> > So why not do both? Incentivise the medics by offering any and all
> > organs below the neck... Then the organ people have incentive
> > to get you cooled and beheaded quickly. spike
"S.J. Van Sickle" wrote:
> The problem is that the vast majority of organ donations are done with
> "brain dead" donors...Even "normal" folks with a
> donor card are extremely unlikely to wind up donating.
>
> Now, *tissue* donations of various sorts *may* be possible...corneas,
> skin, that sort of thing. I'll have to look into it. steve
What Im trying to tap into here Steve is the strongest motivating
force known: self interest. Way stronger than basic human goodness
or charity, likely always will be. Im looking to incentivize the medical
community in a special way.
I had a long talk with a couple friends last night, husband is an
emergency room doctor, wife is an emergency room nurse. We
discussed cryonics, organ donations, etc, and I came away with
the notion that one of the biggest challenges facing the cryonaut
is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the personnel most
likely to handle my cooling corpse either do not believe in cryonics
or oppose it philosophically.
Altho I dont know for sure, I would think that time is critical
after one perishes: it is better to get frozen quickly. The parameds
who arrive on the scene, find the body, attempt a for-show
resuscitation for the sake of the family, perhaps causing more
damage than benefit, etc. They get the message that oh, sure,
another self deluded freezer geezer (term borrowed from
Damien Broderick), then half heartedly carry out the drill, all
along thinking about which hotdog stand will provide lunch.
Nowthen, compare to an alternate scenario, whereby one
incentivizes the parameds to hustle their arses, with a reward
for haste and completeness and correctness in carrying out their
task. With a mere few thousand bucks reward available to the
otherwise lackadaisical personnel, the attitude would then be:
EMERGENCY!! FREEZER GEEZER with MONEY!
Drop everything, get with the program!
My admittedly cynical theory is that the motivating force of
ethical duty is weak indeed compared to the promise of
scoring an occasional few thousand bucks for doing the right
thing.
Furthermore, consider this scenario, also borrowed from
one of Damien's books, Hells Teeth. I perish unexpectedly,
my bewildered spouse is left frantically trying to get the
parameds to speed my remains to the cryonics facility, on
top of having to deal with the emotional shock of my
untimely demise. They being nonbelievers, fail to respond
appropriately and add still more trauma to an already trying
and unfortunate sitch. This is cruel and needless pain
inflicted upon the family, worse than the Robert Reuben
game I was indulging in last week.
If on the other hand, I had some device that communicated
the complete cryo-instructions to parameds, along with the
available monetary rewards to the participants, while they
were in route to my mortal remains, well then my spouse
would be spared. Being as how she will likely already
be having a really bad day, this desire to not make it any
worse than necessary compels me more than even
the tenuous hope of techno-resurrection.
I recognize the ethical dilemmas this whole notion would
present, such as ambulances shrieking past the gravely
injured and scooping up the wealthy corpses, but perhaps
there is a solution among the problems.
Someone who hangs out on cryonet, feel free to
crosspost this message to there, as this topic has likely
already been hashed out. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:39 MDT