| Related sites for http://www.merkle.com/cryo/ |
| Cryonics_UK Site for information and discussion of cryonics in the United Kingdom. The group appears to be associated with Cryonics Institute. | | Cryonics_info A new discussion forum on cryonics, attempting to focus on science issues. Also some links to basic information. | | Danish_Cryonics_Support_Group The DCSG consists primarily of Danish members of the Cryonics Institute (CI) and those interested in becoming members of a suspension organization. The site is in both English and Danish. | | European_Cryonics_Page Information for Europeans interested in cryonics. Includes an extensive list of links to other European cryonics sites and a mailing list/forum for Europeans interested in cryonics, plus a large list | | An_Exploratory_Survey_Examining_the_Familiarity_With_and_Attitudes_Toward_Cryonic_Preservation A paper examining the results of a consumer survey on cryonics. By W. Scott Badger, from "The Journal of Evolution and Technology," December, 1998. | | Frozen_Dead_Guy_Days_-_Nederland_Area_Chamber_of_Commerce The official site of a winter festival held annually in the mountain town of Nederland, Colorado. A bit weird, since the Nederlands city government actively worked to oust Bredo Morstoel (the "froze | | Life_Extension_Society A cryonics public education organization in the Maryland/D.C. area. Not a service provider. | | Long_Life_--_The_Cryonics_Institute_E-Newsletter Free news, updates, and links about the latest scientific, medical, health, anti-aging, and social developments relevant to CI's goal of saving, preserving, and extending human lives. | | Longevity_Report John DeRivaz's British site for cryonics, life extension, and the future. | | New_Zealand_Cryonics_Society A new organization in New Zealand. | | The_Society_for_Venturism A non-profit organization with the purpose of promoting "the worldwide conquest of death and the continuation and enhancement of life through technological means, including cryonic suspension." Does | | Synthetic_pleasures Home page for documentary film about life extension, cryonics, body decoration, and other aspects of modern technological life. | | Timeship_Cryonics Visionary design and project plans by architect Stephen Valentine for a building to house research into life extension, nanotechnology, and cryopreservation of tissue and humans through vitrification. | | Trans_Time,_Inc__--_Cryonics_Services A cryonics service provider in San Leandro, California. | | Was_Walt_Disney_Frozen? The truth (no, he wasn't) with the legends behind the myth. | | Why_Cryosuspension_Makes_Sense A long article by Terry Grossman, reprinted from The Babyboomers Guide to Living Forever (2000). | | Yahoo!_Groups___ConsideringCryonics An on-line discussion group for those who are considering joining a cryonics organization but are worried about what their friends and family might think. | | Heaven_Can_Wait Article by Michael Park of the Sunday Herald (U.K.), primarily focused on Alcor. (May 1, 2005) | | Would_Freezing_Ted_Williams_Work? From ABCNEWS.com, an article on the cryonic suspension of Ted Williams by the Alcor Foundation and asking if the technology might work. (July 9, 2004) | | Cryonics_Over_Dead_Geeks\'_Bodies Wired News article by Michelle Delio, based on an interview with Heather Pringle, author of the new book: "The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead". (July 20, 2001) | | Dying_to_Know A lengthy cryonics article about Alcor by Audun Taraldsen from Arizona State University's "The Electronic Bulldog" - April 26, 1996. Dated in some respects but highly detailed. (April 26, 199 | | ArXiv Recent papers in dynamical systems at the ArXiv preprint server. | | Chaos,_Limit_Cycles_and_Twisted_Rods Integrability and chaotic attractors. Limit cycles of the Lienard systems. Elastic instabilites : twisted rods. Path and surface following : continuation algorithms. | | Climate_Dynamics,_Chaos_and_Quantum_Mechanics A general systems theory for chaos, quantum mechanics and climate dynamics applicable to dynamical systems of all space-time scales. | | Crowd_Dynamics Crowd and Egress Dynamics by G. Keith Still. | | Dynamical_Systems_Data_Base Data base of around 50,000 planar dynamical systems. | | Dynamical_Systems_Home_Page Conference listings, survey articles, open problems, people, jobs, and seminars. | | Dynamical_Systems_Lab This set of lectures is designed to explore one-dimensional dynamical systems using the software Chaos and Dynamics. | | Dynamical_Systems_Websites A list of research sites maintained at the University of Warwick. | | Dynamics_in_One_Complex_Variable These notes study the dynamics of iterated holomorphic mappings from a Riemann surface to itself. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the rudiments of complex variable theory and of two-d | | Evolution_Equations_and_Semigroups Bulletin board and preprint archive. | | Java_Exploration_Tool_for_Dynamical_Systems This Java Applet can be used for the exploration on two-dimensional analytical defined dynamical systems. The system is defined by a set of two differential equations, which will be evaluated within | | Nonlinear_Dynamics_Bibliography Maintained by Peter E. Beckmann, Johannes Gutenberg Universität. | | Pages_on_Dynamical_Systems A interactive laboratory on dynamical systems, in particular on particle systems. | | Population_Dynamics_with_Hysteresis_Effect Papers on population dynamics with hysteresis based on phase transition phenomena, by Emil Minchev (PDF/PS). | | Surveys_in_Dynamical_Systems References to several surveys and papers of introductory character which are available on-line. | | Turbulent_Landscapes Turbulent Landscapes is the result of 13 artists' explorations of complexity in nature. The exhibit will travel to museums and science centers in upcoming months. | | Books_Corner Reviews and pointers to books. | | Difference_Equations_and_Discrete_Dynamical_Systems A web-based newsletter. | | Difference_Equations_to_Differential_Equations By Dan Sloughter. Published in PS/PDF with applets under GPL. |
