BrainPreservation.org

Serious Brain Preservation Research Now!

"If you want to change the world, you change the metaphor." - Joseph Campbell

I do want to change the world – I want to put an end to death. I want to make it every person’s right to experience the future centuries from now, and to live without the constant fear that aging and crippling disease will take away their joy for life, make them a burden to their loved ones, and strip them of their dignity. We have it within our power today to create that world. Let me say that again, we have it within our power today to create that world. From a medical and technical standpoint all that is needed is the development of a surgical procedure for perfusing a patient’s circulatory system with a series of fixatives and plastic resins capable of perfectly preserving their brain’s neural circuitry in a plasticized block for long-term storage. Such a procedure would, in effect, put the patient into a long dreamless sleep where they can wait out the decades or centuries necessary for the development of the more advanced technology required to revive them.

How could a patient ever be awoken from such an unconventional sleep? The necessary technology exists in primitive form today – the plasticized brain block will be automatically sliced into thin sections and these scanned in an electron microscope at nanometer resolution. Such scanning can map out the exact synaptic connectivity among neurons while simultaneously providing information on a host of molecular-level constituents. This map of brain connectivity will then be uploaded into a computer emulation controlling a robotic body – the patient awakes to a new dawn of unlimited potential.

Given our current state of knowledge it is quite likely that the perfection of a surgical brain-preservation procedure could be accomplished in less than five years with minimal amounts of research funds. However, aside from a few underfunded research groups, no serious brain preservation research is currently being performed. More tragically, even if such a surgical procedure were available today the legal system would prevent its proper use as a life saving measure by preventing it from being administered before the declaration of legal death. The reasons are social and political, and from those standpoints such a world is much harder to reach. It requires large numbers of people to viscerally accept a new metaphor--a metaphor that the last 150 years of biological science has demonstrated to be accurate--the metaphor that we are machines.