CryoNet #33126 - #33127

CryoNet - Thu 23 Dec 2010

    #33126: a cryonics economics-dropout tells his story online [un person]
    #33127: Achievements [Ettinger]

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Message #33126
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:36:17 -0800 (PST)
From: un person <[email protected]>
Subject: a cryonics economics-dropout tells his story online

Good stuff!
http://www.network54.com/Forum/672374/message/1292994299/LATER+YEARS+-+not+the+same+as+earlier+years.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=33126

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Message #33127
From: [email protected]
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:33:44 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Achievements

A prime rule of political discussion is not to let the opposition set  the 
agenda. Without being dishonest, keep the focus on the positive. As time and 
 energy permit, and hoping others will help out, I intend to point out to  
newcomers, and remind old timers, of our very considerable achievements, in  
particular at the Cryonics Institute (CI) and Alcor. Segments will vary in 
topic  and there will be some repetition, which is always necessary.
 
Certainly the cryonics movement is still small, and there have been many  
failures and errors, beginning with my initial unrealistic optimism about the 
 rate of growth and acceptance. Nevertheless, growth continues--members and 
 patients--and at improved rates in relatively recent years. World wide, 
but  mostly at CI and Alcor, members number roughly 2,000 and patients 212. 
More  importantly, many of us now have relatives and friends in cryostasis, 
with whom  we hope one day to be reunited, a very big plus. 
 
Today let's put the spotlight on improvements in procedures at CI and  
Alcor. In the earliest years about all we could do was read the cryobiological  
literature and attempt, with available personnel and resources, to 
approximate  for our patients the procedures that seemed to work best. There was 
necessarily  a lot of guesswork, since the literature did not deal with human 
bodies or  brains, but there were quite a few reports in the journals about 
the effects on  mammals of post mortem warm ischemia and related matters. 
(Some of those  reports, which I'll cite by and by, provide reason for a degree 
of  optimism.)
 
The main thing I want to say or reiterate today is that, both at CI and  
Alcor, there has always been a keen awareness of the need for experimental  
verification of the efficacy of our procedures. Obtaining the breadth and 
depth  of verification desired was and is a daunting job, but we tried and to 
some  extent succeeded. Alcor used light and electron microscopy to 
demonstrate that  patients or animal subjects, back when they  relied on glycerol,  
experienced much less damage than controls that were straight frozen. CI,  led 
by professional cryobiologist Dr. Yuri Pichugin, using sheep heads, rabbit  
brain pieces, and rat brain pieces, showed that our vitrification procedure 
 retained not only structure but function, as evidenced by the K/Na  
(potassium/sodium) ratio criterion, believed to be a broad marker of viability.  
Before that, using sheep heads and with the collaboration of colleagues, Dr.  
Pichugin showed that the older CI procedures using gylycerol provided 
definitely  better results than straight freezing. 
 
The problems now include application to whole brains, and  some of these 
problems, under Aschwin and Chana de wolf, are being  subsidized by the 
Immortalist Society, which shares a roof with the Cryonics  Institute. 
 
Note on animal research: CI and Dr. Pichugin have never caused experimental 
 animals to suffer. When live animals were used, mostly rats, they were  
first anaesthetized and then euthanized. 
 
Robert Ettinger 

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