From: Peter Passaro (ocsrazor@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sun Nov 08 1998 - 20:53:45 MST
Spike Jones wrote:
----------
> 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
This is kind of a moot point. Only one in roughly ten million carbon atoms
is a C-14 atom and with a half life of 6000 years this is not a very
frequent event. As to whether it breaks the chain, that is dependent on
the trajectory of the electron emitted by the decay. If this occurs, the
cell is not dead by any means. Small errors in the chain are well
tolerated, this is why you need five or six "hits" to a cancer related gene
before it "malfunctions". If you wanted to repair it, no need to design a
nanobot to do it, cells already carry an inherent repair machinery for all
but the most severe of breaks.
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