rabbit Cortical Slices,Cryobiology, 1984, Jun, 21(3):260-73.

P Clark; Fahy; AM Karow Jr: Factors InfluencingRenal Cryopreservation. II. Toxic Effects of three Ve-hicle Solutions in Nonfrozen Rabbit Cortical Slices,Cryobiology, 1984, Jun, 21(3):274-84.

Fahy: Analysis of “Solution Effects” Injury: CoolingRate Dependence of the Functional and Morphologi-cal Sequellae of Freezing Rabbit Renal Cortex Pro-tected with Dimethyl Sulfoxide, Cryobiology, 1981Dec, 18(6):550-70.

References:Authors / researchers listed in alphabetical sequence by last name:

[9] John Farrant: Mechanism of Cell Damage DuringFreezing and Thawing and Its Prevention, Nature,1965, 205:1284-7.

[10] Frank M Guttman, primary:Guttman; P Robitaille; J Lizin; H Blanchard: Physi-ologic Investigation of Frozen-Thawed Canine Kid-neys, Transplantation Proceedings, 1977 Mar,9(1):255-6.

Additional Frank M Guttman research, by date:

R Wahi; Guttman; B Mitmaker: Mechanism ofCryoprotective Effects of PGE2, Surgical Forum, 1979,30:332-4.

Guttman; J Lizin; P Robitaille; H Blanchard; CTurgeon-Knaack: Survival of Canine Kidneys AfterTreatment With Dimethyl-Sulfoxide, Freezing at -80Degrees C, and Thawing by Microwave Illumination,Cryobiology, 1977 Oct, 14(5):559-67.

Guttman; G Berdnikoff; K Sangbhundhu; P Braun:Preservation of Canine Small Bowel by Freezing, Ar-chives of Surgery, 1976 Mar, 111(3):260-2.

P Braun; Guttman; G Berdnikoff; EB Sandborn; CMorin: Short Term Hypothermic Perfusion for Intesti-nal Preservation with Dimethyl Sulfoxide, Surgery,Gynecology and Obstetrics, 1976 Jul, 143(1):43-50.

Guttman; P Robitaille; J Lizin; H Blanchard: Func-tional Parameters of Frozen-Thawed AutotransplantedCanine Kidneys, Surgical Forum, 1976, 27(62):305-6.

[11] R Hamilton; HI Holst; HB Lehr: Successful Pres-ervation of Canine Small Intestine by Freezing, Jour-nal of Surgical Research, 1973, 14:313-8.

[12] AM Karow; DE Pegg, editors: “The Biophysicsof Organ Cryopreservation”, New York:Plenum Press,1987.

[13] Richard E Lee Jr; JP Costanzo; EC Davidson; JRLane Jr: Dynamics of Body Water During Freezingand Thawing in a Freeze-Tolerant Frog (Ranasylvatica), Journal of Thermal Biology, 1992, 17:263-6.

[14] Basil Joseph Luyet; Marie Pierre Gehenio: “Lifeand Death at Low Temperatures”, Normandy, Mo,Biodynamica, 1940. (Reprints from Biodynamica

#33 (1938), #48 (1939) and #60 (1940)).

[15] Harold Thayer Meryman: “Cryobiology”, Lon-don, NY, Academic Press, 1966, 775p.

[16] G Okaniwa; T Nakada; M Kawakami; S Fugimura;Y Arakaki; S Chiba; M Yonechi; Y Kagami; C Suzuki:Studies on the Preservation of the Canine Lung atSubzero Temperatures, Journal of Thoracic and Car-diovascular Surgery, 1973, 65:180-6.

[17] Gabriel Rapatz, primary:Rapatz: Resumption of Activity in Frog Hearts AfterFreezing to Low Temperatures, Biodynamica, 1970,11(223):1-12.

Additional Gabriel Rapatz research, by date:

Rapatz; BJ Luyet; A MacKenzie: Effects of Coolingand Rewarming Rates on Glycerolated Human Eryth-rocytes, Cryobiology, 1975 Aug, 12(4):293-308.

Rapatz; R Keener: Effect of Concentration of Ethyl-ene Glycol on the Recovery of Frog Hearts AfterFreezing to Low Temperatures, Cryobiology, 1974,11:571-2.

Rapatz: Cryoprotective Effect of Methanol DuringCooling of Frog Hearts, Cryobiology, 1973 Jun,10(2):181-4.

BJ Luyet; Rapatz: Comparative Inhibitory Effects ofMethyl Alcohol and Ethylene Glycol on the BeatingMechanism of Cardiac Tissue, Biodynamica, 1972,11(234):137-47.

BJ Luyet; Rapatz: Search for Concentrations ofCryoprotectant that would Permit a Close-to-NormalBeating Activity in Cardiac Tissue, Biodynamica,1971, 11(227):101-9.

BJ Luyet; Rapatz: Comparative Effects of EthyleneGlycol, Glycerol and Dimethylsulfoxide in Inhibitingthe Beating Mechanism in Frog Cardiac Tissue,Biodynamica, 1971 Aug, 8(4):366-70.

Rapatz: Resumption of Activity in Frog Hearts AfterFreezing to Low Temperatures, Biodynamica, 1970,11:1-12.

Rapatz: Some Problems Associated with the Freezingof Hearts, Cryobiology, 1970, Sep-Oct, 7(2):157-62.

Rapatz; BJ Luyet: Electron Microscope Study of Eryth-rocytes in Rapidly Cooled Suspensions ContainingVarious Concentrations of Glycerol, Biodynamica,1968, 10:193-210.

Rapatz; BJ Luyet: Patterns of Ice Formation in Aque-ous Solution of Glycerol, Biodynamica, 1966 Dec,10(198):69-80

Rapatz; BJ Luyet: On the Instability of Frozen Glyc-erol Solutions Stored at Various Low Temperatures,Biodynamica, 1967, 10:881-93.


[18] Stanley I Rapoport, in “Cerebral Vascular SmoothMuscle and its Control”, K Elliott and M O’Connor,eds, Elsevier/Excerpts Medics, New York, 1978, 237-51.

[19] Keiji Sano; Hideo Terao; Isao Hayakawa; ShujiKamano; Isamu Saito: Experimental Transplantationof the Head - Two Headed Dog, Neurologia Medico-Chirurgica (Tokyo), 1964, 6:35-8.

[20] Summarized in: Audrey U Smith: “BiologicalEffects of Freezing and Supercooling”, Edward ArnoldLtd., London, 1961.

Audrey U Smith, Proceedings of the Royal Society ofLondon, Series B.

[21] Kenneth B Storey, primary:Storey; JM Storey: Natural Freeze Tolerance in Ecto-thermic Vertebrates, Annual Review of Physiology,1992, 54:619-37.

Additional Kenneth B Storey research, by date:

SJ Hemmings; Storey: Response to Freezing and Thaw-ing in the Freeze-Tolerant Wood Frog Rana Sylvatica,Cell Biochemistry and Function, 1996 Jun, 14(2):139-48.

B Rubinsky; ST Wong; JS Hong; J Gilbert; M Roos;Storey: Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Freezing andThawing in Freeze-Tolerant Frogs, American Journalof Physiology. 1994 Jun, 266(6 Pt 2):R1771-7.

Storey; TP Mommsen: Effects of Temperature andFreezing on Hepatocytes Isolated from a Freeze-Tol-erant Frog, American Journal of Physiology, 1994May, 266(5 Pt 2):R1477-82.

TA Churchill; Storey: Effects of Dehydration on Or-gan Metabolism in the Frog Pseudacris Crucifer :Hyperglycemic Responses to Dehydration MimicFreeze-Induced Cryoprotectant Production, Journal ofComparative Physiology, 1994, 164(6):492-8.

TA Churchill; Storey: Dehydration Tolerance in WoodFrogs: A New Perspective on Development of Am-phibian Freeze Tolerance, American Journal of Physi-ology, 1993 Dec, 265(6 Pt 2):R1324-32.

PA King; MN Rosholt; Storey: Adaptations of PlasmaMembrane Glucose Transport Facilitate CryoprotectantDistribution in Freeze-Tolerant Frogs, 1993 Nov, 265(5Pt 2):R1036-42.

MD Vazques Illanes; Storey: 6-Phosphofructo-2-kinase and Control of Cryoprotectant Syn-thesis in Freeze Tolerant Frogs, Biochemica etBiophysica Acta, 1993 Aug 20, 1158(1):29-32.

