Luke Chelluri-
I think this discussion is tilted away from the sceintific aspects of Cryopreservation and towards the ethics of it. I am ignorant of any literature in this field. I guess there is some basic literature suggesting tissues can be frozen and maintained for years(not hours) but it is not clear to me whether those tissues can be thawed and brought back to "life" after years of frozen state. I am assuming there is no such data( those who know otherwise please give published data), so the answer to Crippen's first question should be "we donot know" rather than "probably yes". This research might be helpful and should be contiued but I have a problem with application of the research as method of-- I am not sure what the goal of this is. In the absence of any data or plausible hypothesis to show this technique works in animals, with current knowledge, it is speculation and could be sceince fiction and could be compared to extraterrestrial beings or using "voodoo" to treat diseases. If this technique is sold as method to become immortal, I think the government does have role to protect the consumer from potenial fraud in advertising. Incidentally, what kind of licensing one needs to set up a shop like this and is there a goverment agency which approves this procedure?
The ethics of this is complex and similar to what we do currently i.e.resucitating a 500 gram neonate or 90 year old with multiple organ failure. I am not sure this is a sceintific issue at this point because I presume there is no reasonable hypothesis to show one can achieve whaterver they are attempting to achieve. I think this is comparable to buying a ferrari or a chevrolet and as long as the consumer knows what he is paying for and is willing to do it and the seller can be scutinized and there is no consumer fraud, we have to accept some people want to spend their money as they choose fit.
Michael Kiernan-
Mr. Darwin, I find your reply extremely interesting. I have a couple of questions:
And ye gads! What if, rather than serving as the "pilot" of a star ship, they find themselves running the computer system for the Social Security Administration? Or, worse, as the on-line version of TV Guide with all the best TV shows of the 1970's programmed into their "brain", readily available for the Brady Bunch fans of the future to activate whenever they need a "Marsha" fix? Or serving as non-biased "judges" in Small Claims Court? Or any of a thousand other horrible fates where a "human" intelligence without civil rights (slave) might be deemed useful? If your re-activated corpses choose to object to such use and the re-animators of the future are kind and benevolent, perhaps they will not use your corpses for such purpose against their "will". But what if the folks in the future don't see your corpses as "real" people, but, rather as a useful, non-human "intelligence in a can" resource to be exploited?
Gosh......I think I've got half a great idea here for a sci-fi thriller script....or perhaps 15 minutes of air-time on Geraldo's show in the year 2345......."Today on Geraldo! Computer chips with human intelligence......citizens or slaves?"
Mike Darwin-
I apologize for being tardy in replying to those who asked questions of me and also apoligize to those who wish I simply didn't exist, or at least that I wouldn't answer those questions here. You can't make everybody happy!
First, I'd like to thank Dr. Simon Brown for the good humor and genuinely funny replies he posted in response to my critical post on his views. I meant my examples to be taken in a light vein, but it is one of the hazards of the net that, since we lack important feedback (facial expressions, voice inflection, etc.) it is often hard to know what the person really meant. While Dr. Brown and I couldn't be farther apart on most issues, I genuinely respect his panache and good humor.
In the same vein I note that Charlie Watson was urging me to lighten up over the issues of iatrogenic deaths and also asked where I got those (seemingly ridiculous numbers). First, I should have posted a :) at the end of my message. It was not meant to be mean-spirited, just good fun. As to where I got the numbers: The first number I saw was about a week ago, it was in the Health Section of the RIVERSIDE PRESS-ENTERPRISE newspaper (a large circulation daily where I live in Riverside, Ca) it was a brief piece and said that 80K people died from iatrogenic causes in (if I recall correctly) the US alone. A few days later there was a little blurb on CNN to the effect that 100K people died iatrogenically every year. They cited some study, recently completed. I am of two minds on this "data", first, like Charlie Watson, I find it hard to believe. But then, on reflection, three things come to mind:
If anyone has hard information on these numbers (something better than a vaguely remembered news article and a CNN blurb) I'd be appreciative if they sent them along to me. I find them hard to believe myself, even in light of points 1-3 above.
