3 min Explainer Video - The Brain Preservation Option

BPF Video Series Episode 1 of 8 – Opening Statement: Our Mission

The Brain Preservation Foundation is an American non-profit organization founded in 2010 with the goal of promoting validated scientific research, knowledge, and technical services development in the field of whole human brain preservation for long-term static storage. We also work on the accessibility, affordability, and sustainability of brain preservation procedures and technology, and provide scientific and public education on topics such as the neural foundations of learning and memory, brain preservation, scanning techniques, and whole brain emulation (“mind uploading”).

A 21st Century Vision

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 choice, as long as we do not obviously harm others. Nevertheless, we believe that there are good grounds for making the preservation choice today. History shows that humanity has been continually striving, often in only partly conscious ways, both to improve our lives today and to build better futures for all. Our deep prosociality, and our drive to advance our personal and collective freedoms, abilities, empathy, ethics, and vision, are all essential features of humanity, in our view. Though we constantly create new problems for ourselves, we are always creating new solutions as well, though the latter can often be harder to see and acknowledge in our complex world. We believe it is logical to expect that a world with the science and technology to revive us will be also a world with more and much better regulated human rights, abilities, freedoms, and sustainability. It is likely to be a world where we may choose to be like children again in various aspects of our bodies and minds, able to grow and change. Alternatively, some of us may choose to change very little in that future world, just as humanity makes both choices today. It is also reasonable to expect that we will bring unique and valuable experiences, wisdom, goals, and personalities from our current life into our future life. We believe no future society, or its technologies, will ever be “Godlike”–either omniscient or omnipotent. If our universe and its physics continues as we understand it today, then future society will always improved by better collective memory and diversity, just like society today. Finally, making brain preservation available to all who might want it at the end of life may measurably change our personal and societal values and visions today, making them more adventurous, future, science, sustainability, progress, justice, and community oriented. Getting more of us to see the value of brain preservation in today’s world, with all its unknowns and challenges, won’t be easy, but all revolutions start with individual choices.  We hope you’ll seriously consider the implications and desirability of expanding access to and affordability of this end-of-life choice, for yourself and your loved ones. If you want more on the personal and societal value of this vision, see our essay, Overcoming Objections to Brain Preservation, and let us know what you think.

How You Can Help Us

If you find our mission persuasive, please Sign Our Petition for Global Access to High-Quality Brain Preservation at Change.org. We have 950 signatures as of Dec 1, 2024. We’d love to reach 1,000 signatures as our next milestone. Feel free to add your public comments as well, sharing what the brain preservation choice currently means to you, and if you’d like to see it become medically supervised, accessible and affordable to anyone as an end-of-life option in every society around the world. Want to do more? See our page of suggestions on How You Can Help.

Quick Links to Recent Content

Aspirational Neuroscience Prize: Call for Nominations

YouTube Video Documentary Series on the Brain Preservation Foundation

Neuroscience of Learning and Memory Journal Club Videos (YouTube)

Journal Quotes on the Synaptic Encoding of Memory

Press Release: Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation Wins Final Phase of Brain Preservation Prize

Kenneth Hayworth’s Letter of Support for Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation (and ‘next steps’ caveats)

Vitrifying the Connectomic Self: A case for developing Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation into a medical procedure (Essay)

Pig Prize Evaluation Images (3D Electron Microscopy and Gross Dissection Views)

Introduction

The Great Library of Alexandria, constructed in the third century BC, was the center of science and learning in the ancient world. Its collection of tens of thousands of scrolls contained the hard-won knowledge of the ancient world and a priceless trove of human history. But with the destruction of the library almost all of this knowledge was lost. “The burning of the Great Library of Alexandria” has become a metaphor for any reckless destruction of unique knowledge –an inexcusable insult to both the original author and to future generations.

Considering today’s obsession with digital archiving we might think that future generations will thank us for our careful conservatorship. But in fact it is much more likely that they will look back at the early 21st century and view it as “another burning of the Great Library of Alexandria!”

