Day: July 30, 2002

Is Cryonics a Worthwhile Investment?

With the bizarre legal wrangle over whether or not Ted Williams really wanted to have is body cryonically frozen, Alcor and other cryonics comapnies and advocates were suddenly in the news. Does cryonics represent anything but a Quioxitic effort to cheat death?

I doubt it. I suppose if you’re wealthy enough and don’t mind the idea of havingt your body forzen in liquid nitrogen it might not be an unreasonable idea. After all, the odds of science being able to someday revive cryoncially frozen people is certainly a positive number — but, I suspect, a ridiculously low positive number.

The main problem I see with cryonics is that I don’t want my body to survive, but rather I want me to survive — to make cryonics worthwhile, I would want my consciousness, memories, etc. to be preserved.

But most cryonics advocates seem to have a horribly reductivist view of human consciousness. Certainly consciousness is a biological phenomenon, but cryonics seems to presuppose that it is also an incredibly mechanisitic phenomenon that can be stopped at one state and started decades later like some sort of extremely complex clock.

When looking at what is currently known about how the brain works, however, the evidence seems to be overwhelming that consciousness is largely a process.

Source:

Cryonics: Freezing for the future? The BBC, July 18, 2002.

Could Stem Cell Transplants Extend Human Life?

Researchers at the University of Kentucky report an intriguing finding in mice that one day might offer a way to extend human life spans.

The researchers examined bone marrow stem cells from several different strains of genetically modified mice. The researchers bred the mice, examining which mice had bone marrow stem cells that were the best at resisting cell damage. In this way they were able to identify that part of the mouse genome responsible for the strongest stem cells.

That turned out to be a specific gene on a chromose that had previously been lnked to longevity in mice.

The next step for the researchers will be to create genetically modified strains of mice that have extremely strong stem cells in order to see if it increases their longevity. Researcher Gary van Zant told the BBC, “We hope to show that by making stem cells more hardy we can extend the life span (of mice).”

If they do indeed find further evidence for a connection between strong stem cells and longevity, then this finding might have applications in extending human life span.

Source:

Cell transplants ‘could lengthen lives’. The BBC, July 19, 2002.