Nathan Coates asks, in effect, if we are all products of blind evolution, why do we want to live? Very good question, Dr. Coates. Simple(minded) answer: because if nature hadn't selected for a "drive to survive" life wouldn't exist. In fact, you can call that the first principle of life: survive to pass on your genes. Richard Dawkins answers your question far more eloguently and with far more evidence that I can present here in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER which I highly recommend. As to the "deeper" meaning of "Why live?" implied in Dr. Coates' question, the short answer is simply "I don;'t know, but am very interested in finding out." For the time being the BEST answer I can give is that, on balance, "it feels good to be alive."
Someone asked why everyone was afraid of death. I am not afraid of death. I was "dead" a long time before I was born :), I've had my consciouness obliterated under deep babiturate anesthesia, and I have intimately watched lots of people die. In contrast to what Dave Crippen says, death itself (clinical death: cardiorespiratory arrest) is usually not painful. Dying, by contrast, often is, as is the terrible psychological impact of the anticipation of dying for many people. I would point out that my contact with death and dying people has been enormous and started young. I went to funerals for relatives on average about once every 6 months from ages 5-11 and I discovered a cousin who was very dear to me in the advanced stages of decomposition (she was a noncompliant diabetic who lived (alone) down the street from us and she had been dead about a week in the summer in Indiana) at the age of 8 or 9. Further, my "career" in medicine was as a chronic and acute-care dialysis technician. That was in the days of 1 (or maybe at most 2) patients per tech (we still had some patients on Kiil Boards and I used to build the dialyzer a layer at a time and sterilize it with formalin) so I got to know my patients very well as I spent 4-6 hours with them on average at least once a week. They are almost all dead now.
And, finally, I am homosexual and, thanks to William McNeill's book PLAGUES AND PEOPLES, realized what was happening with AIDS (then called GRID) in 1981. I was celibate for over 3 years. ALL of my friends, however, were not. Not only did they not listen to me, they got angry at me for ruining their fun and for being a repressed "homophobic homosexual" :). With one or two exceptions, they are all dead. Unfortunately, I had to watch them and help them through the business of dying. Thus, at the age of 40, I am, in this culture at this time, anyway, in the rather unique position of not being 80 years old and yet still finding myself having lost to death almost everyone I've known well.
So, if I'm not afraid of dying why do I want to be alive? Well, why do you want to be able to see versus being blind? Why do you want to hear vs. being deaf? Why do you want to enjoy sex vs. being impotent or incapacitated? Why do you want to be able to think, vs. being demented? And, more to the point, wouldn't you experience some anxiety if any one, or all of these things were going to happen to you? Well, guess what? They are, all of them. The best reason for not wanting to be dead is that it just isn't any fun.
You may have to trust me on this one, but believe me, I don't get cards and letters about vacations, books read or written, sexual conquests made or lost, or good dinners eaten from any of my dead friends. I miss them (both the friends and the cards and letters) and one thing is for damn sure; for as long as they were able to, they regretted that they were going to be missing out on sending those cards and letters and on experiencing this very precious thing called life which caused them to write them in the first place.
To head off any speculation that all this death-stuff has warped me into getting involved in cryonics: forget it. I got involved in 1968 after doing a Science Fair project on suspended animation using red-eared slider turtles, honey bees and overwintering (freeze-tolerant) plants. Somebody handed me a newspaper article about the 1st anniversary of the 1st man's cryopreservation (his name was Dr. James Bedord and he was frozen in LA a year before) and I wrote away for information. Over 25 years later I had the incredible experience of cutting Dr. Bedford out of his sealed-in the-field storage dewar (the unit was closed by welding after he was placed inside) to transfer him to a newer, more efficient and safer 4-patient unit. I was able to look him in the face. I was 13- years-old when I got involved with cryonics, I never dreamed I'd see Bedford as I did: he unchanged from a few hours after cardiac arrest on 12 January, 1967 and I now a middle-aged man! No, I got involved in cryonics because I thought it was "neat" because it seemed very aesthetic, and because I liked the idea of getting to the "science fiction" future which so many of you seem so afraid of. (I read a lot of SF as a kid.)
