Monday, 26 March 2018

Immortality is coming!

A bit of three year old news, brought to me by the Kurzweil Organisation, Mr. Kurzweil being a chap who is quite keen on immortality, preferably for himself.

It seems that a method for the preservation of a more or less intact mammalian brain has been developed, opening up the possibility of reactivating that brain, or more probably a copy of that brain, at some point in the future. Provided that is that you can find a company you can trust with your brain until some unspecified point in the future.

It sounds like a variation of the embalming techniques that have been around since the time of the pharaohs of old Egypt - with the difference that the Egyptians embalmed the bodies in coffins, pickled the innards in jars and just chucked the brains away, regarded at that time as unimportant.

Back in the here and now, first you gradually introduce an embalming fluid into the brain. When  enough of this fluid has been delivered and it has had time to work its way into all the nooks and crannies, you pop the brain into a industrial quality freezer and the job is done. It seems that if you defrost such a brain, days, months or even years later, you can use an electron microscope (or something of that sort) to read off the neurons and their synapses in just the state that they were at the time of the embalming. Read off and ready to be written back into a nice new brain, possibly mechanical or silicon. All 150 trillion (150 million million) of them. All fine and dandy, to the extent that you are your neurons and synapses. To the presently unknown extent that you are the chemical soup in which those neurons and synapses live, not so clever. That bit is work in progress.

At the time of writing, back in 2015, all this had been successfully tested on rabbits and pigs.

PS: haven't quite got to the bottom yet of when the host for such a brain might be deemed to have died in the ordinary sense of the word.

Reference 1: Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation - Robert L. McIntyre, Gregory M. Fahy - 2015.

Reference 2: https://nectome.com/.

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