Storey; J Bischof; B Rubinsky:Cryomicroscopic Analysis of Freezing in Liverof the Freeze-Tolerant Wood Frog, AmericanJournal of Physiology, 1992 Jul, 263(1 Pt2):R185-94.

Storey; JG Baust; JP Wolanczyk: BiochemicalModification of Plasma Ice Nucleation Activ-ity in a Freeze-Tolerant Frog, Cryobiology,1992 Jun, 29(3):374-84.

[22] Isamu Suda, primary:

Suda; K Kito; C Adachi: Viability of LongTerm Frozen Cat Brain In Vitro, Nature, 1966Oct 15, 212(59):268-70.

Additional Isamu Suda research, by date:

Suda; K Kito; C Adachi: Bioelectric Dischargesof Isolated Cat Brain After Revival From Yearsof Frozen Storage, Brain Research, 1974 Apr26, 70(3):527-31.

Suda: [Circulation and Function of the Brain.Limit of its Physiological Viability], ShinkeiKenkyu No Shimpo, Advances in NeurologicalScience, 1966 Oct, 10(3):535-41. Language:Japanese.

Suda: [Physiological Interpretation of the Ex-treme Hypothermia], No To Shinkei, Brain andNerve, 1965 Apr, 17(4):340-1. Language: Japa-nese.

[23] Robert J White, primary:

White; Maurice S Albin; George E Locke; Eu-gene Davidson: Brain Transplantation: Pro-longed Survival of Brain after Carotid-JugularInterposition, Science, 5 Nov 1965, 150:779-81.

Additional Robert J White research, by date:

LR Wolin; White; LC Massopust; JC Austin;PE Austin: Absence of Behavioral Modifica-tion with Prolonged Cerebral Ischemia UnderDeep Hypothermia, Surgical Forum, 1974,25(0):453-5.

White; PE Austin Jr; JC Austin; N Taslitz; YTakoaka: Recovery of the Subhuman PrimateAfter Deep Cerebral Hypothermia and Pro-longed Ischaemia, Resuscitation, 1973 Jun,2(2):117-22.

White: Hypothermic Perfusion, JAMA, 1973Apr 30, 224(5):629.

LR Wolin; LC Massopust Jr; White: Behav-ioral Effects of Autocerebral Perfusion, Hypo-thermia and Arrest of Cerebral Blood Flow inthe Rhesus Monkey, Experimental Neurology,1973 Mar-Apr, 39(2):336-41.

White: Modification in Primate Cerebral Cir-culation and Electrical Activity with ProfoundHypothermia, Cryobiology, 1972 Oct, 9(5):383-92.

LR Wolin; LC Massopust Jr; White; N Taslitz:Arrest of Cerebral Blood Flow and Reperfusionin the Rhesus Monkey, Resuscitation, 1972Mar, 1(1):39-44.

White: Preparation and Mechanical Perfusionof the Isolated Monkey Brain, ActaEndocrinologica, Supplementum, 1972,158:200-16.White; MS Albin; J Verdura; GE Locke: TheIsolated Monkey Brain: Operative Preparationand Design of Support Systems, Journal ofNeurosurgery, 1967 Sep, 27(3):216-25.

White; MS Albin; J Verdura; GE Locke: Dif-ferential Extracorporeal Hypothermic Perfusionof and Circulatory Arrest to the Human Brain,Medical Research Engineering, 1967, 6(2):18-24.

J Verdura; White; MS Albin: Profound Selec-tive Hypothermia and Arrest of Arterial Circu-lation to the Dog Brain, Journal ofNeurosurgery, 1966 Jun, 24(6):1002-6.

[24] Robert J White, whole-head transplantresearch:

White; LR Wolin; LC Massopust, Jr; N Taslitz;J Verdura: Primate Cephalic Transplantation:Neurogenic Separation, Vascular Association,Transplantation Proceedings, Mar 1971,3(1):602-4.

White; M Albin; D Yashon: NeuropathologicalInvestigation of the Transplanted Canine Brain,Transplantation Proceedings, 1969 Mar,1(1):259-61.

[25] G Zimmermann; C Tennyson; T Drapanas:Studies of Preservation of Liver and Pancreasby Freezing Techniques, Transplantation Pro-ceedings, 1971, 1:657-9.

[26] Special thanks are deserved by those whoseoutstanding help made this article possible:Steve Bridge for concept inspiration and sup-port; Hugh Hixon for invaluable biochemicaland other technical assistance; Fred Chamber-lain for unflagging enthusiasm and aid; MaxMore for loan of his complete set of Cryonicsmagazines.


nouncement about the birth of fivelambs cloned from fetal cells. Theselambs are special because they con-tain extra genes inserted before theywere cloned. One of the lambs,named “Polly,” carries a humangene. This is significant, since itpoints the way to efficient repro-duction of animals that produce hu-man hormones and proteins of thera-peutic value. Possible examples in-clude clotting factors, human growthhormone, and treatments for cysticfibrosis. (Science 277, pg. 631, Aug.1997).

Molecular Nanotechnology

Dr. Eric Drexler has recently re-leased his design for a new fine-motion controller consisting of only2,596 atoms. Previous rough designswere estimated at over 3 million at-oms. The current design is based ona Stewart platform (similar to thoseused for flight simulators) with eightstruts, allowing the positioning ofatoms and molecules within a frac-tion of an atomic diameter in sixdegrees of freedom. See http://www.imm.org/Parts/Part2.html forpictures, details, and a file of thecomplete design.

Molecular nanotech designs maybe getting simpler, but we still haveto face the question of how to makethem. One approach is to usefullerenes (the famous “buckyballs”)

and their derivatives as buildingblocks. The NASA Ames ResearchCenter Computational ChemistryBranch is investigating this by de-signing components based onfullerenes, including gears and com-puter components. (http://science.nas.nasa.gov/Groups/Nanotechnology/). Professor Rich-ard Smalley, Nobel prize winningdiscoverer of buckyballs, is also in-vestigating the use of carbonnanotubes as probe tips for scan-ning probe microscopes (HongjieDai, Jason H. Hafner, Andrew G.Rinzler, Daniel T. Colbert, and Ri-chard E. Smalley, “Nanotubes asNanoprobes in Scanning Probe Mi-croscopy,” Nature 384, 147-151(1996)).

Finally, abstracts of the papersto be presented at the Fifth Fore-sight Conference on MolecularNanotechnology are now availableon the World Wide Web (http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Abstracts/index.html). Pa-pers of interest to cryonicists include“Cryopreservation of Large Biologi-cal Systems,” “Ultimate TheoreticalModels of Nanocomputers,” and “In-termediate and Long Term Objec-tives in Nanotechnology.”

Buckyballs on the Brain

Spheres of sixty carbon atomsaren’t just for machines, anymore.

Column #1

By Stephen J. Van SickleTechNews

So much is happening so rapidlyin technologies that bear on

cryonics, it is impossible to followeven a fraction of it. This new col-umn is my very humble attempt tofill you in on what I think is inter-esting and important. I make noclaim to completeness or even rel-evance; these are just some itemsthat caught my eye over the last fewweeks. Unfortunately, I don’t seeeverything. This is where you, myreaders, enter the picture. Be myextra eyes, e-mail me informationabout the latest breakthroughs, pointme in the right direction, and I prom-ise this will be much more interest-ing reading than if you had to relysolely on my meager resources. Ifyou want credit, you’ve got it; ifyou’re revealing deep, dark corpo-rate secrets, I’ll defend your ano-nymity. It’s all up to you, though,how interesting and exciting I canmake this column. Feel free to e-mail me at [email protected] (ifyou put TechNews in the subjectline I’ll get to it faster) or postalmail me at Alcor’s address.

