Hello everyone,
This is the final installment of the cryonet posts. I hope many of you have taken the time to read them all. Or at least the posts by Mike Darwin. I don't want to be suspended until these breakthroughs are put into place! I hope the level of cooperation necessary to have these techniques in place for all cryonic suspension providers will exist. Within a few years a major leap forward should have occurred in terms of quality of suspensions. I am glad I was not one of those people suspended with current methods. Hopefully they will be alright in the end also.
Sincerely,
John Grigg
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 01:32:00 -0400
From: Mike Darwin <75120.575@compuserve.com>
Subject: Further Comments on Patent
As expected, I left out several things in my narrative yesterday. I also apologize for the roughness of the text, but my time constraints are such that I neither spell-check nor proof-read any communications of a non-critical (i.e., core business) nature.
First, I Ieft out a *key* credit in my narrative when I stated:
" I also want to make very clear that the intellecual property in this patent was the work of three people: Wowk, Darwin and Russell. Each made pivotal contributions and spent countless back-breaking hours in the laboratory."
Added to this should have been Steve Harris, M.D. (who *is* credited elsewhere). Further, I wanted to mention that Steve's abilities as a synthetic organic chemist are nothing short of incredible. One of the molecules not claimed in the posted patent and which has, in my opinion, shown incredible *specific* promise for improved brain cryopreservation (and was used in the two brain vitrification studies presented at the 21CM Seminar, and to achieve the high quality post-thaw brain EMs posted on the ACS website) was extremely costly, and in very short supply. In fact, to my kowledge, at one point in time the entire world's supply of this molecule resided in our hands. Very experienced synthetic chemists and custom synthesis chemical companies around the world were quoting outrageous figures for manufacturing this molecule, even in large quantities. Steve applied himself to the problem, discovered a de novo, very simple and very elegant synthetic pathway. He then found a graduate student in an appropriate laboratory to produce the compound in quantities sufficient to allow for toxicological and ultrastrucural evaluation in the standard kidney slice model, and for post cryopreservation ultrastructural evaluation in the intact mammalian brain.
I also want to mention the enormous number of hours Chris Rasch has spent doing many hundreds, and perhaps now, *thousands* of grueling, repetetive and boring toxicological evaluations of these cryoprotective agents (CPAs) using the kidney slice model developed by Greg Fahy at the Red Cross many years ago. (FYI: the toxicological response of kidney parenchyma, particularly the tubule cells, appears to closely approximate that of brain neurons and gials cells.) I would conservatively estimate that Chris has single-handledly put in over 10,000 hours each year, for the past 2 years to evaluate these agents *and* the use of drugs to mitigate toxicity and enhance recovery/viability following loading and unloading with novel and conventional CPAs. What was not adequately communicated in my narrative is that in 21CM we have a "science factory" in operation in Rancho Cucamonga a la Edison with the considerable "plus" of a fair amount of the theoretical genius of Nikola Tesla thrown in as well.
A point I left out regarding comments made on Cryonet was a response to the following remarks from Thomas Donaldson:
>As for congratulations, it seems to me that the most congratulations are
>due to Saul Kent and Bill Faloon, who funded 21st Century Medicine in the
>first place. Yes, such advances do require redoubtable technical and
>scientific knowledge, too, but they could not have occurred without
>funding ... and in my own personal estimation, they might have occurred
>as long as 10 years ago, if only the funding had then existed.
No one owes a deeper debt of gratitude to Bill and Saul than I, for they have supported my efforts unstintingly, first with Alcor and later with other endeavors over the past 15 years. However, I do not agree that "the *most* congratulations are due to Saul Kent and Bill Faloon" (emphasis mine). In fact, I believe this attitude is pernicious, corrosive, demeaning and most importantly *inaccurate.* Yes, Saul and Bill have provided enormous sums of money which have taken good chunks of their time (and thus their lives) to produce. But the kind of work required for the advances being made at Critical Care Research and 21st Century Medicine are not confined to "redoubtable technical and scientific knowledge." Rather, they extend deeply into the most personal aspects of the lives of the principals involved in the day-to-day research and business operation of these companies. As examples: giving up virtually all spare time, and most "home life," including major compromises in virtually every aspect of their non-working life: including but not limited to serious disruption of "normal" social activity and even serious sleep deprivation. I cannot count the days I've seen Joan O'Farrell our COO here at CCRI till 0400 after starting her day at 0900 the day before, only to be here at 0900 the following day and so on, day after day... Eugne Leitl is often ashen and severely sleep-deprived running on coffee and "Jolt" cola in order to put in inhumanly long days. My own personal and social life have all but vanished, and that is true for many others here at CCRI and, I believe, at 21CM as well.
