I’ve been focusing on the this coming Saturday, July 20, as the thirty-third anniversary of the Apollo landing. But today, July 16th, is the thirty-third anniversary of the launch, when the Saturn V rose to the heavens on a roaring pillar of fire. For a few minutes, the power generated by its engines probably exceeded the entire electrical output of the country.
The launch went off without a hitch.

[Thanks to Mark Whittington for the reminder]

It was just a matter of time.

The polio virus has been constructed from scratch in the laboratory, using instructions off the Internet. There’s no reason that the same couldn’t be done with smallpox. Fortunately, the people who would want to do so are probably still incompetent to, but we can’t count on this to be true forever.

This is also a step on the way to building true artificial lifeforms.

I said earlier that it was a simple probate case. If this report from MSNBC is correct, it may become more than that, though the thrust of the story is that the family is working out their differences. It’s hard to imagine how they could compromise, given the huge disparity between the positions–one side wants to literally destroy the body, the other to preserve it as best as can be done.

But according to the story, it may come down to a judge’s decision as to what’s the best solution. If that’s the case, then the actual ethical and scientific case for cryonics (as opposed to simply attempting to determine the wishes of the “descedant”) will become a factor in the judge’s decision, which means that it could turn into a landmark case in the field of life extension, if the family doesn’t resolve their differences.

I’ll continue to watch it with great interest.

(Thanks to Alan Boyle over at MSNBC for the heads up.)

There are at least two web sites that are collecting stories about memories of the first Apollo landing, whose thirty third anniversary is this coming Saturday. (You have made arrangements to celebrate it, right?).

One is Where Were You, a site that’s been collecting these memories for a while. The other one, which I got via Mark Whittington‘s blog, is at the George Mason University website, and is part of a project that they call Memory Bank. I hope that the two can coordinate, so we can get it all in one place.

TechCentralStation has two more sympathetic pieces from (unsurprisingly) folks at Cato and Reason (Ron Bailey).

And Kevin McGehee has some thoughts on the implications for souls. To the degree that I believe in souls (not very much), I agree with him. If souls exist, God determines when they leave the body–not doctors or lawyers, and if a body is frozen with the prospect of being reanimated later, I suspect that God’s smart enough to know that, and leave it in place until the situation changes in some way. If not, He doesn’t really live up to His reputation for being omniscient.

I received another comment questioning our right to “impose ourselves on the future.” The quick response is that you impose yourself on the future with every day that you decide to continue to live, instead of tossing yourself off a bridge. The distinction between cryonics, and other means of preserving and extending life, including simply continuing to breathe, is an artificial and arbitrary one.

Along those lines, unlike Jay Manifold, Kevin Holtsberry (who’s having a problem with Trackback) sees a fundamental conflict between cryonics and Christianity.

If cryongenics [sic] was just a way to help people live longer more productive lives, fine. But it is not, it is perserving your body in hopes that someday they can bring you back to life.

In what way does this differ from keeping someone in a coma on life support? Does Mr. Holtsberry propose that we pull the plug on them?

This is quite clearly an unwillingness to accept death. The reference to Lazarus gets us nowhere because that was Christ – God incarnate – using a miracle to teach those around him. Using this to imply that we should go around trying to raise people from the dead is a stretch and one that assumes we should play God. At least Jesus raised Lazarus within a relatively short period of time. Cyrogenics [sic] is not going to raise someone any time soon.

We have a problem of terminology here. Cryonicists don’t propose to “raise people from the dead.” Simply put, they don’t accept that they are dead–just that they are badly broken, and beyond the help of current medical technology to restore them to full function.

Many people who die are allowed to do so, by not taking heroic measures at the end. In the process of cryopreservation, a well-performed procedure in fact involves restarting the heart, so that the necessary preserving fluids can be circulated properly throughout the body. So in what sense is someone in this state “dead”?

Once you get past the notion that death is an objectively-verifiable state (it’s not) then the whole notion of “raising the dead” disappears, and it’s simply another medical procedure designed to, at least ultimately, cure the patient of what ails him. The fact that the functional deterioration, and even absence, is great is mitigated by the fact that future medical technology may be even greater.

At base, cyrongenics [sic] is not life affirming but rather worships life on earth as the end all be all. Those who have faith in a better life beyond this earthly one will not choose to escape thier finite nature and cheat death via technology. Christ death and resurection has already cheated death. Those that accept that gift need not freeze themselves in hope of an earthly solution.

Well, as I said above, if we accept that the unearthly solution is to be preferred, why wait? Why not just end it all now?

How is a cryonic suspension different than prescribing an anti-biotic, or performing a heart transplant, or putting someone with severe brain damage on life support? Which medical technologies does Kevin consider “cheating death,” and which ones will he therefore abjure if the circumstances arise? Will he avoid taking anti-malarial pills before a trip to the tropics, so he doesn’t appear to be thwarting God’s possible will that he die a feverish death? If he’s injured in a car accident, and is conscious, will he beg the doctor, amid the hemmorhaging, not to stitch him up, because it reeks of hubris, and he’s content, even eager to reach the hereafter?