Cloning Update

By now, almost everyone hasheard the news about “Dolly,” aclone from the udder cells of anadult sheep at the Roslin Institute ofEdinburgh, Scotland. What you mayhave missed is the July 24th an-


Researchers have reported thatmalonic acid derivatives ofbuckminster fullerene (a watersoluble form of C60) have powerfulneuroprotective effects, particularlyagainst the glutamate receptor-me-diated excitotoxicity that occurs dur-ing stroke, cardiac arrest, and braintrauma. Is there nothing these ver-satile molcules can’t do? (Laura L.Dugan, et al. “Carboxyfullerenes asneuroprotective agents.” Proc. Natl.Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 94, pp. 9434-9439, Aug 1997)

“Re-educating” Organs

Rejection is the Number Oneproblem in organ transplants. Mostcandidates for organ transplants diewaiting for a suitable organ, trans-plants often fail even with a “match,”and even successful transplanteeshave to rely on dangerous anti-re-jection drugs for the rest of theirlives. Capt. David Harlan and Lt.Cmdr. Allan Kirk at the Naval Medi-cal Research Institute in Bethesda,Maryland have succeeded in thelaboratory with a new technique thatmay change all that. They do notyet understand how their techniqueworks, but they say the data sug-gests the immune system is “re-edu-cated” to leave the transplanted or-gan alone. To quote from the pressrelease: “As part of their research,the team transplanted very mis-matched kidneys into non-humanprimates and treated them with thenovel therapy for 28 days after theoperation. No other therapy, includ-ing the use of anti-rejection drugs,was administered. Six months later,the primates are robust and suffer-ing no significant side effects. Theshort course of the therapy appearsto be long-lasting, precluding theuse of daily medication to prevent

organ rejection.” It appears that thetechnique may also be useful inxenotransplantation (transplantingorgans from non-human animals).Details were published in Allan D.Kirk, et al. “CTLA4-Ig and anti-CD40 ligand prevent renal allograftrejection in primates.” In Proc. Natl.Sci., USA, Vol. 94, pp. 8789-8794,August, 1997, the full text of whichis available on the Web at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/16/8789.

Artificial Chromosomes

Scientists at Case Western Re-serve University School of Medi-cine in Cleveland, Ohio have suc-ceeded in assembling strands of hu-man DNA into artificial chromo-somes. Current experimental genetherapies, relying on viruses to addgenes to existing chromosomes, maycause mutations, alter function inunpredictable ways, and often dis-appear as the cell divides and thenew genes fail to replicate. Artifi-cial chromosomes, the creation ofwhich is not yet fully understood,appear to bypass these problems, andhave survived for as much as 6months in cells replicating in cul-ture. Harrington, J.J., et al. “Forma-tion of de novo centromeres and con-struction of first-generation artifi-cial chromosomes.” Nature Genet-ics 15(April):345.

Alcor Member Wins Award

Dr. Ralph Merkle, Alcor mem-ber and computational nanotech-nologist at Xerox, was awarded onMarch 2, 1997 The Association forComputing’s (ACM) “ParisKanellakis Theory and PracticeAward” for his contributions to thedevelopment of public key encryp-

tion. The Award was given to Dr.Merkle and five others for “the con-ception and first effective realiza-tion of public-key cryptography. Theidea of a public-key cryptosystemwas a major conceptual break-through that continues to stimulateresearch to this day. Without ittoday’s rapid growth of electroniccommerce would have been impos-sible.” Dr. Merkle shared the awardwith Leonard Adleman, Universityof Southern California; WhitfieldDiffie, Sun Microsystems; MartinHellman, Stanford University;Ronald Rivest, MIT; and AdiShamir, The Weizmann Institute ofScience.

Revolution to Orbit

You may not have to take thatrisky low-temperature trip to the fu-ture to fulfill your space traveldreams. Rotary Rocket Company (aRedwood Shores, California startup)has released the latest redesign of itsRoton single-stage-to-orbit space-craft. This extremely original de-sign uses a proprietary rocket en-gine that “rotates about the Roton’slongitudinal axis, generating the cen-trifugal force necessary for pump-ing the propellants at high pressureto the engine’s banks of multiplecombustion chambers.” Rapid turn-around and low operating cost prom-ise to radically reduce the price ofspace travel.

Preliminary financing has beensecured. Engine tests have begun ata site in the Mojave Desert, and pro-pellant tank tests are being conductedat Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites,Inc. It is rumored that major inves-tors include famed techno-thrillerauthor Tom Clancy.


Joe Cannon

Some years ago I learned (fromMike Darwin) that Joe, a long-timecryonicist whose involvement goesback to the ’60s, wrote “a couple ofwaltzes.” When I wrote to Joe, heobligingly sent me the printed scores.The story that goes with them is aninteresting one.

During World War II, Joe hadimagined one day setting up a littletourist attraction: a steamboat cruiseover some of the small, intercon-nected lakes around Appleton, Wis-consin where he lived. Being veryambitious and enterprising, he woulddo everything himself, from arrang-

ing for the boats to composing mu-sic that would be played onboardwhile the customers were enjoyingtheir ride.

And compose Joe did, notwith-standing his meager background forit. Unable to write out a score, hewhistled two waltzes into a tape re-corder. Milton Detjen, a friend withmore formal musical savvy, listenedto the tape and wrote down the notes,adding harmony and getting thingsto sound, on the piano, as Joe imag-ined they should. The music wascompleted and printed in two large,showy flyers with the copyright date1943. The waltzes, around 2 or 3minutes each, are named “ClaudiusG” and “Evelyn T,” after Joe’s par-ents.

They were the only music JoeCannon ever composed. . . and theywere also as much progress as heever made on his cruise project. Nev-ertheless, the music remains, andI’ve had pleasant moments listeningto it. (I use music software on myPC to make up for a lack of playingability.) As you might expect, it isn’t“great” music, but it does have asoothing quality that I imaginewould have been just right for itsintended purpose, a leisurely cruise

For the Record by R. Michael Perry, Ph.D.

Musical Creativity in Cryonics

Cryonics may be important tomany of us, yet it’s only a

means to an end. We work hard fora longer, healthier life, but what wedo with that life is important as well.The things we accomplish on thisside of the freezer will have a bear-ing, we think, on what we accom-plish on the other side, when there’llbe more opportunities and less timepressure.

Cryonicists are noted for beinga diverse (and often divisive) lot,but one of their oft-recurring fea-tures is above-average creativity.Over and over I’ve seen cryonicistsfascinated with one particular cre-ative endeavor: music. Efforts inthis field range from the rankly ama-teurish to the nearly professional,but for the most part have gone un-recognized. I hope to change that.

The following musical cryo-nicists either have suspension mem-bership with a cryonics organiza-tion or are now in suspension. Allof these individuals have consentedto public mention of their cryonicsarrangements. To those musicalcryonicists I may have missed inthis article, I apologize.


aboard a paddle-boat steamer.Joe was suspended by Alcor last

February, aged 82, to join his wifeTerri, who entered suspension 12years earlier. There were problemswith Joe’s suspension, and his finalstate of preservation was far lessthan what we currently consider op-timal.

Someday we hope to have Joeand Terri back with us. We mayhave difficulty in accomplishing this,but we do have some extra informa-tion to aid in the task. Terri, it turnsout, was a prolific diarist. Joe, mean-while, left us his book, Recollec-tions of an Average Man [excerptedin Cryonics, 3rd Qtr ‘97 — ed], hismusic, and several videotape inter-views. These data may get good usein sharpening our reconstructions ofJoe and Terri Cannon, another rea-son for cryonicists to exercise theircreativity and leave some perma-nent, decipherable record of it.

Robert Ettinger

The “father of cryonics” him-self is among those cryonicists whohave composed music. Indeed, it’spossible his composition, “Au

Revoir,” copyright 1966, is the firstsong about cryonics. (This was onlytwo years after the publication ofBob’s famous book, The Prospectof Immortality, that first gained awide audience for cryonics.)

In the song we hear “au revoirbut not goodbye.” There’s an im-portant connotational difference be-tween the two expressions that weusually think of as having the samemeaning. “Au revoir,” in French,means literally, “to the seeing again,”or more colloquially, “till we meetagain,” whereas the English“goodbye,” which happens to de-rive from “God be with you,” car-ries no such thought of future en-counters. In this way, one might saythat the French are ahead of us,cryonically speaking. One wishes,however, that they would take “aurevoir” more seriously — cryonicsis essentially illegal in France.

Recently I asked Bob Ettingerabout his involvement in music. He

considers himself an amateur, ratherlike Joe Cannon; Bob has workedout a few tunes and written themdown. But I also asked him whethermusical talent “runs in his family,”and got an interesting response. Hismother’s family, it turns out, wereRussian Jews who emigrated nearthe turn of the century. He says theycould all play some instrument, most

Robert Ettinger


commonly the piano. An uncle,Herman Chaloff, was a composerand arranger who worked manyyears as a pianist for the show “Okla-homa,” then got a musical doctorateand taught at a western university.A great-uncle, Eugene (Yevgeniy)Plotnikov, was a ’cellist and promi-nent conductor. In younger daysPlotnikov “played fiddle to theCzar,” most likely at the BolshoiTheater in Moscow, where he wasemployed. After the Russian Revo-lution he emigrated to the West andwound up conducting the New YorkSymphony Orchestra!