To understand why, consider how far neuroscience has come in just the last decade, then envision the world a few centuries from now. Today’s neuroscientific theories have led us to deep learning neural networks which allow our apps to understand speech, recognize faces, and even drive autonomous cars. Neuroscience imaging technology is preparing to map entire insect and small mammal brains at the nanometer scale using ultrafast electron microscopes, with the near-term goal of reading memories. We are using powerful new tools in genetics, molecular biology, biotechnology, microscopy, systems biology, data science, and other fields to finally uncover the set of epigenetic, extracellular, and synaptic changes that form the molecular basis of memory. The 2014 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience was won by three neuroscientists for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition. The 2016 Brain Prize was won by three neuroscientists for elucidating the molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation, one of the keys to storing and sustaining lifelong memories in mammalian brains.

If the world continues this accelerated pace there is every reason to expect that in a few hundred years we will have a complete science of how the brain gives rise to mind, and the technological prowess to routinely upload memories and minds. This will be a world whose technological advancements and material prosperity are as far beyond us today as we are beyond the ancient Greeks. Citizens of that future world will have conquered disease and death and overcome countless other biological limitations. They will viscerally understand what today’s neuroscience textbooks try to convey: The mind is computational, and a person’s unique memories and personality are encoded in the pattern of physical connections between neurons.

From that vantage point, future generations will ask:

Brief History

In 2010, we established the Brain Preservation Foundation to evaluate this perspective. We asked:

  • “Is it possible to reliably and affordably preserve the 3D ultrastructure and synaptic connectivity of the human brain at death for >100 years?”
  • “How close are current methods (cryonics and others) to offering a consistent high-quality preservation throughout the human brain?”
  • “Can we find alternative brain preservation methods stemming from modern neuroscience research?”

We reasoned that one of the best ways to definitively answer these questions was to offer a $100,000 challenge prize for the first team that could demonstrate a reliable preservation protocol for brain-wide 3D ultrastructure and synaptic connectivity, for both small animal and large animal brains.

The Brain Preservation Prize: A challenge to cryonicists, a challenge to scientists

Two world-class research labs, 21st Century Medicine in California and Shawn Mikula’s laboratory at the Max Planck Institute, entered into our prize competition.

21st Century Medicine (21CM), a leading cryobiology research laboratory, was the perfect choice to test how well state-of-the-art cryonics preserves brain ultrastructure. A summary of their results can be found on our 21CM Cryopreservation Page. That research uncovered limitations in the current cryonics protocols when judged against the goal of verifiably preserving synaptic structure. As a result 21CM invented a new brain preservation protocol, called “Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation”, which appears to have entirely overcome these limitations. A summary of their results can be found on our Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation Page.

Separately, Shawn Mikula’s laboratory not only worked out how to preserve a whole mouse brain at the ultrastructure level, but they did so in a way that makes it directly compatible with today’s automated scanning and imaging techniques, using high-speed 3D electron microcopy. Our evaluation results of a whole brain entry he sent us can be found on our Mikula Evaluation Page.

It now seems a reasonable proposition to us that reliable, inexpensive, and scientifically proven procedures for high-quality brain preservation could be made available, relatively soon, in hospitals, hospices, and homes around the world, to all terminal patients that might desire it as an end-of-life option for themselves and their loved ones.

Would anyone really elect to undergo such a brain preservation procedure? For at least a small minority of the population the answer is yes. Since its inception, the Brain Preservation Foundation has attracted a diverse group of volunteers, advisors, and donors many of which not only support the development of such technology but hope that the option will be available to them when they need it. Surveys today suggest that a significant percentage of the population (anywhere from 1 to 20%) would desire the brain preservation option for themselves and their loved ones at the end of life, whether or not they actually engage in such preservation.

Cryonics has never attracted significant numbers despite decades of trying, but one of the many historical blocks to considering cryonics is that the cryonics services providers have never been able to establish to the neuroscientist community that their vitrification procedures reliably preserve the delicate 3D ultrastructure and synaptic connectivity throughout the brains of their patients. This new “field” of scientifically-verified brain preservation emerging today may finally remove this objection. Recovery of non-trivial memories, in computer emulation, from preserved and scanned brains in complex animals (mice, etc.) may also change the views of many who are unsure of the future value of this procedure for human beings.

