Please give only what you feel you can easily afford at our BPF Donation Page. $10 or more is a typical online annual donation for individual donors to small nonprofits. Alternatively you may find it convenient to give using Amazon Smile, where Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your eligible purchases to the charitable nonprofit of your choice (these donations go to the BPF General Fund). You may also donate in Bitcoin using the addresses indicated below.

The Brain Preservation Foundation was incorporated in Delaware on August 27, 2010. We hold Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a not-for-profit scientific research organization. Your contributions are fully tax deductible. You can donate publicly or privately, as you prefer.

BPF is committed to transparency where possible in our large donations, while also respecting privacy requests. All donors of $1,000 or more to any of BPF’s Prizes, Funds, or Endowment are listed below, identifying the donor when allowed, ranked by donation size, and with details on donation type and year.

Uploading has the potential to change the way we understand ourselves and our place in the universe. The breathtaking pace of technology has brought us to the point today where all the technology necessary for uploading is now feasible. If the progression of technology continues and animal experiments demonstrate the feasibility of uploading then this should be viewed as life extension technology. Brain preservation and later destructive uploading will preserve continuity of consciousness. The rational choice is to spend whatever resources are necessary to understand, develop, and apply this technology to those who choose to use it. ~ Michael Cerullo

If we had powerful enough computers, we could probably perform uploads right now. Existing brain preservation technologies seem to allow for it, with only modest improvements. Our ticket to the future may be at hand: let’s find out! — Daniel Crevier, Ph.D. (MIT) ~ Daniel Crevier

Understanding the effectiveness of different methods of brain preservation has an extremely high value-of-information. I hope this helps us understand whether it is possible for the mind to survive known brain preservation techniques. ~ Benjamin Hoffman

My motive for this donation is completely selfish. At age 71, I’m likely to need my brain preserved pretty soon. In case preservation tech isn’t ready in time, I rely on cryonics to do what can be done at the time. As President of the American Cryonics Society, I hope we can work together with BPF. I’m ready to be “uploaded” into virtual reality, which may be indistinguishable from Heaven. Once there, I’m probably not coming back. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm…?” ~ Edgar W. Swank

From Overcoming Bias, by Robin Hanson:

The biggest single charity donation I’ve made so far is ~$100. But now I’m donating $5000 to an exceptionally worthy cause. And I suggest you donate too. Here’s my cause:

People who “die” today could live again in the future, perhaps forever, as brain emulations (= uploads, ems), if enough info were saved today about their brains. (And of course if civilization doesn’t die, if someone in the future cares enough to bother, if you are your brain activity, etc.)

This is probably enough brain info: the spatial shape and location of each brain cell, including the long skinny parts that stick out to touch other cells, and two dozen chemical densities (at the skinny part scale) to help identify cell and connection types. Actually, it is probably enough to just get 95% of the connections right, and a half dozen chemical densities.

These brain research techniques have now reached two key milestones:

1.     They’ve found new ways to “fix” brain samples by filling them with plastic, ways that seem impressively reliable, resilient, and long lasting, and which work on large brain volumes (e.g., here). Such plastination techniques seem close to being able to save enough info in entire brains for centuries, without needing continual care. Just dumping a plastic brain in a box in a closet might work fine.

2.     Today, for a few tens of thousands of dollars, less than the price charged for one cryonics customer, it is feasible to have independent lab(s) take random samples from whole mouse or human brains preserved via either cryonics or plastination, and do high (5nm) resolution 3D scans to map out thousands of neighboring cells, their connections, and connection strengths, to test if either of these approaches clearly preserve such key brain info.

An anonymous donor has actually funded a $100K Brain Preservation Prize, paid to the first team(s) to pass this test on a human brain, with a quarter of the prize going to those that first pass the test on a mouse brain. Cryonics and plastination teams have already submitted whole mouse brains to be tested. The only hitch is that the prize organization needs money (~25-50K$) to actually do the tests!

This is the exceptionally worthy cause to which I am donating $5K, and to which I encourage others to donate.  (More info here; donate here.) We seem close to having a feasible plastination technique, where for a few 10K$ or less one could fill a brain with plastic, saving its key brain info for future revival in an easily stored form. We may only lack donations of a similar amount to actually test that it does actually save this key brain info. (And if the first approach fails, perhaps to test a few revisions.)