Mary Margaret Glennie

Mary Margaret is a well-knowncryonicist and libertarian promoterwho lives in Ft. Collins, Colorado.Her husband, Jim Glennie, was sus-pended by Alcor in 1992. Mary Mar-garet has also had a long and variedcareer in music, starting with juniorhigh in her home town of Minot,North Dakota. After high school shestudied Music Theory and Compo-sition at the University of North Da-kota. In the ’60s she hitch-hiked,played the guitar, and sang folk

songs. In the ’70s she had the fe-male lead in “Stop the World. I Wantto Get Off.”

Mary Margaret plays severalmusical instruments, including theFrench horn, piano, and soprano re-corder. Among her compositions areseveral hundred lyric songs and awork in progress for string quartet.Two of her songs, both writtenwithin the past year, are aboutcryonics. While trying to reduce thetime-consuming task of transferringher compositions to paper, she de-veloped a copyrighted staff paperthat is now used in several univer-sity music departments. Dissatisfiedwith the available teaching meth-ods, she developed her own curricu-lum for her piano students.

Mary Margaret Glennie’s two“cryonics songs” were both com-posed for the 1997 Alcor CryonicsTechnology Festival. “For Awhile”is a thoughtful piece about waitingfor someone (such as a spouse) who

has been suspended. “Corpsicle” isin a lighter vein, a lively ditty thatends optimistically with, “I may befrozen now, but in a future time Iwill be hot.” During the Festival,some of us made an effort at singingthese songs, but clearly we neededmore practice. Perhaps this is onemore reason to have more such gath-erings!

Jim Yount

Jim is the president of AmericanCryonics Society and a longtime ac-tivist in the movement. It surprisedme when, in response to my requeston CryoNet asking for contributionsto this article, he said he’d been com-posing and arranging songs “forsome years,” something I hadn’theard before. Many of his songs havea country and western form, but witha science fiction theme. He says, “Idon’t read or write musical nota-tion, so it is a matter of singing into


a tape recorder (often before I for-get the tune). More rarely I also doparody.”

One of Jim’s recent composi-tions with a humorous twist is “LittleOl’ Public Domain Me.” He says(in all seriousness, despite the funnyovertones), “I have been intending,for some time, to declare myself pub-lic domain. That is, I want my ge-netic/biological material to be avail-able to anyone, for any purpose. Thatdoesn’t mean that anyone who wantscan show up at my house and cut offa slice of Jim. However, if theysomehow get a piece, they can use itas they want without paying ‘royal-ties’ to the original. The statementof public-domaindom, must be clear,explicitly precise, and legal. Such astatement must also not interferewith my intentions for cryonic sus-pension. I have not yet worked outthe wording of the declaration;though such is my intention.”

Jim also notes that some otherwell-known cryonicists of his ac-quaintance are involved in music.Two (both now suspended) are DickMarsh and Jerry White. Dick usedto compose parodies (new words tofamilar tunes), and Jerry, while ap-parently not a composer, loved tosing and would sometimes performat AIDS concerts.

Jim suggests the possibility thatcryonicists may want to create theirown CD. Certainly this is a thought,though judging by what I’ve heard,the types of music would be unusu-ally varied. Achieving “unity” mightbe hard. (Now where have we heardthis before?)

Mike Perry

Like many of the others, I’m nota trained musician. I don’t play aninstrument and cannot “hear” a tune

from a printed score. I never thoughtof myself as much inclined to musicwhen growing up, did not performin a band, and did not try out for anyother musical activities. I had somestrong dislikes about music — butsome strong likes too, as it turnedout. In college I heard a lot moreclassical and older music than I’dheard before, and took a special lik-ing to some of the older styles, suchas baroque. Meanwhile, I wouldsometimes mentally “hear” frag-ments of original tunes, which I be-gan to string together into longersequences. At one point a collegeprofessor of mine pointed out that

in a certain composition — the open-ing of “Sleepers Awake” from J.S.Bach’s Cantata #140 — there wasan unexpected amount of materialbefore a repetition occurred. Thisgave me an “awakening” of sortsright then and there: it seemed logi-cal that music would be better off, ifwell done, without repetitions at all.So that’s the way I tried to shape mycompositions from then on, avoid-ing the major-length repetitions ofthematic material you usually findin music. (I think this has changed

now, with some of the more recentstyles, but it’s certainly true of muchof the older music.)

That decision probably killedany possibilities that I might com-pose a significant amount of musicbefore the Singularity*; even withtechnological augmentation to thehuman brain, I suspect that writingmusic will remain difficult. How-ever, I have been able, over the years,to assemble a small number of com-positions with reasonable standardsof non-repetition. Some of thesepieces are several minutes in length,and I hope someday to assemble aCD worth of good-sounding, highly

tuneful, non-repetitious music.As with several others mentioned

in this article, computer technologyhas been a great help to me in get-ting music to a performable stateand actually hearing a compositionplayed. Before the modern PC, Iwould construct a compositionslowly, memorizing it as I wentalong and sometimes whistling intoa tape recorder as a memory aid.This generally took years; I didn’thave anybody handy to reduce thewhistled notes to a finished product.

* For the uninitiated, the “Singularity” is basically the time when technol-ogy to make us more than human becomes available.


Composition is still a slow pro-cess for me, but the end result isbetter. The computer, suitably pro-grammed and with suitable periph-erals, has talents I lack (though Istill get to tell it what to do!). I canenter notes into a score electroni-cally and play them back to find outif this is the sound I have in mind.Best of all, I can try endless experi-ments with top-notes and chords,choices of instruments, etc, and makerefinements to further improve thesound. There is a whole orchestra atmy fingertips, and computers’ soundquality has improved steadily overthe years with quite affordable up-grades.

Ralph Whelan

Ralph has been involved incryonics for several years, servingas Alcor’s Membership Administra-tor, Alcor’s Vice President, an AlcorDirector, and editor of CryonicsMagazine. Music is one of his long-term interests. While Ralph wasgrowing up, he fell under the influ-ence of music his father listened toat home. This included modern ele-ments such as progressive jazz andjazz fusion. In high school Ralphtook up the saxophone, and mean-

while developed an interest in“deconstructing the songs, and fig-uring out the way they were put to-gether.” His interest in performingmusic soon gave way to composingit, which he started doing about agesixteen. Even so, over the next fewyears he joined a couple of rockbands and earned money playing atweddings.

At eighteen — “on a lark” —Ralph eschewed college in favor ofjoining the U.S. Army, and “went inas a musician.” He wound up inGermany. During this hitch over-seas, he took up the piano and stud-ied his favorite jazz fusion artistssuch as David Benoit and Jim Bajor,trying to figure out how their songswere written. Through correspon-dence, Ralph struck up a friendshipwith Bajor, who among other things“found cryonics fascinating” (notenough, however, for him to makethe effort and sign up).

In 1992, after leaving the Armyand starting to work for Alcor, Ralphobtained the necessary equipment formusical composition via computer.“I started being able to mix tunesfor the first time,” Ralph says, “hav-ing actual complicated drum linesand bass lines with different soundsand feels and timbres. ... That’s whenmy interest really started to grow incomposition. I started writing a lotof stuff, probably for about a ... twoyear period, ’92 to ’94, when I wastwenty-five to twenty-seven, prob-ably enough to fill a CD, but onlyhalf the tunes on the CD would bearany semblance of being finished.”

His compositions “always movein the direction of ... the fusion ofjazz and rock” — jazz fusion or fu-sion jazz, depending on whom youask. Ralph explains, however, thatthe term has “really warped a lotover the last twenty years,” becom-

ing less well-defined as new stylesof music have evolved. “Anythingthat’s easy to listen to, and cannotbe classified in any other way, it’slabeled easy listening. And if it’sgot a little more of a beat to it, you’reprobably going to call it jazz fusion,no matter what it is.”

