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World English Bible
Deuteronomy 11
Therefore you shall love Yahweh your God, and keep his instructions, his statutes, his ordinances, and his commandments, always.
Know this day: for I don't speak with your children who have not known, and who have not seen the chastisement of Yahweh your God, his greatness, his mighty hand, his outstretched arm,
his signs, and his works, which he did in the middle of Egypt to Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and to all his land;
and what he did to the army of Egypt, to their horses, and to their chariots; how he made the water of the Red Sea to overflow them as they pursued you, and how Yahweh has destroyed them to this day;
and what he did to you in the wilderness, until you came to this place;
and what he did to Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, the son of Reuben; how the earth opened its mouth, and swallowed them up, and their households, and their tents, and every living thing that followed them, in the middle of all Israel;
but your eyes have seen all of Yahweh's great work which he did.
Therefore you shall keep all the commandment which I command you today, that you may be strong, and go in and possess the land, where you go over to possess it;
and that you may prolong your days in the land, which Yahweh swore to your fathers to give to them and to their offspring,
a land flowing with milk and honey.
For the land, where you go in to possess it, isn't as the land of Egypt, that you came out of, where you sowed your seed, and watered it with your foot, as a garden of herbs;
but the land, where you go over to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys which drinks water from the rain of the sky,
a land which Yahweh your God cares for. Yahweh your God's eyes are always on it, from the beginning of the year even to the end of the year.
It shall happen, if you shall listen diligently to my commandments which I command you today, to love Yahweh your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul,
that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, your new wine, and your oil.
I will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full.
Be careful, lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them;
and Yahweh's anger be kindled against you, and he shut up the sky, so that there is no rain, and the land doesn't yield its fruit; and you perish quickly from off the good land which Yahweh gives you.
Therefore you shall lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul. You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.
You shall teach them your children, talking of them, when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.
You shall write them on the door posts of your house, and on your gates;
that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which Yahweh swore to your fathers to give them, as the days of the heavens above the earth.
For if you shall diligently keep all these commandments which I command you, to do them, to love Yahweh your God, to walk in all his ways, and to cling to him;
then will Yahweh drive out all these nations from before you, and you shall dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourselves.
Every place whereon the sole of your foot treads shall be yours: from the wilderness, and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even to the western sea shall be your border.
No man will be able to stand before you. Yahweh your God will lay the fear of you and the dread of you on all the land that you tread on, as he has spoken to you.
Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse:
the blessing, if you listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, which I command you today;
and the curse, if you do not listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you today, to go after other gods, which you have not known.
It shall happen, when Yahweh your God brings you into the land where you go to possess it, that you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim, and the curse on Mount Ebal.
Aren't they beyond the Jordan, behind the way of the going down of the sun, in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah, near Gilgal, beside the oaks of Moreh?
For you are to pass over the Jordan to go in to possess the land which Yahweh your God gives you, and you shall possess it, and dwell therein.
You shall observe to do all the statutes and the ordinances which I set before you today.
or, seed


