[Recap]

Calvin Mercer asked “Cryonics and Religion: Friends or Foes?”  Cryonics, Mercer believes, will require support from more people than just scientists, including religious people.  How should cryogenics supporters present these ideas to religious people?

How the discussion will play out, according to Mercer, will include debates between liberal and conservative viewpoints, anthropocentric versus theocentric beliefs, materialism versus the supernatural, pragmatic versus dogmatic outlooks, and revisionists versus traditionalists.  This will show up as supporters and critics in the various Christian religions.

Mercer seeks to generate discussion about radical life extension among liberal religious people and someday among conservative religious people, starting with academics.  He provided two examples of success, including sessions at a conference and a book.

Liberal religious people are most concerned about issues of justice and fairness.  They worry that these technologies will not be available for everyone.  On the right are the conservatives, and Mercer said there are degrees of conservatism, but with common characteristics like belief in the supernatural and dogmatic thinking.

Mercer believes some conservatives will in fact embrace radical life extension.  They will be torn between their beliefs and their desire to get “being a good Christian” right to avoid going to Hell.

Christian faith includes the concept of the “miracle” of resurrection.  On the one hand there is resuscitation of the dead, like Lazarus. On the other there is transformation of the dead, like Jesus.  The dialog between radical life extentionists and religious people could be started around their ideas about “indefinite” lifespans and “infinite” existence, respectively.

[Commentary]

I would not expect an Alcor Conference talk about “Cryonics and Unicorns.”  I would not expect talks about “Cryonics and Astrology,” “Cryonics and Baseball Players,” or “Cryonics and Intelligent Design.”  However, I do understand that the majority of people are religious or spiritual.  Mercer presented this talk as an academic, rather than a theologist.

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Popcorn, cookies, and pretzels. We talked to a couple who are musicians and Alcor members about how art can be used to promote life extension and transhumanism.

[Alcor Conference - Table of Contents]

[Recap]

Calvin Mercer asked “Cryonics and Religion: Friends or Foes?” Cryonics, Mercer believes, will require support from more people than just scientists, including religious people. How should cryogenics supporters present these ideas to religious people?

How the discussion will play out, according to Mercer, will include debates between liberal and conservative viewpoints, anthropocentric versus theocentric beliefs, materialism versus the supernatural, pragmatic versus dogmatic outlooks, and revisionists versus traditionalists. This will show up as supporters and critics in the various Christian religions.

Mercer seeks to generate discussion about radical life extension among liberal religious people and someday among conservative religious people, starting with academics. He provided two examples of success, including sessions at a conference and a book.

Liberal religious people are most concerned about issues of justice and fairness. They worry that these technologies will not be available for everyone. On the right are the conservatives, and Mercer said there are degrees of conservatism, but with common characteristics like belief in the supernatural and dogmatic thinking.

Mercer believes some conservatives will in fact embrace radical life extension. They will be torn between their beliefs and their desire to get “being a good Christian” right to avoid going to Hell.

Christian faith includes the concept of the “miracle” of resurrection. On the one hand there is resuscitation of the dead, like Lazarus. On the other there is transformation of the dead, like Jesus. The dialog between radical life extentionists and religious people could be started around their ideas about “indefinite” lifespans and “infinite” existence, respectively.

[Commentary]

I would not expect an Alcor Conference talk about “Cryonics and Unicorns.” I would not expect talks about “Cryonics and Astrology,” “Cryonics and Baseball Players,” or “Cryonics and Intelligent Design.” However, I do understand that the majority of people are religious or spiritual. Mercer presented this talk as an academic, rather than a theologist.

[Alcor Conference - Table of Contents]

[Recap]

Steven Harris is a researcher developing “Rapid Body Cooling for Prevention of Brain Damage.” Rapid body cooling technologies are important to both cryonics and emerging short-term treatments. Hypothermia induced by lowering the body temperature by 4 degrees Celsius in five minutes could allow sufficient time for medical care workers to work to treat a patient, say, after a stabbing wound or other life-threatening injury.

Post-resuscitation hypothermia was discovered by accident in 1980 in dogs. Brain damage can be prevented and the animal resusciated after clinical death. The first human clinical trials failed, because it took too long to start cooling the patient’s body. Two other trials have been positive, including resusciation of cardiac-arrest patients.

Harris is working on a technology to rapidly cool the body. Using Cold Perfluorocarbon Liquid Lung Lavage, Harris has been able to lower the temperature 5.3 degrees in 5 minutes in a dog. The next day, the dog was up and active again.

[Commentary]

This is an incredibly exciting technology, but Harris seemed to be very pessimistic about popularizing it. According to Harris, because of short patents and socialism, new resuscitation technologies are difficult to develop and spread. There were a lot of technical details in the talk, and the speaker had to skip over many of them when time ran out. He ended with a video of a dog that appeared to be fine 24 hours after use of the technology.