As for Ralph himself though:“Most of my favorite stuff has strongjazz components to it, even thoughit really makes use of modern tech-nology ... having digital effects andthings that you wouldn’t normallyattribute to a jazz ensemble sound.”

Derek Strong

Derek was introduced tocryonics by Ralph Whelan whenthey both were in Germany andplayed in an Army band. Over theyears, their close association has con-tinued. Derek has been quite activein Alcor, at one time or another act-ing as Membership Administrator (inwhich he succeeded Ralph), an ad-visor to the Board of Directors, andeditor of the Alcor Phoenix. Atpresent he (along with Ralph) is in


“civilian life” doing computer workfor a living.

Derek remembers singing in pre-school, and that his mother encour-aged him in this activity. A few yearslater he started playing in his schoolband, choosing the trombone be-cause he liked the glissando: “It wasreally circus-like, which entertainedmy fifth-grade brain.” As it turnedout, he was good at this instrument,and he kept getting better. “By myninth grade year I was the best mu-sician in the band, and they were upthrough twelfth grade.”

But Derek’s talents were not lim-ited to performing. “Along there Istarted finding out that I could com-pose ... I could listen to things andfigure them out easily, like on myhorn. And, like sixth or seventhgrade, my brain started ... actuallytrying to manipulate the music,rather than just ... mimicking it ortrying to produce it.”

Musical talent was a stepping-stone for Derek’s plans after highschool. “I went into the Army forbucks and travel,” he explains. As amusician it was easy to get a tour ofEurope, which he did from 1987-90, visiting Germany, Spain andHolland. Afterward he used the GIbill to continue his education. Heespecially remembers playing a jointconcert with a Russian military bandin Berlin (around 1989, when thewall was coming down) and howmusic served as a bridge betweenthe two vastly different groups.

Derek has an interesting com-parison of his talents to Ralph’s.(Like Ralph, he is interested in fu-sion jazz and his compositions tendto follow those lines.) When he hasmusic “in his head,” he has notrouble writing it down. Ralphdoesn’t have this ability (nor domany of the rest of us, myself in-

cluded!) but Derek credits Ralphwith greater creative ability. LikeRalph and others among us, Derekhas profited by computer technol-ogy, and uses it in creating his com-positions.

Bart Kosko

Born in 1960, Bart is a multi-talented cryonicist who has distin-guished himself in several rather var-ied fields. He is an internationallyrecognized authority in the highlyintellectual discipline of fuzzy logic.That’s his profession, and it is im-pressive enough — but he has otherinterests too. He holds degrees inphilosophy, mathematics, and eco-nomics, as well as a Ph.D. in electri-cal engineering. He is a prolific sci-ence fiction writer. He holds a blackbelt in karate. And of course, he’swritten music, including three sym-phonies.

Bart had a tough childhood. Hishouse burned when he was 10, andthree months later his father died ina car accident. The family wasfinanically strapped, and soon splitup. Bart experimented with drugs,

but after a bad LSD trip at age 14 herenounced both chemicals and rockmusic. Bart took up the mandolin,the violin, and the piano, and beganclassical music studies at a local col-lege. Comparing a printed score withthe actual sounds of a compositionaroused his interest in symbolic rep-resentation of information.

At 17 he won a young compos-ers’ contest for his “Second StringQuartet in A Major.” That, plus anorchestral suite, earned him a fullmusical scholarship and allowed himto “pole vault out of Kansas,” wherehe lived, to the University of South-ern California (USC). However, atUSC he became dissatisfied with theemphasis on atonal music and even-tually gravitated to mathematicalsubjects: math itself, computer sci-ence, economics, and the philoso-phy of science.

“Both science and art map expe-rience to symbols,” he says. “Sci-ence symbols reveal the structure ofthe world. Art symbols add struc-ture to the world. Music is the soundof math.” But according to his in-terview in the IEEE Spectrum (Feb.1996), he has mostly stopped com-posing. “The hardest thing to do isto write a new tune. It’s harder thancoming up with a scientific conjec-ture or a logical proof. I now keeponly musical notebooks.”

But this seems unlikely to lastforever, if all goes as it should. Barthas made cryonics arrangements(with Alcor, it turns out), and looksforward to a more-than-human fu-ture. “Biology is not destiny. It wasnever more than a tendency. It wasjust nature’s first quick and dirtyway to compute with meat.” Bart’shopes center on computational hard-ware that will not only replace ourfragile brain tissue but greatly im-prove our powers.


Mark and Judy Muhlestein

These two (formerly of Tucson,now relocated to Northern Califor-nia) have been very active in Alcorover the past several years. Theyalso have a large family betweenthem, and have used this to advan-tage in TV interviews. Signing upyour children as well as yourself isindeed a most noble way to say “Icare.”

In music, they are both confess-edly the rankest of amateurs, withno great knowledge or scoring tal-ent. (Judy has said that her earlymusical training was “limited toturning on the radio.”) But with thehelp of the computer, they have donesome intricate and sometimes beau-tiful composing, and had fun in theprocess — always a great motive!

Final Thoughts

While there are probably no“Mozarts” on this list, we see thatmusical creativity is no stranger tocryonics. In general, we cryonicistslike to use our minds creatively, andour current creative abilities — lim-

ited though they may be — haveprovided us with a glimpse of won-derful things to come. The prospectof grasping these possibilities andfulfilling our creative potential pro-vides many of us with a powerfulmotivation for reaching the future!

Acknowledgments and Sources:

Most of the above is based onpersonal interviews with the peoplereported, and I thank all these peoplefor their willingness and generosityin furnishing information, as well aspermission to reprint copyrighted

material. Bart Kosko sent me an in-terview published in the “profile”column of the IEEE Spectrum, Feb.1996, pp. 58-62. Bob Ettinger’s songis from the Sep. 1970 Outlook, andhis photo is from Cryonics Reports,May, 1967. I also thank MikhailSoloviev in St. Petersburg, Russia,for researching Ettinger’s relativeEugene Plotnikov and translatingand sending the information hefound in the Musical Encyclopedia(Musykalnaya Entsiklopedia), Mos-cow, (ed. Yu.V.Keldysh), vol. 4,1978.


The Donaldson Perspective by Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D.

Not long ago Paul Wakfer de-cided to distance the Prome-

theus Project from cryonics, if onlya little bit, by emphasizing its aimof “suspended animation.” In doingso, he may be making a very smartmove, which will in the end lead tomany more cryonicists than any planfor direct recruitment.

I say this because, in practicalterms, advocacy of any form of sus-pended animation must lead logi-cally to advocacy of cryonics. Myown conversion to cryonics, back inthe early 1970’s, began not withEttinger’s Prospect of Immortalitybut with a suggestion from HermanKahn’s book The Year 2000 that by2000, suspended animation wouldbe available “as a form of forwardtime travel.” Certainly, once I startedlooking I quickly found Ettinger’sbook, but that’s not how my interestbegan.

Here is the reasoning which ledme to cryonics, and may still leadmany others. First of all, many sci-ence fiction books and films use sus-pended animation. Almost always,the intrepid spaceman/woman awak-ens from their suspended animation

Suspended Animation Cryonics

fully competent, ready to fight offwhatever villainous alien presentsitself. As a practical matter, how-ever, the earliest forms of suspendedanimation will very likely require along period of recovery before thesuspendee becomes fully competentagain.

So then: exactly what use wouldsuch a form of suspended animationhave? We all know: it might be usedto transport patients sick with somecurrently incurable disease to a timeat which doctors knew how to curetheir disease and make them wholeagain. Many NON-cryonicists wouldprobably agree with such a use. Yetthis statement raises many questionsthat reflexive advocates may nothave asked.

1. Suppose we were to put pa-tients into suspended animation fora future cure. Just how long shouldthey remain waiting in that condi-tion? If a cure does not come in 10years, do we keep them suspendedfor another 10? After what length oftime should we remove them fromsuspension?

Any standard decision to removesomeone from suspension, say, af-ter 20 years (or even after 100),raises the risk of depositing a sick,confused patient into a future worldhe does not understand, with no rela-tives and no help of any kind. I don’tknow how any GOVERNMENTmight answer this question, but thekindest answer is quite simple. Any-one put into suspended animationshould remain there INDEFI-NITELY until a cure for his condi-tion is found.

2. Suppose that we accept in-definite suspended animation forpatients who choose it as a means toseek out a cure for their disease.Just what, then, is to be considered adisease?

