Preservation Rights

Brain Preservation Bill of Rights

This is a list of demands of sort, or perhaps a call to arms. It is what we think people who believe in mind uploading should be pushing for—a society in which they and their loved ones have a reasonable chance at reaching the future, and where the main obstacles to achieving that goal are real technical ones, and not legal roadblocks imposed by ignorance, prejudice or superstition. It rejects the current status quo where cryopreservations of doubtful efficacy are performed by unregulated institutions only after the declaration of legal death, and often after hours of postmortem ischemic damage [1]. 

It is our individual unalienable right to choose death, or to choose the possibility of further life for our memories or identity, as desired. Under the appropriate conditions, it must also be our right to choose to undergo an uncertain medical procedure which may indeed shorten our life, but which we believe has the possibility of greatly extending it, in quality as well as in duration. In particular:

1. Every major hospital should be able and ready to perform an emergency brain preservation protocol on a terminal patient if requested by that patient, and should have trained personnel and the associated surgical instrumentation on standby.
2. This protocol should be certified to preserve 99.9% of the neuronal connections in a brain (under ideal surgical conditions), and should allow for indefinitely long storage without decay.
3. The preservation protocol’s efficacy must have been rigorously verified through testing on animals. At a minimum, the preserved animal brain must be stored for several months while being subjected to an accelerated aging environment (e.g. temperature swings), after which the brain is dissected to look for gross structural damage, and, most crucially, a sufficient number of tissue samples must be extracted from various brain regions and volume imaged using an electron microscope to verify intact neural circuits and to statistically ensure that the procedure has preserved 99.9% of the synaptic connections across the entire brain. Application of this protocol must show repeatable quality of preservation and must provide diagnostic checks for efficacy of preservation when applied to human patients (e.g. monitoring of perfusion extent during the surgical procedure, post-preservation MRI imaging of brain, etc.).         
4. Legal rights should be secured for persons in storage such that they have rights similar to those held by living humans in temporally unconscious states today. Specifically:
   1. Persons should be ensured a quality surgical preservation procedure performed by a licensed professional. These rights should be on par with the guarantees against malpractice in surgical procedures today.
   2. Persons should be ensured quality long term storage and protection from harm with no removal from storage due to insufficient funds.
   3. Revival rights – The revival wishes of the individual undergoing brain preservation should be respected, when technically feasible. This includes the right to partial revival (memory donation instead of identity or self-awareness revival), and the right to refuse revival under a list of circumstances provided by the individual before preservation.
   4. Some legal rights should be available to allow persons in storage to retain some monetary and other assets, in trust form, so that they can be retrieved by the individual upon successful revival.
5. Brain preservation should be treated legally as a surgical procedure with a very real chance of successful resuscitation of the patient. As such, it most certainly should not be restricted to persons meeting today’s definition of “legal death”. The best preservation protocols require perfusion of chemicals through the circulatory system, allowing them to reach every cell in the brain. Today, the highest quality preservation occurs when these chemicals are perfused into a living animal with a healthy vascular system while the heart is still beating. Today’s legal obligation that patients wait until after death before undergoing a preservation procedure is a cruel and ludicrous requirement for a suffering patient intent on surviving via benefit from future medical breakthroughs. Persons electing brain preservation must have the right to electively undergo a preservation protocol before “legal death” has been declared. The best alternative option is perfusion a short time after death, but perfusion reliability may go down as time after death increases. Individuals deserve both options. 
6. In several countries and states, including at present three U.S. states, medically-assisted suicide programs allow appropriately consented and medically-assisted euthanasia whenever a suffering individual has less than six months to live, as assessed by their own attending physician. In all such legal environments, we must also press for a patient's right to euthanasia via elective brain preservation whenever there is a documented threat of having a substantial portion of their mental patterns erased via Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, metastatic disease, multi-infarct dementia, and other globally brain-degrading diseases. As with existing euthanasia protocols, such determination should be assessable by the patient's chosen attending physician. 
7. No person should be barred from obtaining a quality brain preservation surgical procedure and quality long-term storage due to lack of funds. It is likely that the eventual surgical procedure for brain preservation will be a relatively low cost one given that it mainly involves serial blood perfusions. If chemical fixation and plasticization is performed then long-term storage costs should be minimal. Given that approximately 30% of today’s medical costs are accrued during the last year of a person’s life (while the individual is often struggling with a debilitating illness that will surely be fatal), and assuming that many persons will elect to undergo a brain preservation procedure significantly before they reach the terminal phase (to avoid the suffering and brain damage associated with such an illness), there is likely to be a net reduction in overall medical costs, if individuals can choose medically-assisted suicide and brain preservation when their physician assesses them of having six months or less to live (as time goes on, this number might be raised to a year or less of expected natural life). It is therefore quite reasonable for society to supplement brain preservation costs when necessary.           
8. Brain preservation should always be a voluntary, freely chosen, and appropriately consented procedure. The right to choose personal death must remain an unalienable human right, as must the right to choose brain preservation, with its potential future benefits, which include life restoration. Given the unknowns about if and when a preserved brain would be revived, brain preservation is analogous to a risky surgery electively undertaken by an individual to cure his otherwise terminal illness (e.g. removal of a brain tumor in which death on the operating table is a real possibility) or to treat a condition which severely reduces his quality of life (e.g. brain surgery to treat severe epileptic seizures). We respect the right of individuals to refuse these surgical interventions, and we respect the right of individuals to electively undertake them even though they risk death during the surgical procedure itself. We must extend these same basic freedoms and rights to those wishing to undergo brain preservation, in every country of the world.