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John Smart
Good morning. My name is John Smart. I am a co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation. We're going to talk today about the brain preservation prize. Roughly 150,000 unique and highly experienced humans die. 57M every year. This talk is about a potential solution to this problem, a grand challenge. Today, medicine contains many frontiers, like epigenetics, nanotech, and it's incredibly daunting. While medical science has barely begun to prevent biological aging and death, computer scientists have learned to create primitively intelligent machines with indefinite time. Molecularists and scientists can preserve brains with chemical fixation and plastic embedding. This is called placination, it's an advanced version of.. recently, neuroscientists have learned to trace neural circuits through small volumes of tissue, and these techniques are likely to be automated in the next year. Humanity may gain the ability to do high fidelity preservation of human brain.
The only obstacle of this at present is the development of preservation and verification protocols, and having it achieved. To motivate this, Ken Hayworth, myself, Jay, and others, have launched a Brain Preservation Prize, for the first team to preserve a mouse brain and publish a full protocol. We have created the Brain Preservation Foundation. When the prize is won, the BPF will advocate for brain afordability and access. An anonymous donor has agreed to pay that sum to the first certified winner. We're today, seeking additional donors to increase the prize first, and any contributions help.
For those of you who wish to preserve your brain today- a price of $30k with Alcor. Circuit preservation necessary for our prize has not been demonstrated. Cryropreservation like vetrification might work if it can demonstrate saving enough of the detail to scale. With respect to the consumer adoption factors, dependability, price and so on, vetrification seems to be.. placination at cost.. might be done for maybe $20k, and maybe less than $10k or less than $5k once the technology has been automated. Regarding dependability and so on, room temperature preservation of brains, at cemetaries, with commercial cemeteries, or even in private homes if the law allows.
Regarding verification, neuroscientists are currently doing this for small tissue pieces. A typical placination process might look like rapidly infusing a cross-linking or fixative chemical through the vasculature after an individual's death. This chemical is so small that it would penetrate the cell walls like water, and the next step which could happen hours later maybe in a non-hospital setting, oxium-trioide. A third step is a plastic resin- a small molecule- in increasing concentration throughout the brain, turning the brain into a perfect fossil. When all of the circuits are preserved, and we can scan with an electron microscope, then we've met our goals.
Why is this important? The advancement of science. Several institutes are developing the technologies necessary to do this- with a connectome- a circuit-level map of the brain. The connectome is a necessary pre-requisite to the goal. Large-scale brain donations will be necessary for understanding the scope of human connectome diversity, and it will allow us to create more biologically inspired computers. Some may preserve their brains to help preserve their culture, or advance our understanding of human experience, or pursuing a more scientific or free society, or some who have some objections to being revived in the future as a conscious person, another one might want their life to be left to their loved ones to be left at a later date, as an extension of a virtual memorial that we see today. Some may be convinced by their children to do this, to lessen the grief. Neuroscientists can reconstruct accurate neurons from very small populations, like 177 neurons from an LGM of a cat.
In the future, we should be able to extract whole experiences from the static connectivity of the brain alone, which comes with a baseline understanding. Some, perhaps a future crash, some will .. integrated into a future biological. This group holds the belief that their identity, experiences are residents are.. they are patterns, not materialist. (something something something)
Our selves could be brought back into a world where our friends and loved ones are still alive. Finally, some being deeply uncertain of future, and aware of the deep loss of complexity that would occur, would be okay with preserving their brains now in a Pascal's wager, and leave it to the future or maybe to their cyber avatars or their CyberTwins or digital selves. Let's get this prize won and done, as soon as possible.
We warmly welcome you to help in any way you can. We've received a matching grant of $2k for a summer intern. We're seeking a similar contribution today, of $20 or more at a time. This last slide leaves you with several steps that you can take to help. If you're willing to donate $50, there's an ipod raffle. Most importantly, you're helping a worthy cause. I'd like to end with a last step. We go into airports and see people stressed and concerned. It helps to remember what Alex said at the beginning of the summit. To see the incredible magical era that we're in, and I think that with technologies like this around the corner, we can be happy. We can recognize that we're incredibly lucky to be alive right here and right now. Thank you.
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