All those who believe that ourpresent notions of disease and healthwill remain constant into the indefi-nite future may now go to the backof the class. Even a small amount ofreading in the history of medicine

Continued on page 46


Hostby Peter James, Villard Books (Random House), 1995.

Reviewed by H. Keith Henson

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process which goes on in the sec-onds to milliseconds before we speakseems to be doing the same thing —starting from jumbled memory noisenot unlike the confusion we aresometimes aware of in dreams. Thispre-speaking mental activity can beseen as a Darwinian process withstyle and grammar rules being usedto select from variations. This pro-cess, though not the actual mecha-nism, was described in one ofCalvin’s earlier books, Ascent ofMind.

What Calvin has done in Cere-bral Code is to propose a way thebrain substrate of the cerebral cor-tex might support a Darwinian pro-cess. He starts with the nerve bundlesof the cortex and their interconnec-tions. The bundles are about 0.03mm in diameter and contain about ahundred cells. The bundles cross-excite, not their neighbors, but otherbundles about 0.5 mm away. (Theytend to inhibit closer neighbors.)

So, when a pair of bundles 0.5mm apart start firing in a synchro-nous temporal pattern, besides cross-exciting each other, they both excitethe bundles at a radius of 0.5 mm

from where each one intersects. Theadditional entrained bundles furtherexcite ones on the 60 degree (hex-agonal) pattern, resulting in spread-ing of the firing pattern. Calvinmakes the case that these spatio-tem-poral firing patterns encode ourthoughts, and that spatial propensityto fire encodes memories.

Calvin sees errors, boundaries,long distance inter-brain connectionsand competition for area as the en-vironment of a full scale Darwinianselection process. When “enough”of the cortex is “singing the sametune,” we speak a completed sen-tence or move in some coordinatedway. Calvin’s proposals on howbrains work might be wrong, (hedoesn’t claim certainty) but his workhas no obvious holes from the grosslevel of what we know about brains.

I won’t tell you that this is aneasy book to absorb. In some waysit reminded me of Marvin Minsky’sSociety of Mind . But then youwouldn’t expect ease from a seriouseffort to bridge the gap betweenbrain and mind. While it was writ-

Why would a book about theway brains are organized be

of great interest to cryonicists? Thepoint of cryonics is to get from wherethe breakdown of our bodies will nolonger support our brains to a futureable to reconstruct and restart them.The difficulty is that we don’t knowmuch detail about how brains work,or exactly how and where ourmemories and personalities arecoded into the structure of our brains.Calvin’s new book goes a long waytoward offering a model of howminds are implemented in the topmillimeters of the cerebral cortex.

William Calvin is well knownfor provocative theories — theorieswhich are slowly becoming ac-cepted. One of his previous oneswas that our large brains evolved tocoordinate ever more accuratethrowing, as humans came to oc-cupy a “projectile hunter” niche.Later, these temporal sequencerbrain mechanisms (evolved to coor-dinate throwing) might have cometo be used for speaking.

Just as I write down sentencesand edit them through several cyclesfor grammar and style, the mental

The Cerebral Code:Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind

by William H. Calvin, MIT Press 1996

(The whole book can be found at http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/bk9.html.)



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Reviewed by Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D.

How Others See Immortality:

Welcome Chaos by Kate Wilhelm, 1985

Eternity by Mack Reynolds and Dean Ing, 1983

To Live Forever by Jack Vance, 1956

ment learns of this treatment. Andso, they decide to keep it secret.

As time passes, other scientistscome close to discovering the samesecret. Frankl and his assistant tellthese scientists just what will hap-pen, and get them to join in the si-lence. Gradually a cabal of immor-tal, indestructible scientists devel-ops, carefully guarding against dis-covery of their treatment. The im-mediate story involves two events:in Russia (this book was written dur-ing the Cold War) the treatment isdiscovered separately; in the US, theFBI has tracked some of these im-mortal scientists and followed themabout, suspecting unknown crimes.As part of this, a writer named LyleTaney is also inducted into thegroup. Eventually the Russian sci-entists who have found the samedrug contact this group; most ofthem are held secretly by their gov-ernment. The Russians also explaintheir solution to the problem of ste-rility (yoga exercises!).

The scientists decide to distrib-ute their treatment in little packagesexplaining the risk, listing the ben-efits, and pointing out that contact

From time to time, science fic-tion authors decide to bring some

form of immortality into the pic-ture. The three novels above all havesome form of immortality as basicto their plots, and they all deal withit differently, though with somecommon features.

In Kate Wilhelm’s novel, Wel-come Chaos, a scientist named SaulFrankl discovers an immortalitytreatment during Nazi times. Thetreatment infects those who take it,so that any contact with blood fromsomeone treated spreads the infec-tion. This initial version of Frankl’streatment immunizes people not onlyagainst aging but against all diseasesand many kinds of physical injury(including radiation damage). How-ever, the treatment has two big prob-lems: those who take it become ster-ile, and worst of all, when someonefirst receives this treatment he be-comes very ill. Fifty percent of thosewho receive it die. Frankl and hisassistant flee to Switzerland. Thethought of overpopulation stronglyinfluences them, but they also havenightmarish notions of what mighthappen if Hitler or ANY govern-

with blood of someone made im-mortal and indestructible also trans-fers these treatments to the contactee.This program causes much socialdisruption on both sides of the IronCurtain, but the world is saved fromnuclear war. The title comes fromcode words the group uses for sig-naling delivery of their immortalitytreatment packages.

The second novel, Eternity, byMack Reynolds and Dean Ing, pre-sents a different situation. A groupof naturally unaging people existunknown to present science. The old-est of these remembers Cro-Magnontimes. They hide this trait from oth-ers because they (justifiably) fearpersecution. One of them, AlexGermain, until then quite alone, findsa group of the others in Mexico.

At the same time, a group of“bad guys” have not only discov-ered the existence of immortals, buthave also found some way to bringimmortality to any mortal. However,rather than distribute this artificialimmortality freely, they want to keepit for themselves and eliminate thosenaturally immortal as rivals. (Thesepeople aren’t clearly affiliated with


any government.) Although the badguys kill a few natural immortals,they move slowly enough for thenatural group to disperse over theEarth and disappear. Alex finds thefirst real love of his life in one ofthese immortals, who was formerlyNefertiti. Reynolds and Ing framesections of this book with quota-tions from various people who haveraised the issue of immortality, SaulKent among them.

The novel by Jack Vance, ToLive Forever, differs from the othertwo in one major way: unlike theothers, it happens thousands of yearsfrom now, after a Dark Age broughton by the discovery of immortalityand the overpopulation that results.The only city-state remaining tech-nologically advanced is Clarges ,where the “problem” of immortalityis solved by setting up differentranks, into which everyone may en-roll: Brood, Wedge, Third, Verge,and Amaranth. Each rank adds moreyears to a citizen’s life, until finallya few reach Amaranth and virtualimmortality. To reach a higher rank,one must accomplish something ofadvantage to society, in science, art,or other kinds of achievement. Thisis called striving, and its result isslope. If you do not achieve Ama-ranth in a given time, however, youare visited by the Assassins, whotake you out and kill you. Thosewho don’t enroll in this system growold and die naturally; they are calledglarks, a contraction of Gay Larks.Only one activity offers guaranteedslope: exploration of space.

In the context of the story welearn a good deal about this societyand its contradictions (which in ex-aggerated form mirror those of ourown society; the plot of the storyrequires those present to respond notas we would but with the beliefs and

feelings of Clarges). Assassins alsoprovide the police force, under theguide of the “Actuarian,” which usesa vast computer to assess how manyenrolled citizens must die each day.To murder is the vilest of sins. Mur-derers are labeled as “monsters.” Thepornography of Clarges deals withdeath, not with sex.

Amaranths preserve themselvesfrom destruction of their bodies bymaintaining, in carefully protectedplaces, five unconscious copies ofthemselves. By visiting these copiesperiodically, they ensure that thecopies’ memories will match theirown. If an Amaranth encounters de-struction, his copy replaces him.Except for glarks, everyone thinksconstantly of how they can increasetheir slope and achieve a higherclass. Stress from these thoughtsleads to a special kind of mentalbreakdown in which the victim be-comes catatonic, with occasionalbouts of homicidal mania. Some citi-zens of Clarges, unconsciously feel-ing the contradictions behind theirsociety, meet at night as“Whitherers”; they have no answer,but merely a question: whither?

