Biography: Kennita Watson is a retired software engineer with broad-ranging interests, as can be seen on her personal website. She attended MIT for her undergraduate studies and subsequently went to Stanford where she studied for a masters in computer science, with a concentration in artificial intelligence. She has been an active political candidate in the […]

An examination of ~ a 39,000 year old woolly mammoth brain preserved in the permafrost of Siberia shows good gross preservation, as well as similarities to elephant brains. Here’s the abstract: This study presents the results of an examination of the mummified brain of a pleistocene Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) recovered from the Yakutian permafrost in Siberia, Russia. […]

Executive Summary Brain Preservation Prize competitor Shawn Mikula just published his whole mouse brain electron microscopy protocol in Nature Methods (paper, BPF interview), putting him close to winning the mouse phase of our prize. Brain Preservation Prize competitor 21st Century Medicine has developed a new “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation” technique–preliminary results show good ultrastructure preservation even after […]

Here at the BPF we are interested in measuring the accuracy of a variety of possible techniques for brain preservation — including cryopreservation. The LessWrong forum has an annual survey, one of the questions of which is the following: What is the probability that an average person cryonically frozen today will be successfully restored to life at […]

Biography: Peter Gouras, M.D., Ph.D. h.c., is a Professor of Opthamology at Columbia University. He is a pioneer in the transplantation of retinal pigment epithelial cells and successfully treated a rat model of retinitis pigmentosa by transplanting these cells. Translating his research from the bench to the bedside, he also performed the first human retinal […]

Biography: Shawn Mikula (Lifeboat Foundation Bio) is a neuroscientist devoted to comprehensively mapping mammalian whole-brain connectivity. He completed his Ph.D. in neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at the Krieger Mind-Brain Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. He subsequently worked with Ted Jones at the University of California (Davis) as the architect of the […]

Biography: Rafal Smigrodzki is a practicing neurologist and the Chief Clinical Officer at Gencia Corporation, which focuses on the development of therapeutics related to mitochondria. His research has focused on mitochondrial mutation, or microheteroplasmy, as a contributing factor to aging and age-related diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. He has also conducted research into treatments to […]

Biography: Michael Graziano (Wikipedia) is a scientist, novelist, and composer, and is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. His previous work focused on how the cortex monitors the space around the body and controls movement within that space, including groundbreaking research into the brain’s homunculus. His current research focuses on the biological basis […]