CryoNet #33076 - #33078

CryoNet - Fri 26 Nov 2010

    #33076: Re: Fear of death [John de Rivaz]
    #33077: cryonics needs to grow its way out of insolvency, and that re... [un person]
    #33078: Cryoprotection properties of salts of organic acids [oberon]

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Message #33076
From: "John de Rivaz" <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Fear of death
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2010 11:55:54 -0000

I would certainly join those who deny that cryonics avoids the fear of 
death.

A totally child like faith in religion, as regarded by writers of The Bible 
as being highly virtuous, will avoid the fear of death if totally genuine. 
So if the sole aim is to avoid the fear of death, rather than avoid death 
itself, the Pope and his colleagues win hands down.

Coincidentally this point is made in a letter to the current issue of New 
Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827870.800-blithe-spirit.html
The writer of this letter lives in British Columbia.

Incidentally I regard Dr Stodolsky's excellent analysis of the motives 
behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation horribly convincing. Gates 
comes from a legal background and is also obviously highly intelligent. He 
wrote the first examples of the software that the world runs on today. It is 
just a shame that he does not "see" cryonics, and has probably never even 
considered it for a moment.

Or maybe he has considered it and rejected it for reasons we less 
intelligent people cannot see.

Only the future will tell! The interesting similarity between cryonics and 
religion is that both have ideas that exist outside people. All those that 
started religions are dead yet their religions survive as ideas. Even if all 
those cryopreserved are killed as a result of the institutions financially 
raping the cryonics service providers for their money, ('long march through 
the institutions') the future could still tell whether those people could 
have been revived if they had remained cryopreserved long enough. As a 
result individual members of those institutions may not be remembered as 
favourably as they would have liked.

-- 
Sincerely, John de Rivaz:  http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including
Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley
Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy,  Nomad .. and
more

----- Original Message ----- 
From: David Stodolsky <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, November 25, 2010 10:00 AM
Subject: CryoNet #33072 - #33075

<del>
> *Now* you've got the beginnings of a movement.  People want
> this.  Everyone's afraid of death.

Many will deny this. And we compete head on with the Pope in selling a 
solution to this fear.
<del> 

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Message #33077
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:31:42 -0800 (PST)
From: un person <[email protected]>
Subject: cryonics needs to grow its way out of insolvency, and that re...

cryonics needs to grow its way out of insolvency, and that requires a paradigm shift---a paradigm shift that cannot be accepted by the core cryonicists, apparently. 

The fact is that the way that cryonics is currently sold, it is only seen as valid by a tiny sliver of a fraction of the population. Hence the longterm financial problems that charles platt has pointed out. Now, I suspect that platt is really most deeply concerned about how rich cryonicists will have to bail out the rest of us. Platt has returned to this topic regularly over the past few years. Maybe he is being paid to do so by some rich cryos. Or maybe he came into some money and does not want to have to spend it bailing out alcor. Whatever.

The fact remains that only a tiny sliver of a fraction of the populace is psychologically eligible to even objectively evaluate cryonics. This has nothing to do with logic. 

Homo sapiens is not at his core a rational animal, not when it comes to ideas that are outside the culture and deal with taboo areas like death.

And people are not going to change anytime soon. The culture is not going to change anytime soon.
No singularity is going to deus ex machina cryonics out of its current moribund state. Not in our lifetime.

Cryonics is many decades away from the technical breakthroughs that will allow cryonics to do a "brute force" bootstrap and sell to the general public by reviving animals. This is many decades away. 

But cryonics is in the meantime in serious trouble unless the rich cryos support us. I think they should and they possibly will be able to do that.

My solution is for us activists to meld religion with cryonics. Outside of the cryonics organizations themselves. Go grassroots in protestant churches. As I and others have pointed out, there are a number of verses in the Bible that validate cryonics. Heck, these verses arguably DEMAND cryonics.

We could tap into a potential market that is orders of magnitude larger than the current group that sees cryonics as a valid option.

But like myself, most cryos are atheists. And many of them despise religion as I once did. If we are going to tap into the american mainstream and grow cryonics radically, we are going to have to PREACH cryonics using the Bible.

Are you enough of an egghead to realize and overcome your own prejudices? Stop fighting religion and start using religion.

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Message #33078
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2010 18:12:55 -0800 (PST)
From: [email protected]
Subject: Cryoprotection properties of salts of organic acids

Snip>
"When crystals are grown from solutions containing a sufficient concentration of organic acid salts no additional cryoprotection is needed as the crystals can safely be frozen directly from the crystallizing buffers."

Acta Crystallogr D Biol Crystallogr. 2010 Jul;66(Pt 7):789-96. Epub 2010 Jun 19.
Cryoprotection properties of salts of organic acids: a case study for a tetragonal crystal of HEW lysozyme.
Bujacz G, Wrzesniewska B, Bujacz A. Institute of Technical Biochemistry, Technical University of Lodz, Poland.
Abstract
    Currently, the great majority of the data that are used for solving macromolecular structures by X-ray crystallography are collected at cryogenic temperatures. Selection of a suitable cryoprotectant, which ensures crystal stability at low temperatures, is critical for the success of a particular diffraction experiment. The effectiveness of salts of organic acids as potential cryoprotective agents is presented in the following work. Sodium formate, acetate, malonate and citrate were tested, as were sodium potassium tartrate and acetate in the form of potassium and ammonium salts. For each salt investigated, the minimal concentration that was required for successful cryoprotection was determined over the pH range 4.5-9.5. The cryoprotective ability of these organic salts depends upon the
  number of carboxylic groups; the lowest concentration required for cryoprotection was observed at neutral pH. Case-study experiments conducted using the tetragonal form of hen egg-white lys
 ozyme (HEWL) confirmed that salts of organic acids can successfully act as cryoprotective agents of protein crystals grown from high concentrations of inorganic salts. When crystals are grown from solutions containing a sufficient concentration of organic acid salts no additional cryoprotection is needed as the crystals can safely be frozen directly from the crystallizing buffers.
PMID: 20606259

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