bgwowk

Your points are mostly well-taken, Mike. Not everything is better than it used to be. While the basic cryopreservation technology (vitrification) is better, and some important aspects of service delivery are better, Alcor does not have in-house expertise comparable to the era of you and Jerry Leaf. With the benefit of hindsight, I would say that people of such caliber willing to devote their life to cryonics are a historical anomaly not amenable to formulaic replication.

With respect to communications, the two new potential O.R. surgeons I spoke of were ... (read more)

Mike, let's be fair about this. Veterinary surgeons for thoracic surgery (after loss of Jerry Leaf) and chemists for running perfusion machines were also used during your tenure managing biomedical affairs at Alcor two decades ago. You trained and utilized lay people to do all kinds procedures that would ordinarily be done by medical or paramedical professionals, including establishing airways, mechanical circulation, and I.V. administration of fluids and medications. Manuals provided to lay students even included directions for doing femoral cutdown su... (read more)

In my role as an Alcor director, I had the painstaking and unpleasant task of investigating the veracity of Johnson's book allegations to determine which of them required legitimate corrective action or litigation for defamation. Some of the allegations published in New York Daily News and wire services in 2009 promoting the book weren't even anywhere in the book (e.g. allegations that Alcor dismembered live animals). Such lies about the book itself were apparently just invented to get international media attention two days before the book's release. So... (read more)

I'm doing a text search, and I can't find where I used the word "catastrophic." In any case, the damage done by present cryopreservation techniques is extreme by conventional medical standards (e.g. decapitation). The real question is the significance of the damage in the context of preservation of brain information encoding memory and personal identity, which is what cryonics seeks to preserve.

For decades Alcor has sought to be conservative and perform the first hypothermic stages of cryonics to a standard closer to that of medicine rather tha... (read more)

If I recall correctly, SA charges CI members $60,000 for field standby, stabilization, and transport. SA does approximately one or two cases per year, apparently using contract perfusionists and surgeons when available for the blood washout phase of procedures. The alternative for CI members is simple packing in ice some unspecified period after legal death, and shipment by a local mortician; no cardiopulmonary support, no associated rapid cooling, no blood washout.

As I understand it, Maxim makes two claims:

1. SA underdelivers and overcharges for servi

There's another point that should be obvious, but perhaps not to those not familiar with cryonics procedures. The reason the patient cooled from approximately +20 degC to +12 degC during the long surgery was because HE WAS PACKED IN ICE. That's the same treatment he would have gotten for those five hours had SA not been there.

Before and after those five hours, the patient's treatment was enormously better than it would have been had SA not been there. Prompt cardiopulmonary support (CPS) and ice bath cooling after cardiac arrest supplied oxygenated bloo... (read more)

Is it Dr. Wowk’s position, the vitrification solutions are so very toxic, it’s acceptable to subject Alcor and Suspended Animation’s clients to additional injury, via grossly incompetent personnel, when delivering those solutions? Wouldn’t it make more sense for organizations advertising the possibility of future resurrection, (and charging up to $200,000 for their services), to provide the best possible care? Shouldn’t they be doing as little harm, as possible?

My position is to do the best you can within available resources, and that criticisms should ... (read more)

Something else that may not be apparent to casual observers is the selectivity of Ms. Maxim's criticisms. For the first two years after she left SA in 2006, SA was practically the exclusive target of her criticisms. Alcor officials, including myself, had cordial correspondence with her about a variety of perfusion topics in which she kindly shared her expertise. In August, 2008, one of my emails to her said:

I agree with you about the value of professionals in cryonics field work. I hope cryonics can manage to make that transition. It is regrettable

these are testable claims that you could be testing.

If this wasn't clear from my last post (the one with "OF COURSE" everywhere), let me say it again. I participate in the leadership of a cryonics organization (Alcor). Speaking for myself, I stipulate to the correctness of Melody Maxim's central claim that cryonics procedures do not meet the same standards, or sometimes qualifications of personnel, as hypothermic medical procedures. There's nothing to test. It's true. It's the significance of this that is dispute, not the fact of it.

The ... (read more)

Animals with more sophisticated nervous systems than nematodes can survive vitrification.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20086136

Even more sophisticated neural networks, mammalian brain slices, can now be vitrified with present technology.

http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf

Of course it is what happens to whole brains that are vitrified that really matters to cryonics. The only paper published so far on the technology presently used in cryonics applied to whole brains is this one

http://www.alcor.org/Library/pdfs/Lemler-Annals.pdf

with more micr... (read more)

This is precisely what I would have thought advocates needed to be researching, and I'm amazed there's so far just been defensiveness, circling of the wagons and ad hominem dismissal....

