The Nonlinear Library LW - Why wasn't preservation with the goal of potential future revival started earlier in history? by Andy McKenzie
Jan 17, 2024
10:31
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why wasn't preservation with the goal of potential future revival started earlier in history?, published by Andy McKenzie on January 17, 2024 on LessWrong.
Cross-posted from my blog, Neurobiology Notes.
John Hunter (1728-1793) did not have an especially promising start to his academic life. He was born the youngest of 10 children to a family living in the countryside near Glasgow. They lived in a two bedroom cottage and the children slept in box beds that were pulled out of the walls every night. He was stubborn, hated school, did not like to be taught reading or writing, would skip classes whenever he could, and quit formal education altogether at 13, the same year his father died.
He said that he "totally rejected books," instead preferring to gain practical knowledge first hand. He spent his time helping with the family farm. When he was 20, he made the fateful decision to join his brother William Hunter's anatomy school in London as an assistant.
maternal and fetal circulations are separate, invent the technique of proximal ligation to treat aneurysms,
either inoculate himself or someone else with venereal disease purely in the name of science, coordinate the first documented artificial insemination,
propose the gradual formation of new species due to random variations 70 years before Darwin, create a school providing lectures in physiology, make enemies with all of the other surgeons at his hospital, almost die when he was attacked by one of his many exotic animals, amass a huge collection of specimens that he spent nearly all his money on and that
remains in London today, and become the person widely considered the founder of modern scientific surgery.
a photo from the Hunterian museum in London
I learned this all from Wendy Moore's excellent biography of John Hunter,
The Knife Man:
The Knife Man by Wendy Moore
Although I'm a closet Anglophile, the main reason I picked this book up is because Hunter also seems to have been one of the first people, if not the first person, to seriously research suspended animation. Suspended animation is a hypothetical procedure in which a person or other animal could be preserved for a long period of time in a way that the procedure is known to be reversible, allowing for reanimation at the time of one's choosing.
Suspended animation is not the same as cryonics, because in cryonics, it is not known whether the preservation will ever be reversible, so a cryonics procedure relies on the possibility of bootstrapped advances in future technology that might allow reversibility.
Hunter was interested in suspended animation for a number of reasons, including because he was interested in the dividing line between life and death, and because he thought it might make him rich. He also
thought that it might be practically useful:
Till this time I had imagined that it might be possible to prolong life to any period by freezing a person in the frigid zone, as I thought all action and waste would cease until the body was thawed. I thought that if a man would give up the last ten years of his life to this kind of alternate oblivion and action, it might be prolonged to a thousand years; and by getting himself thawed every hundred years, he might learn what had happened during his frozen condition.
In 1766, Hunter
performed an experiment to test this. He placed two carp in a glass vessel with water. He then kept adding cold snow to the vessel. At first the snow repeatedly melted, but eventually the water around the fish froze. He thawed them slowly, but found they did "not recover action, so that they were really dead."
Benjamin Franklin had similar ideas. In the cryonics community, Franklin's
remarkable letter to a friend in 1773 is kind of famous:
I have seen an instance of common flies preserved in a manner somewhat similar. They had been ...
Cross-posted from my blog, Neurobiology Notes.
John Hunter (1728-1793) did not have an especially promising start to his academic life. He was born the youngest of 10 children to a family living in the countryside near Glasgow. They lived in a two bedroom cottage and the children slept in box beds that were pulled out of the walls every night. He was stubborn, hated school, did not like to be taught reading or writing, would skip classes whenever he could, and quit formal education altogether at 13, the same year his father died.
He said that he "totally rejected books," instead preferring to gain practical knowledge first hand. He spent his time helping with the family farm. When he was 20, he made the fateful decision to join his brother William Hunter's anatomy school in London as an assistant.
maternal and fetal circulations are separate, invent the technique of proximal ligation to treat aneurysms,
either inoculate himself or someone else with venereal disease purely in the name of science, coordinate the first documented artificial insemination,
propose the gradual formation of new species due to random variations 70 years before Darwin, create a school providing lectures in physiology, make enemies with all of the other surgeons at his hospital, almost die when he was attacked by one of his many exotic animals, amass a huge collection of specimens that he spent nearly all his money on and that
remains in London today, and become the person widely considered the founder of modern scientific surgery.
a photo from the Hunterian museum in London
I learned this all from Wendy Moore's excellent biography of John Hunter,
The Knife Man:
The Knife Man by Wendy Moore
Although I'm a closet Anglophile, the main reason I picked this book up is because Hunter also seems to have been one of the first people, if not the first person, to seriously research suspended animation. Suspended animation is a hypothetical procedure in which a person or other animal could be preserved for a long period of time in a way that the procedure is known to be reversible, allowing for reanimation at the time of one's choosing.
Suspended animation is not the same as cryonics, because in cryonics, it is not known whether the preservation will ever be reversible, so a cryonics procedure relies on the possibility of bootstrapped advances in future technology that might allow reversibility.
Hunter was interested in suspended animation for a number of reasons, including because he was interested in the dividing line between life and death, and because he thought it might make him rich. He also
thought that it might be practically useful:
Till this time I had imagined that it might be possible to prolong life to any period by freezing a person in the frigid zone, as I thought all action and waste would cease until the body was thawed. I thought that if a man would give up the last ten years of his life to this kind of alternate oblivion and action, it might be prolonged to a thousand years; and by getting himself thawed every hundred years, he might learn what had happened during his frozen condition.
In 1766, Hunter
performed an experiment to test this. He placed two carp in a glass vessel with water. He then kept adding cold snow to the vessel. At first the snow repeatedly melted, but eventually the water around the fish froze. He thawed them slowly, but found they did "not recover action, so that they were really dead."
Benjamin Franklin had similar ideas. In the cryonics community, Franklin's
remarkable letter to a friend in 1773 is kind of famous:
I have seen an instance of common flies preserved in a manner somewhat similar. They had been ...