Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> writes:
> for those who are up to speed on cryonics, a question please:
> our tissues are mostly carbon and carbon has an isotope (C14)
> with half life about 6kyr. when C14 undergoes beta decay, the
> remainder is a nitrogen atom. looks like the dna chain would
> be broken there. would the cell then be dead? dependent
> on a nanobot to find and repair the break? have there been
> calculations done on this? spike
According to the chemistry textbook I have in my bookshelf the abundancy in living material is one in 10^12. The human genome is roughly 6e9 nucleotides, each having around 10 carbon atoms - hence each cell has 6e10 carbon atoms in the genome. The chance of having just one C14 is one in 17; of these just 1% suffers decay in a century. The problem is likely minor compared to other sources of damage.
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