PROVENANCE
I was born on June 6, 1944 on the D-Day, 80 years ago. Historians claim that when Hitler was advised of the Allied landings in Normandy, he heard only their addendum that I had landed in Canada, rolled over and went back to sleep. Big mistake.
Both sides of my family had been CPR locomotive engineers. I would be just as subtle.
After ten years of unremarkable childhood in Quebec City, I was in grade 5 and receiving congratulations for getting 92% on my Scripture test. After coming first in my class in grade 4, I was attempting the same that year, but it was never to happen again. Something like the ADD of its day left me distracted.
Anyway, as I sat at my desk wishing I could escape school on that spring morning, I recall saying to myself about those Bible teachings: “Listen, if these people actually believe this stuff I must be a philosopher or a scientist, anything but a priest.”
This was my first encounter with authoritarian mendacity, but it would certainly not be my last. As I gaze out my window a lifetime later, recent suspicions have been proven out in spades - this Dr. Fauci a modern Dr. Faustus, and I have long since stopped expecting wisdom as the foundation of human governance.
So in Bobby we trust.
Instead I would concern myself with my own interests.
That grade 5 episode left a sense of dislocation in my life that has never left me, everything I did was with one hand behind my back, as I schemed to find some way toward salvation under my own auspices. Some people just blow these incidents off, but I was tortured by the fact that death really was an indelible issue, and if God wouldn’t be my conduit to Heaven, I would need to find my own route.
I struggled through ten years of university in the 60’s – McGill/Laval/McGill/SFU and finally Berkeley, having landed in San Francisco in 1969 just in time for Altamont. A physics flunkout who was intellectually rescued by some pre-med studies and a superb biology course by Paul Savage himself.
But no med school would have me, so I wandered back to Vancouver to run a small hippy garage, then fishing tackle mfg. based on a fish olfaction patent I was granted -wherein I proved that salmonids taste an underwater language based on amino acids. I was getting better at science, but BC Packers stopped selling herring oil - my main ingredient - so I had to reinvent myself in the nascent world of desktop computers.
ALL WERE CALLED - COMPUTERS
I became a small manufacturer of IBM clones, and thrived by importing 386 motherboards before anyone else. There were 22 employees (Cardz) learning with me, and we had 32 phone lines into our bulletin boards. But I hated the business and yearned to build software in BC’s Gulf Islands.
In the early 90’s I had introduced BC to the Internet, with my BBS running a TCP/IP library. However, the Hong Kong scare of the imminent transfer to China drove a lot of impromptu immigrants into Canada, and they were soon dumping computer parts and clones into Vancouver.
No businessman can survive dumping – so I quietly closed my store and took my wife and two little girls to BC’s gorgeous Gulf Islands - with my two programmers. I had been an avid boater for 20 years, and was delighted to be going back to the islands, upgrading my squatter’s cabin on Galiano to waterfront homes on Saltspring.
The only problem was there was zero Internet to be had, so my first item of business was to connect the four major islands to a mountain-top T1 radio, and Imagen became their founding ISP. I sold that business, built a brick house on St. Mary Lake, and labored through the Dotcom bust, turning out some NT billing software - none of this was what I really wanted to do.
I had become a self-educated network designer, not so much for complex Internet functions - more like my private research into fish olfaction. I wanted to get at the root of what death represented to our species, and how we could adapt to its finality – if at all.
In the 1970’s I had taken a stab at writing a pamphlet on the subject of cryonics, inspired by Robert Ettinger’s proposal that humans can freeze themselves wholesale immediately after death. The hope that science might some day revive them persists today. My advice: don’t lose their DNA - we’ll take care of it.
IDENTITY
I argued then and now that the problem is poorly posed, as my physics profs would have maintained. If you want to save oak trees, save their acorns – not the tree itself. So I maintain since DNA can and does reproduce itself - let’s concentrate on that.
The freezing of DNA and tissues was impractical - people didn’t keep that kind of equipment at home - and liquid nitrogen is ugly to handle. Meanwhile Cryonics continues with their macro approach of frozen organs or more – to little avail.
In the past dozen years, DNA handling evolved to become dried and stored at room temperature. So here was part of the solution, but for regeneration (I do not use ‘cloning’ for individuals). The sampled DNA for ectogenesis (artificial womb) and SCNT requires precise viability, and purpose-built repositories exist solely for stewardship.
