Depressed Metabolism

From the preface of Michael Munowitz’s Principles of Chemistry:

The wonder of the world is not its complexity, but its simplicity. Given enough color and canvas, anybody can make a mess; that, we do ourselves. More to admire is the artist who makes do with little, the artist whose art is to conceal an economy of [...]

The June 2009 issue of Rejuvenation Research features an article by Cryonics Insitute President Ben Best about the involvement of nuclear DNA damage in the aging process:

Abstract
This paper presents evidence that damage to nuclear DNA (nDNA) is a direct cause of aging in addition to the effects of nDNA damage on cancer, apoptosis, and cellular [...]

Real estate is all about location, location, location. Location matters in cryonics as well.
The objective of standby and stabilization in cryonics is to limit injury to the brain after pronouncement of legal death. Unfortunately, many cryonics patients have not been stabilized promptly after pronouncement of legal death because the cryonics organization did a poor job [...]

The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis)

According to this news item the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is taking legal action against the brother and sister of an Alcor member who “denied the foundation’s request for his body and didn’t notify them of their brother’s death until months after he was buried.” Although some may question the wisdom of pursuing this case [...]

Whenever there is a major economic event (a rapid decline of stock prices, a spike in the price of oil, high unemployment, etc.) the media can be counted on to feature a person who was predicting these events all along. This should not be surprising because there are so many professional economists and commentators who [...]

Hans Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy is among the most accessible and illuminating statements of logical empiricism. Although the book can be read as an introduction to philosophy, the central message of the work is that most of what constitutes philosophy is either (outdated) pre-scientific speculation or incoherent reasoning.
One of the most powerful chapters [...]

In ‘The Rise of Scientific Philosophy’ the logical positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach writes:

In Leibniz’s philosophy the rational side of modern science has found its most radical representation. The successful use of mathematical methods for the description of nature made Leibniz believe that all science can be ultimately transformed into mathematics. The idea of determinism, of [...]

Source: ExtroBritannia
Why the much anticipated medical breakthroughs of the early 21st century are failing to materialize
Saturday 30th May 2009, 2pm-4pm. Room 403 (fourth floor), Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX. There’s no charge to attend, and everyone is welcome.
Speaker
Mike Darwin has 30 years experience in cutting edge medical research. Co-founder of the Institute for [...]

It is common medical knowledge that after 5 minutes of cardiac arrest the prospects of successful resuscitation without neurological impairment become progressively bleak. But there is less consensus on the mechanisms of such injury. One strong candidate is what is called the “no-reflow” phenomenon. No-reflow refers to the impairment of perfusion of the brain after [...]

The genre of “torture porn” seems to be at the height of its popularity. The 2009 Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam featured a non-trivial amount of horror movies with excessive violence, torture and sadism. But perhaps the most trustworthy indicator that this trend may be nearing its peak is the French movie “Martyrs.” The movie [...]

How seriously should we take William Warren  Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment? Despite its emphasis on critical inquiry, the work has a lot of elements that would place the book in a more obscure tradition.
The first thing that strikes the reader is the enormous number of pages that are devoted to the “search for identity” [...]

Basile J. Luyet (1897-1974) can be considered the father of modern cryobiology. His book “Life and Death at Low Temperatures” is a classic in the field and his journal “Biodynamica” evolved into a publication solely dedicated to the study of low temperature biology. Luyet identified the possibility of solidification without crystallization at low temperatures (vitrification) [...]

Cryonics patients can greatly benefit from rapid stabilization after pronouncement of legal death. One fortunate feature of stabilization procedures is that the most effective and validated procedures are relatively inexpensive and easy to perform.  The difference between no stabilization procedures at all and procedures that aim to rapidly restore blood circulation and drop the patient’s [...]

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality:
Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science’s picture of the way we think – the ways we succeed or fail to obtain the truth, or fulfill our goals.  The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of [...]

Under ideal circumstances cryonics patients are stabilized immediately after pronouncement of legal death by restoring  blood flow to the brain, lowering temperature, and administering medications. In most cryonics cases, however, there is a delay between pronouncement of legal death and start of cryonics procedures. In some cases there are no stabilization interventions at all. Provided [...]

