I got a letter from Alcor yesterday (Thursday) about this. They are
licensing vitrification technology from 21st Century Medicine. This
will enable greatly improved suspensions and hopefully eliminate much
of the damage from ice crystal formation.
However, it is only for neurosuspensions. (Those involve freezing only
the head.) The technology requires very rapid cooling, and this is not
yet practical to achieve with whole body suspensions. Even if it does
become practical, Alcor warns that it may be a much more difficult and
expensive procedure, and therefore they may have to raise the cost for
whole body suspensions. Whole body suspension members like myself are
advised to consider converting to neurosuspensions in order to take
advantage of this new technology.
Personally, I will wait and see. My health is good and so I can hope
that they are able to get it working for whole body members within a
few years. If it costs more at the end, so be it.
(The reason I am a whole body member is because I believe there is
information in the muscles, spinal cord and other tissues which will not
be recoverable in a cloned body. This includes both learned information
as well as basic issues of neural architecture which are not fully
determined by genetics. Fitting an old head to a new body may not be
practical, I fear.)
Hal
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