From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Nov 10 1998 - 12:00:33 MST
Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> writes:
> for those who are up to speed on cryonics, a question please:
> our tissues are mostly carbon and carbon has an isotope (C14)
> with half life about 6kyr. when C14 undergoes beta decay, the
> remainder is a nitrogen atom. looks like the dna chain would
> be broken there. would the cell then be dead? dependent
> on a nanobot to find and repair the break? have there been
> calculations done on this? spike
According to the chemistry textbook I have in my bookshelf the
abundancy in living material is one in 10^12. The human genome is
roughly 6e9 nucleotides, each having around 10 carbon atoms - hence
each cell has 6e10 carbon atoms in the genome. The chance of having
just one C14 is one in 17; of these just 1% suffers decay in a
century. The problem is likely minor compared to other sources of
damage.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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