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Brain-Machine-2

Information technology's difficult to pitch a product when part of the deal is that y'all will absolutely, 100 percent dice if yous become a customer. That'southward an integral function of what Nectome is offering, though. This Y Combinator startup wants to give you the hazard to live forever — sort of. To take reward of what Nectome bills as a service to back up your heed, they have to kill you first. Information technology's a tough sell, but some people are already lining upward.

The goal of Nectome'due south service is to let its customers to live on afterwards their physical bodies die by preserving their brains with unprecedented accuracy. The company muses that in the indistinct future, it will be possible to browse a preserved brain and copy it into a computer (or maybe even a humanoid robot). The problem: Nectome is banking on unknown advances in the time to come to become that done. All it's concerned with is making certain your brain lasts a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Nectome'southward process could accurately be described as high-tech embalming combined with cryonics. Company co-founder Robert McIntyre calls it aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, and it doesn't sound similar a pleasant process. The patient (customer?) is sedated and hooked upwardly to an artificial centre-lung machine. Then, a chemical preservative is pumped in through the carotid artery. The patient will dice presently thereafter, simply the brain is exquisitely well-preserved. This is very different than simple cryonics, which causes damage to the cells in club to preserve the tissue.

Nectome recently won an $80,000 government grant subsequently showing that information technology could preserve a pig brain so well that all the synapses were intact and visible with electron microscopy.Information technology as well got $960,000 from the NIH to develop its total-brain preservation tech. Nectome claims it can preserve brains at the nanometer level, retaining every cell and all its connections for later analysis. That tin be thousands of connections per cell, which is more than information than we can procedure allow alone simulate in a computer right now. Maybe non in the time to come, though.

The squad from Nectome also recently preserved a human cadaver brain as a proof of concept, just the body was several hours erstwhile at the time. For its technology to have any gamble of bringing you back from the dead, your encephalon has to be locked in at the moment of decease. The cells are totally dead, and fifty-fifty Nectome in its boundless optimism isn't suggesting your brain will exist reanimated in another body. Still, if yous believe you are the meat between your ears, then scanning every synapse in a brain could amount to a copy of your very being.

Would any of this work? Information technology certainly requires some faith in the future progress of humanity and wrestling with some weighty existential questions, but 25 people have already paid a refundable $10,000 eolith to have their brains preserved by Nectome. Performing the procedure on a alive person is however years away — if information technology happens at all. Nectome has examined California'southward Finish of Life Option Human activity and believes information technology volition exist legal to preserve brains in a way that kills the patient. The offset people to undergo brain preservation will exist terminally ill, but who knows what the futurity holds?

This is either wild out-of-the-box thinking or the prelude to a dystopian future like the above video. We'll have to await and meet.