Posts Under Featured Articles Category
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, March 2013 By Max More Why do Alcor members have to pay membership dues? What are they used for? Why do I also have to pay CMS (Comprehensive Member Standby) fees? Why can’t we run the organization using income from doing cryopreservations and abolish dues? Can’t we just cut our costs? How will dues change in the… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, March 2013 By Aschwin de Wolf In a previous column called “Iatrogenesis and Cryonics” I observed that cryonics is uniquely vulnerable to iatrogenic injury because the objectives of individual cryonics procedures (such as stabilization) are not clearly defined and due to the lack of obvious feedback that a low temperature stabilization procedure entails. This does not mean that cryonics advocates have not thought about how to… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, February 2013 By Laurence Mueller, Cassandra Rauser, and Michael Rose, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Book Review by R. Michael Perry The book here reviewed is a technical study on the effects of aging, mainly using fruit flies as a model, since these creatures are short-lived so that research involving many generations is feasible. The findings… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, February 2013 By Chana de Wolf This is the first entry in a new series of short articles about neuroscience and its implications for the field of human cryopreservation and life extension. In this article I discuss the relationship of the brain to consciousness and knowledge acquisition before venturing into more specific and practical topics What is consciousness?… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, January 2013 By Chana de Wolf In honor of its 40th anniversary, Alcor held its first conference in 5 years on October 19-21, 2012, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The program featured a wide variety of topics for presentation, with themes regarding how to improve the odds of a successful cryopreservation and theories of aging and their implications for… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, January 2013 By Aschwin de Wolf Executive Summary Scientific and practical considerations strongly support cryopreservation rather than chemopreservation for the stabilization of critically ill patients. Technology for achieving solid state chemopreservation of brains larger than a mouse brain does not yet exist. Chemical fixation is irreversible without very advanced technologies. Chemical fixation permits no functional feedback or… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, November-December 2012 As evidence is emerging that contemporary vitrification technologies are adequate to preserve identity-critical information in the brain, critics of cryonics have tried to raise the bar by postulating that the neuroanatomical basis of memory is so fragile and transient that it cannot be captured by technologies that can successfully preserve the connectome. The online exchange… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, November-December 2012 By Aschwin de Wolf The cryonics organizations Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have taken great care to correct some of the persistent myths about cryonics. With so much widespread misinformation being circulated in the media it seems trivial to pay attention to some of the misconceptions that some people who are sympathetic to cryonics hold. But… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, September-October 2012 Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are by Sebastian Seung, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade, 384 pages, 2012. Reviewed by Aschwin De Wolf [This review originally appeared in Venturist News and Views, June-July 2012, 6-7.] The scientific perspective that informs Sebastian Seung’s bestselling popular neuroscience book Connectome is so familiar to cryonicists that the… Read more »
[FEATURED ARTICLE] Cryonics, September-October 2012 By Ben Best On Saturday, July 7, 2012, I attended the Symposium on Cryonics and Brain-Threatening Disorders in Portland, Oregon. The symposium was the “brain child” of Aschwin de Wolf, who also kindly invited me to give a presentation on treatments to mitigate Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). The symposium was organized by the Institute for Evidence-Based Cryonics and… Read more »