The association of cryonics with “transhumanism” seems inevitable but is problematic.  It seems inevitable because cryonics should be most attractive to people with a very positive perspective on the future capabilities of technology. Barring rapid advances in mitigating aging, cryonics  offers the only credible option for transhumanists to become a part of that future. It [...]

The philosopher Karl Popper has published on a wide variety of subjects but his most lasting contribution is his answer to the problem of induction by drawing attention to the asymmetry between verification and falsification. A theory can never be proven, but it can be falsified. Popper’s falsification criterion can also be used  to distinguish [...]

Following the news that mice have been cloned from 16 year old frozen tissue comes an announcement that scientists have made advances in resurrecting  the extinct Pyrenean Ibex. This does not only offer hope that someday other extinct species may be resurrected and returned to nature, it further reinforces the power of low temperatures to [...]

The cryonics organizations Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have taken great care to correct some of the persistent myths about cryonics. With so much widespread misinformation being circulated in the media it seems trivial to pay attention to some of the misconceptions that some people who are sympathetic to cryonics hold. But the price of [...]

Patrick Millard is a Michigan based artist who works with different media including photography, painting, mixed media, sound, and installation. He currently works as an adjunct professor of photography at Grand Valley State University and Grand Rapids Community College and is a photography instructor at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids.
One of [...]

Various approaches are available to investigate cryoprotectant toxicity, ranging from theoretical work in organic chemistry to  cryopreservation of complete animals. Because resuscitation of complex organisms after cryopreservation is not feasible at the moment, such investigations need to be confined to viability assays of individual cells and tissues or ultrastructural  studies.
One simple model that allows for [...]

Robert J. White is most known, or perhaps most notorious, for his work on primate head transplants. Less known, but more relevant to the practice of human cryopreservation, is his work in cerebral ischemia, hypothermia, and brain preservation. Most of White’s innovative work was published in the 1960s and 1970s. White also published a substantial [...]

Consumers are constantly bombarded with advice about health. Lower your cholesterol, avoid carbs, take dietary supplements, avoid Teflon, get a full body scan, etc. Such advice does not fall on deaf ears. Who does not want to remain healthy, look good, and extend life? Two other factors contribute to our eagerness to consume and follow [...]

For most of the decade one of the authors of this blog maintained another website called Against Politics to disseminate information about the theory and practice of a depoliticized society. Topics that held Against Politics together included non-cognitivism, contractarianism, polycentric law, and an emphasis on the work of thinkers such as David Gauthier, Jan Narveson [...]

Esquire magazine features an article on scientist Mark Roth and his research into “suspended animation.” As the website title “The Mad Scientist Bringing Back the Dead…. Really” indicates, this is not supposed to be a detailed account of Ikaria’s recent advances in induction of depressed metabolism but a sensationalist piece on mad scientists. Although the [...]

Molecular nanotechnology pioneer and cryonics advocate Eric Drexler has launched his own blog called Metamodern: The Trajectory of Technology. This is what we can expect:

In this blog, I’ll discuss current progress in science and technology, often with a specific perspective in mind: how current progress can contribute to the development of advanced nanosystems. This system-building [...]

The Dutch psychologist Piet Vroon once opined that philosophy has lost much of its relevance because it  has lost touch with the (natural) sciences. Although philosophers associated with logical positivism and critical rationalism made great efforts to discipline the practice of philosophy by encouraging logical thinking and verification (or falsification), so far their efforts must [...]

On Barely A Blog, Ilana Mercer reports on Robert Aumann’s recent inaugural lecture of the Center for the Study of Judaism and Economics at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.  Robert Aumann, who won the 2005 Nobel prize in economics with Thomas Schelling, is known for his work on repeated games and the role of [...]

As documented in David M. Friedman’s The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever, Lindbergh and Carrel considered the human body a living machine made of replaceable parts. A major reason why Carrel was interested in developing and refining equipment to perfuse isolated organs is because he believed that [...]

What is the relationship between individual choice and collective choice? What should be the domain over which a democracy chooses? Prevailing answers to these questions are an important factor affecting the size of government. One argument why imperfect foresight should favor limited government, or no government at all, involves the difference between how individual and [...]