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Cryonics Cryonics Cryonics in the news Links to further information An open letter by scientists supporting cryonicsOverview The purpose of cryonics is to save lives and restore health. Today's medical technology can't always keep us alive, let alone healthy. A future medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology should be able to preserve life and restore health in all but the most extreme circumstances. Tissue preserved at the temperature of liquid nitrogen does not deteriorate, even after centuries of storage. Therefore, if current medical technology can't keep us alive we can instead choose to be preserved in liquid nitrogen, with the expectation that future medical technology should be able to both reverse any cryopreservation injury and restore good health. A common misconception is that cryonics freezes the dead. As the definition of "death" is "a permanent cessation of all vital functions" the future ability to revive a patient preserved with today's technology implies the patient wasn't dead. Cryonics is actually based on the more plausible idea that present medical practice has erred in declaring a patient "dead." A second opinion from a future physician – one with access to a fundamentally better medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology – lets us avoid the unpleasant risk that we might bury someone alive. Evaluating cryonicsThe major reason that cryonics is not more favorably viewed in the medical community is relatively easy to explain. Medicine relies on clinical trials. Put more simply, if someone proposes a technique for saving lives, the response is "Try it and see if it works." Methods that have not been verified by clinical trials are called "experimental," while methods that have been tried and failed are rejected. In keeping with this tradition, we would like to conduct clinical trials of the effectiveness of cryopreservation to determine whether it does (or does not) work. The appropriate trials can be easily described. Cryonics proposes to preserve people with today's technology in the expectation that medical technology of (say) the year 2100 will be able to cure them. Thus, the appropriate clinical trials would be to: Select N subjects. Preserve them. Wait 100 years. See if the technology of 2100 can indeed revive them. The reader might notice a problem: what do we tell the terminally ill patient prior to completion of the trials? While this problem is not entirely unique to cryonics (the plight of a dying patient who wishes to know whether or not to take a new experimental treatment is well known), cryonics poses it in a qualitatively more severe fashion: we must wait longer to determine the outcome and we have no preliminary results to provide a clue about what that outcome might be. If a new treatment is being tested we normally have the results of animal trials and perhaps some preliminary results from human patients. Further, we expect to get reliable results within a small number of years. In the case of cryonics, we are quite literally awaiting the development of an entirely new medical technology. Preliminary results, even on experimental animals, are simply not available; and the final results won't be available for at least several decades. Thus, while we can begin the clinical trials required to evaluate cryonics today, clinical trials cannot provide a timely answer about the effectiveness of cryonics. It is not possible (utilizing the paradigm of clinical trials) to draw conclusions today about whether physicians tomorrow will (or will not) be able to revive someone who was cryopreserved using today's technology. Does cryonics work?The correct scientific answer to the question "Does cryonics work?" is: "The clinical trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we'll give you a reliable answer." The relevant question for those of us who don't expect to survive that long is: "Would I rather be in the control group, or the experimental group?" We are forced by circumstances to answer that question without the benefit of knowing the results of the clinical trials. In order to show that cryonics will not work (or even to show that it's unlikely to work) it is necessary to show that no future technology, no matter how advanced, will ever be able to restore the cryopreserved patient. When we consider what is routine today and how it might have been viewed in (say) the 1700's, we can begin to see how difficult it is to make a well founded argument that future medical technology will never be able to reverse the injuries that occur during cryopreservation. Is the treatment worse than the disease?Finally, there is the risk that a proposed treatment might be worse than the disease (which creates a strong prejudice against the use of experimental treatments on human beings). Current laws require that cryopreservation begin after "legal death" (which should be distinguished both from death by current medical criteria and death by the medical criteria of (say) the year 2100). This presumably implies a rather small risk. Even with complete patient autonomy and the ability to start cryopreservation prior to legal death (as could happen in the future) cryonics