🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>... no one has looked into irradiation ...
>>>
>>>Ed

>> ... hard gammas would leave you somewhat absent-minded.
>> --JoSH]

Are there any food irradiation experts out there? I'm afraid we're 
both shooting in the dark. (Though I am trying to dig up more facts 
on the subject.) And isn't memory, especially long-term memory, stored 
in structural changes in the synapses themselves, besides chemically?
I would expect those long-term memories would prove more difficult
to "bleach out". 

Nuclear physics is rife with macabre stories of men who, having
accidentally received lethal dosages of radiation, then walked
around lucid and clear-headed until they died. (Perhaps in those
cases amnesia would have been a blessing.)

If there is some truth to what you assume here, we can still 
minimize the damage by irradiating the body briefly once, to kill
the microbes, then hermetically sealing it. There's no need to bathe 
in hard gamma for 200 years, one brief dip will do.

ED

[As Howard Landman notes, you still have to worry about ordinary
 chemical decomposition at room temperatures.  

 As far as synapses are concerned, you may be right.  According
 to Crick (in PDP v2 p365) it isn't really known how the weight
 of the synapse is represented, but his guess is simply the area 
 of the zone of apposition across the synaptic cleft (see p338).
 In the best of all cases it might even be proportional to the
 volume of the presynaptic process, a feature whose size is on
 the order of a micron (ie, big; the cleft is 20-30 nm across).
 If so, you might get away with irradiating the body and simply
 dessicating it for the long wait.  I wouldn't risk it personally
 though :^)
 --JoSH]