The importance of the second point is that it is now possible to see both how and why some novel technologies are embraced and developed, and how and why some aren’t. Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo is a profoundly humane and profoundly anti-authoritarian hero. He creates the Nautilus, and wields it as he does, because he is both frustrated and disgusted at how humanity uses powerful new technologies (and please, don’t confuse Verne’s Nemo with the psychopathic rendering of him in the Disney film version of Verne’s novel). My lengthily footnote about Werner von Braun in the “Technological Inevitability” piece annoyed several people, who considered it out of place. My point was that von Braun could have cared less about Nazi ideology or about WWII in general; he considered both an irritating distraction, as well as an enabling series of events for the technology he wanted to develop – namely the ‘space colonization’ of your “paleofuture.” The point is that the Nautilus (literally) that became a reality was not the one Verne ‘invented,’ but rather was a tool of war, of total war that was the polar opposite of what Captain “No One” stood for, and wanted. Similarly, the liquid fueled, multi-stage rocket capable of interplanetary travel, and of opening up the stars to human kind, was not implemented as the device its two primary creators dreamed of and longed for. Both Werner von Braun and Sergei Korolev wanted the moon, Mars and the stars. But the civilization they were embedded in wanted intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to deliver massively destructive thermonuclear weapons capable of utterly destroying civilization – rather than spreading it amongst the stars! Thus, the only reason these technologies became a reality was because they were good for warfare.

Now that the pace of technological advance has become lightning fast by historical standards and we are living longer (on average) and have more ‘leisure’ time to reflect on our life and times as “average Joes,” it possible to see that a big hunk of technical advance, and the choice of which technologies are developed, is a function of their military utility and the core values of the cultures that develop them – or choose not to. The fictional Nemo, and the very real Korolev and von Braun, never reflected or represented the values of their respective cultures, or of their (and our) civilization. If you would understand the reason for the paleofuture bill of goods our generation was sold, it is necessary to understand that Kennedy and Khrushchev’s bold and inspiring words about the “conquest of space” were lies. They were just so much political rhetoric to justify the expenditure of an unbelievable fraction of their respective nation-states’ GDPs on weapons of mass destruction. The vehicle that carried Vokstok 1 and Yuri Gagarin into orbit, and the Redstone rocket that put John Glen (briefly) into space were ICBMs pressed clumsily into service for manned spaceflight as a politically expedient afterthought. No serious student of history would argue that either the US or the USSR manned space programs were anything but political theater. The Nazis had a wonderfully descriptive word for this kind of thing: propaganda (which, BTW, they used freely, and with a straight face).

A good hard look at history shows that the interests and expenditures of each successive generation are driven by a complex mix of factors. Near the top of the list is the politico-military situation of the time. Next are the fads, fashions, and pressures generated by the social and political milieu of the moment. Just like individuals, cultures only have a limited amount of time and attention. A given individual may be primarily interested in music and popular culture, getting ahead at work, being a soccer mom, or being a biker at any given point in time. Individuals can also make transitions between these lifestyles and priorities. What determines the predominance of the given mix of selections on the menu of lifestyles are the core values of the culture. Travel the world and truly move amongst its peoples and you will see this as a living, breathing reality. Not every society or culture wants what the West wants – although I would be the first to say that the differences are mostly superficial. No culture wants practical immortality, universal justice, and a truly long term view of life and individual humans’ role in it, to become a reality. These are as new and as profound ideas as are the rights of man, universal literacy, the abolition of slavery, and the ideal of capitalism (i.e., free movement of markets and peoples).

The irony is that most cryonicists still just ‘don’t get it.’ They want to pursue these powerful, incendiary, and utterly revolutionary ideas in the same way as they would hawk canned peas. They think, and honestly believe, that you can fill a trough with cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and then proceed to try to persuade the culture to drink it (and be grateful in the bargain) by finding the “right” Public Relations angle, or by bowing and scraping in just the right way. This is nonsense! The ideas I’ve just listed above are as toxic to the current world order as were the Magna Carta and the US Declaration of Independence to the old world order. Fortunately, people like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson ‘got it,’ and didn’t try to bow or scrape their way into favor with the powers that were. The US Revolutionary War was not primarily about serious economic or social injustice in the framework of the times. The nascent nation-state that would become the US had no truly serious economic gripe with the British Empire. Nor was their an insurgency, or any other kind of local terror, or intolerable lawlessness (a major driver of revolutions). The central change that drove that Revolution was a novel ideology – not economic expedience, or the necessity to re-establish law and order.

