The New Yorker recently had an article titled The Iceman. Judging from the abstract, it’s anti- and not very high quality (excerpt: “The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse you get mush”, a type of argument covered in your post.)
Hint: Just in case you’re not within reach of this issue of The New Yorker, a little bit of Google-fu turns up a scan of said article.
I found the piece not particulary exciting. It’s certainly well-written but Jill Lepore obviously wasn’t interested in digging too deeply re: the scientific or non-scientific foundations of cryonics. Instead we get a lot of impressionistic descriptions of Michigan (where the Cryonics Institute is located), slightly disdainful accounts of the CI’s facilities and many synopses of SF stories .The latter isn’t without reason, though, because Robert Ettinger was very influenced by Science Fiction.
Mrs. Lepore does her best to let Ettinger come across as grumpy, though I suspect that this “grumpiness” has to do with him knowing all to well what will very likely come out of it when a general interest magazine visits the CI. In other words, we are witness to a small culture clash: Of course it must be strange to a historian like Lepore that Ettinger has a completely different sensibility!
The New Yorker recently had an article titled The Iceman. Judging from the abstract, it’s anti- and not very high quality (excerpt: “The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse you get mush”, a type of argument covered in your post.)
Hint: Just in case you’re not within reach of this issue of The New Yorker, a little bit of Google-fu turns up a scan of said article.
I found the piece not particulary exciting. It’s certainly well-written but Jill Lepore obviously wasn’t interested in digging too deeply re: the scientific or non-scientific foundations of cryonics. Instead we get a lot of impressionistic descriptions of Michigan (where the Cryonics Institute is located), slightly disdainful accounts of the CI’s facilities and many synopses of SF stories .The latter isn’t without reason, though, because Robert Ettinger was very influenced by Science Fiction.
Mrs. Lepore does her best to let Ettinger come across as grumpy, though I suspect that this “grumpiness” has to do with him knowing all to well what will very likely come out of it when a general interest magazine visits the CI. In other words, we are witness to a small culture clash: Of course it must be strange to a historian like Lepore that Ettinger has a completely different sensibility!
Reading that led me to this: Corpsicles in The New Yorker