As I've tried to explain, the entire line of criticism is based on a false analogy of cryonics to hypothermic medicine.

OF COURSE, if cryonics were an elective procedure in which a patient were to be cooled to +18 degC and heart stopped for brain surgery, you wouldn't use paramedics, scientists, or contract cardiothoracic surgeons who may or may not able to show up to do ... (read more)

it provides me no information that he thinks cryonics works.

I don't think cryonics "works." I think it's worth doing. That's not the same thing. I've explained that cryopreservation causes damage that is severe by contemporary standards. It cannot be reversed by any near-term technology. Nobody should confuse cryonics with suspended animation or established hypothermic medicine.

The purpose of cryonics is to prevent "information theoretic death," or erasure of the neurological basis of personal identity. Any evaluation of the ef... (read more)

it provides me no information that he thinks cryonics works.

I don't think cryonics "works." I think it's worth doing. That's not the same thing. I've explained that cryopreservation causes damage that is severe by contemporary standards. It cannot be reversed by any near-term technology. Nobody should confuse cryonics with suspended animation or established hypothermic medicine.

The purpose of cryonics is to prevent "information theoretic death," or erasure of the neurological basis of personal identity. Any evaluation of the ef... (read more)

it provides me no information that he thinks cryonics works.

I don't think cryonics "works." I think it's worth doing. That's not the same thing. I've explained that cryopreservation causes damage that is severe by contemporary standards. It cannot be reversed by any near-term technology. Nobody should confuse cryonics with suspended animation or established hypothermic medicine.

The purpose of cryonics is to prevent "information theoretic death," or erasure of the neurological information that encodes personal identity. Any eval... (read more)

Dr. Wowk has stated that he needs cryonics to work, and so it provides me no information that he thinks cryonics works.

I don't recall making any context-less statements that cryonics works. Obviously I think that cryonics is worth doing, but that's not same as thinking it "works."

I explicitly stated that the damage done by the best cryopreservation technology is severe by contemporary standards. It's not compatible with revival by any near-term technology, no matter who does it. Nobody should be under any illusions that human cryopreservati... (read more)

Alcor already employs a full-time paramedic with surgical training in large animal models to do vascular cannulations when it is possible to do so in the field. Cannulations at Alcor are typically done by either a contract neurosurgeon or a veterinary surgeon. I've written further details about who does surgeries at Alcor, and who has done them historically, here:

http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/44772-is-cryonics-quackery/page__p__437779#entry437779

It's misleading for people to keep saying that Alcor sends out "laypeople" to do vascular cannu... (read more)

Dr. Wowk is being dishonest, in his representation of my opinions of cryonics. I have never said I "don't believe anybody's survival actually depends on cryonics because it won't work."

You've been saying it by implication. See below.

In fact, on numerous occasions, I've clearly stated cryonics has a basis in reality, based on existing conventional medical procedures, in which people are cooled to a state of death and then revived. Many times...many, MANY times...I have CLEARLY stated I believe someone preserved in a fairly pristine state mi

It is ridiculously absurd for Dr. Wowk to write that it is his "understanding" that I, (a person who has probably written millions of words about cryonics), "have no personal interest in cryonics."

You've said elsewhere that you have no personal interest in cryonics for yourself, and that you don't believe cryonics will work. You imply that you don't believe it will work because it's not being done competently. However if the Mayo Clinic started offering human cryopreservation tomorrow, you would still believe that cryonics couldn'... (read more)

Except for the very small number of people who choose to sign up for it, practically no one values or cares about cryonics. No one takes the time to learn its premises, its history, the technologies it's predicated upon, or what technical elements will ultimately determine its success or failure. There are no schools or generally-recognized standards. No one cares. This includes mainstream medicine and mortuary science. My understanding is that you yourself have no personal interest in cryonics.

Against this backdrop, it's not credible that there is a ... (read more)

I don't have enough information to comment on the cases in question, except that I believe SA, like everyone else in cryonics right now, makes a good faith effort to do work that nobody else wants to do, and that most cryonics cases don't fully pay for. SA was founded and is heavily subsidized by people who want the cryonics stabilization service it provides. SA has motive to do a good job, and use the best people that resources and case logistics permit. Prior to SA, the best CI members could expect was to be collected by a local mortician. Prior to ... (read more)