Most cryonicists just don’t get it – they don’t understand that the values and the apparatus that enforces them are LITERALLY KILLING US, EN MASSE, RIGHT NOW! Look at the numbers. Easily one third of the patients now being cryopreserved are chopped up or sit around for days before they can be treated and stabilized. Of those who get the “best” treatment, at least a third, and probably more like 90% (at present) have ischemic intervals that run to many minutes or many hours! These patients almost certainly have little (or more likely) no chance of being recovered with their declarative (biographical) memories intact – or even with their memories present at all in any integrated, narrative form. Most cryonicists have made the lethal error of confusing the fact that someone can be revived in the case of virtually every cryonics patient now in storage, with the idea that that “someone” will be the same person who was cryopreserved to begin with. Not even the most conservative, rational biomedical scientist would argue that it is impossible to clone humans. That means that, at a minimum, every cryopatient now in storage can be revived – if your criterion for revival is a “continuer” who shares the original person’s genome and its epigenetic implementation. That’s not what I want, and I don’t think it is what most cryonicists want – or expect.

Any careful reading of Ettinger’s writings over the years will reveal that he does not consider biographical memory central to, or an essential requirement for survival of the individual. Rather, he believes in some hypothetical arrangement of neurons which he terms “the self-circuit” that constitutes and enables each (presumably?) “unique” individual. Of course, he is entitled to that point of view, and it goes a long way to explaining the reality of CI’s practical indifference to the details of how its patients get cryopreserved. “Frozen is frozen; and a bicycle is a Yugo is a Mercedes.” I don’t agree with this position, although it would be very convenient to do so, because in practice what this means is that any blob of decomposing protoplasm that makes it into cryogenic storage is a PATIENT with the same (implied) chances of recovery as that of any other PATIENT. Just making it to -196 degrees C is, in effect, a ticket to ride to Resurrection Day.

That’s religion, and I can’t (or more properly won’t) argue with the right of people to choose that kind of ritual-based comfort. What it is not is scientific cryonics – something that is feedback driven, employs the corrective mechanism of the scientific method, and yields steady and demonstrable improvements in the quality of treatment. It also doesn’t “rock the boat,” in that as clinical and forensic medicine produce more and more severely injured and degraded patients as halfway medicine advances, the cryonics community will remain nonplussed.

Consider that in 14 years the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) will be 18% of the population in the developed Western world! By 2025 the percentage of end-stage AD and other dementias as the cause of death will be approaching 40%! Add to that the percentage of patients who will suffer cardiac arrest from massive stroke and other brain destroying diseases, and the number of people who really are DEAD by the time they present for cryopreservation is pushing 50%! If you then add in autopsy (or long delays until the patient is released) with consequent straight freezing, it becomes pretty clear that conventional medicine will have at long last converged with cryonicists’ definition of death. In other words, when they say you are dead, you really will be dead – by the information theoretic criterion (ITC). This “advance” towards a convergence between the point where conventional medicine “abandons” its patients and pronounces them dead, and the point where the ITC says you are dead, is already well underway. In 1964 when cryonics was launched most people died of things that left their brains intact. As medicine “squares the curve” it is progressively shifting the cause of death to brain failure. Most of the people in extended care facilities today are there because there is something profoundly wrong with their brains. You can be very physically disabled and still live independently. But serious cognitive disability is immediately disabling and requires vigilant and fantastically costly care. Look at these numbers:

• Average lifetime cost of care is $170,000 (American Journal of Public Health, 1994)
• Costs businesses $61 billion each year in America (Alzheimer’s Association, 2002)
• Government expects to spend $640 million for research of the disease in America 2003 (Alzheimer’s Association, 2004)
• $5.5 billion each year in Canada (Canadian Medical Association, 1994)
• $36,794 per individual with a severe case in Canada (Canadian Medical Association, 1994)
• $9,451 per individual with a mild case in Canada (Canadian Medical Association, 1998)

Read more at http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/alzheimers_disease/stats.htm?ktrack=kcplink#society_stats

Anyone who thinks there will be a cure for AD in 14 years is just plain foolish. And even if a cure were developed tomorrow, it would only shift the cause of death from AD to the “normal cerebral atrophy of aging.” If you never get AD, you will still be losing ~80K neurons per day (from age 2 onward), and by the time you are 70 your brain mass will have decreased by a third!

