What does the scientific community think of brain preservation?

There are two use cases through which the scientific community presently considers the subject of brain preservation:

1. Brain preservation for scientific and medical research uses.This use is generally noncontroversial, as it has been happening since the 1880’s, imperfectly for large brains, and near perfectly for very small sections of brain. As neuroscience, connectomics, and scanning technologies advance, chemopreservation and cryopreservation of increasingly large brain sections, and recently of whole animal brains, will continue to advance.
2. Brain preservation for memory, experience, or identity preservation and later reanimation.This use is considered speculative by most scientists at present. Dozens of laboratories are today trying to understand the molecular basis of memory, and are using chemically preserved and cryopreserved brains to do so, along with other techniques. But there are many open questions that will have to be answered before it will be generally accepted that a well-preserved brain has retrievable memories, or more generally, is a preserved individual.

As the scientific and medical research use continues to grow, each of these uses may increasingly overlap, via preservation of brains for the purpose of the attempted retrieval of simple memories in animal models in neuroscience. As a result, those few who presently engage in the second use (cryonics patients, at present) and those who seek to validate or falsify brain preservation techniques (BPF and other organizations) will continue to introduce important scientific, ethical and legal questions to be resolved by future societies.