If God objects to any of these things, including cryonic suspension, I presume that he will make his objections known in some divine manner. So far though, medical science continues to advance.

I should point out (and should have pointed out earlier) that almost all of these philosophical issues have been treated extensively in a book by Dr. Mike Perry, titled Forever For All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality. He is associated with Alcor. His book assumes the materialist premise, but I suspect he treats souls at least on a theoretical basis, as Kevin did at the post referenced above (since there’s really no other way to treat them).

[Update, a few minutes later]

I see there’s also a post over at Samizdata (which has finally gotten off of blogspot) on the subject.

Here’s a story unusual in the fact that it doesn’t treat the subject as wacky or off the wall. It’s actually quite sympathetic. Unfortunately, it’s from Santa Cruz, so it’s not necessarily a harbinger of more rational coverage from the mainstream press.

David Barash has a fairly critical review of Steven Jay Gould’s final book (though not of the man himself). Summary: it was too long, it badly needed an editor, he simply ignored valid criticisms rather than responding to them, he has a final indulgence in some pet (and silly) theories, and the author was too full of himself right to the end. Warning: the review itself is not short.

I probably won’t be reading the book myself any time soon, but at fourteen hundred pages, I probably wouldn’t have been anyway.

David Barash has a fairly critical review of Steven Jay Gould’s final book (though not of the man himself). Summary: it was too long, it badly needed an editor, he simply ignored valid criticisms rather than responding to them, he has a final indulgence in some pet (and silly) theories, and the author was too full of himself right to the end. Warning: the review itself is not short.

I probably won’t be reading the book myself any time soon, but at fourteen hundred pages, I probably wouldn’t have been anyway.

David Barash has a fairly critical review of Steven Jay Gould’s final book (though not of the man himself). Summary: it was too long, it badly needed an editor, he simply ignored valid criticisms rather than responding to them, he has a final indulgence in some pet (and silly) theories, and the author was too full of himself right to the end. Warning: the review itself is not short.

I probably won’t be reading the book myself any time soon, but at fourteen hundred pages, I probably wouldn’t have been anyway.

I’ve been remiss in not covering the Ted Williams cryonics situation, because it’s a subject in which I have a deep interest and more knowledge than most, including, I suspect, most bloggers. I’ll try to stay on top of it better when I get back to California next week, but in the meantime, I just wanted to comment on this latest story from the National Post’s sports section. Now the daughter is pleading with President Bush and former Senator Glenn to intercede on her behalf (though what the legal basis would be for them to do so is unclear to me).

For those few who have been on another planet this past week, baseball legend Ted Williams died a few days ago. Apparently either he or his son had made arrangements for him to be cryonically suspended–that is, his body has been frozen in the hopes that some future technology advances will be able to cure what ailed him, and to undo the even more severe damage caused by the cryonics process itself, allowing him to once again stride the earth, and smell the roses, and maybe even once again hit balls out of the park.

The son claims that this was Mr. Williams wish. His half sister, Ted Williams’ daughter, claims that it wasn’t at all his desire–that he wanted to be cremated and have the ashes scattered over the Florida Keys. Mr. Williams himself is unable to weigh in on the matter, being many degrees below room temperature and, legally at least, dead.

As is usually the case in such stories, the reporting has been appalling, confusing, and confused. As always, many refuse to use the term “cryonics,” instead using the incorrect term “cryogenics,” which is simply the scientific and engineering field of low-temperature phenomena. And the back story is missing in action in most cases, so I’ll try to fill the gap a little here.

Cryonics is often, and mistakenly, lumped in with UFOlogy, ESP and other pseudoscience, but it actually has a very sound scientific and philosophical conceptual basis.

Most people think of death as an objective, unambiguous, and verifiable condition. But in fact, it’s a legal fiction, and its declaration is simply function based and arbitrary. It’s also based on the knowledge level and location of the personnel making the declaration.

For instance, a hundred years ago, a simple cessation of breathing (perhaps after drowning) would have been sufficient to declare death, though today such people are often resuscitated through simple CPR, and go on to live many more years. More recently, the lack of heart function was sufficient, though we now routinely stop hearts for cardiac surgery. The current medical standard (in most jurisdictions, which indicates again that it’s a legal standard, and not an objective scientific one) is a flat line on an electroencephalogram (EEG), indicating no brain function. But there’s no reason to believe that this is any ultimate indicator either–it may be possible in the future to revive people who have gone flat line (and in fact, this may already be the case now–I haven’t done a recent literature search).

For these reasons, cryonicists don’t accept a function-based definition of death. Instead, they propose something called information death. This is defined as the point at which, no matter what the level of conceivable future technological capability, it is no longer possible to repair the body to the point that it can be revived, with original memories and personality. Even this definition represents a continuum, rather than a binary condition, because most of us walking around now have lost or altered some of their earlier memories. But it’s a much more promising, and valid, definition for the purposes of offering a chance at future revival.