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Day two of the Alcor Conference. The day began with the “Human Cryopreservation and Critical Care Medicine Panel,” including Alcor’s Tanya Jones, critical care physician David Crippen and bioethicist Leslie Whetstine and moderated by Aschwin de Wolf.

[Recap]

The panelists discussed the various definitions death, including legal and biological, and the ethical issues of cryonics. A diagnosis of brain death is required for organ procurement as well as cryopreservation, but determining death is difficult. There are several steps within brain death and it is difficult to determine exactly what part of the process a brain may be in at any particular time. These difficulties and complexities require negotiation between hospital and Alcor personnel, and there are similarities and differences with organ donor requirements.

Alcor prefers the pronouncement of cardiac death over a pronouncement of brain death. Whetstine argued, however, that cardiac death is problematic. If the heart is dead, but the brain is not, and as technologies improve, then this could lead, according to Jones, to a time when the first steps of cryopreservation will transition from an after-death procedure to a medical procedure requiring trained medical personnel.

[Commentary]

The inclusion of a bioethicist in the panel added some drama to the proceedings. Whetstine appeared to be arguing (and this is a vast oversimplification of her argument) that it is okay to declare someone dead if their heart stopped, but it is wrong if you then want to cryopreserve the patient.

So when is a patient dead? When is it okay to cryopreserve them? Right now, Alcor must work within a legal and cultural framework that does not view cryonics as feasible and where the definition of death is changing. Jones said she believes Alcor will need to go on the offensive based on positive results, instead of waiting to be attacked. Whetstine was argumentative, but I found her arguments unclear. She obviously finds cryogenics problematic, but she kept repeating things like “but then they are not really dead” and “that is not death.” She works on the definition of death and believes it needs to be changed.

Some Alcor members were concerned about how their own personal wishes would affect decisions made upon their death. Crippen felt that physicians generally honor their patients wishes, but Whetstine felt patients’ consent should not be part of a declaration of death. Crippen said Alcor members need to get over thinking of consent as something that trumps legal and cultural issues.

Both Jones and Crippen believe that the framework will need to change for cryonics to be more acceptable. Alcor, said Jones, must be open about their arrangements to ensure a more positive future for Alcor.

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Stephen Van Sickle, Ralph Merkle, Michael R. Seidl, and Brian Wowk of the Alcor Board of Directors answered questions from the audience for the last session of the day. The Board addressed questions about the current state of Alcor finances. Alcor is financially stable, with the following sources of income:

• 1/3 membership dues
• 1/3 bequests and estates
• 1/3 grants and donations

At the current number of members (approximately 800) Alcor cannot support all the efforts it needs to support. Employees must wear many hats to cover all the administrative and technical tasks required. Better fund-raising was a popular suggestion for improvement by Board members.

“Alcor will aways muddle through,” said Van Sickle, stressing that this was both a strength and a weakness.

Maintenance costs are expected to remain stable over the next few decades, but operations costs are generally less stable. With more members, Alcor could see economies of scale, but exactly how does Alcor gain new membership? Rudi Hoffman, a certified estate planner who helps people secure the necessary level of life insurance to cover the Alcor fees, suggested using the Internet and mapping, with their permission, local Alcor members so that prospective members can contact them for more information.

Alcor does not intend to open up voting for choosing directors to the membership (this in response to a member question submitted to the conference emcee Susan Fonseca-Klein.)

Van Sickle briefly discussed a wealth preservation trust that would better protect a member’s estate upon their death. Alcor’s lawyers are trying to develop this type of arrangement, but it may take many years before it becomes available as an option.

[Commentary]

A minor few members were relatively emotional about the statement regarding membership voting for directors. Otherwise, it appears (from a show of hands) that most members are happy with the board and how the board continues to choose its own members.

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[Recap]

Does Aubrey de Grey really need an introduction at this point? His public proposal for repairing and reversing the damage of aging, SENS, and his public admission of being an Alcor member were the topics he discussed in “Is it Politically Safe for a Biologist to Support Cryonics Publicly?”

According to de Grey it is an important decision for a scientist to admit to supporting cryonics. A public acknowledgment of their support can affect their professional work. One of the dangers of being a leader in admitting to support is the lessened ability to procure funding. Funding peer review can be more difficult than publication peer review.

A cryonics leader provides public outreach and information. As other speakers have emphasized, legal death is only a convenience that needs constant review as technologies advance. Some people who are legally dead have in fact been revived, and this is something de Grey suggests the public be reminded of. Brain death is itself a complicated concept. Not only can a person be legally dead, they can be legally alive but functionally brain dead, via dementia, for example.

Cryonics supports can also provide ethical leadership. Cryonics supports can help demystify death and cryonics, promote cryonics as life saving, and provide facts for a useful ethical debate. Some people find cryonics “yucky” but a straightforward approach by scientists, rather than anger or ridicule, could be especially effective in demystifying the technology.

Science politics will also be affected by leadership. While mainstream cryobiologists support organ preservation, they do not generally embrace brain preservation. Leaders can point out this apparent discrepancy.