Simon Brown discusses society's "rights" vs. those of the individual. I would say the following. Society is merely a screaming aggregate of individuals. When enough of the individuals in a "society" can be, or are persuaded that something is in their best interests (usually) or in the best interest of everyone (never) and they have access to FORCE then they get their way until the next screaming mob gets their hands on the guns. Democracy "civilizes" this process somewhat, but only crudely and never for long. Where democracy does not exist then the process is shown for the naked evil it is as is the case in the former USSR or its "client" states.
How can you be so naieve? Don't you realize that the Ferrari or Mercedes in your garage is one of the reasons you work so hard and have suffered and sacrificed so much to reach the pinnacle of competence each of you has reached as critical care physicians? Don't you realize that one Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, or John D. Rockefeller did more to raise the global standard of living than every socialist/communist practioner that ever lived. These robber barons (many of whom were ruthless, self-interested, and greedy in pretty short sighted ways) gave the US the hightest standard of living anywhere in the world at one time and made your very professions imagineable, let alone possible.
And, surprisingly, a lot of these people pumped an enormous amount of their personal wealth (as opposed to the indirect wealth the created through employment for others) back into the "society" as a whole. I am the personal benificiary of this: I learned to love books and to develop a passion for reading in one of the old Carnegie libraries (complete with a "Regulator" clock and awesome expanses of natural wood and huge windows) a couple of miles from where I grew up. Bill Gates didn't create Microsoft with sole goal of making your life easier or more productive; and neither did Steve Jobs found Apple for that reason. Furthermore, you guys didn't go through medical school, internship and residency out of the milk of human kindness alone. You were motivated by the desire for money, prestige, the satisfactions of the art, and so on as well as the desire to help others.
I note, however, that most of you appear not be helping others for free, or sans a good quality of living. Nor should you. "Society" creates nothing, only individuals can do that, sometimes working together, sometimes working alone: but still ONLY individuals. Any society that does not respect that fact and appreciate and understand it, destroys the wellspring of its wealth and both improverishes and ensalves the individuals which comprise it. And, to those of you who feel this very far afield from your lives or work, I assure it is not. Already you are struggling with resource trade-offs without a moral foundation for doing so.
The problem with government making these decisions is that government, by its structure (or society) does not have sufficient information to make these decisions well (even if one posits they have a moral philosophy for doing so; which they don't). This is the same problem governments with planned economies have. I would like to take a little time to make this point in some detail because it is critically important, and even cuts to the core of how living systems manage to operate.
The problem of whether to give or withhold care or charity wisely is dependent upon knowing a lot about the individual case. In a small town or village everyone knows who the people are who have had "legitimate" bad luck: hard working people who have had setbacks and who need help to recover homeostasis -- and for whom such help will likely work. Furthermore, they also know who are the lazy wastrels who aren't worth a nickel of money or a moment of time (even Rescue Missions make their derelicts listen to the gospel before they feed them!). Local charity and local medical triage work not perfectly, but better than when they come from the government because the people who are giving the resources get to make the judgements about to whom, for whom and how they give the resources, and they earned the resources they are giving themselves and thus value them highly. Governments simply can't know all the relevant information: it would swamp them, be impossible to collect, digest, and so on. Just as anticipating the economic needs, whims and wishes of 250 million people is impossible to anticipate through central planning: the problem is, from an information- theoretic standpoint, just too complex.
