For more than a year now I have been trying to locate Jerome B. White’s paper “Viral Induced Repair of Damaged Neurons with Preservation of Long Term Information Content.” This paper is referred to in a number of books and articles, including Robert Ettinger’s Man into Superman (1972), Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation, and Mike Darwin’s biological repair proposal in his article The Anabolocyte (1977). Despite being recognized as the first presentation about repair of the brain of cryonics patients, I am not aware of any actual quotes or discussion of the paper, raising the question of how many authors who have referenced the paper have actually read it. The best I have been able to find is what amounts to the complete abstract of the paper in Robert Ettinger’s Man into Superman:

“An organic cell is a self repairing automaton, but if environmental interference exceeds a certain limit, damage will become total. Freezing can be used to halt progressive damage along with all metabolism, but means are required to restore or augment the cellular genetic control program, or enrich the environment to enhance repair ability. It has been proposed that appropriate genetic information be introduced by means of artificially constructed virus particles into a congenitally defective cell for remedy; similar means may be used for the more general case of repair. Progress has been made in many relevant areas. The repair program must use means such as protein synthesis and metabolic pathways to diagnose and repair any damage. Applied to brain neurons, this might destroy long term information content, which appears to be stored in molecular form, often suggested to be in a feedback cycle involving mRNA and protein. This information can be preserved by specifying that the repair program incorporate appropriate RNA tapes into itself upon entry and release them on termination of repair.”

Jerome B. White’s paper was presented at the Second National Cryonics Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969. Unfortunately, only the proceedings of the First Annual Cryonics Conference in 1968 have been made available as a book. We can state with reasonable certainty, though, that White spoke on this topic at the second conference because Saul Kent briefly mentions his presentation in a review of the conference for Cryonics Reports, April-May 1969. Even more intriguing, the reference for this paper in Man into Superman includes “reprints available [emphasis added] from the Cryonics Society of Michigan,” which provides evidence that this presentation was either transcribed or an actual paper was prepared prior to or after the conference. Notwithstanding this encouraging point, I have not been able to locate this paper so far, despite asking individuals such as Michael Darwin, Michael Perry, Stephen Bridge, and Catherine Donaldson. Could it be possible that a paper was produced and distributed on a small scale but no copies of the paper have survived? This would be a tragedy, especially in light of the fact that it was the first proposal for a cell repair machine to resuscitate cryonics patients.

One person we cannot consult is Jerome Butler White (b. 1938) himself. The “good” news is that Mr. White has not passed away but, after a struggle with AIDS, was cryopreserved in 1994 by the American Cryonics Society (ACS) in collaboration with BioPreservation. (He is now stored at the Cryonics Institute.) Some of his other presentations include “The Technology of Cryonic Suspension,” Cryonics Conference and Scientific Congress, San Francisco, 1971, and “Heat Flow in the Human Patient,” Lake Tahoe Life Extension Festival, 1985. In the internet age it is hard to imagine that any information can be lost forever but we cannot rule out here that only a few individuals who have heard this presentation in 1969 are still alive today (some who have made cryonics arrangements) and that all physical copies may have been (irretrievably) lost. If that is the case, the text of this first paper on viral cell repair of cryonics patients will never be known and we can only speculate on its contents based on the abstract and any recollections of people who were present. One cannot think about this scenario and fail to reflect on the fragile nature of the personal memories stored in our own brains….

Note added by Mike Perry: Someone I know who is a prominent cryonicist thinks he has notes or text for the speech that was given by Jerry White at the 1969 Cryonics Conference. I have been waiting for the scanned document and will report when something comes to light.

Originally published as a column in Cryonics magazine, February, 2014

Postscript: Jerome White’s paper was (re)discovered by Art Quaife in September, 2014 and published in Cryonics Magazine, October, 2014. The paper is now available online here.