Thomas K. Donaldson

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Thomas K. Donaldson
Donaldson in 27 October 1990 at London
Born1944
Kentucky, U.S.
Died2006
Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S.
NationalityAmerican and Australian
EducationPhD in mathematics
Alma materUniversity of Chicago
SpouseCatherine Woof
Scientific career
Thesis Embedding theorems for Orlicz-Sobolev spaces and applications
Doctoral advisorFelix Browder

Thomas K. Donaldson (1944 – 2006) was a

Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1969. He also lived in Sunnyvale, California, and for many years in Canberra, Australia, where he taught mathematics at Australian National University. He founded both the Cryonics Association of Australia and the Institute for Neural Cryobiology, which has funded ground-breaking research in cryopreservation
of brain tissue.

Writings

In 1974 his monograph A Laplace Transform Calculus for Partial Differential Operators was published by the American Mathematical Society.[1]

In 1976 Donaldson published A Brief Scientific Introduction to Cryonics,[2] the first concise review of scientific literature supporting the practice of cryonics. He was a regular contributor to Cryonics magazine, the newsletter of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, for many years. He also published his own periodical, Periastron,[3] which discussed neuroscience issues as they pertain to cryonics.

Donaldson proposed some of the earliest ideas for cell repair technologies, seeing such technologies as extensions of natural biology, but using new

Eric Drexler’s ideas about molecular nanotechnology came to dominate cryonics thinking in the mid-1980s, he frequently expressed concern that too much reliance was being placed on the new molecular-mechanical repair paradigm to the exclusion of earlier biological approaches. Donaldson’s seminal exposition of his vision of future medicine was his 1988 essay, 24th Century Medicine.[4]

Definition of death

The views expressed by Donaldson on the subject of death were far reaching even by

decrypting the original information content of injured brains would always keep coming. He wrote of "neural archaeology" as an important part of future medicine.[6] He said cryonics
in some form would always be necessary because whether certain brain injuries were ultimately repairable would always remain an open question for the future.

Donaldson also maintained an avid interest in biomedical gerontology, self-publishing the book "A Guide to Anti-aging Drugs" in 1994. Despite this interest, he was pessimistic about near-term prospects for extension of human lifespan. In 1986 he stated that only small children might live long enough to see advances allowing them to avoid the need for cryonics. In late 2005, he wrote in Cryonics magazine, "We aim, by cryopreservation, to reach a time when aging can be reversed and abolished. Cryopreservation may well turn out to be the only way that anyone (now living) has any chance of doing that."

Brain tumor

In 1988, Donaldson was diagnosed with grade II

tumor begin regrowing, not a desire for immediate cryopreservation
.

In early 2006, his friend Steve Bridge posted a message[8] to the Cryonet email list indicating that Donaldson’s cancer had returned, and that he was returning from Australia to the United States in serious condition. He is cryopreserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation; his biography matches the description of patient A-1097, described in the Spring 2006 issue Cryonics Magazine, who received an unusually smooth cryopreservation on January 19, 2006.

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-8218-1843-5
    .
  2. ^ "A Brief Scientific Introduction to Cryonics".
  3. ^ "Periastron Index". Periastron. Archived from the original on 2006-06-18.
  4. ^ "24th Century Medicine".
  5. ^ "Prospects of a Cure for "Death"".
  6. ^ "Neural Archaeology".
  7. ^ "The Thomas Donaldson Case".
  8. ^ "Repost of "Thomas Donaldson is seriously ill"". www.cryonet.org.

External links

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