[extropy-chat] transhumanist nut jobs

[Joseph Bloch]

I get the impression that "Transhumanist nut-jobs" is meant as a whole 
category in and of itself. Not that there are non-nut-job 
Transhumanists, but that all Transhumanists are nut-jobs. Kinda like 
when Rush Limbaugh refers to "environmentalist whackos".

Curious, when you consider that cryonicists have been around longer than 
Transhumanists.

I suggest we take the U.N. approach. We should send them a 
sternly-written note. And if they ignore it, we should write them yet 
another sternly-written note.

Joseph

spike wrote:

>Bad news, fellow cryonicists.  This month's issue of Wired refers to
>cryonicists as transhumanist nut-jobs.  Then the article goes on to explain,
>presumably to non-transhumanist non-nut-jobs, how this crazy idea might
>actually work:
>
>http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.html?pg=4
>
>
>Stuck Pig
>
>Mike Duggan, a veterinary surgeon, holds his gloved hands over an 8-inch
>incision in the belly of pig 78-6, a 120-pound, pink Yorkshire. He's waiting
>for a green light from Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon at Massachu-setts
>General Hospital.
>
>"Make the injury," Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash,
>fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the
>organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and
>with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It's 10:30 am. Pig
>78-6 loses a quarter of her blood within moments. Heart rate and blood
>pressure plummet. Don't worry - Alam and Duggan are going to save her.
>
>Alam goes to work on the chest, removing part of a rib to reveal the heart,
>a throbbing, shiny pink ball the size of a fist. He cuts open the aorta - an
>even more lethal injury - and blood sprays all over our scrubs. The EKG
>flatlines. The surgeons drain the remaining blood and connect tubes to the
>aorta and other vessels, filling the circulatory system with chilled
>organ-preservation fluid - a nearly frozen daiquiri of salts, sugars, and
>free-radical scavengers.
>
>Her temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit; brain activity has ceased. Alam
>checks the wall clock and asks a nurse to mark the time: 11:25 am.
>
>But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead - the common term for her state is,
>believe it or not, suspended animation. Long the domain of transhumanist
>nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical
>trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems).
>Trauma surgeons can't wait - saving people with serious wounds, like
>gunshots, is always a race against the effects of blood loss. When blood
>flow drops, toxins accumulate; just five minutes of low oxygen levels causes
>brain death.
>
>Chill a body, though, and you change the equation. Metabolism slows, oxygen
>demand dives, and the time available to treat the injury stretches. "With
>the pig essentially dead," Alam says, "we've got hours to fix it and play
>around." By noon the team has stitched up the arteries and gone to lunch. It
>has become -routine: Alam has suspended 200 pigs for an hour each, and
>although experimental protocol calls for different levels of care for each
>pig, the ones that got optimal treatment all survived. Today he'll keep 78-6
>down for two hours.
>
>That afternoon, the team scrubs back in and starts pumping warm blood into
>78-6, watching the heart twitch and writhe like a bag of worms as it
>struggles to find a rhythm. A healthy heart should feel like a rare steak,
>Alam explains; medium or well-done -suggests muscle damage. He pokes it.
>"Medium," he says, removing clamps to let it pump more blood. If he closes
>the chest too soon and the heart tires, he won't be able to save the animal.
>
>
>A few minutes later, Alam touches the heart again. "Medium-rare," he says.
>"Looks pretty good." But he admits he's ballparking. "It's the gestalt," he
>says. "It's not in any book."
>
>Over the next hour, the surgeons stitch up 78-6. Everyone leaves except
>Alam, who perches on a stool at her side. When he removes her breathing
>tube, she breathes irregularly a few times and he leans in with a hand
>venti-lator, squeezing rhythmically and stroking her head. She quivers; her
>ear twitches.
>
>By 6 pm she's awake, draped in a blanket. Attendants roll her gurney into a
>recovery room with classical music playing on a radio and a healthy pig in
>an adjacent stall to keep her company. Pigs like that. Tests on other
>subjects - and postmortem examinations of brains - have revealed no
>cognitive damage from the -procedure, but Alam will nevertheless stick
>around until 78-6 gets back on her feet, around midnight. "She didn't look
>so great before," he says, patting the pig's side. "But she's going to make
>it." 
>
>- Bijal P. Trivedi
>
>
>
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