will only be used when the patient is terminal and has little remaining life, either in quantity or quality. There is little need, in the case of cryonics, to fear that the cure will be worse than the disease. What to do It works It doesn't work Sign up Live Die, lose life insurance Do nothing Die Die How might we evaluate cryonics? Broadly speaking, there are two available courses of action: (1) sign up or (2) do nothing. And there are two possible outcomes: (1) it works or (2) it doesn't. This leads to the payoff matrix to the right. In using such a payoff matrix to evaluate the possible outcomes, we must decide what value the different outcomes have. What value do we place on a long and healthy life? (It is important to realize that the kinds of medical technology required to restore today's cryonics patients will almost certainly be able to restore good health for an extended period). What (presumably negative) value do we place on being dead? And finally, in the absence of direct experimental results in one direction or the other, what estimate do we make of the chances that it will work? This analysis has sometimes been compared with Pascal's Wager, although the two are quite distinct. While different people will answer these questions in different ways, this provides a useful framework in which to consider the problem. Present successes It is worth pointing out that a fairly wide range of simple tissue types have been successfully cryopreserved and then rewarmed, including very early human embryos, sperm, skin, bone, red and white blood cells, bone marrow, and others. Glycerol (anti-freeze, see molecular structure at left) has historically been used to greatly reduce freezing damage. New cryoprotectants in combination with ice blockers are now able to eliminate ice formation in a process called vitrification.SummaryCryonics proposes to use an experimental treatment on human patients with no expectation that clinical trials will be completed anytime in the near future. This has created some controversy. Despite this, cryopreservation is the medically conservative course of action (in the best sense of the word "conservative.") Conventional medical criteria pronounce the cryonics patient "dead." These criteria are disputed by those who support cryonics, who argue that (at the very least) this diagnosis might be in error. If there is a debate about whether or not a patient is dead it would seem inappropriate to resolve the dispute by placing the patient in a furnace, particularly if this course of action is against the wishes of the patient. If we wish to gain some insight today about the chance that cryonics will or will not work we must consider (a) the kinds of damage that are likely to occur during cryopreservation and (b) the kinds of damage that future medical technologies might reasonably be able to repair. Those interested in pursuing this subject can read The Molecular Repair of the Brain. In the news: Recent coverage about cryonics is available from Google's news search. The Institution of Engineering and Technology, November 5, 2008: "A Science Without a Deadline" – "“If sceptics don’t want to pursue this area, that’s fine, but I ask them not to interfere with my own efforts to save the lives of myself and the people I love”" Yahoo News, November 3, 2008: "Frozen mice cloned - are wooly mammoths next?" – "There is hope in bringing Ted Williams back, after all" BBC News,October 20, 2008: "Doctors get death diagnosis tips" – "...there is enough ambiguity in diagnosing death that doctors need guidance" "...like low body temperature when it is inappropriate to confirm death." (audio) Newsweek, July 23, 2007: "Back From the Dead" – "The other is to scan the entire three-dimensional molecular array of the brain into a computer which could hypothetically reconstitute the mind, either as a physical entity or a disembodied intelligence in cyberspace." Newsweek, May 7, 2007: "To Treat the Dead" – ""After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later." The Wall Street Journal, January 21st 2006: "A Cold Calculus Leads Cryonauts To Put Assets on Ice" – "At least a dozen wealthy American and foreign businessmen are testing unfamiliar legal territory by creating so-called personal revival trusts designed to allow them to reclaim their riches hundreds, or even thousands, of years into the future." This Is London, May 25th 2004: "Sperm 'can be kept for thousands of years'" – "...sperm could survive 5,000 or 6,000 years stored in liquid nitrogen." The Arizona State Legislature is not regulating cryonics. Reasononline, February 25th 2004: "Regulating the Biggest Chill" – "Arizona's state legislature is about to consider one of the silliest pieces of "consumer protection" legislation ever devised." Guardian Unlimited, January 23rd 2004, "House of the temporarily dead" – "Officially, the building is "the world's first comprehensive facility devoted to life extension research and cryopreservation", a six-acre structure that will house research laboratories, animal and plant DNA, and up to 10,000 temporarily dead people." Science News, December 21st 2002: "Cold Comfort: A futuristic play of cryogenic proportions" – an amusing story in which Ted Williams, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman awake in 2102 and find they are wards of the Martha Stewart Living Foundation. Says Ted: "...the Red Sox should have won a World Series by now." The Fifth Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension resulted in several articles: Wired News, November 18th 2002: "Ray Kurzweil's Plan: Never Die" – "Ray Kurzweil, celebrated author, inventor and geek hero, plans to live