🚀 go-pugleaf

I suspect a cryonicist (I am not one) would answer your "insurance"
questions with a statement of faith in cryogenics. This is a faith I
lack, because, as far as I can tell, human brains have not been 
frozen, then thawed, with cell structure intact. It seems safe to
say that with full blown nanotechnology any molecular structure 
will be able to be duplicated. But if the crucial structure of the
brain is not preserved in the first place, there will be nothing
worthwhile to duplicate.

It could be that my understanding of this field is incomplete, I
haven't followed it at all that closely. I would be very much interested
is seeing the before and after results of the following cryonics
experiment, if anything like it has already been done.

Take a gorilla or chimpanzee, train it for some particular task.
Then take some small brain tissue sample and prepare micrographs.
Now freeze and thaw the test animal. If the subject survives, great!
Test for memory of the pre-learned task. If the subject cannot by
revived, determine why. In any case, take post-freeze brain tissue 
samples and make micrographs. Publish all data in exhaustive detail.

Has anything like the experiment that I've just outlined been performed
and published? If so, a reference would be appreciated.

I lean toward immortalism, I would like to live forever. I am very
interested in any technique that offers a better than even chance
of getting "over the hump" to the nanotechnological future, which
promises to be a *very* interesting place. One chance in a million,
however doesn't interest me (I don't play the lottery, either.)

Right now, it seems, a better bet would be a brain transplant 
(Assuming that your brain was reasonably intact).  Probably a vastly
more expensive undertaking, but perhaps you get what you pay for.
I recall that, in the brain, tissue rejection is not much of a problem.
Has this experiment ever been done? (Outside of grade B horror
pictures, that is :-)

Ed Strong
ems@Princeton.EDU

[This is probably a good place to reiterate that cryonics is based
 on the concept that enough information will be saved by freezing
 brain tissues to recreate the brain with a mature nanotechnology--
 *not* that the brain could be restored to order simply by thawing 
 it out.  This is sort of the same difference as that between the
 murderer hanging around at the scene of the crime to await the
 cops, or having left enough clues that Sherlock Holmes can figure
 out who he was.
 
 Given that it is common practice to freeze human embryos and 
 thaw them *in a viable state*, right now, it is hard to believe
 that the freezing process destroys so much information that 
 an atom-by-atom analysis could not figure out what had been there.

 The highest-level whole-animal experiment I know of involved a dog,
 which I understand is still alive.  Can someone fill in more details?

 --JoSH]