Biostasis Pluralism

[jordansparks]

Jessica Radley and Aschwin de Wolf just made a blog post:
https://www.enter.biostasis.com/p/biostasis-pluralism
Unfortunately, it was hopelessly biased. Cryonics was presented as equivalent to the true scientific gold standard of chemical fixation. Gallingly, at the end, is this statement: "Under non-ideal conditions it is not clear which technology is favored..." No, it's quite clear even if some people are still in denial. Just go ask any mainstream scientist. Would they freeze without cryoprotectant and cause ice crystals or would they immerse in formalin? You'll get a very clear unanimous answer. They would be very puzzled about why you would even consider freezing because ice crystals are obviously damaging. Immersion in fixative does not lead to decay at the center of the tissue. Instead, a very small amount of formalin is able to quickly penetrate deeply. Yes, it takes a few more weeks to become fully fixed, but the small amount that does penetrate is enough to slow and then fairly quickly halt degradation. In case you feel like debating this, let me remind you that brain banks do this all the time. After a delay of a day or two, they immerse in fixative and they don't have any issues with "decay". This protocol is well established in brain banking literature.

Let me be really blunt here. Not using formalin is what causes damage. That's true for ideal cases, non-ideal cases, and badly compromised cases. The only exception is if the brain is already frozen for some reason. In that case, we obviously would not thaw the brain just to add formalin.

Cryonics is substandard care. Cryonics is harming patients. Every single time.

[jordansparks]

I just had a private conversation with Aschwin. He admits that he is advocating for the demonstrably worse quality of straight frozen tissue because he thinks that the original structure might be inferable with very high tech by extrapolating ice crystal growth backward. This is extremely speculative, bad science, and not based on any evidence. He is literally pushing for lower quality. I would remind him again that I really don't thing that kind of damage allows inference of the original state. As ice forms, it "smears" the material with shearing forces of about 75,000 psi. Any physical process that stirs or smears molecules causes a kind of damage which would not allow future inference of the original structure. His approach is bad science because there is zero feedback. He's depending on a process that is entirely hypothetical and cannot be validated. One other major proponent of inference after ice damage was Mike Perry, who actually wrote a book claiming that all previous humans who had ever lived could be brought back to life using a much more elaborate version of backward extrapolation.

After talking with Jessica, she still seems to naively think that we should be humoring the cryonicists. Maybe it's because cryonics has been around for a while; I'm not really sure why. So she was pushing for cooperation and didn't even really care about the technical issue that I latched onto. It looks like I still have some work to do to convince her that market share does not have any bearing on how scientific a company is. All of cryonics is well outside of mainstream science. Her company, Nectome, is actually correctly following mainstream science and just needs to quit trying to work with cryonicists. Cryonics is harming patients. Instead of working with them, we need to figure out how to steer patients away from cryonics.

[jordansparks]

I previously covered all the topics in that post here:
https://www.sparksbrain.org/cryonicsVsAldehyde.html
and
https://www.sparksbrain.org/revival.html
The difference was that I made it clear that cryonics should never be used. I did not portray cryonics as some sort of acceptable alternative. Cryonics is not based on a strong scientific foundation with evidence.