As an example of the difference between structural damage and information death, consider that a book that has been cut up into pieces, or even shredded, could be reconstructed by a patient and talented puzzle solver, and still have the same information value as the original. But a book that has been burned, and had its ashes scattered, is irretrievable by any technology short of time travel.

All of this discussion, of course, presumes a materialist perspective–that the living body, including personality and consciousness, is the emergent property of the machinery that composes it. If one believes in an evanescent immaterial “soul,” without which the body, even if living, is a zombie of some kind, then it doesn’t work, but there’s no scientific reason to believe this to be the case, so from at least a scientific perspective, cryonics should work, in theory.

So from this viewpoint, if Mr. Williams was adequately preserved upon his legal declaration of death, he is not in fact information dead, but is rather still alive. And thus his son is saving his life (putting him in an ambulance to the future, so to speak) whereas the daughter is trying, in her ignorance, to kill him. That’s because one can’t be more dead from an information standpoint than to burn the remains, converting them to illegible carbon molecules and scattering them.

That’s what makes this quote from the article above interesting:

Ferrell said she and her husband, Mark, had known for a year about John Henry Williams’ desire to have their father’s body sent to the cryonics lab after he died.

“It is unfortunate that I have been put into a corner to fight for what is right and for my father’s final wishes,” she said in the letter. “I too am on a final mission to save ‘Ted Williams.”‘

Of course, from a cryonicist’s point of view, what she is doing is exactly the opposite of “saving” her father, by any rational definition of that word. She is, in fact, attempting to ensure that it will be impossible to save him. I suspect that she is doing this out of some version of Leon Kass’ “yuck” criterion for moral probity. She’s uncomfortable with the thought of her father’s body being frozen, perhaps for religious reasons, or perhaps simply because it’s unconventional. She probably doesn’t believe that he will ever be revivable, or perhaps she doesn’t believe that he should be revived even if it’s possible, again, for irrational emotional reasons.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing things for irrational emotional reasons per se, but a man’s potential life is at issue here. If it were my decision, I’d have everyone suspended, because the cost of doing so isn’t that much more than standard methods of interment (particularly if it were a common practice), and I grieve the loss of sources of consciousness to the universe under all circumstances, unless they are malevolent.

But the ultimate arbiter should be the wishes of Mr. Williams. And it’s very difficult to tell what that was from the reportage to date.

Normally, Alcor (the cryonics organization to whom he has at least temporarily been entrusted) likes to avoid these kinds of disputes, for obvious reasons. It’s bad business, and bad publicity, to have to thaw and destroy a patient that they’ve accepted. They encourage prospective customers to get permission from their families, if possible, and when it’s not, or even when it has been gained, to make their wishes very clear, in a lucid and compelling manner, in writing and video.

If Mr. Williams signed up for the procedure himself, and can be shown to be of sound mind when he did so, and not coerced by his son, then the daughter will be out of luck–she won’t be able to kill her father under the mistaken guise of “saving” him.

If he didn’t sign up himself, but was signed up by his son, then it may be more problematic. In the absence of any clear indication of Mr. Williams’ wishes, it will simply become “he said, she said,” in which he will claim that Mr. Williams did want to attempt to extend his life into the future, and she will claim that he wanted his ashes dissipated over the Keys.

It wouldn’t surprise me in either case that they are simply expressing their own wishes for their father, rather than attempting to follow out his own. I can easily imagine that the daughter’s feelings are sufficiently strong as to lie about his desires, so finding corraborating witnesses on both sides will be critical. Similarly, if the son really was talking about selling Ted Williams DNA for cloning or other purposes, it will damage his case in the public mind, and make Alcor unhappy, because that isn’t the business that they’re in. They don’t want to preserve DNA–they want to preserve persons. Of course, if she’s lying about Mr. Williams’s wishes, she could be lying about this as well, to discredit her brother and bolster her own case.

It will be an interesting legal situation, but it’s not (at least yet) about the theoretical validity, practical effectivity, or ethics of cryonics–it’s really just a simple probate case.

But my concern will be if President Bush or Senator Glenn actually do attempt to do something to help her. If that means making cryonics illegal, that will be both scary (if it succeeds) and interesting. I’m afraid that the Yuck Factor will once again come into play, and that the rational discussion on the subject will be minimal. British Columbia already has a law on the books outlawing this form of human preservation, and I hope that the same doesn’t come to pass anywhere in the US, let alone in the entire country. When it becomes illegal to freeze people, or to extend their lives, then only outlaws will be frozen.

The notion that any Supreme Court would find such a law constitutional is disturbing, for what can be a more basic human right, for someone who has committed no crime other than to be born, than to live?

[Update shortly after posting]

I see that Jay Manifold has already found, and responded to, a Christian argument (and an utterly inadequate one, even from a Christian perspective, in his and my view) against cryopreservation. And like many opponents of cloning, the concern is not that it won’t work, but it will.