Leaders in this situation may be one of those lucky few who do not have to worry about dangers to their careers, funding, etc. De Grey believes he was lucky to have entered this field and “make trouble” without destroying his career. These lucky few should be able to help each other, until there is a tipping point toward broader support of cryonics.

De Grey believes he made the right decision to go public about his support of cryonics and Alcor membership.

[Commentary]

Leaders are important to any movement, and technologies themselves can be movements when tied to ideas like radical life extension. Cryonics support can be positively affected by people standing up and admitting they support the idea.

But what will be sacrificed when one stands up and stands behind such ideas? How does one talk about cryonics? These are important questions, and I think a review of other movements and how they address their own topics may be helpful.

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Ice cream! Networking! Being nearly run over by busy organizers!

[Alcor Conference - Table of Contents]

[Recap]

Another approach to recovery of cryonics patients, or patients prior to requiring cryonics, is regenerative medicine, that is, the ability to use stem cells to rebuild tissues. Michael West from Advanced Cell Technology discussed “Immortal Cells: The Prospect of Regenerative Medicine.”

The biology of aging remains a mystery, and West provided a history of thoughts on aging, including a reference to August Weismann in 1891 who predicted that cell division in somatic cells is finite. His research, however, was ignored. Researchers have since determined the finiteness caused by a “clock” in somatic cells, through telomere shortening on the tips of DNA over multiple cell divisions. The germline maintains telomere length. West and his research team tried to take this ability in germline cells and apply them to somatic cells. According to West “it worked!”

A reservoir of “immortal cells’ turned out to be human embryonic stem cells. These cells, even in the laboratory, will differentiate into a wide-range of tissues. According to West, nuclear transfer does reset the “aging clock,” despite the common belief that research showed this was not to be the case, with Dolly the cloned sheep commonly believed to have been “born old.”

Where is the field of stem cell research currently at? West and his company are working on technology to sort stem cell precursors to various mature tissues.

[Commentary]

Recent research into the environment of stem cells, as opposed to stem cells themselves, suggested you cannot simply inject stem cells into the body, especially an older body, and hope they regenerate and rebuild the necessary tissues. Particular factors in the environment of these stem cells appear to be important for letting the stem cells do what they need to do, according to researchers like Irina Conboy. West said that there are definitely unanswered questions, but so many promising avenues of research that something good will come from this activity.

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[Recap]

Nanotechnology. Once only an obscure buzzword among fringe techno-progressives, nanotechnology has emerged both as a multi-billion dollar industry and a controversial technology that could lead, according to some, to a prosperous future of plenty, or, according to others, the destruction of the Earth. The word has become increasingly tied to modern, market available structures measured in nanometers and included in goods to provide properties not possible with larger scale materials.

Originally, however, nanotechnology referred to something now called molecular manufacturing. These are nano-sized devices, including computing and mechanical, that can, among other capabilities, manipulate individual atoms and perform computation. This technology is an important area of inquiry for those interested in cryonics because it could be the very technology used to restore cryopreserved individuals to life.

Ralph Merkle is a noted expert in the field of nanotechnology. He discussed “Molecular Nanotechnology and the Repair of Cryopreserved Patients.”

His definition for nanotechnology includes the arrangement of atoms in “most of the ways permitted by physical law,” get them in the right place, and decrease manufacturing costs to not much more than the cost of the raw materials and energy. Important to cryonics is the ability to position atoms where needs, in hopes of repairing damage and rebuilding healthy bodies.

This enabling technology is called positional assembly. Diamond is a suggested material for building these tools. By making use of just a select few elements like hydrogen, carbon, and germanium nearly limitless types of structures could theoretically be created. To support this idea, Merkle and Rob Freitas have been exploring minimal toolsets by using simulation software. The nine tools they propose are molecules that can perform particular functions. For example, a hydrogen donation tool could deposit hydrogen atoms where necessary.

Combined with these tools the researchers suggested a selection of reactions to attach and detach atoms where required. Repeating these steps many, many times, you can create new copies of the same tools, as well as hydrocarbon structures.

Beyond these simulations, Merkle recommends more specific proposals to actually begin building these tools and nanostructures by exploring each of the useful reactions proposed in more detail using more detailed simulations, and by conducting experiments based on the simulations.

Eventually, molecular manufacturing is expected to lead to robotic arms, 8-bit computers, and other parts for devices smaller than, say, the mitochondrion. Merkle estimates that a sugar cube-sized volume computer created by molecular manufacturing advances would have more computer power than all the computer power that exists in the world today: “almost a billion Pentiums in parallel.”

This radical reduction in size and increase in ability would lead to nanomedicine and the ability to revive cryopreserved patients, by repairing and rebuilding at the subcellular scale. However, one issue is appropriate funding levels to conduct the necessary experiments and development. If molecular manufacturing is a capability that will take several decades to develop, long-term thinking investors are necessary.

[Commentary]

Fantastic speaker. It is helpful to create a blueprint by which others can design their own experiments.