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Brain-Machine-2

It's hard to pitch a product when role of the deal is that y'all volition absolutely, 100 percent die if you become a customer. That'due south an integral part of what Nectome is offering, though. This Y Combinator startup wants to give you the chance to live forever — sort of. To have reward of what Nectome bills as a service to back up your heed, they have to kill y'all first. It'south a tough sell, but some people are already lining upward.

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

Nectome's procedure could accurately be described as loftier-tech embalming combined with cryonics. Company co-founder Robert McIntyre calls information technology aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, and it doesn't audio similar a pleasant process. The patient (client?) is sedated and hooked up to an artificial center-lung machine. So, a chemical preservative is pumped in through the carotid avenue. The patient will die soon thereafter, but the encephalon is exquisitely well-preserved. This is very unlike than simple cryonics, which causes damage to the cells in order to preserve the tissue.

Nectome recently won an $fourscore,000 government grant after showing that information technology could preserve a pig brain so well that all the synapses were intact and visible with electron microscopy.It likewise 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 after assay. That tin can exist thousands of connections per cell, which is more data than we tin process let lonely simulate in a computer correct at present. Possibly not in the future, though.

The team from Nectome also recently preserved a human cadaver encephalon every bit a proof of concept, simply the body was several hours old at the fourth dimension. For its technology to have any chance of bringing you lot dorsum from the dead, your brain has to be locked in at the moment of death. The cells are totally dead, and fifty-fifty Nectome in its boundless optimism isn't suggesting your brain will be reanimated in another torso. However, if you believe y'all are the meat between your ears, then scanning every synapse in a brain could amount to a re-create of your very being.

Would any of this work? It certainly requires some faith in the future progress of humanity and wrestling with some weighty existential questions, but 25 people accept already paid a refundable $10,000 deposit to accept their brains preserved by Nectome. Performing the process on a live person is still years away — if information technology happens at all. Nectome has examined California'due south End of Life Option Deed and believes it will exist legal to preserve brains in a way that kills the patient. The get-go people to undergo brain preservation will exist terminally ill, only who knows what the future 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 see.