The point is that today’s cryonicists will absolutely confront these realities and that, as a consequence, cryonics is mostly an empty promise for us – just a much crueler version of the paleofuture you are already mourning the loss of. And if we choose to not accept that version of our future, then we are at odds with the existing social and cultural order.

It’s as simple as that. – Mike Darwin

Well, we know how progress in astronautics has turned out so far, despite the recurring progress porn about sending people to Mars, now with the intention of leaving them to die there. (I doubt that a “Mars colony” would put building a cryonics facility high on its list of priorities.)

Younger people in my experience don’t find the idea of manned space exploration compelling, and cryonics’ association with that sort of futurology from the 1960′s and 1970′s has given it a paleofuturistic reputation, in the neighborhood of flying cars, geodesic domes and jet packs. I submit that the association of Drexler’s “nanotechnology” with cryonics, still a no-show after 30 years, doesn’t help cryonics’ credibility either.

So how do we rebrand cryonics to make it cognitively accessible to people who don’t remember the moon landings? Do we have to call it “iFreeze” or something?

For example, if someone invented cryonics now as a new idea, based on today’s science and technology, and on current assumptions about “the future,” what would it look like?

You could say the same thing about people not embracing libertarianism and/or atheism. I’ve seen this first hand: A group of activists imagines that since their ideas are so right or so logical, all one has to do is hone one’s debating skills and start the conversions. These activists all fancy themselves as being a Mr. Spock, whose job is to convince Captain Kirk and Doctor Mc Coy to do the logical and rational thing. However, after years of hard work, they almost always become burnt out and are befuddled that the masses don’t accept their brilliant arguments and logic. “After all, how can a sensible person accept God or think socialism is a great idea?” “Where did we go wrong?” they wail as they tear out their hair.

The problem is, as Mike Darwin notes, that people who embrace fringe ideas like cryonics, libertarianism or atheism DO NOT think like other people and no marketing campaign is going to change that. Sure, people can change, but it’s rarely because of brilliant minds talking people out of their old beliefs. Social change generally has little to do with “arguments. ” For example, why is homosexuality increasingly accepted in the West? Not because of “arguments”—the real reasons include everything from the birth control pill, modern capitalism , the decline of Orthodox Christianity, people coming out of the closet and old conservative people dying off. But it’s certainly not because some philosophers convinced the masses that hatred of gays was “illogical .”

But still, like Charlie Brown attempting to kick the football after Lucy has pulled it away a hundred times, people keep trying the same failed things over and over. History repeats itself first as tragedy — and then as farce many times over.

Now that we have that out of the way, I want to say, immediately, that if you are physician, then cryonics desperately needs your talents, on every level that you may choose to make them available. I’m afraid the first round of MDs I recruited in the 1980s are all used up – either cryopreserved, or driven mad by being in close proximity to cryonics for too long. But either way – no longer of the use they once were ;-). Ans while I am joking here (a little), I’m also really serious. There are literally a dozen ways I can think of, offhand, that you could materially contribute to progress, even if you live a safe distance from any hands-on cryonics activity.

At a minimum, I have at least 50 questions for you, starting with ‘trivial’ ones, such as how you heard about cryonics, how long it took you before you thought it made sense, how long it then took you to sign-up, what your colleagues, spouse/SO and friends think…to more serious questions such as what your medical specialty is, what kind of medicine you currently practice, your approximate age… Providing you choose to answer the latter questions, you needn’t do so publicly, but I think it would be of general interest, and possibly of some use if you commented on the former ones, here.

Cryonics has a peculiar history with respect to physicians in that there have almost always been one or more seriously involved as activist members, and there are a disproportionate number in cryopreservation, compared to the demographics of the general population. Ironically, I was working on finishing the technical case report on a physician I helped cryopreserve in March of 1989, Dr. Eugene Donovan: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport9002.html. [The technical case report was written at the time, but due to technological limitations, it was not possible to graph all the data or integrate photos - unfortunately, this task is not much easier now, due to formatting changes in software, so I have to re-enter much the numeric data by hand.] I don’t know what the current statistics are on the number of physicians per capita of patients at Alcor or CI, but I would think it would have to be between 4-6% at Alcor.

