John Smart will give a talk, Chemical brain preservation: How to live "forever" at World Future 2012 in Toronto.
Technology Prize
Technology Prize
Prize purse as of Sept 30, 2011:$106,720 US
Prize Overview
The nonprofit Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) hereby officially announces a cash prize for the first individual or team to rigorously demonstrate a surgical technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable using today’s electron microscopic (EM) imaging techniques.*
In our analysis, this prize is by no means impossible to win, but neither is it easy to win. Winning will require a significant investment of time and resources, and may take many years to occur if it is not induced with an appropriately sized prize purse. We are actively seeking donors to increase the size of our purse. Please contact us if you can help.
This prize competition is structured into two Stages:
Stage 1- Preservation of an entire mouse brain(or similar small mammalian brain) using a technique that is applicable to a laboratory environment.
Stage 2- Preservation of a large mammalian brain(a pig for example) using a surgical technique meeting all the medical standards necessary for it to be applied (as an elective procedure) to a human patient in a hospital setting, and using a procedure that, with minor modifications, might potentially be offered for less than US$20,000 by appropriately trained medical professionals. The first group to complete Stage 1’s requirements will win 1/4 of the total prize purse accumulated up to that date. The first group to complete Stage 2’s requirements will win the remaining prize purse, or the entire prize purse if no one has previously met Stage 1’s requirements.
Prize Donors
BPF is committed to providing transparency on donations to the Technology Prize. Our current policy is to break out all donations and legal donor pledges at or above $1,000 as line items in public accounting, while respecting the rights of any donors who wish to remain anonymous. Individual online or other donations below $1,000 are for now reported as a Collective Online Donors line item, as we are not presently asking these donors for the option to publish their names along with their donations. To date, the Technology Prize is funded by the following donors:
Anonymous Donor: $100,000
John Smart: $5,000
Ken Hayworth: $1,000
Collective Online Donors: $720 (as of 09.30.11).
Once we have received our 501(c)(3) certification, we will actively solicit additional large and small donations for the Prize, and report them here.
Prize Rules and Structure
For a complete list of the prize rules and structure, please see:
BrainPreservationTechnologyPrizeRules_Ver1.0.pdf
For a discussion of the motivation behind the prize, a brief history of the idea of brain preservation as a medical procedure, an accessible technical overview of the existing state-of-the-art in cryonic and chemical brain preservation techniques, and an overview of the electron microscopic imaging techniques that will be employed to evaluate the quality of whole brain preservation attempts, please see:
Background Information Pertaining to the Brain Preservation Technology Prize.pdf
Eligibility Rules for Prize Contestants
Charitable nonprofit rules require us to ensure that no BPF Officers materially benefit from BPF prize activities. In particular, BPF Directors, Officers, Judges, and Advisors cannot be contestants for BPF prizes. Such individuals must resign from Director, Officer, Judge, or Advisory positions if at any point they decide to become contestants. All others who have access to legally permitted research laboratory facilities, academic or industrial, are encouraged to apply to BPF to become contestants in BPF research prizes.
Information on Incentive Prizes
Around the world, roughly 220 incentive prizes are available with a purse of $100,000 or greater. Most, like the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, are annual prizes that reward excellence by recognizing prior achievement in a particular field. But the most rapidly growing category of prizes is inducement prizes. Between 1991 and 2009, 80% of new prize money was raised for prizes that reward future solutions to important social problems, and simultaneously stimulate the emergence of new products, services, and markets. Most inducement prizes are one-time prizes, with prize rules carefully written to achieve valuable technical and social objectives. We believe the Brain Preservation Technology Prize is such a prize. For more on the current variety of incentive prizes and their beneficial effects, see this McKinsey study, And the Winner Is..., 2009.
Your Donations Greatly Help
For those able to help increase either the Technology Prize purse, our Competitor Evaluation Fund, our Operating Budget, or our long-term Endowment, please consider making a small donation today. Every dollar helps. Thank you.
Larger and relationship donors, we welcome you to contact us with any questions you may have.
Pledge donors, please use our Brain Preservation Prize Pledge Agreement Form.
Footnotes
* In electron microscopy we can visualize preserved neural tissue down to about a 6 nanometer resolution. This allows us to directly see each neuron's synapses and dendrites, and all the larger molecular structures, including neurotransmitter vesicles in axon terminals, that form their connections. This level of neural structure is the most common definition of the connectome, how neurons connect to each other in a living brain.
Electron microscopy does not allow us to directly see things like individual membrane receptors and other even smaller molecules in the synapse, or the signal states (phosphorylation, methylation, etc.) of individual brain proteins. That level of structure is sometimes called the synaptome, and it remains an open question in neuroscience what features of the synaptome need to be preserved to preserve memory and identity. What we do know is that chemical fixation and cryonics both preserve the fats, proteins, sugars, and DNA in living neurons, and fix them effectively in place, and membrane receptors stay in their normal distributions as well, as verified by antibody probes. What we don't know yet is which of the very smallest molecules in our neurons and glia are critical to memory and identity, and which signal states at the molecular level are also important.
Our current Brain Preservation Technology Prize is focused on the connectome. As neuroscience advances, we may learn that certain features of the synaptome must also be preserved. In that case, the Brain Preservation Foundation will offer additional synaptome-level Technology prizes. Bottom line: As neuroscience continues to advance, BPF will do our best to help science to determine whether reliable and affordable protocols can be found to preserve those brain structures that give rise to our memories and identities, according to our best evidence to date.