[ExI] [New_Cryonet] (no subject)

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from m2darwin at aol.com -----

Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:46:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: m2darwin at aol.com
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To Whom it May Concern,
 
I noticed your petition to" HM Government: Start a universal cryonics care  
program to preserve people after death," and would like to make the 
following  comments and observations.
 
First, the use of the word "death" is both confusing and a non-starter. The 
 definition of death is the irreversible loss of life. By that definition, 
"dead"  people cannot be returned to life using 
non-mystical/non-supernatural means.Iit  is for this reason that ideas like "the resurrection of the 
dead" and "reviving  the dead" are, properly, considered the province of god 
and religion. If persons  who are cryopreserved are truly dead, then they 
cannot, by definition, be  revived by any known or foreseeable technological 
means.
 
The clear implication is that people being subjected to cryopreservation  
after medico-legal death are not, in fact, dead, but rather, that the past 
and  current criteria for determining and pronouncing death are flawed and 
inaccurate  - and therefore invalid.
 
Asking the population as a whole, their government(s,), or any large  
segment of either,  to support the revival of dead people evokes  an attitude of 
disbelief and dismissal, at best, and of outrage and sacrilege at  worst. It 
is also oxymoronic on the face of it, since dead is, in fact,  dead.
 
Second, your petition puts the cart before the horse. No government or  
nation state is going to sanction subjecting living (viable) people to a 
process  that results in currently irreversible injury to the brain rendering it  
non-viable by all established medical criteria; no matter how compelling  
hypothetical scenarios for future repair may be. Thus, at a minimum, it  is 
necessary to first demonstrate that the mammalian (and human) brain is viable  
after cryopreservation using now available techniques. 
 
Current criteria for a viable brain (= a living person) are the presence of 
 integrated  electrocerebral activity; e.g., an EEG of some sort (quality  
not specified). It is not legally or practically required that the person's 
body  be intact or capable of (independent) function, since a person on a 
mechanical  ventilator, or who is undergoing extracorporeal; support or even 
hemodialysis is  not capable of remaining alive (i.e., having a functioning 
brain) absent  external technological support. By the same reasoning, a 
person with a viable  (even though injured) brain who is cryopreserved may still 
be considered alive,  even though much of their body has not survived 
cryopreservation. 
 
We are, in fact, quite close to achieving mammalian brain cryopreservation  
sufficiently good to allow for demonstration of EEG and LTP activity 
following  cryopreservation using existing vitrification technology. In several 
instances,  rabbit brains subjected to vitrification have briefly yielded 
integrated EEG  activity (Greg Fahy, personal communication, June, 2011).
 
Thus, the most rational course of action to follow is to urge/petition for  
the development of cryopreservation technology which can be shown with  
scientific rigor to at least preserve the brain well enough to satisfy 
existing,  conservative legal and medical criteria for preserving life. This is a  
trivial technological goal compared to the development of whole body, fully  
reversible human suspended animation. 
 
At The 8th Annual  Critical Care Symposium held in Manchester,United 
Kingdom on 29 April, 2011, I  presented a talk entitled "Achieving Truly Universal 
Health Care" which argue  that the most logical and humane way to deal with 
the increasingly impossible  burden of delivering health care to an 
increasingly moribund population using  contemporary "half-way" medical measures 
was to develop reversible brain  cryopreservation and then begin triaging 
patients receiving medically futile and  otherwise ineffective care into long 
term cryopreservation. Not only would this  greatly reduce the overall cost of 
healthcare, it would represent the only known  option for definitively 
rescuing and treating these moribund and otherwise  hopeless patients. It would, 
in effect, be not only their best path to short  term, meaningful 
(functional) survival, but their only chance at indefinitely  extended life in a 
state of youth, health and productivity. 
 
Most of this talk,  and of the slides which accompanied it are present here:
 
http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/14/achieving-truly-
universal-health-care/index.html
 
This talk was given to ~200 medical professionals from the UK, Europe and  
the US specializing in "intensive care (treatment)" medicine and it was  
generally well received. 
 
In conclusion, I would urge you  to rethink and "re-present" your  petition 
to include (more) reasonable and vastly more achievable goals, along  with 
scientifically and financially robust plans to achieve them and the 
associated documentation, which demonstrate that the use of  cryopreservation as an 
alternative to futile and extremely, indeed unbearably  costly end of life 
care is a superior alternative. 
 
Mike Darwin

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org
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