Setting standards for brain preservation quality Monitoring preservation’s transition from the laboratory into clinical practice Summary The potential of preserving people for possible future revival depends on maintaining the neural structures that encode memories, personality, and other aspects of personal identity. Ensuring preservation procedures actually achieve this requires rigorous assessment standards to verify that critical […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
Note: Because of my research developing electron microscopic imaging techniques for connectomics, I was invited to participate in the recent NIH/DOE Brain Connectivity Workshop Series discussing the possibility of mapping the connectome of an entire mouse brain. Speakers in that workshop series were all asked to submit ideas to NIH Public Crowdsourcing site on the […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
I think the future is bright and that humanity as a whole trends toward progress and innovation. Like many others of my generation, I grew up knowing that we face plenty of challenges in the near future, from environmental collapse and the rise of artificial intelligence to ongoing persecution and suffering. A reality where society […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
Note: The following is my personal opinion, and does not necessarily reflect the views of my colleagues at BPF. I am a futurist, not a neuroscientist. Any mistakes here are my own. Please point out any you find in the comments, so I can revise as necessary, thanks. Cryonics, Old and New In 2016, Motherboard […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
Author: BPF Co-Founder, John Smart BPF advisor Dr. Susan Blackmore recently wrote a thoughtful and insightful opinion piece, Brain preservation is a step closer, but how could it ever be ‘you’? in the Death and Dying section of The Guardian (14 Mar 2018), exploring the ethics, sustainability, and lack of desirability, from her perspective, of brain preservation at the end […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
Authors: Michael Cerullo and Keith Wiley One of the goals of the Brain Preservation Foundation is to spark debate on all aspects of the idea of preserving brains for future revival by uploading. The recent announcement of the winning of the Large Mammal Prize [link here] has brought many of these issues to light. Here […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
A follow-up to the similarly titled 2016 article concerning the BPF small mammal prize Keith Wiley Author of A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading Brain Preservation Foundation fellow Mar. 13, 2018 On March 13, 2018, the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF, http://brainpreservation.org) announced the winner of its large mammal prize for the successful preservation of a pig […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
Let’s imagine that in a hypothetical future world, head transplants become possible, as somehow the massive technical challenge of reattaching the brain to the spinal cord can be overcome. This would raise an empirical question: is your brain able to adapt to the novel sensory inputs? An analogous question, probably even more distant in the […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
A new manuscript from Gornet et al. describes their work using a serial electron micrograph-derived Drosophila connectome to simulate motion-detection in neurons in the T4 area of the optic lobe: They used the simulation tool NEURON, which is a wonderful and widely-used tool for predicting the electrical output from well-defined sets of connected neurons. One of their findings was that […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
In cryobiology, it is generally thought that cellular gene expression profiles do not change substantially following cryopreservation. This is important because if viability cannot be directly shown in a preservation protocol, such as brain cryopreservation, then we are forced to use clues in order to infer that the majority of the information content of the cells remains […]| The Brain Preservation Foundation
Given recent advances in neuroscience, we believe brain preservation for individuals at the end of life can soon become a very affordable, accessible, valuable, sustainable, and socially beneficial bridge to living on, with all of our friends and loved ones who make the same personal choice. We are in no way advocating that this is a choice everyone might want to make. How we die is a deeply personal choice of belief and action. We all deserve the greatest freedom and respect in making that c...| www.brainpreservation.org
A technology designed to preserve synapses across the whole brain of a large mammal is successfulUsing a combination of ultrafast glutaraldehyde fixation and very low temperature storage, researchers have demonstrated for the first-time ever a way to preserve a brain’s connectome (the 150 trillion synaptic connections presumed to encode all of a person’s knowledge) for centuries-long storage in a large mammal. This laboratory demonstration clears the way to develop Aldehyde-Stabilized Cry...| The Brain Preservation Foundation