So, the response of government is to create overly broad or overly exclusive rules and make them quite rigid. And, since the money (wealth) they disburse is extorted from the people who worked hard to create it (and thus who most appreciate it) they (the government) do not have the same incentive to be careful and niggardly in how they disburse it. Thus, as happened last night, I watched a lady buy 40 dollars worth of candy and junk food with US Federal Food Stamps and then take out her ATM card and buy a carton of cigarrettes with cash. I await with anxiety the day that people in the US (who are more ill-tempered and more selfish than in most other areas of the world) start pulling out guns and shooting such people for spening THEIR money in this way. God knows, I felt like it last night!
Health care is the same old story in a slightly different context. The desire for medical care is infinite as you have all discovered by now, with grannies on vents and hemo and with no cortex left cluttering up your ICUs and spending all of our money. This infinite set of desires is normally tempered by a competetion of other self-interested desires on the part of the people who have to pay for them. Unfortunately, if you don't have to pay for it, why the hell not take granny to surgery and rack up another 100K of billing? After all, you (and even me, in the past) as health care providers are not always right! Every once in a while (maybe twice in my 8-years of in-hospital work) I saw a granny gomer snap out of it, tolerate hemo well, recover mentation and walk out of the hospital alert and with it: despite every bad prognosticator before we started ICU care. Of course, on the other hand, if someone asked granny's family to sell their house and live in a hovel for a 1 in a million chance that granny will improve, I'm betting that damn few of them would. It would very quickly be "to hell with granny."
Barry Markovitz raises the issue of cryonics driving other technology. This is true. There is now a technique which, in the laboratory, allows for viable ice- free storage of rabbit kidneys at -135xC. This technique was developed by a man who's primary interest was human cryopreservation and who as a teenager was involed in cryonics. Further, most of my work has been focused on taking the techniques developed by solid organ preservationists wishing to use 0-4xC storage of organs for transplant, and applying this technology to whole animals. We can currently recover dogs from 5-hours of asanguineous storage at 4xC with no neurological problems and very high rates of survival (9 out of 10). We pioneered this work, first successfully recovering dogs in the mid- 80's from 4-hours of bloodless perfusion. This work, using our approach (intracellular perfusates) has now been taken up by others such as Michael Taylor of Cryomedical Sciences. Its applications to trauma, to neurosurgery, and to complex reconstructive neonatal and pediatric cardiovascular surgery requiring long periods of cardiac arrest are obvious.
My second area of work has been on cerebral resuscitation, or more accurately, ameliorating the pathophysiology of brain ischemic and reperfusion injury. Both of these areas of work were motivated powerfully by my desire (and those of my cryonics colleagues) to deal with damage done to patients we can only begin to treat after you guys pronounce them dead which (invariably) involves some period of normothermic ischemia, and often a long antemortem period of shock (which is itself quite damaging and which triggers the immune/inflammatory cascade) sometimes causing CNS edema which limits our ability to introduce cryoprotectant drugs (consequently exposing the patient to even more injury from freezing).
Several people including Michael Kierman and others have raised the issue of informed consent (especially with regard to unfavorable outcomes) and the issue of fraud. I'll deal with fraud first. Let's start with a definition: fraud is usually understood to be the conscious or willful deception by lies (or by omission of critical information) of someone which results in their taking action(s) (usually costly,unprofitable and/or injurious) which they would not otherwise have taken if given full information or accurate information. This is certainly not the case with cryonics. I think (and I tell) patients that the best they can hope for is an unknown chance of recovery. But I go much further and point out the following (both in print and verbally):
Anyone wishing access to the cryonics FAQ on Cryonet can simply ask for it on SCI.CRYONICS and Kevin Brown, who moderates Cryonet, will pick-up your request and send you information. Further, I believe that the complete cryopreservation paperwork of the Care Foundation is available electronically; here, once again, a request to Kevin Brown on SCI.CRYONICS should get you such information. (Arthur Kaplan, in particular, may be interested.) I wrote most of the Consent for Cryopreservation which is now in use by three of the four cryonics groups (with slight differences between groups) in the United States. I am proud to say I not only anticipated every one of Dr. Kiernan's concerns, but others besides, which I think he will find of interest.