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"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Many Are Cold But Few Are Frozen
I'm a humble, lovable (like Underdog), underpaid Research Assistant in a cell biology lab. One of my routine job duties is to freeze vials containing tens of millions of human cells and send them into the future. I also unfreeze cells from decades past, revive and grow them. I have personally revived cells from 1987; but the record must be somewhere in the early 1960s, when our crude freeze protocol was developed. Cells frozen in 10% DMSO/90% calf serum should be revivable for centuries. Other labs freeze embryos and larger structures with better protocols.
So it baffles me that I still run into 'educated' people who tell me earnestly that 'it's impossible to freeze living things; the ice crystals destroy the cell membranes.' (Another common myth is 'the cells die when reheated.') Even outside the lab, several species of frogs, salamanders, and turtles freeze 60% of the water inside their cells every winter. In other words, they're frogsicles and turtlecubes. While this is not true -150' C cryonics, these animals don't have heart-lung machines or radio-frequency heaters to help them revive. At some point, half their cells are frozen and half aren't, which sounds stressful . . . but they survive and revive every spring.
Cryonics is easy for cells, routine for embryos, and probably doable for whole human organs and bodies with the right perfusants, heart-lung machines, and reheating physics (long-wave RF heaters? Fluctuating magnetic fields?). Unfortunately no one has had the guts to find out. (Apparently real billionaires are more timid than 'Montgomery Burns.')
Cryonics is an orphan idea. In spite of media attention from Ettinger's book Man Into Superman in the 1960s to Fox's Futurama, no one has ever invested serious money in cryonics. Even a slight improvement in cryonic protocols would allow for freezing kidneys, livers, etc., greatly reducing the shortage of transplant organs. None of the drug companies has seen a clear route to FDA approval for anything so innovative and controversial, though. They prefer instead to invest their billions in rearranging the methyl groups on old drugs to make 'new' patentable tranquilizers for housewives, Ritalin substitutes, etc.
Present cryonics organizations Alcor and Cryonics Institute are made up of very smart, well-intentioned, but underfunded hobbyists, just like the early personal-computer clubs. They use variations of our time-tested cell biology freezing protocols to attempt to save the minds of those whose hearts or other important organs recently stopped working. Future science may be able to repair and revive those frozen today, or it may not; we don't know enough about how the brain stores memory to know for sure. Personally, I think most of the Alcorpsicles will be revived, but with more difficulty than those frozen later with better technology.
Of course if you have cancer now, you don't have the option of waiting for better technology. Those who are frozen today will certainly be no worse off medically than those who rot, and at the very least their DNA can be cloned and used to make quaint pets for the cyborg children of the future. (Hey, c'mon guys, think of the children.) And it only costs $80,000 for a neurosuspension, fundable with term insurance. What does $80K of term cost a 30-year-old? $50 a year? It's trivial, worth it for the novelty value alone.
Cryonics and Freedom
So, what does this all mean for freedom? A lot. Cryonics (and the rest of biotechnology) can be used to make individuals live longer than political parties, governments, and empires. People who have outlived three governments won't take the fourth so seriously.
The Unfrozen could also contribute some political perspective even to the young of future generations. Wouldn't it be great to have Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allan et. al. here to see our current government? Ben Franklin said that he would have had himself preserved to see the future of the Republic; unfortunately the wine-cask technology that he suggested was not up to the task. If it had been, think what an asset Ethan Allan would be to the Free State Project!
In the shorter term, Cryonics can solve several government-created problems. As mentioned, the transplant-organ shortage (caused largely by government restrictions on paying donors) would be drastically reduced if organs could be stored for decades.
The political fight over 'assisted suicide' would be eased if freezing yourself to escape terminal illness were an option. People with cryonics contracts also form a lobby against government control of the human body. Cryonicists want to be able to freeze themselves when they get a brain tumor, not wait until it has destroyed their mind.
Cryonics also solves many problems for those wishing to travel . . . REALLY travel. One way to tell that NASA has no serious plans for space exploration (or even to rebuild its 1960s nuclear engines) is that it has no research institute working on cryonics for astronauts.
Believers in index investing can freeze themselves at age 30 and wait for their IRAs to compound. Better read this first, though; and remember that the investors in Latvian stocks in 1940 are not billionaires now.
The final argument for Cryonics is: Some people want to do it. That should be good enough for those who really believe in freedom.
Have problems with living too long? Drop dead. I don't mean to sound flippant, but the nature of entropy being what it is, staying alive is always harder than disintegrating. We already have enough military and fast-food technology on this planet to cover the needs of all the suicidal folk of the Galaxy for the next millennium. There will never be any problem of excess lifespan in this universe, unless the laws of physics change.
As for those who think there is some sort of theological problem with cryonics: Your gods are way too small, if a matter of a century or two of human life more or less frightens them. The early Christians actually preserved their dead bodies very carefully in the Catacombs against what they believed to be imminent Resurrection; they would have used cryonics in the Catacombs if they could.
So: get some perspective, an Alcor or CI contract, and work hard to make a freer world until the big chill comes. If things aren't better in 2105, you can complain to me then. Remember: many are cold, but few are frozen. Frozen is cooler.

subset: commoncrawl


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Media Contact: William Davis, 919-962-3405, email@example.com
Friday, March 1, 2013
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – In an article published as the cover story of the March 2013 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, Lindsey James, PhD, research assistant professor in the lab of Stephen Frye, Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor in the UNC School of Pharmacy and member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, announced the discovery of a chemical probe that can be used to investigate the L3MBTL3 methyl-lysine reader domain. The probe, named UNC1215, will provide researchers with a powerful tool to investigate the function of malignant brain tumor (MBT) domain proteins in biology and disease.
"Before this there were no known chemical probes for the more than 200 domains in the human genome that recognize methyl lysine. In that regard, it is a first in class compound. The goal is to use the chemical probe to understand the biology of the proteins that it targets," said Dr. James.
Chromatin regulatory pathways play a fundamental role in gene expression and disease development, especially in the case of cancer. While many chemical probes work through the inhibition of enzyme activity, L3MBTL3 functions as a mediator of protein-to-protein interactions, which have been historically difficult to target with small, drug-like molecules.The researchers found three to four further disease subtypes within TN tumors, with more than 75 percent of the tumors falling into the basal-like subtype. Further research is needed to identify the distinct biomarkers shared by the expanded subtypes of TN cancers. The ultimate goal will be to target the individual biomarkers of these subtypes and create therapies that target their individual biology, according to Dr. Perou.
"Many people believe that protein-protein interactions are difficult to target. Often they have a large surface area, so it is hard for small molecules to go in and intervene," said Dr. James.
Almost 40 percent of the genes that drive cancer can be mapped to dysfunction within signaling pathways. In the last five years, chemical probe development has allowed researchers to make fundamental observations of the role of these pathways in cancer development, as well as pointing to potential targets for new therapies. Each of the complex interactions within the signaling pathways represents a potential point where a therapy can be applied, and the probes allow researchers to interact with these processes at the molecular level and observe the overall effect of their perturbation on the disease state.
In a 2008 Nature Chemical Biology commentary, Dr. Frye outlined the qualities that make a good chemical probe. To Frye, a good chemical probe must be highly selective to enable specific questions to be asked and it must function as well in a cell as in the test tube, providing clear quantitative data with a well understood mechanism of action in either situation. It also must be available to all academic researchers without restrictions on its use, a criteria that the L3MBTL3 probe fulfills through the Frye lab's commitment to provide researchers with the probe free of charge on request and UNC1215 is already available through commercial vendors as well.
This research was supported by NIH grants (RC1GM090732 and R01GM100919) and the University Cancer Research Fund.