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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, https://brainpreservation.org) announced the winner of its large mammal prize for the successful preservation of a pig […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A manuscript by Manuchehrabadi et al. about using magnetic nanoparticles to improve rewarming of vitrified tissue samples made quite a splash when it was published earlier this month. What is the problem that they addressed? As it turns out, a lot of the tissue damage in vitrification procedures occurs during rewarming, as opposed to cooling. This […]