That advanced biobanking, AI and blockchain program is now what I offer and consult for - again as a network designer with the Humanist Union Society.
THE PLAYERS
Two vital technologies have appeared this decade that complete the pudding.
The first is vapor nitrogen (N2) storage of whole blood or tissue samples. Vapor N2 avoids immersing samples in liquid nitrogen, making that medium ideal for long term storage (decades+). Advanced cryopreservation techniques prevent ice crystallization, so that our blood samples can be held in vitrification (glass-like) at -137C or lower, in N2 vapor only. It will be protected from mRNA genecide, if stored pre-emptively.
This is a DNA time machine, because the sample is highly fortified and purified for optimum viability, and exploits AI freezing and thawing. Aging of the phenotype has been halted, our DNA can then wait patiently for many decades if required, with zero degradation.
Regeneration begins with AI gametogenesis - AI doing the selections while generating eggs for the SCNT process. Historically this has been a wasteful and erratic procedure, with most criticism describing its inefficiencies. AI dramatically improves decision -making, especially over the long term.
And let’s remember that our DNA is quietly waiting – unchanged and in its youthful, Sunday best- for these binding technologies to catch up. Credit will be granted for time served - consider ETH staking to fortify your personal trust endowment. :-)
All the tech required for successful and efficient regeneration is now at hand. The overt network design is before the membership - that fresh life cycles can be engineered.
We have the drawings, now we need the prints, facilities and staff. The HU Society binds these aspirations and opportunities into communal projects, these result in life cycle 2 for each member.
All of this is anathema of course to the cryonics and longevity advocates, most notably the pharma researchers looking to goose our brains back into youth, maybe upload them to the cloud. AI itself foretells of AI competition, so we must close ranks as a species and look to pastoral settings, and ancient animal partnerships for a few centuries - by our own definition.
This narrative sees DNA as our species seed, every one a unique franchise in Life. But does our Identity and/or our Self lie within our brain, or our DNA? The key thing to remember here is that with SCNT one actual DNA molecule from you is transferred - so there is biological continuance. That makes all the difference, as an existential guarantee of persistence. And it will be ratified via that ETH smart contract to be exclusively and uniquely you.
LONGEVITY A PRECURSOR TO REGENERATION
Our brain may be almost as smart as our liver, but it is really just a data diaper with a 40-year duty cycle for homeostasis, temporal learning and prediction. Nobody would choose a Cuban car over a new one, and a fresh life cycle brings with it childhood, youth and romance. All the miracles of life, one more time, in this virgin Universe, on this green planet, at the very peak of Evolution.
Renew my franchise, I’m re-upping.
If you have any interest, it today costs just $3698 via Securigene (no affiliation) to get your samples stored both in a stainless capsule at room temperature for your custody, with your regeneration sample there at -137C in an N2 biobank, whenever you’re ready. Stay as long as you like (renewable), a deep resource because your sample can perform many more functions than iterated regeneration.
The Humanist Union Society’s mission is to organize enough of us who recognize this doorway until, as the philosopher Arlo Guthrie might comment “..they may think it’s a movement!” My own value-add is for the HU to functionally oversee a member’s specimen on the Ethereum blockchain, funded thereafter by ETH smart contracts toward their individual regeneration.
The HU Society’s core business is actually DNA Stewardship, and it operates as an ‘Oracle’ that administers the smart contracts of each member. For this the Society retains a third of funding for its own operations, to subsidize the gametogenesis research and execution equitably among all stakeholders - our Constitution.
A regeneration medical discipline may soon emerge, toward women’s health and imminent reproduction initiatives. A family may be reconstituted genetically, blending personal and conventional reproduction, rich in profound new options, especially for women.
SIGNING OFF
As a summing up I can report that this week I was myself sampled and my DNA placed into the said N2 environment, for a planned stay of perhaps a decade - perhaps to allow the ethical baggage train to catch up.
On my 80th birthday I hereby retire as a network designer, and my commitment as HU Moderator begins. Unlike the living, I shall not grow old, nor interested in longevity - this round is for all the marbles.
My DNA can now stand easy. I am content, and death shall have no dominion.
dwight@humanistunion.com humanism.substack.com