Depressed Metabolism

Excerpt from “Ben Best – A Case for Free Will AND Determinism” Determinism implies materialism — implies that consciousness is material. Cryonics is based on the premise that the preservation of the fine structure of the brain at low temperature will preserve the self — ie, that the self is entirely determined-by and contained-in the [...]

About 35 people attended the Cryonics Oregon-sponsored debate on the subject of SENS. Chana de Wolf was mistress of ceremonies. A show of hands indicated that the great majority of those attending were signed-up cryonicists. There was a sizeable contingent of CI Members who drove down from Seattle for the event. One was Eron Hennessey [...]

On June 6th the next Cryonics Oregon meeting will coincide with a downtown Portland aging conference. As a result we have been successful in persuading Cryonics Institute President Ben Best and Alcor member and biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey to attend our meeting. The theme of the evening will be “Strategies for Life extension and Rejuvenation: [...]

Cryonics Institute President Ben Best talks about cryonics and how cryonics is related to rejuvenation in this one-hour long interview on “It’s Rainmaking Time!” Further Reading: Depressed Metabolism Interview with Ben Best

Once a year I try to attend at least one biogerontology conference. Although I attend biogerontology conferences out of personal interest, and at my own expense, they are the most fruitful grounds for promoting cryonics I have found, and this is especially true of SENS conferences. I have missed none of the four SENS conferences [...]

This past weekend Motel X, the Lisbon (Portugal) International Horror festival, had its third anniversary. It is one of the smaller international horror festivals around, but this year they managed to have both Stuart Gordon, director of several Lovecraft adaptions, and John Landis, director of the horror classic An American Werewolf in London, as special [...]

Danila Medvedev has translated Ben Best’s  article “Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice” into Russian. The translation is available on the KrioRus website. The original Engish article was published in Rejuvenation Research and is available as a PDF file at the Cryonics Institute website. ABSTRACT Very low temperatures create conditions that can preserve tissue for centuries, [...]

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, [...]

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) [...]

When I was in New Zealand in 1999, CI Member Cam Christie told me that one of his co-workers was against cryonics because she was a Jehovah’s  Witness and her church had a position against cryonics. I recently found an article about cryonics on the Jehovah’s Witnesses website: The piece contains the statement: “…the use [...]

This is the first in a series of interviews with individuals in the life extension and cryonics movement. We start off with an interview with Ben Best, president of the Cryonics Institute. What is your philosophy toward life? I think that “sense of life” or emotional involvement  in life is the most crucial determinant of [...]

A technical cryonics article to be published in the conference proceedings of a customarily peer-reviewed scientific journal, entitled “Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice (pdf),” by Ben Best, President of the Cryonics Institute, will appear in the next issue (Volume 11, Issue 2) of Rejuvenation Research. (A previous article by Ralph Merkle, “The Technical Feasibility of [...]