Money is all well and good. It is precious, damn hard to come by, and absolutely essential. But it CANNOT, IT ABSOLUTELY CANNOT buy the kind of effort that has been going on here for the past few years. That cost *is* a large part of the very lives of the people who give it, and it is unarguably as valuable, if not more so, than hard cash. It is time quite possibly forever lost, which for many of us, will likely not be regained. Speaking for myself, I am 45 years old now, and at the very end of a period in my life that I could spend in pursuits which require stamina and physical capabilities which will not be there even 5 years from now. I am also ever mindful of men like Jerry Leaf, who most people on this list probably have not even heard of (!) who's lives ended well before they expected in no small measure as a result of their efforts to advance this field of endeavor, and whose *indefinitely* "postponed gratification" rests with them in liquid nitrogen in Phoenix, Arizona. The men and women involved in this endeavor are paying with capital as dear as any gold or dollars ever minted or earned. And many are paying for it *without being compensated in money now* and at considerable risk of NEVER being compensated. (Such compensation *may* come later, but it may well not, and it is a gamble damn few are willing to make in life, and a gamble which, with few exceptions, *none* of the people on this list have made or been willing to make, Thomas Donaldson included.)
This not to denigrate the fine efforts put forth by many on this list who have worked hard and long for advancing cryobiology or cryonics now, or in the past. However, speaking from my unique perspective (having been around for so long (since 1968) and involved with so many cryonics operations), I have never seen anything even remotely approaching the sustained, *cooperative and productive effort of this magnitiude in the entire history of this idea.* In fact, I have rarely personally witnessed it any sector of life: business, social, charitable, or religious, although I am acutely aware of many contemporary and historical examples.
As thanks for these efforts they have mostly been ignored and have often been denigrated or made to seem superfluous by the most outspoken on this list. Robert Ettinger's response to expose Olga and Ziggy Visser as the frauds they were was to ban any cryopatient treated by me (BioPreservation (BPI)) from being stored in CI's facilites thus ending contracts between ACS members desiring both services and ending the contract between CI and CryoCare for storage, which, BTW, probably cost CI arrangements with Bill Faloon and several other CryoCare members who did not wish to be stored with CryoSpan. His reason: "my unethical disclosure of the active ingredient in Visser's Virodene and cryoprotectant frauds."
And this does not include the Nanoluddite postings of George Smith.
Finally, one individual from CryoNet wrote to me asking the following questions which deserve at least cursory answers:
Regarding my comments on the Visser affair:
>I don't understand this yet. You might be saying:
>1. The Visser affair depleted a resevoir of money that would otherwise
>have been spent on doing the clinical trials. (But why are they part
>of the same pool of money?)
>2. The Visser affair caused the regulatory authorities to be
>predjudiced against 21CM. (In this case have you considered licensing
>the technology to someone else who might want to bring it forward?)
>3. The Visser affair caused the regulatory authorities to be
>predjudiced against certain technologies, including the drugs that
>were going to go through the trials. (But what is the resemblance
>between DMF and the drug that were going to go through clinical
>trials?)
>4. The Visser affair screwed up the regulatory structure of South
>Africa enough that attempting clinical trials in South Africa in
>general is pointless. (But why is South Africa the only option?)
>5. Something else?
The answer is #4 above. It is simply impossible to realize the impact the Virodene fiasco had on clinical trials and experimental medicine in SA. And no, SA is not the only option but it was, until recently, a particularly attractive one for the following reasons:
This kind of "public notice" for important, life impacting projects (government and private) are done all the time in your local newspaper. When the government wants to build a highway through where your home is located, or a corporation wants to put a 24-hour petrol station next door to your home it is handled in precisely this way. While it also true that most people rarely read these endless pages of small type in their local newspaper, nevertheless this fine print public notice sometimes ends up determining where and/or how they will be living a year or two later. Sometimes it determines whether they will be alive at all: dams, waste disposal sites, military testing of nuclear or biological weapons were and are often vetted through these channels in far finer print and far more obtuse language that we've proposed be used.