Incidentally, Dr. Kiernan, we call them patient's, not cadavers. If this seems strange it is no more so than you calling a critically ill patient with an uncertain but overwhelmingly bad probability of death a patient.
Nor, I might add, am I a zealous advocate for cryonics although I once was. I see cryonics as a two edged sword; it does cost money, and while very affordable to anyone young enough and in good health enough to buy life insurance, the lost value of money spent on insurance and dues to the cryonics group (about $400 Us dollar/yr.) over a life-time is not insignificant. The cost of cryonics is about the cost of a 2-3 pack a day cigarette habit (I notice a lot of bums in the park near my house seem able to afford this addicition, somehow). The point here is that over an average lifetime you will have spent (if you don't "win" and die young, right after you buy your policy: and I don't call that winning) about 250K on dues, insurance and misc. expenses. A good 75K of this is profit the insurance companies will have made on the money paid into the policy: life insurance is a lousy investment but it is safe in that if you make the cryonics group owner, or execute a collateral agreement, it cannot be seized by heirs, creditors, the government unpaid critical care docs, or anybody, whereas other assets can. That's a lot of nice dinners out, braces for the kids, trips to Hawaii, and so on. On the other hand, it is hardly the outlay the average Mormon or other titheing religious person makes when one considers the real dollar value of 10% of your income diverted to the church over an entire lifetime.
Then their are other, less obvious potential downsides to cryonics such as alienation from family and friends both while young and well and while dying. Most people have deeply programmed into them coping strategies and attitudes about death and dying which are opaque to them on a conscious level. Cryonics can profoundly disrupt this coping, particularly in surviving noncryonicist family members. For instance, whereas for the family of a dying person the normal coping response is to sit with the person for a while after death, have the body prepared, have friends and family group around the deceased, etc., in a cryopreservation patient what happens is that a group of "strangers" invades the home (hopice, hospital, etc.) and immediately takes control of the patient when legal death occurs. You critical care types may be less sensitive to this kind of thing since when patients code you exclude the family and then when the code is unsuccessful you're gone after a few words a la Star Trek's Dr. McCoy to the effect of "Sorry, he's dead, Jim."
In a home setting this can become a real problem and in patients I treat I spend a lot of time with the family trying to tell them what to expect and trying to restore their sense of control at a time when they are really going to feel helpless (with or without cryonics). And especially so since the traditional ways of regaining some degree of control are going to be absent or short-circuited. I also point out that for most patients the act of being cryopreserved makes THEM feel more in control, less helpess and less despairing and that the family should make allowances for this (sometimes unappreciated by them) real-time benefit of cryonics.
Finally, there are ways that cryopreservation can interfere with medical care or create conflicts which force the prospective cryonics patient to make choices at an already difficult time. Chief amongst these is the issue of experimental protocols which involve travel to countries where delivering cryopreservation would be problematic or impossible, or where the treating institution's protocol requires a full autopsy if the patient dies while undergoing experimental therapy in the institution's care.
A corollary of this is that because of PREJUDICE against cryonics a patient who might otherwise be a good candidate for experimental treatment may be excluded from the protocol because the researchers and treating docs don't want the cryonics complication or think that the patient must be "nuts" or "a sick-o" to have chosen this option. While there are undobtedly some nuts and sickos who happen to be cryonicists, the vast majority are well educated, independent-minded people who would make good research subjects. Most are computer programmers or self-employed consultants or small businessmen, most are single and male, and most are articulate and conversant with scientific and technical issues. Statistics on the composition of cryonics groups are available, and in fact people wishing more information on the social and ethical issues involved in end-stage care of cryonics patients can contact me via e-mail and I can provide them with the first six chapters of my book dealing with these issues (it is a how-to manual on Standby which is the act of setting up to do post arrest care and transport of the patient from the point where legal death occurs to the cryonics facility).
