> Jeff Davis wrote:
>
> > monastery curriculum not to strong on the radiochemistry of coal, eh, spike?
>
> Spike Jones wrote: I meant, wood has some carbon 14 to start with, then
> over the eons it takes to form coal, yer 14 goes away, half every 6k years...
After reading over the replies, I realized we have two different ideas going on. For long term preservation in cryonic suspension, I am not too worried about a little ionizing radiation from the decay of potassium 40, or the resulting argon atom. Looks to me like a frozen brain would get very little damage from the radiation. I had in mind the damage due to the actual DNA molecule within the brain, getting a bit unhinged or becoming disfunctional when a carbon 14 atom decays to a nitrogen atom. I am not sure it would wreck the strand, but it seems like it would.
If we ate carbon-14-free food for several years before suspension, we would have few if any C14 atoms incorporated into our DNA, thus looks to me like we would have a better chance at long term suspension, eh Jeff?