2) It is our position that current methods of CPR are grossly clinically inadequate (survival to discharge is 1% in New York City (one of the worst) and 12% in Seattale (one of the best) and the incidence of post resuscitation neurological deficit overall in survivors is ~80%). Further, closed chest CPR was never properly clinically validated (no Randomized Clinical Trials against the previously used, and in our opinion, (and supported in the literature) superior open chest cardiac massage: overall survival rate ~30% with <15% neurological deficit). Perhaps most importantly, INFORMED CONSENT is NOT obtained before closed chest CPR is applied today! BTW, closed chest CPR was never subjected to FDA review and was put into universal practice on the basis of limited, often clinically irrelevant, and frequently scientifically invalid, animal and small-scale human research studies conducted in the early 1960s.
3) Most Western countries tow the FDA line, and most countries that do not, lack the high quality infrastructure and medical care available in places like South Africa which, despite being a Third World country, has excellent tertiary care facilities with superbly trained physicians, nursing staff, and support infrastructure: autoclaves, clean linens, modern analytical equipment, staff who understand the scientific method, and so on). We could certainly "do" a study in Mexico or China, but we would be faced with rampant corruption ("mordita" or the "the bite" as they call it in Mexico and Latin America) and tertiary medical facilities out of the 16th Century where even soap and water, let alone sterile technique are practiced on a casual basis, if at all. That infrastructure is absolutely critical to the success of sophisticated technological and pharmacological intervention which is integral to CCRI's protocols.
Perhaps most importantly, many Third World countries such as China boast seemingly "well educated and credentialed" medical personnel who in reality operate as "robots" and are, apparently for cultural reasons, incapable of understanding the real mechanics of science: statistical design, the concept of statistical "power" in terms of the number of *appropriate* patients required to have confidence in a given % improvement in outcome, the absolute necessity for sophisticated qualitative and quantitative data collection, and above all, the theoretical basis for the work being done. This last point determines *practical* (real world) study exclusion and inclusion criteria, as well as possible conofunding and invalidatig factors (prior medical history, off protocol drug treatment, and so on).
There are other countries where this work is possible. But language barriers, cultural differences, and many other factors add tremendous complications and costs. Speaking as someone who has worked "out of country" in clinical research settings I can attest to the magnitude of the difficulties. South Africa, until recently, has had a good tertiary medical infrastructure which is utilized homogenously by both whites and blacks of all classes (a very important consideration when an "American" company is doing drug tests: read experimenting on uneducated blacks). SA has had a history of extremely high quality, aggressive, and scientifically sophisticated research and tertiary medical care (remember that the first heart transplant was done in Capetown). And, very importantly, it is academically and medically an english speaking country with a fundamental culture reasonably close to that of the United States': Far closer than that, say, of China, or even Japan.
>>And the ultimate irony is, the storage costs will probably be lower and
the
>>up-front technology not more than 20% to 30% more costly than that
employed
>>by Alcor now (the only high technology player left in the human
>>cryopreservation field).
>I, for one, would be interested in a description of what would be
>required to do this, and some numbers supporting the cost estimates.
>I am not at all clear on the difference between what you're proposing
>and what BioTransport is trying to do.
This is beyond the scope of the time I have here. The numbers for storage, including detailed technological and design considerations, were worked out largely by Brian Wowk (with some minimal input from me) about 6 months ago and seemed persuasive to others with the requisite technical backgrounds and critical minds suitable to evaluate these scenarios.
Regarding BioTransport: as I understand it, BioTransport plans to license some of the innovations in cryopreservation technology made by 21CM, but has an "incremental approach" (my words) and is not inclined to pursue a full-thrust program of vitrification for the forseeable future (my impression). They also appear deeply committed to a "motor home" rescue to dry-ice approach which I believe will be severely technically limiting. However, Michael Riskin, CEO of BioTransport , and Saul Kent, CEO of 21CM would be FAR better qualified by far to answer this last question, as I am now very far removed from the mechanics of cryonics activity.
Mike Darwin, Director of Research
Critical Care Reserch, Inc.
10743 Civic Center Drive
Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91730
Phone: (909) 987-3883
FAX: (909) 987-7253