Gavin Waylock, just after reach-ing Amaranth level, causes the“death” of another Amaranth by ac-cident. (Naturally the Amaranth hekilled returns to life in the form of acopy.) Waylock runs away, fakeshis own death, and takes on anotheridentity to hide from the Assassins.He supports himself by working inCarneval, a place with many gamesand diversions to which citizens ofClarges go to forget their strivings,if only for a few hours. Waylockplans to remain hiding in Carnevaluntil the legal system declares himofficially dead, after which he willenroll as Brood and try once moreto reach Amaranth. Just before that

time, however, he takes up brieflywith another Amaranth, a womanwho suspects his identity. Waylockmust kill this Amaranth, too. Aswith his first murder victim, she re-vives but does not clearly rememberher time with him (this informationis not preserved in her copy, whichremembers only up to the last ses-sion with her).

Still, the resurrected Amaranthwoman has suspicions. WhenWaylock re-enrolls as Brood, shepursues him constantly, blocking allhis attempts to strive legally. In or-der to save himself, Waylock bringsdown the entire society, awakeningthe stored copies of all Amaranth,forcing the Assassins to kill morecitizens to make room. TheActuarian and the Assassins aremobbed and destroyed. The samemob then searches for Waylock asthe man who has brought down theirworld. The book ends withWaylock’s speech to the mob, justbefore he goes off to space for newworlds: everyone should have im-mortality, so long as they make aplace for themselves, in space orelsewhere. Vance makes quite plainone major point of his story: “theevents [mobs storming theActuarian, killing Assassins] ... rep-resented a culmination to the Indus-trial Revolution, to the defeat of dis-ease in the 20th Century, ... to thereach of Clarges itself...”

All three of these books tell ussomething about attitudes toward im-mortality, which in each case bothpowerfully attracts and powerfullyrepels. In Welcome Chaos, immor-tality brings chaos, social disruption,and a 50% risk of death. In Eternity,immortality serves as the ultimateelitism; even the discovery of artifi-



Hostby Peter James, Villard Books (Random House), 1995.

Reviewed by Brian Shock

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Design for Dyingby Timothy Leary with R.U. Sirius ,HarperEdge 1997

Let’s dispense with the basics.First, I can sum up the message

of Design for Dying in one sen-tence: “Don’t let the Establishmentdictate how you die.” What elsewould you expect from a man whonever let the Establishment dictateanything he did?

Next, drawing on a protractedstring of hints in Design for Dying,I can tell you why Timothy Learydecided to forego cryonic suspen-sion: Cryonics had become onemore form of Establishment for him.Remember Leary’s public statementthat he didn’t wish to reawaken fromsuspension in fifty years and findhimself surrounded by white-coatedmen with clipboards? This type ofimage — the humorless, impersonal,mass-production, dictatorial medi-cal/religious/legal Establishment —recurs again and again in Design.In the end, I believe that TimothyLeary was offering CryoCare andBioPreservation a compliment longdesired by the cryonics community— they were too well formed, tooacceptable, too mainstream.

In refusing cryonic suspension,Timothy Leary was acting far moreconsistently than if he had allowed

anyone to freeze him.Now, let’s talk about the con-

tents of Design, and why I feel youshould or should not read it.

If you’re looking for scientificinformation, forget it. Leary usedpseudo-scientific jargon as bothsledgehammer and whoopie cush-ion; his “Leary Eight-Circuit,Twenty-four-Stage Theory” of mu-tation and evolution is high silliness.He probably would have admittedas much, if doing so served his mo-mentary purpose.

If you’re looking for biography,you will find only tantalizing bitsand pieces. In particular I was in-trigued by his chapter on “Psychol-ogy,” in which he suggests (appar-ently from personal experience as apsychologist) that post-World WarII psychotherapy owes its form anddirection to the OSS and CIA.

If you’re looking for insight, ajudicious search just might revealsome. In his chapter “One Last Ta-boo for the Road,” he offers a verycolloquial outline of what might be“Terror Management Theory,” asdefined by Sheldon Solomon, JeffGreenberg and Tom Pyszczynski(espoused on CryoNet by Tim Free-

man, et al).If you seek a way to convey the

idea of cryonics to your New Agefriends, you may have hit the jack-pot. Design begins with New Agetechno-mysticism, seamlessly leadsup to cryonics and nanotechnology,treats both with relatively deadpanfactuality, and never for a momentrepudiates their usefulness.

And if you wish to know theimpact that Timothy Leary had onthose around him, this is definitelyyour book. The last 60 pages con-tain nothing but loving anecdotesfrom Leary’s friends and acquain-tances. The very fact of Design is atestament to the lives that Learytouched.

Timothy Leary was an icono-clast in a rapidly evolving age whenmoss-covered idols needed razingand green ideas needed to emerge.If we as cryonicists extract anythingfrom his last work, I hope it teachesus to maintain our sense of humorin the times ahead, when social andscientific “(r)evolution” may occurfaster than ever before.


Early Bird “Thank You For Getting Us Started” Special Rate...received by December 1, 1997...$97

Regular Rate...received by March 3, 1998...$149

Late Rate...received by April 2, 1998...$179

Door Rate......$195

Individual Speaker/Panel...$25 Saturday Awards Luncheon...$20 Saturday Banquet...$36Ala Carte:

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REGISTRATION

Mail registration and payment to:1998 Alcor Conference, 7895 E. Acoma Dr., Ste. 110, Scottsdale, AZ 85260

Please make check payable to Alcor Foundation. Your check is your receiptPlease pick up your tickets at the conference. Thank You!

Alcor Third Annual Cryonics Conference

Featuring...From Alcor: Gregory Benford (tbc), Fred & Linda Chamberlain, Bart Kosko (tbc), Ralph

Merkle, Marvin Minsky (tbc), Michael CloudFrom The Venturists: Dave Pizer; From BioTime: Dr. Paul Segall, Hal Sternberg

From Cryonics Institute: Robert Ettinger

April 3 - April 5, 1998 Scottsdale/Phoenix, Arizona

For: Anyone interested in cryonics technology and communityInformation: (602) 922-9013 (800) 367-2228 (970) 484-8184

When: April 3 - April 5, 1998. Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday.

Where: The Holiday Inn Airport Select, near Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. 4300 E. Washington,Phoenix, AZ 85034. (602) 273-7778

Lodging: $99/night/single or double room. Fifty rooms are being held through March 4, 1998.For additional information, contact the Chamber of Commerce in Scottsdale at(602) 945-8481 or in Phoenix at (602) 254-5521.

Cost: Full package includes all speakers and materials, Saturday awards luncheon and Saturdayfund-raising banquet.


Watch for future program developments as Alcor’s Third Annual Cryonics Conference approaches.

Sunday, April 5, 1998

8:45-9:30 am Bus to Alcor Facility9:30-11:15 am Alcor Tour and Sign-up Party11:15-11:45 am Bus returns to Conference Site11:45 am-1:15 pm lunch break1:15-2:15 pm Paul Segall and Hal Sternberg2:15-2:45 pm break2:45-3:15 pm Dave Pizer “A Retirement Community and Safe Storage”3:15-3:30 pm break3:30-4:30 pm Robert Ettinger4:30-5:00 pm wrap-up

Friday, April 3, 1998

7:00-8:00 pm registration, reception8:00-10:00 pm welcome: Merkle Mode Desert Contest

Gregory Benford (tbc) “Cryonics in Science Fiction”

P R O G R A M

Saturday, April 4, 1998

9:00-9:30 am Introduction9:30-10:30 am Fred & Linda Chamberlain “Alcor Research Update”10:30-11:00 am break11:00-12:00 Ralph Merkle “Nanotechnology Update

and Molecular Repair of the Brain”12:00-12:15 break12:15-1:30 pm awards luncheon1:30-2:30 pm Marvin Minsky (tbc)2:30-3:00 pm break3:00-4:00 pm panel “What’s in It for Me?”4:00-4:30 pm break4:30-5:30 Michael Cloud “How to Make the Idea of Cryonics Infectious”5:30-700 pm break7:00-7:30 pm reception with no host bar7:30-11:00 pm banquet and fund raiser

Bart Kosko (tbc)


shows that over time our civiliza-tion has changed its ideas of whatconstitutes a “disease.” Indefinite-term suspended animation will in-evitably modify these ideas further.People might seek suspended ani-mation — or have it forced on them— even though today’s medicinewould not consider their condition atrue illness.