Finally, finally, do I or others worry about re-entry on "the other end." Most don't. I do. I don't expect it will be easy. But then I have neighbors who came from a Vietnamese village on a "life" boat they made shortly after the fall of Saigon. These people lived in an almost bronze age culture, most of the family were rice farmers. They make about twice what I do now, they have a big screen TV and a moderately priced car. (and by the way, all the problem that go with such a lifestyle, and which they could NEVER have imagined when they shoved-off in a little boat 20 or so years ago). So, to Dr. Caplan I would reply: "Yes, don't overestimate immortality (it ain't utopia and I don't believe it will be), but don't underestimate the capacity of human beings to adapt and thrive in the most amazing and alien of environments. And yes, expect some people not to. This is the real-world here, not religion.
Victor Frankl, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, notes in his book MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING that there were fundamentally two kinds of people in concentration camps: those who drew their sense of self and reason for living from their social position, their work, their status, their family, their wealth and/or all of these things. These people died early and did not do well since all of these things were taken away from them. And there was second group; a group of people who's reason for living came from within, came from their fundamental love of life as an experience in and of itself, and from their love of others. Indeed, it was love for his wife and family that sustained Frankl through the worst of it. Cryonicists tend to be the second type. They are often disconnected from society, often outside its established perspectives, and have often had to find reasons to live that have little to do with the particulars of what they are experiencing or have experienced, and everything to do with the realization that experiencing, that being alive and learning and growing are the only enduring and indestructible reasons for living. Consider me a case in point: my being gay puts me (necessarily) outside the mainstream social perspective, especially so since I realized this very early on in life.
Such people are willing to pay a high price for life, even pay a high price for a slim chance of conintuing it on unknown shores, perhaps in a form they cannot today even imagine. But then, that does not make them fools as much as it makes them adventurers. In that respect they have in common a great kinship with every single creature that left its pre-ordained environs, that struggled up out of the sea and developed lungs and conquered the land, that jumped across risky chasms and developed wings and conquered the air.
I (and they) will NOT be alone, a stranger in a strange land, if cryonics works. Some of my dearest friends wait in liquid nitrogen now. If I join them, chances are we will all return, if not to be together immediately, surely so in an eyblink of time as the universe goes. And, if we are very, very lucky, we will have that whole big universe to explore with each other for a very, very long period of time. I may be one of the only men alive today who has a date with a lady to raise a glass (or its equivalent) as we watch Saturn's rings while orbiting Saturn. Just anticipating that moment makes it all worthwhile for me. For the rest of you? Well, heh, it's your choice, right?
Mike Darwin-
Anyone wishing to receive a copy of the Consent for Cryoprerservation and Decisions Concerning the Members Cryopreseration, as well as added information such as a copy of the member- cryonics organization contract (warning this sucker is 10 pages of 9 point print long!) may do so by contacting Charles Platt of the CryoCare Foundation at: cp@panix.com. He will supply these documents via e-mail, and, for Arthur Caplan and others who wonder about the biological basis of cryonics Charles also has available a detailed article called The Cryobiological Case for Cryonics and another on scenarios for repair of cryoinjury. Patient case histories which I have posted publically to Cryonet can be obtained by requesting such via Cryonet (ask Cryonet to send you these by posting your request to SCI.CRYONICS).
Michael Kiernan asked about the soul and religious questions. These are hardly an issue for most cryonicists for several reasons, not the least of which is that we (cryonicists) differ with you (contemporary medicine) over when death is. So, in short the answer is that it isn't a problem since we don't consider the cryopreserved patient dead. This is not greatly different than asking the same question about a patient who rolls into you ER in full arrest. What about religion? Where is his soul? Is it right to call him back from Heaven (or Hell, for that matter)? The only difference between this situation and cryonics is that you get a resolution in a time frame you are comfortable with and used to: a few minutes to an hour or two at most -- or worst case, a few days later in the ICU when you turn the ventilator off.
