How much would brain preservation cost?

Brain preservation cost will likely vary greatly by country and service offering. Some complex medical procedures (dental work, orthopedic surgery, transplants, fertility treatments, etc.) are available as much as ten times cheaper in specialty countries, a condition that has led to a multi-billion dollar medical tourism industry in recent years. Brain preservation services offered in elder residence or hospice centers in developing nations, for example, could be offered at far lower cost than in the US. Those using Alcor for cryopreservation today must take out (and on average, prepay over time) a life insurance policy that pays $80,000 at death for neuropreservation, or $200,000 for whole body preservation. Three-quarters of Alcor’s patients have opted for the cheaper option. Neuropreservation is also offered by KrioRus, a Russian cryonics company, for $12,000. Alcor had 118 patients, and KrioRus 25 patients in 2013. This shows the wide variation in current costs today, when brain preservation is in a Very Early Adopter phase. Costs will surely go both lower and higher in the future, as services variety, innovation, and adoption grows.

The Brain Preservation Technology Prize rules specify that the winning team must submit a brain preservation procedure that “with minor modifications, might potentially be offered for less than $20,000 by appropriately trained medical professionals.” This is an estimated cost of brain chemopreservation or cryopreservation by appropriately trained medical personnel, and includes any necessary storage costs after death. This cost is not specific to any country, and it does not include the cost of medical standby prior to death, which can be very little or very expensive, depending on each individual’s end-of-life arrangements. It also does not include any future costs of memory or identity reanimation. The prize winner must simply make a reasonable case that a service provider using their procedure might be able to do medically-supervised preservation and any necessary storage at this price, in any country in the world. This target cost has been picked as a worthy technical accomplishment, based on estimated cost of necessary specialist labor and materials. In combination with neuroscientific localization of memory in the connectome in animal models, we expect that winning the Prize as structured should help grow global demand, access and affordability of brain preservation services.

In lowering costs, cryopreservation has the present advantages of significant technical knowledge gained over fifty years of experimentation, but the disadvantage of higher storage costs, due to the need for dewars and ongoing supply of liquid nitrogen. Chemopreservation has the advantage of no necessary storage costs after death, but the disadvantage of little technical experience with whole brain preservation to date, and the toxicity of the preservation chemicals involved.