If we look around us, we can seethe boundaries between disease andhealth moving constantly. Is addic-tion to tobacco a disease? Not longago many would have claimed suchaddiction did not exist. What aboutthose who molest children or com-mit violent crimes? With a betterunderstanding of how our brainswork, we can see how physical con-ditions can turn some normal peopleinto homicidal maniacs. For thatmatter, we now see a gradual move-ment of medical opinion to the no-tion that OLD AGE is a disease.

2A. Is death itself a “disease”?

In this case, many would un-thinkingly answer NO. Yet as ournotion of “disease” has changed overtime, so too has our notion of“death.” When it became clear tomedicine that at least some peoplemight be revived after both heart-beat and breathing had stopped, theold tests for death lost their absolutevalidity. Committees of physicianshad to create a new definition fordeath, but soon this one too becameriddled with questions. Under thebest available treatment, some“dead” patients have been revivedeven though their “deaths” lastedminutes past the accepted limit (andthese were patients who were NOT

at low temperatures and had NOTtaken barbiturates).

Instead of a simple end to life,death begins to sound more like apotentially correctable condition.Since new treatments emerge everyday, who could then say that a treat-ment might not arrive for a particu-lar form of death?

3. Shall we apply suspended ani-mation to patients almost regardlessof how much damage they have sus-tained? Even if our methods for sus-pended animation are faulty andcause damage themselves, should weapply these methods to most of thosenow considered “dead”?

Given that we’ve accepted in-definite-term suspended animation,and given that we’ve accepted thenotions of DISEASE and DEATHwill continue to change with time, itis irrational not to answer YES toall these questions. Those peoplewho agree are cryonicists, even ifthey may not yet know it.

The Donaldson Perspective,Continued from page 39

cial immortality leads one group (thebaddies) to try restricting it to them-selves. In To Live Forever, the city-state Clarges shows both the attrac-tion and the repulsion. The Assas-sins of Clarges kill to prevent over-population, and yet murder by any-one else is a monstrous sin. GavinWaylock “kills” two Amaranths,who promptly revive. The caste sys-tem of Clarges itself follows the ideaof immortality for only a select few.

Why must immortality be so re-stricted? It’s not just a problem ofoverpopulation.

One reason may be that much ofour society depends implicitly onaging and death. If these were abol-ished for everyone, many thingsmust change. The functioning ofmajor offices in our current societydepends on the death or retirementof those holding them; an immortalsociety would have to find other so-lutions for the lifetime tenure of col-lege professors, Supreme Court jus-tices, and the like. Historical poetryand literature, which assume somany things about relations betweenold and young, would have little in-terest for immortals. Even the ideaof authority based on age wouldfounder in a society where ancientsand youths appear identically young.(Imagine a 25-year-old Pope!)

As cryonicists, we should facethis problem directly: if suspended,we will probably awaken in a soci-ety with NO organization based onage. We will have to judge peopleby other criteria.

Donaldson Fiction Review, Continued from page 42

ten mainly for neuroscientists, thereis a serious effort to include enoughbackground for an educated laymanto understand what is going on. Italso helps that a lot of the book usesanalogy — which Minsky says isthe primary way we extend knowl-edge. In any case, you can sampleit, or even read the whole book onthe Web. I read it off the screen, andordered a copy before I was halfway through.

Henson Non-Fiction Review, Continued from page 40


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Amara Graps interviews Dr. FiorellaTerenzi; The Heat Death of Tim Leary;What’s Wrong with “CyberspaceIndepenence?”; Anti-Aging andNanotechnology conference reports; andmuch more. 68pp, $5; $17 for one-year(4 issue) sub, $32 for 2 years, fromExtropy Institute, 13428 Maxella Avenue,#273, Marina del Rey, CA 90292. [email protected]

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If you had the pleasure of attend-ing Extro 3 (August 9-10, San Jose,CA), you may have heard EricDrexler’s speech on “Conservatism”at the banquet on Saturday night.For those of you who didn’t, Dr.Drexler offered some simple yetcogent reasoning: Since medicalscience continues to advance, a“conservative” thinker does not as-sume that any current medicalcondition will remain permanentlyincurable. When faced with deathfrom aging or illness, such an in-dividual would “conserve” him-self in the best manner available,until technology offered suitable

treatments. [Please forgive the clumsyparaphrasing, Eric. --ed.] So compel-ling did Dr. Drexler find this reasoning,he announced publicly that he had madethis type of conservative arrangementfor himself.

But then most of you probablyalready guessed that Eric Drexler, au-thor of Engines of Creation, was anAlcor suspension member.

The next day of Extro 3, after apanel featuring Artificial Intelligence

theorist Marvin Minsky, Dr.Drexler again made a speech: “Ihave long wondered how I wouldexplain the absence of the headof my dissertation committee topeople in the future. Now, I won’thave to do so.” He then pre-sented Dr. Minsky with a newAlcor bracelet and necktag set,officially initiating him as an Alcorsuspension member.

If other brilliant minds like Drexler and Minsky choose cryonics, shouldn’t you? Sign up with the cryonics organization of your choice today!


Cryobiology and the Feasibility of CryonicsThe Molecular Repair of the Brain, by Ralph Merkle, Ph.D. ............................................................................................. $ 3.00Will Cryonics Work? by Steve Harris, M.D, plus Why Cryonics Probably Will Work, by Michael Perry, Ph.D. ...... $ 3.50Freezing of Living Cells, Mechanisms and Implications, by Peter Mazur, Ph.D. ......................................................... $ 2.50“Cryobiology and the Feasibility of Cryonics Package” (all 4 of the above articles) ................................................. $ 7.50

NanotechnologyThere’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, by Richard P. Feynman, Ph.D. ........................................................................ $ 1.50Molecular Technology and Cell Repair Machines, by K. Eric Drexler, Ph.D. ............................................................... $ 2.00Nanotechnology, by Brian Wowk .......................................................................................................................................... $ 2.50Cell Repair Technology, by Brian Wowk ............................................................................................................................. $ 2.50“Nanotechnology Package” (all 4 of the above articles) .................................................................................................. $ 7.00

Memory, Identity, and the BrainThe Terminus of the Self, by Max More............................................................................................................................... $ 3.00A Commented Bibliography on Brain and Memory, by Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D. .................................................... $ 2.00Isn’t That You Behind Those Foster Grants?, by David Krieger ..................................................................................... $ 1.50Neurosuspension: Head First Into the Future, by Steve Bridge ..................................................................................... $ 1.00

Cryonic Suspension ReportsHer Blue Eyes Will Sparkle, by Linda Chamberlain ...........................................................................................................$ 2.00A Well-Loved Man, by Mary Margaret Glennie ..................................................................................................................$ 2.00

Alcor Legal HistoryOur Finest Hours: Notes on the Dora Kent Crisis, by R. Michael Perry, Ph.D. .............................................................$ 2.50Motion for Award of Attorneys’ Fees, by David Epstein ...................................................................................................$ 2.50

GeneralElements of a Cryonics Patient Transport, by Tanya Jones ........................................................................................... $ 2.00Frozen Souls: Can a Religious Person Choose Cryonics?, by Steve Bridge ............................................................. $ 1.50Lovecraft, Scientific Horror, Alienation, and Cryonics, by Steve Harris, M.D. ............................................................ $ 1.50Cryonics in Popular Culture, by Steve Neal ....................................................................................................................... $ 2.00“Why We Are Cryonicists” and “Alcor: The Origin of Our Name” ................................................................................... FreeWhy Cryonics Can Work (brochure) ..................................................................................................................................... $ 0.75Cryonics and Christianity (brochure) .................................................................................................................................... $ 0.75

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Books & MediaCryonics: Reaching For Tomorrow ................................$12 .95Engines of Creation, by Eric Drexler .............................$10 .95The Prospect of Immortality, by R. Ettinger .................$11 .00The 120-Year Diet, by Roy Walford ...............................$ 5.95Chiller, fiction by Sterling Blake .....................................$ 5.95Becoming Immortal, by Wes DuCharme ......................$20 .00Tech Heaven, by Linda Nagata .....................................$ 4.99Videotape : Immortality on Ice (Discovery Channel)......$22.00Videotape: 1997 ACT Festival (Merkle/Muhlestein)........$10.00

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