I want to make it clear that cryonics is NOT about bringing dead people back to life. That cannot be done because, by definition (Webster's Dictionary), death is the irreversible cessation of vital functions, life etc..... I and most other cryonicists don't think we can bring dead people back to life and further, I think descriptions like "clinical death", "brain death", etc. are confusing, misleading, and do contemporary people, cryonicists excluded a great disservice. Clinical "death" is an oxymoron if its reversible. The very words brain death have, in my personal experience and considered opinion, killed a lot of people. How? By confusing family members and the public at large about what death is and thus making many people refuse to donate their own or (more frequently) their loved ones' organs. The people killed here are the patients with ESRD, ESCHF, liver failure, diabetes, etc. who don't get organs they would otherwise have received.
Caplan and many others have raised all kinds of issues pertaining to cost, rationing, allocating scarce resources, etc in both the cryonics and the medical context. Consider the following scenario:
If you could reversibly cryopreserve human brains right now (even if that was the only organ you could reversibly preserve) then you could put all your grannies and a lot of other dying people in suspended animation. The cost for up-front preparation would be about the cost for a typical CABG and the cost for storage is currently about 2K a year for whole body patients and about $500.00 a year for neuro patients. However, these yearly costs would rapidly fall since cost here is dependent upon scaling (heat leak is a surface-to-volume problem). Thus, the costs for any large scale implementation of human cryopreservation would drop to a few hundred dollars per year per patient. The amount of capital required to generate than kind of money, plus growth for future treatment, is amazingly small, even assuming a very conservative 2% real rate of return on the invested money. I played with these numbers informally some time ago and I came to the conclusion that if we just cryobanked all the patients with "hopeless" APACHE scores instead of delivering the ICU and custodial care we current give (to the tune of about 10% of our GNP) health care costs would plummet, at least being cut by 2/3rds.
Now, you can argue that we are only deferring the cost of delivering care to all these frozen people. And that is, of course, true. But, those patients, if they can be treated at all, will be treated by a medicine that uses nanoscale engineering and self replicating technology. For an example think of a seed and the magic that turns it into a Sequoia tree. It is easy to be mislead when considering the costs of future technology by not carefully considering the likely pathway to and character of such technology. By way of example if you asked the best engineers at Rolex 30 years ago how much it would cost to make a timepiece that would be accurate to thousands of a second a year, display minutes, hours, seconds day, date, time, and do basic math (all digitally) and weigh an ounce or less, they would have laughed in your face or given you a dollar figure number greater than zero followed by a very large number of zeros. Further, no matter how much money you had in 1965 they could not have built you such a watch. Period.
Now, a watch like that can be had by any common person with $25.00 US. A watch that will do hours, minutes, seconds, day, date and time with millisecond/yr accuracy (and no winding!) can be had for about a $1.50 US in discount stores, they are often given away as promotional trinkets, and they are universally thrown away when they break. A couple of weeks ago I actually got a calculator through the mail (multifunction, credit card type) with BioPreservation's address on it as a sample promo: this was a cold mailing: imagine how many businnesses got such calculators with their names on them. Keep in mind that BioPreservation has zero use for such promos since we don't deal directly with the public at all. The point here being that it wasn't even cost-effective for them to do the research to find this out. It was cheaper to mail out calculators to ANY possible prospect!
Yes, it cost a FORTUNE to develop the enabling technology. But, since knocking out semiconductors is an almost biological like process, the per unit cost is pennies. The future of medicine lies in this direction. The cost of getting there will be enormous, but the end product will be self- replicating (or easily manufactured) nano and macro cell and tissue repair devices. Anyone who has owned two rabbits (male and female) will understand what I'm getting at here. (Or anyone familiar with the history of Australia.) So, the actual cost of reviving, rejuvenating and restoring all those people to life may be trivial on a per person basis. And if that seems unimagineable, think about the hand-held calculators you guys all use now and think back (this will date you) to when you got your first slide rule. (I'll leave it to someone else to explain exactly what a slide rule is to younger members of this forum who may not know.)