Real-Life Communication
You're sitting at your desk, trying to clear up the backlog of work
in your "to do" file. You work at a cryonics facility, where human beings
are frozen in suspended animation.
The hope is that someday scientists
will develop a technique for bringing people back to life. At that point you
will be able to help reanimate the people stored in your facility, who will
hopefully go on to live for many more years.
Your official job title
is cryonics technician. However, the reality is that very few people are put
into suspension each year. Like everyone else at the facility, you spend the
bulk of your time trying to promote the cause of cryonics in the media. It
can be tricky though -- you want publicity, but not the wrong type of publicity.
You
pull the next piece of paper from your "to do" basket. It's an editorial item
from a national newspaper. A certain state is considering bringing in legislation
to make cryonics illegal.
The person who wrote the editorial agrees
with the state legislators. He says that cryonics is a silly idea, designed
to give false hope to people that there is life after death. He adds that
there is no scientific support for cryonics. The article makes cryonics sound
like a crazy idea taken straight from a bad science fiction novel.
Reading
the article gets your blood boiling. What really upsets you is that the author
obviously didn't do any research. You hate to think that thousands of people
will base their opinion of cryonics on one poorly written editorial.
Here
are some questions the writer raised in the editorial. Write a response that
answers them.
- If cryonics has a basis in real science, then why do so many writers use
it in science fiction novels?
- How can people who are frozen possibly be brought back to life?
You write down several points to include in your response:
- Science fiction writers often come up with ideas that later become fact.
For example, it was writer Jules Verne who first came up with the idea of
a submarine.
- There is no way that people can be brought back to life at this point
in time. The process of freezing the body causes irreversible
damage. But we believe that in the future, scientists will make this possible.
- We can't know what medicine will be like 100 years from now. A century
ago, no physician would have foreseen that antibiotics and gene therapy would
be part of our future.