Coming back to our analogy: Each of us are the scrolls in today’s Library of Alexandria. Each of us has spent decades accumulating our unique memories and honing our unique identity. Our memories and personality weave the thread of our life together with the lives of our loved ones and, in turn, with the rest of humanity. As fragile biological creatures, we have learned to accept that we all age and die, and with death our particular thread is ripped out of the tapestry of humanity – our scroll is set ablaze.

With the ever quickening pace of science and technology more of us are realizing that traditional death many not be a necessary part of the human condition forever. Our great-grandchildren may not know traditional death at all; ours may actually be one of the last generations to cower under its ancient shadow. In our view, the perfection of brain preservation technology represents today’s most reasonable chance at reaching that future world.

Please join us in advocating for more research into brain preservation techniques, and if and when they are reasonably validated to have informational value value for future society, in urging the medical community to supervise and implement elective brain preservation procedures, in hospitals, hospices, and homes around the world, for all who might want this option at the end of their lives.

BPF Position Statements on Three Topics, for Scientific, Medical, Legal, and Government Professionals and the General Public  

  1. Brain Preservation Services. BPF is a nonprofit research organization, and our mission is to promote scientific research and services development of whole brain preservation for long-term static storage. This is presently very important for scientific and medical brain banking and connectomics research. If useful information (non-trivial memories, at least) is validated to be contained in preserved animal brains, by a minority neuroscience consensus on relevant structural preservation and computer emulation, we will also advocate for services development for the general public, as an end-of-life option. To date, simple memories have been recovered from preserved animal brains. See AspirationalNeuroscience.org for papers. But recovery of non-trivial memories has not yet occurred yet, in our opinion. The BPF does not currently support the offering of ASC, or any other preservation method to human patients, and will not endorse any particular preservation services company, now or in the future. We hope that all preservation services companies continue to improve their procedures, publish them in open journals, and engage in periodic medical ethics and legal reviews of their contracts and consent processes.
  2. Memory Preservation. Validation of preservation value for public use, in our opinion, requires making a case that such preservation will preserve non-trivial  memories, at least. Many neuroscientists would agree that preserving the connectome alone may not be sufficient to preserve memory. Aspects of what is called the synaptome (synaptic receptors and small molecules) and perhaps, the epigenome (molecular tags on neural DNA), may modulate human memory storage as well. We do not yet have a full understanding of how the many varieties of memory are stored in animal brains, so any opinion rendered today by anyone on that topic must be provisional. ASC, the technology that won our recent prizes, appears to well-preserve both the connectome and these small synaptic and nuclear features, as far as we know today. But discussion and consensus with respect to ASC’s potential adequacy (or not) for preserving useful human memories, among a respectably-sized community of neuroscientists, has not happened, to our knowledge. There is even less understanding and consensus with respect to related mental properties like personality, emotion and consciousness. Our affiliated neuroscience practitioner community, AspirationalNeuroscience.org, exists to engage with the neuroscientific community in exploration of this important open question. Until a minority professional consensus emerges around this question, validation of preservation’s value for human use has not occurred, in our opinion.
  3. Sustainability, Affordability, and Accessibility. For BPF to advocate public services development, we will also need to make a reasonable case, in open journals, that those services can be provided sustainably with respect to the environment, and made both increasingly affordable and accessible to the general public, as a matter of social justice. The resource costs of preserving and “uploading” small animal connectomes, while those simulations are quite incomplete today, has been exponentially decreasing with the progression of digital computers. AI, automation, and such 50-year trends as Koomey’s law also allow us make a case that future reanimation may be done particularly sustainably with respect to the environment. Affordability and accessibility of public services must also be discussed, and we hope to do our small part to advance that discussion, should validation of preservation accuracy and value be achieved. At present, we are focused on validation, a process that may still take a number of years to occur, from our perspective.

We recognize that death is a deeply personal and emotional process, and that each of us comes to terms with it in our own unique way. Now that our first two Preservation Technology Prizes have been won, and at least one company is making plans to preserve brains in a way that at least a few neuroscientists expect may preserve memories, we believe the scientific, medical, legal, and government communities should begin discussing this topic. We should be asking what technical, medical, ethical, legal, and economic conditions will ensure that whole brain preservation services respect the wishes of those involved, and are appropriately regulated when public services are offered, in all free societies.

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