[extropy-chat] Biochemistry text challenges students to find biological fallacy in cryonics

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 11:40:10PM +1100, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> "Death is essentially an irreversible loss of order. On dying, 

Death is essentially a decision on part of medical personnel
based on best knowledge of the state of the art.

http://ccforum.com/inpress/cc3894/abstract

Critical Care 2005, in press      doi:10.1186/cc3894

Published 	  	31 October 2005

Abstract

Contemporary intensive care unit (ICU) medicine has complicated the issue of what constitutes death in a life support environment. Not only is the distinction between sapient life and prolongation of vital signs blurred but the concept of death itself has been made more complex. The demand for organs to facilitate transplantation promotes a strong incentive to define clinical death in a manner that most effectively supplies that demand. We consider the problem of defining death in the ICU as a function of viable organ availability for transplantation.

> cells loose their order on the molecular level by loosing their
> ion gradients, enzymatically digesting their macromolecular
> components, breaking down their membranes, etc. Thus, 

Rubbish. Some of these cryonics patients need to
be shut down by meds orelse they would come back on life
support.

> although cells and the organisms they comprise appear to
> change little on dying, the microscopic changes which occur
> are profound and cannot be reversed by simply "curing" the
> condition that caused death".

What this boils down to is "we just redefined death, and since 
we don't know how to reverse these changes in the new definition 
nobody else can and will in future".

That's a lot of implicit conditionals in that passage.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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