forever." Wired News, November 20th 2002: A Few Ways to Win Mortality War – "Discussions among leading researchers in nanotechnology, cloning and artificial intelligence focused on much more than cryonics, the process of freezing the body in liquid nitrogen after death to be later reanimated. Cryonics is basically a backup plan if technology doesn't obliterate mortality first." Wired News, November 20th 2002: Who Wants to Live Forever? – "Gregory Benford, of the University of California at Irvine, believes the public should know that 'cryonicists aren't crazy, they're just really great, sexy optimists.'" KurzweilAI.net, November 22nd 2002: The Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension – "Bringing together longevity experts, biotechnology pioneers, and futurists, the conference explored how the emerging technologies of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and cryonics will enable humans to halt and ultimately reverse aging and disease and live indefinitely." Small Times, December 6th 2002: Cryonics Conference Brings Out Nanotech's Extreme Optimists – "Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but the only way to really find out whether nanomedicine is achievable is give it a try." Coverage of cryonics related to the Ted Williams case has been voluminous. Here are links to a few articles: Sports Illustrated, August 2nd 2003: "Splendid Splinter chilling in Scottsdale" Sports Illustrated, June 30th 2003: "Chillin' with the Splinter" The New York Times, September 26th 2002: "Fight Over Williams May End" CNN Sports Illustrated, August 13th 2002: "Williams' eldest daughter asks judge to keep jurisdiction"  USA Today, July 28th 2002: "Vitrification could keep tissue safe during the big chill" The New York Times, July 16th 2002: "They've Seen the Future and Intend to Live It" The New York Times, July 9th 2002: "Even for the Last .400 Hitter, Cryonics Is the Longest Shot"(Note that the Boston Globe links and others that have gone dead have been deleted). Howard Lovy's blog August 27th 2003: "Unfrozen Cave Men" Reason Online, August 2002: "Forever Young: The new scientific search for immortality" New Scientist, September 2nd 2002: "New Scientist offers prize to die for." – "When the winner of the New Scientist promotion is pronounced legally dead, he or she will be ... suspended in liquid nitrogen at –196°, in a state known as cryonic preservation[sic]." KRON 4 News, Nightbeat, May 3rd 2001: "Frozen for Life" – “…[medical] advances are giving new credibility to cryonics.” Wired News, July 20th 2001: "Cryonics Over Dead Geeks' Bodies" Scientific American, September 2001: "Nano nonsense and cryonics" Search PubMed for published articles on cryonics.For further information: Those interested in joining the experimental group can contact: The Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr. Suite 110 Scottsdale AZ 85260-6916 phone: 480-905-1906 or (toll free) 877-462-5267 fax: 480-922-9027 email: info@alcor.org www: http://www.alcor.org No action is needed to join the control group. (Quite a few people well known in the fields of computer science, software development, and other high tech areas have joined the experimental group. "... we've discovered a new Silicon Valley trend." Dan Gillmor, Mercury News Technology Columnist, July 19 1998). Alcor gives a succinct description of its procedures, and also describes some common myths about cryonics. Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation discusses biostasis and cryonics KurzweilAI.net discusses cryonics and related concepts. It provides an excellent overview of the multiple cascading technological changes that will transform our lives in the coming decades. The molecular repair of the brain discusses the technical issues surrounding the feasibility of cryonics. Large scale analysis of neural structures reviews the issues involved in high resolution imaging of the human brain. While not directly applicable to cryonics, it provides useful background about the neuronal structures that we wish to preserve. Nanomedicine by Robert A. Freitas provides a technical overview of expected medical applications of nanotechnology. The Prospect of Immortality (1965) by Robert C. W. Ettinger, is now available on the web. This book started the cryonics movement. Jim Halperin's 1998 novel, The First Immortal, is a well researched and entertaining introduction to the subject. Cryonics, cryptography, and maximum likelihood estimation discusses the surprisingly close relationship between cryptanalysis of World War II rotor machines and the problem of inferring neuronal wiring given partial information. The society for the recovery of persons apparently dead by Steven B. Harris. An essay on people's remarkable ability to ignore new ideas for decades and even centuries, and its relevance to cryonics. A page on Nanotechnology and Medicine discusses some of the improvements in medicine that should be feasible with a mature nanotechnology. The DMOZ open directory project has many links related to cryonics. Timeship Cryonics will pursue research in life extension, vitrification (cryopreservation without ice), and related areas. The growing movement for increasing autonomy and control by the terminally ill patient will likely improve the conditions under which cryopreservation can be performed. The Oregon Death With Dignity Act is one manifestation of this movement. Anyone interested in a long and healthy life will also be concerned about the regulatory environment and its impact on health care.  Thispage is part of Ralph C. Merkle's web site.hits since 02.09.26:  |
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