I guess I should also point out that the high number of docs in cryogenic storage is not an artifact of any wickedness on our part – but rather, just a consequence of human biology and the passage of time. If you want my email address, just ask. – Mike Darwin

“The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the Department of Health have requested a revision of the 1998 document “Code of Practice for the Diagnosis of Brain Stem Death”. This resulting Revised Code of Practice has been prepared by a Working Party established through the Royal College of Anesthetists on behalf of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the English Department of Health. This code of practice is designed to address the diagnosis and certification of death in all situations and to make practical recommendations which are acceptable both to the relatives of the deceased, to society in general and also to the medical, nursing and other professional staff involved. “

And I believe that similar, if not identical language is present in or on the regulations when they were distributed prior to implementation. The full text of the Revised Guidelines is available at: http://www.aic.cuhk.edu.hk/web8/Brain%20death%20code%20of%20practice.htm
Because I have good friends in Britain who are Intensivists, and also some practicing Anesthetists (ICU medicine grew out of anesthesia in the UK) I was alerted to the proposed changes in the Guidelines in 2006, and provided with a draft copy of them. At that time I immediately contacted all of the individuals/organizations in cryonics who I could think of, who would have a material interest in seeing these regulations exempt cryonics, and I urged them to form a working committee or to appoint a representative or hire a barrister to provide input to the Royal College to exclude cryonics from the prohibition against restoration of post-pronouncement perfusion. This included the CEO and Suspension Team Leader of Alcor, Alan Sinclair, then President of CUK, and Garret Smyth. I believe I also copied former UK cryonics activist and former cryonicist Mike Price. CI was notified, perhaps a year later. I received no response to these communications.”

Subsequently, I wrote an article entitled “How Dead is Dead Enough” which was published on Aschwin deWolf’s blog, Depressed Metabolism on 30 April, 2008: http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/how-dead-is-dead-enough/

In that article I say the following in regard to the change in criteria for pronouncing death in the UK:

“The British Catastrophe?

60. Brook N, Waller, JR, Nicholson, ML. Nonheart-beating kidney donation: current practice and future developments. Kidney Int 2003;63(4):516-29.”

This article was published on DM, after being rejected for publication by both US cryonics organizations.

At around the same time the “How Dead” article was being prepared, I received information from a friend I have in organ procurement here in the US, that the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), was in the process of beginning a revision to the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), as well as to the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA). They were conducting an ‘open meeting’ in Hilton Head, SC to solicit input from all parties with an interest in amending these acts, with the focus being on the UAGA. Invited parties were the funeral services industry, the tissue banking industry, organ and tissue procurement agencies, and any others who might be materially affected by changes in the law. Again, I notified the US cryonics organizations, and this time I received a response from Steve vanSickle of Alcor, stating that the relevant people in management had prior obligations during the time the Hilton Head meeting was to take place.

As is the case with the Royal College of Anesthetists in the UK, the NCCUSL, despite its government-sounding title, is in fact a non-government body. It was created about 120 years ago by a group of lawyers, in response to the chaos resulting from widely varying laws between states – laws that were impacting both interstate commerce, and the professions. The US differs greatly from most other countries in that the states have strong rights, independent of the Federal government. Thus, you can serve a long sentence in prison in one state, for an act that is perfectly legal in others. To help resolve these conflicts where critical issues of law were involved regarding (mostly) commerce, a group of lawyers formed the NCCUSL and began drafting “Uniform Laws” – two such laws are the UDDA and the UAGA. However, these are not really laws, but rather a suggested template, which each state can use as they choose, or not. Thus, both the UAGA and the UDDA vary substantially between states, and some states adopted neither, but rather went with their own language. It is thus necessary to pay very careful attention to individual state’s SPECIFIC laws when dealing with the pronouncement of death, or the donation of organs or tissues. Even those states that adopt the Uniform Law usually modify it extensively.

I do not know what the status or outcome of the proposed revision of the UAGA was – but I assume it has been made, and is now out there for the states to use as they please. Once the Uniform Law is completed and ‘proposed’, NCCUSL will not alter it. Thus, the only recourse in that situation is to go state-by-state and lobby for changes to the law – an incredibly costly, and usually hopeless undertaking: this is why NCCUSL encourages participation and input by all affected parties – large or small – during the drafting process.

Mike Darwin

Are these guidelines applied to non-organ donors?

What I wonder about is why more people don’t find this idea as exciting as I do, perhaps we are wired to accept the inevitability of death and so can’t psychologically see that there may be other options?

What I’d like to see is something like the X prize but for cryonics research – for example, demonstrate eeg activity in a mammal after cryopreservation and revival is a $100,000 prize, etc.