Fixation? Cryonics involves cryoprotectant and vitrification at liquid nitrogen temperatures, not plastination, and the last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope. Also, think in terms of the brain being carefully examined on the molecular level by nanotech for tiny hints in the process of being restored to its exact old state, not in terms of trying to warm people up using present-day technology and hoping they pop back to life. The whole point of cryonics is to wait until technology advances to the point of being able to restore you so long as the necessary information is physically there in any form.
Things that look like the newtechnology.html's figs 4 & 5 can look very bad at higher mags. I know this from painful experience. I don't see any high mag pictures at newtechnology.html or in Lemler et al. 2004, which that page cites. These mags are quite accessible once one has gone to the trouble of preparing sections for transmission electron microscopy.
Sheleg et al. 2008 was interesting and surprising to me. It is published in a journal not included in the ISI Science Citation Index, so I can't tell at a glance how their paper might have been received by other workers. I might try replicating their results myself at some point down the road, it would be a pretty simple experiment for me to do (at least, the EM part, not the histology work).
I understand the hope that even anatomically degraded tissue could retain sufficient information for cryonics to be useful. I just don't plan to bet my own money on this hope, at least not at this time.
Aschwin says it's a reasonable request and he knows they've got those and he'll see if he can make them available. I'll reply again when/if the info is available. Any particular way in which I should contact you, if this conversation goes stale?
